The answer that presents itself is not a pleasant one: There are more of them out there than we think, and they recognize one another when we do not. If you doubt this, check the statistics on the number of children who disappear each year and are never seen or heard from again.
But the attack on Clete Purcel was not random. When people kill one another, it’s always for reasons of money, sex, and power. I suspected that whoever was behind the attack on Clete was driven by all three.
I called the sheriff of Iberia Parish, Helen Soileau. She had worked her way up from meter maid to patrolwoman at the NOPD, and later had become my plainclothes partner at the Sheriff’s Department in New Iberia. She was an attractive, enigmatic woman, and I was convinced several personalities lived inside her. She was the subject of an IA investigation after she had an affair with a confidential female informant. She also had an affair with Clete Purcel. She was the only cop in the area he allowed to bust and hook him up after he had destroyed a saloon in St. Martinsville and almost killed three outlaw bikers with a pool cue.
On occasion her eyes would turn warm and linger on mine, as though one of the women who lived inside her was having thoughts about straying. But I never questioned her integrity or challenged her authority, and I always respected her courage and the grace with which she conducted her life. I also learned that anyone who mocked or treated her disrespectfully did so only once. When our former sheriff retired and Helen took his place, Helen won the hearts of t
he entire community, and no one publicly discussed her sexual persuasion.
I called her and asked if she could run Leslie and Ridley Wellstone for me.
“The oil and natural-gas guys?” she said.
“Right,” I replied. But I knew what was coming.
“Is there a pattern here?”
“Sorry?”
“You have trouble with rich people, Streak. Entertain the trout and let Montana take care of its own problems.”
Then I told her what had happened to Clete Purcel.
“I’ll get back to you in two hours,” she said.
Her phone calls produced a surprise.
CHAPTER 16
I HAD EXPECTED HELEN to find compromising material on the patriarch of the family, Oliver Wellstone, or on Leslie, the Berkeley-educated humanist who had given up on the flower children and gone to the Sudan, where his features had been melted off his face like wax on a candlestick.
But it was Ridley, the over-the-hill cowboy, the stoic, laboring painfully on his aluminum forearm crutches, whose name had figured in a double-homicide investigation many years ago. The case had almost been forgotten and written off by everyone except a Houston homicide detective who had worked on it for a decade before he was found asphyxiated in his garage, his car motor running for twenty-four hours in the middle of July. He left no suicide note and, according to his friends and colleagues, had shown no signs of depression or worry in the days leading up to his death.
But the homicide detective had left behind a case file bursting with notes and transcriptions of interviews with people who occupied every stratum of Houston society.
Thirty-one years ago, Ridley had met a salesclerk by the name of Barbara Vogel in a Galleria jewelry store. She was approaching middle age, but her suntanned skin was as smooth as tallow, her chestnut hair cut like a young girl’s, giving her an appearance that was both asexual and yet strangely erotic. But it was her brown eyes that made Ridley return to the store twice, finding excuses to talk about jewelry, finally asking her to have dinner with him at the River Oaks country club, the same club that had excluded his parents from membership years before. Barbara Vogel’s eyes were warm and guileless and seemingly intrigued by everything Ridley had to say. Her body had the firmness of an athlete’s, and she could talk about any subject and had experience far beyond that of a salesclerk. She said she had been a barrel-racing rodeo queen in Dalhart, the owner of a boutique in Fort Worth, and an insurance appraiser in Beaumont. She also knew quail hunting, the price of slaughter beef, and the depth a drill rig was expected to hit a pay sand in a certain offshore quadrant. She also hinted that she was part owner of the jewelry store.
They got married after making a spontaneous champagne-soaked flight on his private jet into Juárez. Barbara Vogel didn’t bother to tell Ridley that she had been married twice already and her first husband had gone to prison for embezzlement. She also didn’t bother to tell him about her outstanding debts, her love of charge accounts, and her friendship with a collection of white trash who hung at a notorious bar in North Houston once known as the Bloody Bucket. Ridley got to meet a few of the latter when she bought a motor home the size of the Taj Mahal, loaded her friends into it, and drove to a Waylon and Willie concert in Austin. When she and her friends returned to the Wellstones’ sprawling estate, they were wiped out on reds and weed and purple acid and could hardly stand up in the yard. Most of them went to sleep on the lawn furniture and didn’t wake up until Ridley turned on the sprinkler system.
