Raptor Page 17

  “Unfortunately,” Betts continued his beaver story, “the investors weren’t well capitalized. They ran out of money and went back to California leaving the beavers with nobody to feed and care for them. It was not a pretty sight; the animals were sick and starving. Many of them died. Katharine’s group petitioned the government for permission to go in there and feed the beavers until the case could be settled. Permission was granted to feed and care for them—that’s all. But the next time the Fish and Wildlife Service went back to check up the beavers were all gone, every last one. Those people took it upon themselves to release them. They rented a bunch of vans from Rent A Wreck and turned them in in Boise, Idaho, but the vehicles had been destroyed. The beavers had ripped them to shreds and defecated all over the place. They’ll never get the smell out. It was disgusting.”

  “What happened to the beavers?”

  “Unless Katharine and her buddies turned them in to pets, they released them somewhere between here and Boise. Most of those beavers were raised in captivity and they didn’t know zip about surviving in the wild. Sometimes these soft-hearted do-gooders are soft headed, too. People get pretty irrational when it comes to wildlife.”

  “What would you have done?” I asked.

  Betts sat up straight in his chair. “Fattened ’em up, slaughtered ’em and sold the pelts to pay off the creditors.” He looked at his watch. “I believe Katharine Conover is a violent menace to society and that she should not be released on bail.”

  Betts’s record had been admirable so far, but unless there were some witnesses I doubted he’d be able to pull this one off. Katharine had walked through an airport, something destroyed a jet engine, she’d lost her temper under duress. There wouldn’t be any fingerprints; the evidence had gone up in smoke. Maybe she’d broken some people’s code for female behavior, but you still need evidence to prosecute someone in America. If that’s all they had, it wasn’t much except for the supposed connection between March and Pedersen and the real connection between Pedersen and the prince, March and Katharine.

  “It’s also quite likely she and March were in complicity in the Pedersen murder,” said Betts.

  “Why would she do something that would endanger her lover?”

  He widened his eyes, the butterflies drifted up. “Women do crazy things.”

  “Men don’t?”

  “This particular woman has committed very irrational acts.”

  Next he’d tell me she’d been on the rag and recommend the PMS defense. Well, who was I to defend Katharine? She had her own attorney. “Actually, I didn’t come here to talk to you about Katharine Conover. I’d like to talk about someone else—Cortland James. I assume you know who he is.”

  The blues fluttered down and lighted on me. “An Easterner, the head of the Conservation Committee. He was here with your birding expedition.”

  “Maybe, maybe he was here before the birding expedition. As the Irish say, a man can’t be in two places at once unless he’s a bird. When Cortland was supposedly still back East, he could well have been here. The flight he arrived on came from Bullhorn and didn’t connect with any flights from the East. I think he flew out of Fire Pond on the Frontier flight to Bullhorn on November twelfth and came back on the return trip.”

  “So?”

  “You could get the names of the passengers on those flights.”

  “What would that prove? Maybe he flew under an assumed name.”

  “He seems pretty fond of the name he has.”

  “Maybe he had business in Bullhorn.” Once again there was that sense of something lurking behind the darting butterflies. Were we going to have to go through the discovery routine again?

  “Do I really need to remind you that if you have information that will affect my client you are required to disclose it to me? All of it.”

  Betts fondled his knuckles, looked out the window as if he wished he were on the other side of the glass, and then he fessed up. “We don’t need to check the passenger lists. Cortland James was here before the afternoon of November twelfth.”

  “He was negotiating with Pedersen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, I suppose you have it all on tape.”

  “Not exactly.” He had the kind of fair skin that was also an indicator, and the flush it exhibited right now indicated to me that the government had screwed up so badly even he was embarrassed by it. “Some of the tapes are missing. Someone broke into Pedersen’s apartment the day of the murder and took them.”

  The day of the murder. The day Cortland supposedly stayed home sneezing into his embroidered hanky. There’s more than one way to induce a runny nose. “Someone broke into Pedersen’s apartment the day of the murder and you didn’t tell me?”

  Betts shrugged. He had more nervous habits than George Bush and something similar to be nervous about, another dubious government cover-up. “There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, nothing to tell. It could well have been one of the falconers who negotiated with Pedersen. It could have been Katharine. Her whereabouts haven’t been established for that day.”

  “Was Cortland James’s tape taken?”

  “All the tapes in the apartment were taken. Tapes of some falconers were missing, too.”

  “What about your men in the phone truck? Weren’t they recording everything?”

  “Not everything. Some of the falconers would only meet Pedersen in places we couldn’t get close enough to record. In those instances he wore a body recorder about the size of a cigarette pack taped to his calf.” He bent over to demonstrate on his leg where the recorder was affixed. It was a child’s trick, trying to divert you from the major misdeed by plying you with irrelevant details.

  “Didn’t he copy those tapes?”

  “He was going to. We planned to pick them up Wednesday.”

  Trust the federal government to set up an elaborate, expensive sting and fuck it up.

