BART BROUGHT MICHELLE LEUCI down to the Toussaint bar about ten. It was good that they had found the bar. Since they were so lost in each other they kept tripping over chairs and knocking over glasses. Du Pré played the fiddle, someone played the piano, and a guitarist no one knew but who was damn good kept picking icy little bunches of notes in the background. Du Pré didn’t much like electric guitars or, for that matter, electricity, but this guy…
Madelaine laughed behind her hand at the lovers. She was very happy for Bart, whom she treated with the loving disdain big sisters bestow on their little brothers.
The evening was pleasant. No one got drunk.
Benetsee came in just a half hour before closing, shuffling along, bright black eyes flicking here and there like a smart old bird’s.
“Who is that?” said Michelle, leaning over to Du Pré and putting her hand on his.
“That is old Benetsee,” said Du Pré. “You remember you asked me about him when I talked to you in Washington?”
“He’s the seer, the medicine man,” she said. “I need to talk to him.”
“Buy him a jug of wine, he talk to you,” said Du Pré. The old goat talk to you in riddles and parts of sentences, stories don’t make any sense till doings happen to you. Let him drive you nuts for a while.
“Bart is going to work a little on the house in the morning,” said Detective Leuci, “and I have to talk to you for a while. I would like to talk to him, too.”
“Okay,” said Du Pré, “I will be at Madeline’s. I will get a jug of that bubble-gum wine he likes.”
“Will he be at Madelaine’s?”
“He will probably sleep in the garden shed like usually,” said Du Pré. “If he doesn’t, I know where he lives.”
If he ain’t either place, ask the fucking coyotes.
Du Pré bought a big jug of cheap wine to go.
Bart and Michelle went off into the night. Pretty soon, Du Pré and Madelaine left, too. Benetsee hadn’t said anything to them, he just stood at the back wall, glass in hand, nodding his head to the music, or, when the music stopped, just nodding his head.
Michelle Leuci came rolling up the next morning at nine in Bart’s Land Rover. She was dressed in new outdoor clothing from one of the mail-order houses. She greeted Du Pré and Madelaine with a jar of marmalade made in England.
“I’ve eaten,” she said to Madelaine’s offer.
After breakfast, Madelaine started cleaning up. Her children were all off visiting friends or, since the older boys were now pretty damn independent, off hunting.
Du Pré took Michelle Leuci to the living room. They carried mugs of coffee.
Du Pré rolled and lit a cigarette, and Michelle pulled a long filter tip from a silver case—Ah, that’s Bart there, Du Pré thought—and they smoked for a moment.
“This asshole Chase,” said Michelle, “we have nothing on him we can use for a decent case. I am sure in my gut he did it. But we got nothing. We dug around in his past. Rich kid, private schools that he kept getting thrown out of. Tried to bum one down, I understand. Another place he was expelled for killing animals slowly and painfully—dogs and cats. That’s two on the sociopath’s list of lovely childhood qualities.”
“What’s a sociopath?” said Du Pré. He didn’t know the exact meaning of the word.
“Smarter than hell but cannot grasp that there is anyone in the world but them. No conscience. No empathy with anything. But they are smart, and hard to spot. They act human, most of the time, but they aren’t.”
“They killers?” said Du Pré.
“Sometimes. What I wanted to pump you about was, exactly what was he like on the trip? Starting from day one. What exactly did he do and how did he do it?”
Du Pré recounted the journey. How Chase and his assistants had pretty well retreated into a shell, except for setting up camp and doling out food. How Chase had acted the night the little bear wandered into camp.
“He’s a real asshole,” said Du Pré.
“Wonder what made him drop the mask,” said Leuci, knuckles to mouth.
“You know about how he cut in at the end of the trip,” said Du Pré. “I told you.”
“Was it just him?”
Du Pré thought back.
“The paddlers looked like locals,” said Du Pré. “He didn’t bring the assistants back with him.”
Leuci shook her head. She shut off the little tape recorder and closed her notebook.
“That poor girl,” she said, “Annie McRae. Never been in a town of more than a few hundred people. Murdered in Washington, D.C. I am going to nail that bastard’s ass to the wall.”
Du Pré got up. “You want to see if Benetsee is here?” he said.
“Sure do.”
They walked out back to the garden shed. The door was halfway open. Du Pré looked in. The bed had been slept in, but the old man was gone.
“We go out to his place, then,” said Du Pré.
Since it was on the way to Bart’s, she followed in the Range Rover. She ground the gears a little, not used to a stick shift.
Du Pré parked in front of the old man’s shack. No smoke from the chimney. No old fart came to the door, but the old dogs came round the house and wheezed at them till honor was satisfied and they could go lie down someplace warm again.
Du Pré put the jug of wine just inside the front door and closed it.
“I don’t know where he would be,” Du Pré said. “Listen, if I see him, I tell him that you want to see him.”
Detective Sergeant Leuci was looking around the shabby, littered place curiously. She began to walk around back.
Du Pré waited.
“Du Pré!” she called, loud, not frightened.
Du Pré walked round toward her voice.
There was a small stand of apple trees in back of Benetsee’s shack, planted there many years ago, not for the apples but to attract deer, who love such fruit. So you could shoot them out the back window. Not so much work then, carrying meat home. The trees were twisted and ill cared for. Their apples were small and wormy.
There was a big black feather twisting on a length of black thread tied to a tree branch. The feather had been painted some.
Oh Christ, Du Pré thought, here we go.
Du Pré caught the feather and jerked, breaking the thread.
There were some tiny daubs of paint bright on the vulture’s pinion feather.
Six canoes, four small and two large.
Stick figures, fifteen of them.
Du Pré with his fiddle, Bart bigger than anyone, six Indians with headbands, Chase with his spade beard, the two white women, red hair and brunette. The assistants who were male weren’t pictured as human, though.
One was a dog, the other some bird Du Pré had never seen.
“What is it?” said Leuci.
“I don’t know,” said Du Pré.