“Did they investigate?” Susan said. She was caught up in it, Vicky realized. A young Arapaho making her way in Hollywood, caught up in the disappearance of another Arapaho, as if Charlie had disappeared yesterday. But wasn’t that the way it always was for her people? Whatever had happened in the past seemed always a possibility in the present.
Brett pulled another sheet from the envelope and gave it to Vicky. “This is all I found,” he said.
Another official-looking form with a typed paragraph near the top, the letters ragged and smeared-looking. Vicky read out loud: April 14, 1923, Disposition of Missing Person Report. Tim McCoy, employed by Lasky Studio, stated that he believed movie star Missy Mae Markham may have information concerning Charlie Wallowingbull, reported missing April 10. Contacted Elvin Hall, Lasky spokesman. Informed that Miss Markham has been in Arizona and couldn’t possibly have any knowledge of missing Indian. Hall said that Wallowingbull was a disruptive and unreliable employee, ill at ease away from his natural surroundings on a Wyoming reservation. The studio has conducted its own investigation into his absence and concluded that Wallowingbull returned to his reservation of his own accord. Investigation closed.
“Why didn’t McCoy find this?” Vicky let her eyes skim the paragraph again.
“It was 1923, before the open records laws,” Brett said. “Records could be open or closed depending upon the police chief’s orders. Could be the investigation was closed because Lasky Studio wanted it closed. They gave the police a plausible explanation, something to put in the report.” He nodded at the sheet in Vicky’s hand. “If the studio didn’t want McCoy to see the final report, he didn’t see it. Sorry, Vicky.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s not much.”
Vicky smiled at the young man across from her who loved her daughter. “It’s everything,” she said.
1923
WILLIAM LIFTED THE breastplate carefully out of his parfleche and pulled it over his tanned shirt. The small dressing room was crowded with Indians putting on regalia from the Old Time—tanned and beaded shirts and trousers and moccasins, feathered headdresses. “Studio wants the real thing,” McCoy had told them. “It’s gotta be authentic.”
Tonight was the premiere of The Covered Wagon. They had spent hours rehearsing. The theater would be filled with stars and celebrities. The Indians were quiet as they dressed, not talking much, slowly draping their bodies with precious remnants of the past. Several other Arapahos already had on breastplates. William struggled to loop the leather ties in back. The small white bones of the breastplate were cracked and some of the porcupine quills and beads had fallen off. Still it was beautiful. His father had worn it on the plains, and his grandfather before and on back—he didn’t know how many generations. All of them protected from the arrows of enemies.
“You seen Charlie?” It was McCoy’s voice behind him.
William finished tying the loops, then turned and faced the white man. “He’s here somewhere,” he said.
“He’s nowhere around.” McCoy had pushed his white Stetson back. His gaze switched about the room. “He ride down with you?”
William shook his head. The Indians had ridden into town two or three at a time, the way McCoy had told them. No sense clogging up the roads and getting folks riled up. The roads were already crowded with cars moving toward Hollywood Boulevard. Pedestrians jammed the sidewalks. Out in front of the Egyptian Theatre, crowds lined both sides of the forecourt, and the sky was streaked with lights from the big klieg lights that had been set up. The warm evening air was filled with a sense of expectancy and celebration.
“I figure Charlie rode down with Painted Brush,” he said.
McCoy gave a quick glance toward the far corner of the room where James was fixing a roach to his head. The porcupine hair stood straight up and made him seem taller, more menacing. White folks in the audience liked the roaches.
“When did you see him last?”
“Just before I went out to the corral to saddle up.”
“He wasn’t with that actress, was he?”
William looked away. Not then, Charlie wasn’t. Not when William had shouldered the parfleche and headed to the corral. But earlier . . . He tightened his jaw against speaking the rest of it. Late this afternoon when they were starting to pack up for the show, Missy Mae Markham had driven into camp. A silver Packard with the top down, bouncing over the hillside, scraping the brush, and her blond hair flying in the wind. Somehow she had steered around the scrub brush and cottonwoods and stopped right in front of Charlie’s tipi. She had stepped out, slammed the door, and screamed, “Charlie?” Her scream, echoing over the camp, had brought the other Indians out of the tipis.
