Specimen Song (10 page)

“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.

D
U
P
RÉ FOLLOWED
M
ICHELLE
toward Bart’s log house. He had the painted feather in the inside pocket of his jacket.

That old fart and his damn riddles. But. Perhaps he only knows the riddles, not the answers? I don’t want to do so much of the old man’s thinking for him, Du Pré thought. I can barely do my own.

The Rover turned off on to the rutted road to the rising house. The heavy trucks had torn the roadbed up and Bart hadn’t got round to grading it. Du Pré’s car lurched and creaked as he tried to thread his way past any number of places he could high-center on the transmission.

Bart had fixed an aromatic cedar bush to the highest point on the double-pitched roof.

A saw whined inside. A hammer bashed.

Michelle Leuci went on in.

Du Pré finished his smoke, got up, and stumped over the torn earth to a window hole. He leaned in and whistled.

Bart was putting treated-oak brackets on the rafter joints.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “the union says that you got to stop and pay some close attention to pretty ladies.”

“Down tools,” said Bart, coming down the ladder. He unbuckled his carpenter’s belt and dropped it. “Find anything?” he said.

Michelle Leuci nodded her head yes. “But we don’t know what.”

“You know old Benetsee,” said Du Pré. “Drive you crazy, like trying to nail smoke to the wall.”

“Would mamselle care to go riding?” said Bart, bowing.

“Only if it is an old and very polite horse,” said Michelle Leuci. “I am a city girl. I, uh, have never…”

“Oh,” said Bart.

“Riding lessons were offered by my parents,” Michelle went on solemnly, “but all they could afford was a merry-go-round ticket once in a while.

“Ol’ Trapper, do you think, Gabriel?” said Bart. Booger Tom was nowhere in sight, so Bart was really asking a question.

“Oh, yeah,” said Du Pré. Trapper was a fine old gentleman of great patience and good manners.

Bart brushed sawdust off his arms, chest, and stomach and then he hugged Michelle.

They went off arm in arm toward the stables.

Du Pré grinned.

He went back to his car and sat there for a moment, turning the black feather with the crude paintings on it this way and that. There is something here that I am not seeing, Du Pré thought. This is what Benetsee sees.

The strange bird. Dogs were a cheerful part of Cree life, but this bird…the beak had two deep notches in it. It looked like a mean bird. And long talons.

And a bent neck. Was the bird a killer, or an eater of carrion? Du Pré shook his head. It didn’t, look like any symbol he knew of, not that he knew that many.

Du Pré walked over toward the horse barn. He knocked loudly on the sliding doors. Maybe Bart and Michelle had hit the hay, real hay.

“Yo,” Bart called.

“Michelle,” said Du Pré, “I need to maybe sketch part of that feather there, write to Lucky, ask him if it means anything to him.”

“Good,” she said. “I was going to do the same thing. Normally, I’d take it to the Smithsonian…”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. “Well, every time I talk to an expert, I end up knowing less than I do when I talk to someone who does it.”

They laughed. Du Pré went off to his old cruiser. He sat in it a minute while it warmed up and he watched Bart and Michelle ride out. Well, Bart was riding. Michelle, she was having an ass-and-saddle fight like any other novice tight with fear. Trapper glanced back at her and then Du Pré swore the big old bay gelding shrugged.

I’ve had worse, if you could read horse talk.

When they were perhaps two hundred yards away from the barn, old Booger Tom came out, shaking a little with laughter. The old goat rolled a cigarette. He looked over at Du Pré and nodded.

Du Pré put the cruiser in gear and backed round. He drove forward and lurched and dodged out to the county road through the crater field Bart’s service road had become.

High fall. This was the best time of the year, except that the fat-assed drunks from the flat would show up for the opening of the big-game season next Sunday. This was Sunday, so it was two weeks. Well, two weeks was two weeks.

Du Pré despised the out-of-state hunters, like every native. 

When he turned on the road leading toward his place, he saw the slumped, boneless shape of Benetsee walking very quickly toward town. The old man could cover country, for sure. He walked pigeon-toed a little, like Catfoot.

Things are looking up, Du Pré thought sourly. First murder I get in my life happened a long time ago and everybody’s dead who had much to do with it. Now I got one happens while I am fiddling in front of thousands of people. The woman could have been knifed by anyone who was there and who could now be tree thousand miles away.

Du Pré slowed and opened his window.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “you want a ride to somewhere?”

Benetsee slowed and came over to the car. He leaned down. His breath was rosy with alcohol. Sickening.

Du Pré looked up at him. He almost started.

The old man had smeared charcoal in his eye pits.

“Hey,” said Du Pré, “you will not go snow-blind now. You have to have snow and a bright day.”

Benetsee started.

Du Pré had never seen him off balance.