  “We have no reason to suspect Cortland James of murder or of taking the tapes. He is a wealthy, prominent citizen, the head of a prestigious conservation organization, not a falconer.”

  “He was negotiating with Pedersen, he must have wanted the falcon. Why? To add to his life list?”

  “We don’t know.” He used the royal “we.” It was “I” when the government did something right, I noticed, “we” when they didn’t. “But we have no reason to believe that Cortland James would kill for a bird.”

  “Maybe he didn’t kill for a bird,” I said.

  Betts blinked his eyes and looked at his watch again. “Are we finished? There’s a bail hearing in fifteen minutes,” he said.

  “We’re finished,” I replied.

  I went next to see Marie, Tom Mitchell’s crackerjack secretary, in the office on Third Avenue. The pace had picked up since the last time I’d been there. No longer sitting still at her desk staring wistfully toward the Dakotas, Marie was bustling around, shuffling papers, and the phone rang several times during our brief interview. It’s annoying to be talking to someone who keeps taking phone calls, but I had it under control.

  “How’s it going, Neil, you making some progress?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “The reason I wanted to talk to you is that Tom called this morning to say he’s coming back Monday.”

  “You seem relieved.”

  “I am. I hate not having anything to do. Anyway, Tom said he’s ready to take over March’s defense.”

  “Have you talked to March about it?”

  “I wouldn’t do that. He’s your client now.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, even though I already had. Would I like to go back home and sleep curled up behind the Kid? Yes. Was I still pissed with March for talking to Katharine? Maybe. Would I leave Montana with an unresolved case, without even finding out who had run me off the road? No. Could I persuade March to keep me on the case? “I’ll talk to March over the weekend and call Tom on Monday.”

  “Give him my best,” Marie said, taking ano
ther call.

  “Be glad to,” I said.

  It felt like a night to go home to my motel efficiency and plot my next move while I curled up with a Cuervo Gold and some Lean Cuisines. As I had plenty of the former but none of the latter, I stopped at Albertson’s on my way back. I picked out a zucchini lasagna and a cheese cannelloni, got into the checkout line and read the headlines on People and the National Enquirer just to stay in touch.

  A courtly silver-haired gentleman got on line behind me. “Elvis Presley is alive,” I told him. “He was seen buying Lean Cuisines in a supermarket in Oregon. He’s still trying to lose weight, but he’d do better if he limited himself to one. The trouble with Elvis is he never learned when to say when.”

  “You can read that far?” asked the gentleman.

  “Only when I wear my contacts,” I replied.

  “I have glasses,” he said squinting toward the tabloid headlines, “but I hate to wear them.”

  “How do you find your way around this place? It is rather large.”

  “I’ve been here so often I know where most everything is. I wanted to make myself a cheesecake, but I think they’ve moved the mix. You haven’t seen it, have you?”

  There was a sign over aisle four clearly visible through my lenses, CAKE MIXES, it said. “Aisle four, right over there,” I told him.

  “Thanks.”

  He was back with his mix before he’d lost his place in line. I paid for my groceries, he paid for his. He followed me outside.

  “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

  “New Mexico.”

  “Welcome to Montana. I hope you’ll enjoy your visit.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I watched him get in his truck, not bothering to put on the glasses he hated to wear, and, squinting narrowly, pull out of the parking lot. I waited a few minutes to put some distance between us. If you’re going to have a collision, you might as well have one with a gentleman, but it’s better not to have one at all.

  There are those who focus on the far away in Montana, those who keep their eyes on the middle distance, those who can only see what’s up close. The time had come to look up close, to go out to the aerie and search for the black line, the thread that led out of the rug.

  19

  WHEN I GOT back to the Aspen Inn, I put a quarter in a vending machine in the lobby and took out the Fire Pond News. The name of Kills on Top, the Indian who had been accused of a barroom murder, had been spelled Killsontop in this paper, which made him seem a lot less culpable. The selection of stories about wildlife-related crimes rivaled the National Enquirer today. A man in Silverton had been treated for rabies after having had sex with a raccoon. He defended himself against charges of animal cruelty on the grounds that the raccoon was already dead.

  It was an early edition paper and the news I was looking for wasn’t in it yet. I checked the weather. A winter storm watch was in effect for Sunday afternoon, as a major low pressure system was coming in bringing snow, several inches of it, which could easily close Freezeout for the winter. Tomorrow, Saturday, could be my last chance to get to the aerie to look for evidence and to see the gyr. It could also be somebody else’s last chance to take her, my only chance to prevent it.

  I stopped by Avery’s room and found him sitting on the floor reading maps. Some people read the National Enquirer for amusement, some read the phone book, some read maps.

  “I was thinking I might drive up to The Pipes Sanctuary tomorrow. Want to come?” He pointed the spot out to me on the map. Map readers need to see a place before they go there and have an image in their mind of where it sits relative to all the other places they have (or haven’t) been. I could understand it, having once been a map reader myself, but then I discovered legal briefs and phone books.

