"I see."

"You're not convinced?" he said.

"It's been good meeting you, Mr. Girard. I read a couple of your books. I admire your talent."

He seemed to look at me with a different light in his eyes.

He said, "Holly and I are having some people over tonight. It's a publication party. A collection of essays done by local writers on the Blackfoot. Bring Tobin Voss or whoever you like."

"That's kind of you. Tell me, Mr. Girard, why would a fellow's film agent want to send a private detective after him?"

"Man claims I set fire to his convertible outside the Polo Lounge. But don't put any credence in that. The poor guy's unbalanced. He's trying to set up 900 toll numbers for Charlie Manson and the Menendez brothers."

"This is your agent?"

"Not anymore," he said, his eyes smiling.

"Come with us," Doc said to his daughter Maisey that evening.

"Holly Girard looks like melted wax somebody put in the refrigerator," Maisey said.

"I don't want you here alone," he said.

"Steve is picking me up. We're going to the movies. If you don't trust me, then stay home."

"What time are you coming back from the show?" Doc said.

"Maybe you could put an electric monitor on me. The kind that criminals wear when they're sentenced to home arrest."

"How about it with the histrionics?" Doc said.

"How about it yourself, Dad? You're the selfish one. You give up nothing and want me to give up everything."

Maisey's face had the bright shininess of a candied apple. The skin above her upper lip was moist with perspiration, like a little girl's.

Ease up, Doc, I thought.

He looked out the front window at the twilight in the hills and the black swirl of the river as it made a bend and flowed deeper into woods that had already gone dark with shadow.

"We'll be back by eleven. Can you do the same?" he said.

"I don't know. Kids in Missoula fill condoms with water and throw them at each other's cars. Can I give that up for my father's peace of mind? Gee, I'm not sure," she said. She fixed her hair in front of the mirror and looked at her father's reflection and raised her eyebrows innocuously.

I went outside and waited for Doc by my truck. Through the front window I could see him and Maisey arguing bitterly. When he came outside he tried to be good-natured but he couldn't hide the strain in his face.

"They say a father has a few rough moments when his daughter is between thirteen and seventeen. I think it's more like being rope-drug up and down a staircase on a daily basis," he said.

"Who's the kid she's going out with?" I asked.

"He lives up the road. He's a good boy. There's his car now," Doc said.

"Then quit worrying," I said.

We drove into Missoula through Hellgate Canyon and met Cleo Lonnigan at an ice cream parlor on the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. She was outside, at a table by the water, the cottonwoods blowing in the wind behind her. She wore a black dress and pearls and looked absolutely beautiful.

"I called your house. I thought maybe I was late. Maisey said you'd already left," she said.

A network of lines crisscrossed Doc's forehead.

"How long ago did you call?" he asked.

"Just a minute ago," Cleo answered.

"Why is she still at home?" Doc said, then went to the pay phone inside the ice cream parlor before either Cleo or I could speak.

"He's a little wired," I said.

"I think Doc and his daughter should get a divorce," she said.

I saw him replace the receiver on the hook, then walk down the steps toward us.

"Nobody home. They probably took off," he said.

"Sure," I said, glad the conversation was about to change.

He glanced at his wristwatch, his eyes busy with thought. "I'll call from Girard's place," he said.

Xavier Girard and his wife Holly lived in a big log house on a bluff above the Clark Fork. The sun was only a spark between two ridges in the western part of the valley now, but the afterglow rose high into the vault of blue sky overhead, and looking to the north you could see snowcapped mountains in the Rattlesnake Wilderness and, toward Missoula, the maple trees in residential neighborhoods riffling in the breeze and the lights of downtown reflecting on the river's surface.

"Whose money bought this place?" I said as we walked up the drive toward the sundeck of the Girards' house.

"Not Xavier's. He has the reverse King Midas touch. Everything he touches turns to garbage. He went back to Louisiana and built a million-dollar home on the bayou, you know, boy from Shitsville makes good, except he built it in a sinkhole and the foundation caved in and the whole thing slid into the bayou," Doc said.

The guests on the deck and in the living room were writers and university people, artists, biologists and conservationists, photographers, liberal arts students from the East, an editor from Doubleday, a journalist from Time, a movie producer from A amp;E, smoke jumpers, and Xavier Girard's entourage of barroom fans.

An actor from north-central Texas, who wore a suit with no tie, his dress shirt open at the collar, was holding forth at a glass-topped table, his mouth downturned at the corners like a drill instructor's.

He was talking about a casting lunch of years ago.

"See, Dennis is a right good boy and all, but he don't have no understanding of Southerners whatsoever. We was waiting on the food to come out and he started lecturing at me and using profane language and carrying on and getting in my face like he growed up in a vacant lot. So I reached across the table and grabbed him by the necktie and dragged him through the Caesar salad and cut off his tie with a steak knife and slammed him back down in the chair and told him to start acting like a white person for a change. I didn't have no trouble with him after that, but damned if the part didn't go to…"

Down below the deck we could hear Xavier Girard, stripped to the waist, pounding a speed bag with his bare fists while his barroom pals looked on admiringly.

It was Girard's wife who was the surprise. I expected her to possess at least some of her husband's eccentricities. Instead, she was either an extraordinary actress or she must have been blind-drunk the night she married him. She seemed to gaze into your eyes with total interest, regardless of the subject of conversation. Her skin was pale, her mouth irregularly shaped, as though her expression and smile were unpracticed, perhaps a bit vulnerable. She wore her dark blond hair in tresses and stood close to the person she was talking to, either man or woman, in a way that seemed sexually intimate yet defenseless.

"You were an Assistant United States Attorney?" she said.

"For a while. In Phoenix," I replied.

"Why'd you quit?" she said.

"I probably wasn't that good at it."

Her eyes probed mine, as though my sentence contained meaning that the two of us should examine together. Then she fitted her thumb and forefinger around my wrist and said, "Will you let me share something with you?"

We walked to the edge of the deck, into the shadows and a layer of cold air that rose from the river. The pines farther up the hill were black against the stars. She wore a purple evening dress and there was a shine on the tops of her breasts. Through the sliding glass doors I could see Doc punching in numbers repeatedly on a telephone while Cleo stood behind him, an exasperated expression on her face.

"I'm concerned for Doc. He's obsessed about this gold mine up the Blackfoot," Holly Girard said.

"Seems like he has a lot of company," I said.

"But people listen to him. He was a war hero. He's got this Byzantine aura of spirituality about him. He could read the phone book and sound like John Donne."