I called Buddy Pertwee just after five o'clock that afternoon; he suggested meeting at an old downtown bar called Knuckles. I was slightly hesitant about taking Renee there. I hadn't done much partying in Missoula for quite a few years, but back then Knuckles had been the watering hole of choice for local bikers and a lot of other hard-edged individuals.
But there were leavening elements of old hippies, blue-collar working people, college students, and other young folks groping their way up the perilous ladder of life, and rowdy as it was, real trouble was rare and usually happened later in the evenings when enthusiasm was running high. It was also a good-sized place, so we'd be able to get off by ourselves and have a private conversation. And I wanted Buddy to feel comfortable, on turf of his own choosing.
Downtown was only a few blocks away, so Renee and I walked. She carried one of those little traveler's umbrellas that she offered to share, but the rain had lightened to a drizzle and I enjoyed feeling it against my face. I liked rain, at least when I didn't have to stay outside working in it all day-maybe a throwback to my Celtic heritage, a gloomy, gene-deep love for a misty land where I had never gone.
Still, the damp weather enhanced the neon-lit welcome of Knuckles when we stepped inside. The main room was a long rectangle, with an L-shaped bar running most of its length and a fine old hand-carved backbar. The first thing that struck you when you walked in was a unique and stellar portrait collection, by a renowned local photographer, of old-time cowboys, railroad men, and drifters who had frequented this place. The way that he had caught their faces was magic; their eyes, their creased, weathered skin, and their broken smiles were windows into their hard and sometimes desperate lives. A gold star pasted in a bottom corner meant that they were dead. There were a lot of those.
We paused to order drinks from the bartender, a pretty young woman with multiple body piercings. When she turned away and crouched to pull a beer out of a cooler, the scallop between her top and her low-cut jeans revealed what looked like a snake tattooed down her spine. It must have been a fairly big snake, a green one. In general, the body art motif spoke loud. I saw one guy shrug off his jacket and sling it over a barstool, and I thought at first that he was wearing a striped shirt. In fact, his arms were bare.
Renee leaned close to me and whispered, "I almost got a tramp stamp once, but I chickened out."
"Tramp stamp?"
"You know. A butterfly or something, up high on a girl's behind, so you can just see it above her whale tail."
"Whale tail?"
"Thong, The back part," she said, giving me her patient-teacher look again.
After several seconds, it registered. "Oh. Because that's the shape. Like the tail of an actual whale, sort of, uh, rising up out of the ocean of her womanhood."
She patted my hand approvingly. "What a quick study you are. Did you ever think about it? A tattoo?"
"I never had the money."
We took a booth toward the rear. The crowd was moderate-a few regulars who'd probably been there all day, several men bullshitting over their after-work beers, and a couple more playing desultory eight-ball-but there was a steady trickle of newcomers, mostly of the younger set. I watched them as they came through the door; I didn't know what Buddy looked like, but I'd given him a brief description of Renee and me, and she, at least, wouldn't be hard to spot in here.
When he did come walking over to us, I liked the immediate hit I got. He had the knobby look of a guy who was accustomed to using his body; banged-up hands and scraped forearms spoke to the landscaping work he did. His face had the kind of wary, tough look that came from taking some hard shots in life, like the time he'd done in the state prison in Deer Lodge.
I stood up, shook his hand, and told him the drinks were on me. He said my own setup, a bottle of Pabst and a shot of Knob Creek bourbon, looked pretty good. Renee sat him down beside her and turned on her quiet charm; as I waited at the bar, I could see her listening attentively and nodding. By the time I got back to the booth, he had lit a cigarette and seemed to be relaxing.
"Buddy used to live in Phosphor before he moved here," Renee said to me. "He was telling me about what happened to Astrid's cabin. Remember, the roof was half-gone?" She turned back to him inquiringly.
"What I heard was, her family wanted to get rid of it, so they found a guy who was going to take it apart and reuse the logs somewhere else." He spoke in a raspy voice, with his gaze constantly shifting. "But he walked off before he got too far. Didn't like the feel of it."
I had no trouble understanding that.
"And they just left it?" Renee said.
"Guess so. I haven't been over that way for a long time." He took a swig of beer, then returned to his posture of hunching over the table with his forearms encircling his drinks. I'd read somewhere that that protectiveness was a habit men picked up in prison.
"Bad memories?" she prompted.
"Worse than memories. I'd get stomped." His quick gaze flicked back and forth between her and me. "I was a rat. I'd worked in the woods around there, and I knew a lot of the guys who were on the mine project. I'd hang around in the bars and bullshit with them like I was their friend. But I was really finding out what was going on up there and when nobody would be around."
"You must have believed in what you were doing," Renee said soothingly.
"Yeah, the noble cause," he said, now with a bitter tone. "I told myself that for a long time, and some of it's true. You watch places you love getting trashed so assholes in New York or Hong Kong can get richer. But I finally figured out the real reason I was into it-I was on a big power trip. I was the dude who knew the secrets, I was pulling the strings. I thought I was so cool, like an undercover agent." He shook his head unhappily. "Now I can't believe I did it. I'm not some fucking trustafarian-I grew up the same way as those people, they were my friends."
His tough eyes had dampened. I reached across the table and pushed his shot glass closer to him.
"Finish that off; I'll get us a couple more," I said.
When I got back from the bar this time, he looked like he was feeling better again, no doubt under Renee's calming influence.
"So how did this outfit work?" I said. "Was there an organized group? You, Astrid, other people?"
His gaze swung to me combatively. "Look, I'm glad to talk to you guys, on account of Tom Dierdorff-he saved my ass. But I'm not naming names."
