The Royal Wulff Murders (11 page)

He replaced the lid, unlocked the lower right-hand drawer of his desk, and set the can inside, next to a stack of Beth’s love letters he had taken with him from Vermont. It seemed like a betrayal and he promised himself he’d move the can somewhere else soon.

Stranahan glanced at his watch. Too late to drive to the Madison
and be back before cocktail hour at the Trout Unlimited banquet. He wouldn’t have minded missing it; yuppie fly fishermen bored him to tears. But there was the matter of money. He didn’t see fishing for beautiful women as an industry with much growth potential. Being on hand for the auction would bring him into contact with potential clients.

He turned to the half-finished canvas that he’d been working on when Vareda first came through the door. He worked best when his paintings were envisioned as story scenes. He’d lost the thread of this one—just what in hell was the man doing there, with the rod tucked under his arm and his pipe in his teeth? In the painting it was twilight, the river glinting to pearlescence through shadows of forest. Feeling for a mood, he found himself reeling back through the years to a summer night on Vermont’s Battenkill River. He was following the cherry glow of his father’s cigarette as they waded downstream. The river rose around his thighs, swirling, murmuring to itself. The overhanging limb of a weeping willow dipped rhythmically into and out of the current. A trout rose. Then his father was casting, the line whistling in the darkness. There was a sudden walloping explosion and his father’s arm came up and he turned to hand over the rod—“Here, take it now, Stranny”—and then that thumping weight pulling him into the lost dimension, the river magic where time stops and the human soul pulses out through the fingertips to merge with the wild.

He picked up his brush and began to paint.

T
here are many ways of feeling alone. There is the squeezed-chest loneliness of walking down a dark alleyway, and there is the self-reliant isolation of fishing a midnight river in wilderness. There is that delicious hollow feeling of standing alone in a slumbering city, waiting for the light to change on the metropolitan avenue shining under the street lamps after the rain, secure in the knowledge that
the woman whose bed you have left is dreaming about you and it is two against the world—a loneliness built for two. And then there is the devastation of being left by someone you love.

Stranahan had known all these forms of loneliness, including the unfocused drifting that had been his life since moving west. But upon entering the convention room of the Holiday Inn, he found that a cocktail reception in a room full of people you didn’t know engendered a form of uncomfortable solitude he’d just as soon do without.

The Trout Unlimited banquet hosted an eclectic mix: men with what-the-hell beards scattered among trust-fund complexions, women sporting spaghetti-strap dresses and muscular calves, graying Montana natives standing straight as ramrods, wearing bolo ties.

Stranahan bought a watered-down bourbon and Coke and studied the competition on the wall and the long table where the art was displayed. His eyes were drawn to a night scene of the Gallatin River, a thoughtful, moody oil that had Lee Stroncek’s signature. Next to it was a Francis Golden watercolor of a steelhead river winding between buff-colored bluffs. Here and there a trout leaped from a teak pedestal, trying to escape polished-wood water. Stranahan’s contribution,
First Water
, hung at the far end of the wall. The river flowed under a ceiling of mist. A single ray of sunlight shone on a distant pine as a man pulled on waders by the side of a beat-up pickup truck, the steam rising from a thermos coffee cup set on the wheel well. The painting was a cliché, a necessary nod to the popular market, but it was also the autobiography of a thousand mornings in Stranahan’s life.

He heard the voice first—gruff, full of gravel, amiable.

“What these pictures need are naked chicks in them, you know, wearin’ hip boots and goose bumps.”

Stranahan turned to see blue eyes twinkling over a smashed nose and a broad expanse of beard.

The man stuck out a meaty hand.

“Rainbow Sam.”

He took the hand, escaping the grasp with tingling fingers.

“Sean Stranahan.”

“What I’m sayin’ is the sport oughta let its hair down. Fly fishermen have become insufferable, seven X this and
ephemerella
that. It’s goddamned pansified Latin gibberish. For chrissake, a trout’s a phallic symbol and let’s not forget it.”

He pointed at
First Water
.

“Paint in some red-tipped double-breasted mattress thresher pulling up high-heeled hip boots and buddy, I’m telling ya, you’d have every man in the room puttin’ up his hand to bid.”

Stranahan had to smile. He said, “I’ll think about that next time I put a painting in this auction.”