William had rushed toward her. He remembered the thoughts that tumbled through his head. He would delay her, convince her Charlie had already left for the theater, get her to turn around and drive out of there. But Charlie was ahead of him, pushing him out of the way, and he remembered something else—the arrow of anger that had shot through him. He grabbed Charlie’s arm and wheeled him about. “She’ll get you fired, you fool. You gotta tell her now. Tell her so she’ll get out of here and leave you alone.”
He could still see the expression changing in Charlie’s face as if he were walking in and out of the shadows. He was fighting with himself. Oh, William knew what was inside him. This beautiful white woman, the most beautiful woman they had ever seen, and she wanted Charlie. Wanted to come inside his tipi, fling off the flimsy dress, and give herself to him. The thought had made William feel like he was choking. Because if she came for him—if she ever came for him—he would take her inside his tipi.
“You gotta tell her the truth,” he said, but Charlie had already pulled away. He walked over to the woman, then led her through the camp to his tipi. William had followed. Gratitude washed over him that no one from the studio was there. No sign of the skinny bodyguard. No one knew she was in camp except the other Arapahos and Shoshones. The stage show was supposed to go on for eight months. Eight months of good, steady pay. They would not say anything, but he could see the worry on their faces.
“No!” The scream burst past the tipi. The scream of a wounded animal, high-pitched and shrill as a whistle. Then the girl ran out, crashed against him, and kept running, one hand flung over her forehead. William had felt as if he were watching a silent movie as she ran through the brush, tripping in the little white heels and lurching forward. The skirt of her white dress caught on a stalk of wild grass. He heard the ripping noise.
Charlie stepped out of the tipi, and they both watched her throw herself into the Packard. The motor made a coughing noise, and the thin front wheels dug into the dirt and brush. She started backing up, hunched over the wheel, the motor growling. Reverse, forward, reverse, forward, the tires grinding down. She drove past a clump of trees, over grasses and brush that snapped under the tires. They watched until the car was lost in a cloud of dust out on the road.
“She said I promised to love her forever,” Charlie said. “I never told her that. It was her story she told herself.” The cloud of dust had blown away, as if the car had never been there. “I guess she’s gone now.” There was a sadness in the way he said it, William had thought, but now he wasn’t sure. Perhaps it was his own sadness that he had heard.
“Show starts in thirty minutes,” McCoy was saying. “Big audience, theater’s already full. Word’s gotten out there’s gonna be a good prologue. We need everybody here. Lasky won’t like it if we disappoint people. Go get Charlie.”
William removed the breastplate and beaded moccasins. He could feel the anger burning inside him again. She had returned. It was the only thing that explained Charlie’s absence. He pulled on his boots, slammed out the back door, and crossed the field to the corral. In a few minutes, he had saddled the quarter horse and was riding down Hollywood Boulevard, past the cars and the people crossing the street. Riding hard, as if the heat of his own anger drove the horse on. He could sense things, the horse. They had herded catt
le together on ranches outside the reservation, and the horse always knew when to pull back, when to plunge ahead. He could sense anger; it became his own. He would have been a good buffalo horse in the Old Time, William always thought, sensing when to pull back, when to race in for the kill.
The horse galloped onto the dirt road that wound up the pass, past other cars, past a horse-drawn cart with a family inside. “Damn Indian,” the driver called out as they raced by. They came around a curve, and it was then that the camp came into view, the tipis gray-looking in the fading light. He turned the horse onto the hillside and took a diagonal cut through the brush, the white heat burning inside him.
The silver Packard was parked in the same place it had been earlier. The tipis were arranged in a circle, all of them dark except for Charlie’s. The white canvas glowed with the light of a lantern inside. He thought of the ranch he would buy, the small herd of cattle he would build. Charlie would ruin everything. Everything. Well, he would not tolerate it.
32
STREETLAMPS GLOWED IN the morning darkness and a fine snow drifted over Main Street when Vicky unlocked the front door of the building and made her way up the stairs. She let herself into the office and flipped the light switch. It might have been an abandoned office with side chairs neatly arranged against the walls, the polished surface of Annie’s desk glowing in the light, the computer shut down, the telephone silent. The office of a firm that handled important cases that had nothing to do with an Arapaho who had killed Kiki Wallowingbull in self-defense.
