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“What’d you do to him?”
“Ask Click.”
“You want a lawyer? I think you and your friend Purcel should have a team of them to follow you around.”
“I lost control. If you want the details, get them from the good reverend. While you’re at it, ask him why he lied during a murder investigation.”
“I thought I had seen the whole cast of characters, but you and your fat friend take the cake.”
“I’m getting a little tired of this, Sheriff.”
“You are? I bet Click is, too.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We’re still waiting on the coroner. Come inside and tell me what you think.” He handed me a pad and a pencil. “Jot down every place you’ve been this afternoon, Mr. Robicheaux, and the names of people who saw you there. How about your friend Purcel? Know where he’s been? Seems like when one of you tracks pig flop on the rug, the other one is right behind. You don’t have mad cow disease in Louisiana, do you? That’s what we’re afraid of in Montana. At least until you guys arrived. I’ve never been to Louisiana. Me and the old woman got to visit there someday.”
I followed him inside the house. Two plainclothes cops were in the bedroom. They wore polyethylene gloves and were taking everything out of Click’s dresser drawers. A straw-bottom chair lay on its side in front of an open closet.
“The wind knocked down a tree on the power line. A lineman looked through the side window and saw Click. He was still warm when we got here. That’s the only reason you’re not in handcuffs.”
Click had been suspended from horse reins that were looped over a rafter at the top of the closet. They had been wrapped around his throat and were knotted tightly under the carotid artery. His loafers had fallen from his feet. The purple discoloration had not left his face, and he wore the strange, lidded, downcast expression of a man who has accepted that he has gone permanently into deep shade. His neck did not look broken, and I suspected he had strangled to death.
When the coroner arrived, he and a deputy cut Click down with a pocketknife. I walked outside and stood in the wind. Afternoon fishermen were headed up Rock Creek Road and soon would be casting flies on sunlit riffles. I could see mountain goats high up on one side of the canyon, and down below, penned horses inside the afternoon shadows and a man splitting wood and stacking it inside a pole shed. I saw all these normal and beautiful things while I waited for Joe Bim Higgins to come out of the house.
“The coroner thinks Click bailed off the chair. He also says somebody put some serious hurt on him,” Higgins said. “You got any problem of conscience about that?”
“Guys like Click don’t kill themselves because of guys like me,” I said.
“You’re saying this is a homicide?”
“I think he was unconscious when he was dropped from the rafter.”
“Why’s that?”
“His hands were free. He was an able-bodied man. He could have pulled himself up.”
“Yeah, if he wanted to. But suicide victims don’t want to save themselves. That’s why they commit suicide.”
“You want me to come down to the department and make a statement?” I asked.
“No, what I would really like is for you and your friend to get off the planet,” he replied.
CHAPTER 23
THE BEST RESTAURANT in Missoula was called the Pearl Café. The walls were salmon-colored and hung with pastel paintings inside gnarled wood frames. The tablecloths and silver and crystal settings glowed with clarity and light; the waitstaff was dressed as formally as waiters and waitresses and bartenders in fine New York restaurants, and they had the same degree of manners and professionalism. Alicia Rosecrans had selected the Pearl, not Clete Purcel, who normally ate in saloons or working-class cafés where the food was deep-fried in grease that could lubricate locomotive wheels. Clete’s objection was not the ambience but his belief that Alicia Rosecrans’s career would be compromised by her being seen in public with him.
Nonetheless, he had consented to go there with her and had put on a new powder-blue sport coat and gray slacks, shined loafers, and a soft gray fedora that he had recently purchased at a fashion store in Spokane. He had ordered iced tea rather than wine with his dinner, and hadn’t broached the subject of what they might do or where they might go later in the evening or, for that matter, tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that. The truth was, Clete didn’t even know where Alicia lived. When she was in Missoula, she stayed in a motel. That day she had been in both Billings and Great Falls, and she was vague about where she would be the following day.
“You’re pretty tired?” he said.
“I think in the next two months I might be transferred to San Diego,” she replied.
“Yeah?” he said.
“You’ve been there?”
“When I was at Pendleton. It’s a nice city, the ocean and all.”