The man squinched up his face as if he’d received a blow. “Shit, I didn’t mean nothin’. It’s a goddamned good painting. You just have to excuse me. I’m always putting my foot in it; comes from never shutting up.”

“No offense taken,” Stranahan said. Seeing an opening to bridge the man’s discomfort, he added, “You’re Sam Meslik, aren’t you? The guide? It was your client who found that body?”

Sam’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, I caught some strange things before—bats, beavers, hooked a buffalo in the Park once on my back cast, had to break him off, a’course, woulda taken too long to land and I didn’t have a tag for him.”

Sam chuckled, his voice trailing away. Then he seemed to recall the question and said, “Yeah, that was my first homo sapiens, though. The only good cast my client made all day. Dumb shit couldn’t catch a turd in a cesspool.”

He lowered his voice conspiratorially, “You ask me, it weren’t no ordinary drowning. It coulda been, but then it coulda been something else, is what I’m sayin’. I’m not supposed to tell anybody this,” Sam said—though he had told anyone who would listen in the past five days, including three bartenders and the checkout girl at the County Market—“but
you find a man drowned with a size twelve Royal Wulff stuck in his lip, you ask yourself how it got there.”

Sam jutted out his lower lip and with his forefinger hooked an imaginary fly through the center of it. Stranahan could see V notches in several places in his upper teeth.

“He hooked himself on his back cast?”

“Yeah, but the hook point was forward.” Sam tugged at his lip, indicating the direction of the pull. “I s’pose he coulda caught it coming forward, you know, on his delivery,” Sam said, “but usually you catch an ear or hook yourself in the back of your neck. Right in the center of the lip, and the lip all blowed up bloodshot—just seems unlikely to me.”

“So you figure someone hooked him on purpose and the fly broke off?” Stranahan prompted.

“You said it, I didn’t. But it makes a fella wonder, specially when you see a two X tippet hanging off the fly.”

“Two X, that’s awful heavy,” Stranahan agreed. In fact, two X tested out around twelve pounds and was way too stout to use with any dry fly smaller than a sparrow.

Sam continued, “Now why would a guy use a tippet that’s so thick he can hardly poke it through the eye of the hook? The fly isn’t going to ride right and the fish will shy away from the tippet. The way I figure, either he doesn’t know anything about fly fishing or he’s fishing for some mighty dumb trout.”

“Not many dumb trout in the Madison,” Stranahan said.

“Don’t I know it. And I know the man could fish some because I’d seen him.” Sam briefly explained the circumstances under which he had recognized the young man. “So I been sniffin’ around. I don’t have much faith in that woman sheriff or the clown she has for a deputy.”

Stranahan would have pursued the conversation, but the emcee of the evening was clearing his throat, calling for everyone to sit
down to dinner. The burly guide drifted away to sit at a table with the clients he’d been fishing with that day. Stranahan found an empty chair at an adjoining table beside a middle-aged couple from Texas. The Texan was a Lone Star icon in bolo tie and Stetson who emphasized his opinions with a finger that jabbed toward Stranahan’s chest, the woman a bleached blonde, wearing a snap-up Western shirt unsnapped to reveal freckled, very deeply suntanned cleavage. From her ears dangled glass pendant earrings enclosing miniature trout flies.

Stranahan made what conversation he could, but his mind was on the auction. He didn’t permit himself expectations. Although the
Boston Globe
had heralded him as a “poor man’s Ogden Pleissner,” which the writer had intended as a compliment, he was unknown here, and in the art world reputation was much more important than quality of work. Stranahan’s reputation, such as it was, had been made on his New England riverscapes, their distinctive characteristic a singular lack of fishermen. He thought it was enough to create the mood of angling; let the buyer paint himself into the picture where and how he wanted. His downfalls were the same as his strengths: refined taste, a rich yet somber palette, and a sense of restraint. But cliché was what sold. Collectors of angling art, like collectors of wildlife or Western art, harbored illusions of sophistication, but they wanted to see trout jumping and mountains reflected on water. Stranahan’s concessions to commercialism—painting an angler into
First Water
, for example—usually didn’t go far enough; that was one reason he was living in his studio.

