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“No, sir, you’re out of line,” I said. “That crack was about as dumb a remark I ever heard an officer of the law make.”
I could see pale spots in his face, his hand tightening on the edge of the drawer that contained the earthly remains of a man who, in death, had the significance of a doorstop. The sheriff’s discomfort was obvious. He knew he was wrong, and it was not a time to crowd the batter any more than I had.
“Sheriff, you found the perpetrator’s semen on the body of Angel Deer Heart,” I said. “You went to the data bank for a match, right? What did you find out? Are we dealing with Asa Surrette or not?”
“The specimen got lost,” he said, his face reddening.
The only sound in the room was the hum of the refrigeration.
“Bill Pepper?” I said.
“I think he was drunk. Whatever he did with the specimen, we can’t find it.”
“I have to ask you a question,” I said. “Why did you let a man like that stay on in your department?”
“At one time he was a good cop. When his marriage went south, he started drinking. Maybe you’ve never had problems like that. I have. So I gave him a chance. I wish I hadn’t. I apologize to Ms. Horowitz for the remark I made. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to have gunfights in the streets of my city. And nobody is going to show disrespect for my office, either.”
Fair enough, I thought. He’s not a bad guy. Time to boogie and leave others to their own destiny. Err on the side of charity and let disengagement become a virtue.
“I heard Percy Wolcott’s plane explode. Not crash. Explode,” Gretchen said. “Forget the apology, Sheriff. Then pull your head out of your ass and do your job for a change.”
IF YOU ARE a parent, you know the following to be true: Even though your child has grown into adulthood, you never see the man or the woman; you see only the little boy or the little girl.
Whenever I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass. I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover before me like a hologram.
Why get into that now? Because all of the events I have narrated started with an attack upon Alafair’s person while she was jogging on the hill below Albert Hollister’s ranch. Somehow the fact that her attacker may have been Asa Surrette had fallen through the cracks.
Did Asa Surrette survive the crash of the prison van into the gas truck, then hook up with a fellow predator and come to Montana in pursuit of Alafair? It was possible. But Emile Schmitt did not have that kind of history and had been on retainer by law firms that represented members of the Mafia. The Mob is many things, but it doesn’t hire serial predators to look out for its interests.
Let me make a confession. I would like to say I became a police officer with the NOPD in order to make the world a better place. I became a cop in order to deal with a black lesion that had been growing on my brain, if not my soul, since I was a child. My parents embarked upon the worst course human beings are capable of: They destroyed their home and their family and finally themselves. If there is any greater form of loss, I do not know what it is. It stays with you every day of your life; you wake with it at dawn and carry it with you into your nocturnal hours. There is no respite or cure, and if your experience has been like mine, you have accepted that only death will separate you from the abiding sense of nothingness you wake with at the first touch of light on the horizon.
A man named Mack ruined my mother, and she helped turn my father, Big Aldous, into a sad, bewildered, raging alcoholic who once wrecked Antlers Pool Room and tore up seven Lafayette police officers with his bare fists. I had no feeling about the Vietcong or the NVA, but I put Mack’s face on every enemy soldier I killed. When I came back home, I rented an apartment in the French Quarter and slept with a .45 under my pillow, a round in the chamber, not in fear but in hope that someone would try to break in.
Please forgive my obsession. My own story isn’t important. The story of the human condition is. If you see your natal home destroyed, one of two things will happen: You will let the loss of your childhood continue to rob you of all happiness for the rest of your life, or you will build a family of your own, a good one, made up of people you truly love and in whose company you are genuinely happy. If you are unlucky, born under a dark star, violent men will ferret their way into the life of your family and re-create the act of theft that ruined your childhood. From that moment on, you will enter a landscape that only people who have stacked time in the Garden of Gethsemane will understand.
You will discover that the portrayal of law enforcement on television has nothing to do with reality. Chances are, you will be on your own. Perhaps you will find out that the suspected perpetrator has been released on bail without your being notified. The detective assigned to your case might do his best, but you will sense he is drowning in his workload and not always happy to see you. Your phone calls will go unanswered. You will become a nuisance and begin to talk incessantly about your personal problems, to strangers as well as friends. When you think it’s all over, you may receive a taunting call from the person who raped or murdered your loved one.
Sound like an exaggeration? Dial up someone who has been there and see what he has to say.
I remember sitting naked and ninety-proof in an Orleans Parish holding cell, flexing my hand, my body running with sweat, as I watched the veins swell in my forearm while I fantasized about a man I was going to kill as soon as I was released. The target of my anger was a Mafia boss I normally referred to as a three-hundred-pound load of whale shit whose name wasn’t worth remembering. I changed my mind when one of his gumballs shot my half brother, Jimmie, in the head and blinded him in one eye. That was when I decided to get back on that old-time lock-and-load rock and roll and turn a certain Mafia boss into wallpaper. At the time I thought and did these things, I was a police officer sworn to protect and serve.
Now I felt great shame at having doubted Alafair’s conviction about Asa Surrette surviving the wreck of the prison van. I felt I had not only let down my daughter, I had joined the ranks of deadbeat cops who turn a cynical ear to those who need and deserve help the most.
When we returned to Albert’s ranch from the mortuary, I made three calls to Kansas. The people there are among the best on earth, but bureaucracy is bureaucracy wherever you go. I’ve always suspected bureaucracy serves an ancillary purpose in the same way the human body absorbs an infection and prevents it from getting to the brain. Bureaucracy protects the people in charge from accountability. My efforts on the phone with the Kansas officials were beyond worthless. I was left with the impression that I had just conducted three separate conversations with a grain elevator.
I went out on the deck and sat on a chair in the sunshine, surrounded by huge pots of purple and blue and pink petunias, the wind ruffling the flowers. Molly came out and sat beside me. “Don’t let it get to you,” she said.
“Talking to people with CYBS?”
“What’s CYBS?”
“Cover-your-butt syndrome.”
“You think it’s Surrette?”
“It’s somebody who’s pure evil.”
“You think he killed Bill Pepper?”