  “Actually, Avery, I was going to ask you if you’d go back to Freezeout with me. I’m not getting any cooperation from Wayne Betts. I still feel that something is missing and that if we look at the aerie hard enough we’ll find it. I know what you said about not leading another predator to the nest, but it could be a case of keeping other predators away from the nest. Everyone knows where the bird is now anyway, where Pedersen fell. There’s a storm predicted for Sunday; it could be the last chance to get out there this year. I think we should do it.”

  “Be glad to,” said Avery.

  “How did it go with the birds?”

  “Depressing. A lot of them are not going to make it, but they’re in good hands with Leo.”

  “Big hands, anyway.”

  “But surprisingly gentle. It’s quite something; unusual in a man with such a…”

  “Monstrous ego?”

  Avery smiled. “Blustery manner. There were some lovely birds, but nothing to compare with the gyr. She’s one in a million, one in a billion maybe.”

  “There are still people out there who want her badly. Can’t anything be done to stop falcon poaching?”

  “A volunteer watch could be set up. It’s been done before. In Vermont they did that to keep people from hiking down a trail that led to the first pair of peregrines to come back to nest. I’ve heard that in Germany they’ve set up watches to keep disreputable falconers from taking the birds, but that would be difficult in a place as remote as Freezeout. Amazing, isn’t it, the lengths we go to to save our wildlife? But we may never match the lengths some are willing to go to destroy it. In Africa the game wardens have taken to tranquilizing rhinos and filing down their horns so poachers won’t kill the animals for them. It’s unusual for the gyr to hang around so long, sooner or later she’s going to go further south or head back north. If we find her there, maybe we could convince her to leave sooner just in case the storm doesn’t close Freezeout. There’s no guarantee she’ll find a safe place, but wherever she goes is likely to be safer than here.”

  “I’m game. How do we do it?”

  “Scare her off somehow. Let me think about it a little bit.”

  “While you do that, I’ll go watch the news. You’ll call me when you wake up?”

  “First thing. We should get an early start.”

  I turned on the TV when I got back to my room and got a local station that gave in-depth reportage of high school football games—anything to fill an hour. Next they got to the weather and talked about the upcoming storm. A news reporter came on the screen finally and told me what I wanted to know, which was that Katharine Conover had been released on bail. Betts had struck out on this one; the wild bird was free again. He still had Heinz, however. Tomorrow was Saturday, the day the prince was to leave Fire Pond “if all goes as planned.” He’d shown little respect for our criminal justice system so far, maybe he’d lost confidence in his expensive attorney as well. He’d have to leave the Sparhawk out of his plans but he might well include the gyr and/or Heinz. He cared plenty about the gyr—enough to find some way to trap her? It was questionable how much he cared about Heinz and whether he could (or would) spring him.

  The rest of the news was too boring to watch, even for the mood I was in, so I preheated the oven, precooled my glass. When that had been accomplished, I put the Lean Cuisines in the oven and poured the Cuervo Gold over the ice in the glass. I flipped through the channels. A dying John Huston was on one of them, breathing through an oxygen tube and complaining about the colorization of his movies for cable TV. It was some kind of entertainment news show, but Sylvester Stallone came on next and forced me to shut it off. There wasn’t much else amusing in my stucco-walled, mottle-carpeted room, nobody in Fire Pond to call and I’d already read the phone book. I began thinking about words:

  raptor: a bird of prey;

  rap: a kind of jive talk, the knock of spirits against a table;

  rapacious: covetous, subsisting on prey;

  rapid: fast, a place in a river where the water moves swiftly but is blocked by obstacles;

  rape: to violate by force;

  rapture: a state of ecstasy;

  rapport: an affinity;

  rapprocheme
nt: a state of cordial relations;

  rapier: a two-edged sword.

  I played monkey at the keyboard until the Lean Cuisines were done: His rapture over raptors and his rapport with them were a rapier. He raped the environment rapidly, rapaciously and repeatedly but never rapped about it because it would destroy the rapprochement.

  I poured another drink, ate dinner, cleaned up by throwing away my plastic fork and tin dishes, then lay down on the fold-out sofa. I opened Joan’s journal to the end of the Raptor section, where she quoted again from her favorite book, The Peregrine by J. A. Baker:

  Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, a sinking planes of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this freedom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the neat squares of orchard and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries. But what does he understand?

  What does any living creature understand of any other? was my question, even those that walk the same paths and speak the same language. What do we have to go on? Eyes, expressions, body language, words, words that are spoken and words that are written, words that reveal the essence of someone, words that do not.

  There was nothing left to read now but Personal. I turned to this:

  Like a haggard falcon, having gotten used to solitude, I have come to prefer it. I have lived alone for many years. What love I have is at a distance, and companionship has sometimes been lacking, but there is a still, clear center to my life, a clarity that no one can give or take away from me. Moments come, moments pass, the sunlight dances on moving water. An unnoticed moment is gone, an observed one lives. What matters is not that the moment passes, but that it is observed. Bird watching has brought much joy and beauty to my life, it has taught me to be still, to listen, to see.