I realized I'd touched a sore spot. "Sure, I understand. That's not important," I said, although it might be. I'd worry about it later. "Keep going, please."
"It was half-assed organized. We'd have meetings, act like we were commandos. But the only thing that ever really happened was when a few of us fucked up that equipment."
"And the others walked, and you took the hit," Renee said.
Buddy nodded grimly.
I decided to cut to the chase.
"Buddy, we heard Astrid was planning to sabotage the mine," I said. "Actually blow up the construction. But it doesn't seem like the sheriffs ever really investigated that."
He snorted scornfully. "They never really investigated anything. Those guys were like Reno 911!-only not funny. The one thing they were good at was busting balls on dudes like me."
"Did Astrid ever talk about that?"
"She hinted around at it."
"You think there was anything to it?" I said. "For openers, it doesn't sound like your people had that kind of know-how."
"Not even close, man. But there was this rumor-like an urban legend, nobody knew where it started or if it was pure bullshit. Supposedly, she met some dude in Colorado who was righteous for the cause, and he was an ex-Special Forces ranger. He took her with him to raid a gyppo logging camp that was poaching old-growth timber. They didn't kill anybody, but one guy wouldn't back down and they shot him in the leg. Then ran them all off and wrecked their stuff."
Renee's gaze on Buddy was already intent, but now it turned to a stare.
"Was it Astrid who shot him?"
Buddy shrugged. "Same as the other deal-nobody knew for sure and it wasn't the kind of thing you asked her. Anyway, the buzz was that the Green Beret dude was going to come up here and blow up the mine-plant the explosives, all that. But I don't know if he was even real."
"Did you ever hear anything linking that to the murders?" I said. "Like somebody found out what she was planning, and decided to stop her? Maybe even somebody from the mining company?"
"Never anything solid. Of course, with the Keystone Kops in charge, who knows?"
Then his eyes narrowed, and he emphasized his next words with little jabs of his forefinger.
"But I can tell you this, man-there were people who thought she had it coming."
Renee flinched, and Buddy's face turned anxious with apology.
"Hey, sorry. I didn't mean that the way it came out," he said.
She managed a wan smile. "Don't worry, I'm learning all kinds of new things about her. So what finally happened with your group?"
He leaned back in his seat, almost flopping, like he was overcome by the thought.
"It was way weird. The last couple meetings, she was all of a sudden like a different person. That fire was gone-you could tell she didn't even want to be there. Then she told us all to chill for a while, she'd get in touch. But she didn't, and the whole thing just fell apart."
This was another surprising piece of news, with no ready explanation. The possibility that Astrid had simply lost interest seemed highly unlikely.
"What brought that on?" I said.
"Never found out." He groped distractedly in his shirt pocket for another cigarette. "I tried to talk to her, but she turned real nasty-basically told me to fuck off. Other people said she was the same way with them. The feeling I got was, she was really pissed about something."
"Something?" Renee said sharply. "Because you and the others screwed up?"
He shook his head decisively. "If that was it, she'd have told us. She got right in your face about shit like that."
His restless gaze had kept moving all along, his head frequently swiveling toward the door. It went there again and paused, apparently on another young man who had just walked in and was scanning the room.
"I'll be back in a minute," he said, getting up.
I was sure that the newcomer also saw him, but there was no sign of recognition between them. Buddy headed down the rear hallway to the restrooms. The other guy turned around and left the bar.
There was an alley around the side of the building, and a back door at the end of the hallway, that both led to a parking lot. I suspected that in its shadows, some kind of illicit substance and a sum of money were about to change hands. It had crossed my mind earlier that Buddy must have a backup source of income for the winter months, when the lawn and garden business wouldn't cover the bills.
Renee wasn't paying attention to that or anything else around us; her gaze had gone unfocused. I touched a finger to her forehead.
"What's going on in there?" I said.
"I'm wondering where I've been all these years. Can you think of anything else in particular we should ask him?"
"I'd say let's just keep him talking."
That wasn't hard. When Buddy returned, he still had plenty to say. But after another half hour he started to run around the same bush, and he edged more and more into bitterness at his mistreatment by the Dodd Company and the local authorities. Tom Dierdorff's wry warning crossed my mind-getting him to shut up would be the tricky part.
But our patience was rewarded when he let drop another eye-opener.
Astrid's infidelity hadn't been one-sided. The young mining company manager who'd been murdered along with her had a girlfriend at the time-a local woman from Phosphor named Tina Gerhardt, whose family owned the town's small grocery store.
That news put Phosphor on our itinerary back to Helena tomorrow, a detour of about an hour. Tina might be long gone by now, and if she was still around, she might not want to talk to us. But the opposite could just as well be true, and like Buddy, she might even have an ax to grind. The grocery store was a local hub where everybody in the area stopped by frequently and gossiped, and she was connected to the crime. She very well might have gleaned information that had never officially come to light. It was definitely worth checking out.
As Renee and I were getting ready to leave Knuckles, I bought Buddy one more drink and set it in front of him.
"For what it's worth, seems to me you've carried that weight on your back long enough," I said. "Paid your dues, all that."
He looked surprised and pleased. "Thanks, man." But then his face turned almost plaintive, like he found the thought more unhappy than reassuring. "I keep telling myself I should go someplace new, get something else going. But it's hard when you got a record. And, you know"-his fingers opened and closed, like he was trying to take hold of words-"there's something about this town. It's got a drift you get caught up in."
I'd heard other people say that about Missoula, and I'd felt the tug myself.