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I dressed and went up to the main house. The phone rang in the kitchen just as Albert opened the front door. He went back to his office, and I picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?” a woman’s voice asked.
“What can I do for you, Ms. Wellstone?” I said.
“It’s Jamie Sue,” she replied, either correcting or not hearing me. “We’re in terrible trouble.”
“Who’s the ‘we’?”
“I think I’ve been betrayed. I think my husband found out.”
“About what?”
She hesitated. “I was supposed to meet Jimmy Dale. I bought a car for us and had it delivered by somebody I trusted. But I can’t leave the compound. All our cars are gone. Ridley and Leslie’s security men won’t take me anywhere, either.”
“Call 911,” I said.
“And tell them I’m meeting an escaped convict?”
“I can’t help you.”
“They’ve set up a trap. Clete doesn’t answer his cell. They’re going to kidnap or kill Jimmy Dale.”
“Where did you have the car delivered?”
She gave me the name of a bar on the Flathead res and described the vehicle.
“You said someone betrayed you.”
“I paid Harold Waxman to buy the car and park it at the bar in Arlee,” she said.
“You paid the bartender at the club on the lake, the man now working for your husband?”
“I thought he was my friend. It’s not my fault. I thought he was loyal. I can’t believe he sold us out.”
“What do you know about Waxman?”
“Nothing. He was a fan and an admirer. Maybe I’m wrong about him. Maybe Lyle Hobbs followed him. Maybe Harold is innocent. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if her sense of betrayal had less to do with an individual than her discovery that fame and celebrity are cheap currency and seldom purchase loyalty in others. I wanted to ask why she hadn’t stuck by Jimmy Dale when he went to prison and why she had married into a collection of scum like the Wellstones. I wanted to ask if she ever felt remorse because she’d helped deceive the audiences who had bought in to Reverend Sonny Click’s charlatanism. I wanted to ask if she had ever thought about the suffering Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw had gone throu
gh before they died. But I already knew the answers I would get. Andy Warhol was dead wrong when he said every American is allowed fifteen minutes of fame. Fame comes to very few, and when it does, it takes on the properties of a narcotic and puts into abeyance our fears about our own mortality. Anyone who acquires a drug that potent does not give it up easily.
“Are you there?” she said.
“Clete knows nothing about your plan to run off with Jimmy Dale?” I said.
“No. Are you going to ask him to help?”
“Tell me, Ms. Wellstone, does it bother you at all that you’re asking a man you slept with to help you leave your husband and run off with a third man? No, let me rephrase that. Does anything at all bother you except the fact that you screwed up your life?”
“Yes, quite a few things bother me, Mr. Robicheaux. I deserted Jimmy Dale when he needed me most, and I married a monster. Now I have a little boy who may fall into the hands of the most evil people I’ve ever known. If you condemn me for it, I’ve earned every bit of your scorn and then some.”
The side of my face felt as though it had been stung by a bee when I replaced the receiver in the cradle.
“YOU SURE THIS is the place?” Candace asked as she and Troyce pulled off the narrow asphalt road in the middle of the Jocko Valley. A bar built of logs and topped with a peaked red roof was set back from the road, a few vehicles parked in front, the windows lit with neon beer signs.