Coming last on the auction block wouldn’t help. There was money in Bridger, but it was young money, in impatient pockets, and buyers were likely to get in on the action early. As he’d predicted, the Stroncek oil and Golden’s watercolor moved at good prices, $950 and $1,100 respectively. Most of the other paintings went for between $350 and $650, sculptures and carvings in the same range. Two young
women paraded down the rows of tables, holding the pieces high overhead, like ring girls carrying placards between the rounds of a boxing match. They wore matching white blouses, trout-print bandannas knotted at their throats, and crimson lipstick.

Stranahan felt a tap on his back and turned to hear Sam whisper raspily, “What’s Montana coming to, eh buddy?”

The auctioneer’s voice cut short further comment. “And now we come to
First Water
, a truly gorgeous oil by Vermont artist Sean Stranahan. This is it, so let’s dig deep for the good fight to protect our treasured trout streams. Do I have five hundred to start the bid?”

He didn’t, settled for $300, and from there the bidding inched upward. Stranahan felt his chest expand and seemed to lift fractionally off his chair, floating in suspension as the auctioneer’s disembodied voice receded into the background. It was ridiculous, he knew, but he was always like this at an auction, even though any money the painting garnered was donated to the cause.

His chest eased a bit as the bidding reached $500. At least now he wouldn’t be disgraced. But the bidding plateaued at $550. “I got five and a half, five and a half going once, going twice… and I got a six hunnerd dollar bill. Thank you, sir. Do I have six and a half?”

Stranahan was too late to see Rainbow Sam lower his hand, but an exaggerated wink was enough to betray the bid. Stranahan’s fondness for the gruff-looking bear grew by bounds.

The bidding was picked up at $625 by the same ruddy-faced man who had helped trade it up to $500. He took it for $800 a minute later as Stranahan felt his back muscles sink into the hardback chair. It was more than he had hoped for. True, he’d once sold a painting for five grand at a benefit to save the Androscoggin River in New Hampshire, but that was a cause célèbre for one of the east’s most hallowed trout rivers and he’d had the benefit of name recognition. Plus, the Madison Avenue executives and Boston Brahmins who were spreading like a cancer across New England buying and restoring farmhouses
needed something other than molting deer heads and leather-yoke mirrors to adorn their walls.

After the auction, Stranahan found the man who had bought
First Water
and introduced himself. Richard Summersby had an iron handshake and said he was from the Santa Ynez Valley in California, where he owned a vineyard. He said if Stranahan ever got down Santa Barbara way, he should stop in for some grape juice. He smiled at his little joke and winked at Stranahan, rich man to rich man. He said he and his wife had a “bungalow” on the Madison River where they fished during the summer. The house, Stranahan suspected, was what realtors called a “two-two-eighter”: two people, occupied two weeks a year, eight thousand square feet. The kind of trophy palace where Stranahan’s painting would be introduced to the khaki clientele that wildlife and angling artists crave, before sleeping unseen through the winter.

Excusing himself, he found Sam in line for the bar. “What’s yours, buddy?” Sam said.

“I should be buying you the drink.”

“Nah, I liked your painting; it was real, absence of booty and boobage notwithstanding. But it’s dangerous to put up your hand in that crowd.”

It was the most genuine compliment Stranahan had heard all night. He said, “Guess I’ll have a whiskey to celebrate. Bourbon and whatever. I’ll get the second round.”

“Won’t be anyone to drink it,” Sam said. “I’m outta here. The featured speaker is a personal friend of mine, and a fuckin’ PC bore. He’s going to give a spiel on the curse of whirling disease, how it passes from fish to bird to river, how we all gotta wipe our boots and hose our boats down so we don’t spread it around and lose the resource. Yada, yada, yada. I mean, it’s true, whirling disease is still killing trout despite the naysayers putting their heads in the sand and saying the rivers are recovered. Anyone who fished the Madison in the old days can tell you it’s
still a big fuckin’ problem. But the way he talks you’d think we were worshipping the goddamned trout, not yankin’ and crankin’ em.

He went on, “Hey, I gotta free day tomorrow. How about doing a little fishing with me at Henry’s Lake? Now those are trout that are trout. I caught hybrids there that went ten pounds. Damsel nymphs on the menu this time of year. Do you have a float tube?”

Stranahan didn’t.

“Then I’ll bring my extra. Meet me at Josie’s, six a.m. You know Josie’s?”