“Unh,” the old man grunted. He was pointing to a wad of bar napkins jammed in Du Pré’s diddy box, a weighted tub that fit over the transom.

Du Pré handed him a couple.

Benetsee spat into one and rubbed his eye pits.

“Good,” said Du Pré. “Now you just look dirty like usual.”

Benetsee went round to the other side of the car, opened the door, and flopped in. He had to slam the door twice to latch it.

“Take me to Stuart’s Rock,” he said. He seemed to be wheezing, it was hard for him to breathe.

Du Pré drove him there. Stuart’s Rock was a chunk of Canada that the glaciers had brought down and dumped on the east side of the Wolf Mountains. It was a pale red and didn’t look like the rocks here. It wasn’t even that big, just about the size of half a house trailer.

Du Pré pulled off on the verge.

The rock was out in a pasture.

Benetsee slipped through the sagging barbed wire and walked over to the rock and climbed up on it. He pulled something from his pocket or maybe the lining of his coat. Du Pré couldn’t see what it was.

The old man dropped the thing and then began to whirl it round and round.

Whirrrrrrrrr. Rooaaar.

Bullroarer. Flat piece of wood on a thong.

What’s this? Du Pré thought.

The old man kept whirling it, facing to the east.

D
U
P
RÉ WOKE UP
smelling Madelaine’s hair. The phone. The damned telephone was ringing.

Maria, my daughter who lives in the library and I only see by the light of her computer screen? A beer bust? I don’t think so.

Du Pré fumbled for the light, got out of bed, went round to the other side, and lifted the receiver. Madelaine stirred.

“’Lo,” he said.

“Du Pré?” It was Michelle Leuci’s voice.

“Yes, it is me,” said Du Pré.

“Rollie just called,” she said. “Another one.”

“What other one?” said Du Pré.

“Another murder,” said Michelle. “A young woman, an anthropologist from Canada.”

“Oh,” said Du Pré.

“She was strangled. She had been working late, researching in one of the collections. Now, the security there is tight, so whoever did it had to have the right ID and code cards—if I have that story right.”

Du Pré was thinking of Benetsee standing on the Canadian rock with the bullroarer thundering.

“Okay,” said Du Pré, “so where was Chase?”

“They’re looking for him.”

“When did this happen?”

“Sometime early evening,” said Michelle. “She was last seen alive about six
P.M
. The ME’s report will take a day or so.”

Six would be …four here. Jesus Christ.

Du Pré remembered the angle of the sunlight. Benetsee had been there close to four, on that rock.

God
damn
that old man.

“I will try to call Lucky in the morning,” Du Pré said. There was a phone number in that letter, he thought.

“Where was she found?”

“Rest room. Apparently the killer was just waiting behind the door. Strangled her with some piece of rawhide.”

“Rawhide?” said Du Pré. That stuff was usually pretty stiff.

Michelle said, “Bart’s flying me back…Just a minute. He wants to talk to you.”

The phone was shuffled.

“Yo,” said Bart. “Listen, Gabriel…”

“I get your house buttoned up for you,” said Du Pré before Bart had a chance to ask. “The doors and windows come, I put the doors on backward and the windows in upside down,” said Du Pré.

“Thanks,” said Bart, hanging up.

The telephone rang again.

“Yo,” said Du Pré.

“Papa,” said Maria, “did Bart’s lady find you okay?”

“Yes,” said Du Pré. “Hey, how come I never see you anymore?’ ‘

“I’m sorry, Papa,” said Maria. “You know I want to do well there. There will be all of these people went to really good schools, you know, and…”

“Yeah,” said Du Pré. She will not be a little Métis girl much longer, my Maria. What she wants is not here now. But she will come back.

“Why don’t we go on a picnic for lunch, just you and me, eh?” said Maria.

“Yes,” said Du Pré. “I miss you.”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” said Maria softly. She hung up.

Madelaine was sitting up in the bed, mussed and beautiful.

“Who was those?” she asked.

Du Pré told her.

“Lots of nuts in Washington, D.C.,” said Madelaine.

At midday, Du Pré pulled up to his house. Maria was sitting on the porch. She had a big hamper, and she was smiling widely. She walked to the car and got in and leaned over and kissed Du Pré on the cheek.

The day was warming. This late in the year, it took some time to get past the night’s frost and then the sun was golden. The grasshoppers had died, the mosquitoes, too.

They drove for an hour, all the way to a favorite place, where a spring bubbled up from below a gray-yellow scarp near the barely traveled road. There was a pool there, thick with willows and small, darting trout. Indians centuries ago had carved pictographs in the soft limestone. Vanished peoples, no one knew who they were. There was one worn, dark carving that looked sort of like a Viking ship, but it had been dismissed as a fraud by experts. Still, it looked older than all of the other carvings.

Maria had made tuna salad and a bowl of crudité and had brought some pop for herself and some whiskey for Du Pré.