Ridley also discovered his wife’s affection for unusual fashion. She favored skintight riding pants, push-up bras, and western shirts unsnapped at the top that exposed both her cleavage and a diamond cluster that spelled out RICH BITCH.
Two years into the marriage, Barbara’s teenage daughter showed up, fresh out of rehab, her hormones blinking in red neon. She hung paper all over town and threw a roach in a horse stall, setting the barn on fire. She also got caught screwing her former high school drama teacher on his desk. The kicker for Ridley was the night both Barbara and her daughter piled his collector’s Rolls into a live-oak tree by Rice University. They not only left the scene, they told the cops later that they had not been driving the car, implying that Ridley was the man the cops needed to question.
The divorce should have gone smoothly. Ridley’s attorneys offered Barbara a three-million-dollar settlement. Barbara’s attorneys sued for seventy million and the house. They also indicated their hired psychiatric consultant had noted definite signs of sexual abuse in Barbara’s daughter and that nobody was ruling out criminal charges being filed against Ridley, with as much attendant publicity as Barbara’s attorneys could generate.
The double homicide took place on a humid September night in a quasi-rural area dotted with oak trees and split-level ranch houses. The spacious grounds surrounding Barbara’s house were bordered by a piked iron fence, the gates electronically locked, the hedges and gazebo and gravel walkways monitored by security cameras. The underwater lamps in the swimming pool automatically clicked on at sunset, creating a brilliant patch of blue light in the backyard, turning the flowers and umbrella and banana trees into a Gauguin painting. Fall was at hand, and the languid air was tinged with the odor of chrysanthemums and charcoal starter flaring on a grill. No one in the neighborhood paid particular attention to the visitor who arrived at Barbara’s house in a yellow cab.
He was tall and wore gloves, a raincoat, and a slouch hat, although the thunder in the clouds was dry and the local meteorologist had said there was little chance of rain that evening. The visitor punched in the security numbers on the gate and entered the grounds as the cab turned around in the lane, then parked under a tree.
The visitor’s weapon of choice was a cut-down pump twelve-gauge, loaded with double-aught bucks, hanging from his shoulder on a looped cord under his coat. While a neighbor broiling steaks stared aghast, the visitor walked poolside and paused in front of the recliner where Barbara’s daughter lay in a bikini, a movie magazine on her lap, her face lifted in either disdain or annoyance. The visitor raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger six inches from her forehead. Behind him, the visitor heard Barbara drop a tray with two cream-cheese sandwiches on it and try to run for the patio door. He pumped the spent shell casing onto the tile and caught her with a wide pattern across the back of her blouse. He crossed the St. Augustine grass, ejecting the casing, and looked down at his handiwork. He touched her once with the tip of his shoe, then buttoned his coat over his shotgun and got into the back of the waiting cab.
The two homicides had all the signs of the classical hit. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump and the dispassionate execution of the victims were marks of a professional killer. The gloves and raincoat ensured that no fingerprints would be left at the crime scene and the killer would not have blood splatter on his clothes. The stolen cab was a perfect getaway vehicle — commonplace and innocuous and easily dumped in a restaurant parking lot five minutes from the crime scene.
But how did the killer acquire Barbara’s security code? The electronic gate had been installed only six days before the night of the homicides. She would have had no motivation to give the code to her estranged husband. The cops pulled in an ex-convict whose wife ran a bar on Jensen Drive. His words were “A rich guy put out an open whack for fifteen grand on the Wellstone bitch and her daughter. I wouldn’t touch it with a pole, man.”
“Why is that?” a cop asked.
“Those oil-and-gas fuckers don’t pay their bills,” the ex-convict replied.