She hurried across the waiting room to her private office and shut the door, trying to ignore the feeling that she had wandered into the wrong place. She hung her coat in the closet, dropped onto her chair, and turned on the computer, forcing herself to concentrate. She hadn’t slept last night. The plane had landed in Riverton two hours late. It was almost two in the morning before she got home, and she had spent the next three hours tossing about, trying to make sense out of it. It was obvious Kiki believed he had learned what had likely happened to his great-grandfather—murdered in a fit of jealousy by his friend, William Thunder, and the body disposed of, the whole matter made to disappear, by a studio making millions with Missy Mae Markham. What had Kiki done? What happened that a man named Will Redman had killed him in self-defense?
She worked through the messages and mail, then brought up the office calendar. So many important things: documents to prepare for negotiations in the tribal water case; meeting with the tribal water engineer tomorrow morning. Then she saw the note from the probation and parole department that Annie had left: residence of Will Thunder Redman. The second line contained the address of a house out on the plains east of Riverton.
She started reviewing the files on the water case, half aware of the office coming to life. The telephone ringing, Annie’s voice filtering through the walls, doors opening and closing. At one point, Annie had knocked and pushed the door open a few inches. “Welcome back,” she’d said, peering past the edge. “Good trip?”
The trip was fine, Vicky told her, glancing up from the screen. “And you are a fine investigator.” Then she told her to hold the calls, and she went back to studying the files. There was another knock on the door, something hard and impatient about it. She swung around and watched Adam step into the office and close the door behind him. He jammed both fists into his trouser pockets and leaned against the door. “Just got back myself,” he said.
She heard herself asking if everything had gone well, marveling at the perfunctory sound of her tone. Adam shrugged away the question and started across the office. “I think we have to talk,” he said.
“I was just on my way out.” Vicky pressed her hands on the desk and rose to her feet.
“Oh? This about the caller who won’t give his name?” Adam said. One eyebrow lifted, which gave him a slightly off-balanced look.
“I know who he is. I intend to help him clear himself in Kiki’s murder.”
“Roger says our former client, Tallfeathers, has cut a deal with the U.S. attorney. The case against Bellows is as good as gold. Why can’t you let it go?”
“Bellows didn’t kill Kiki,” she said. “My client . . .” She hesitated, realizing she had always thought of the caller as a client. “. . . killed Kiki in self-defense.”
“Your client? The man has harassed you, Vicky. He hasn’t hired you.”
“What do you want, Adam?”
He started pacing in front of her desk, and that struck her as ironic. She was the one who paced when she was trying to work out her thoughts, place them in some kind of order, summon the words that made sense.
“What do you want?” she said again, but softer this time, trying to convey the sense that she already knew the answer, that she had been thinking about it as well, and it was okay, it was right.
Adam stopped at the far side of the desk. He looked directly at her. “This isn’t working,” he said. He put up a hand, as if to stop any objections, but she didn’t object, and he dropped his hand. “It used to work. When we started the firm, everything worked great. You and I, on the same page. We were good together, Vicky. You know how I feel about you. That hasn’t changed. You’ve changed. You went away.”
“I went to visit Susan.”
“You went away from us.” He stood with his arms at his sides, the cuffs of his blue shirt rolled back over muscular forearms. They had been through a lot together. She hadn’t seen it ending like this, and yet it seemed appropriate, foreordained even.
“We can dissolve the firm,” Vicky said, the lawyer voice, logical, dispassionate-sounding in her ears.
“We can, but we don’t have to,” Adam said. “I’ll be spending most of my time working with the Crow tribal council. There’s a lot to get into place before they can start developing the coal deposits. I’ve taken an apartment in Harden. It will give us time to think. We don’t have to make any hasty decisions. Holden and Lone Eagle has a reputation across the West. No sense in throwing that away.”
Vicky stayed in place for a long moment after Adam had gone, the door closed behind him, the sense of vacancy that she had felt earlier sweeping over the office. He hadn’t wanted to dissolve the firm, but the rest of it—the personal relationship—he had just dissolved. She had to stop herself from laughing out loud at the unaccustomed waves of relief rolling over her.
WALKS-ON BOUNDED across the drive as Father John got out of the pickup. Running on a tilt, dipping his muzzle into the snow and tossing snow windmills into the air. Father John scooped up the soft snow, patted it into a ball, and threw it. Arrows of pain shot through him. The dog doubled his tracks, chasing after the ball that disintegrated in the air. Father John stooped over slowly, cupped some more snow and threw another snowball, then he led the dog up the icy steps in front of the administration building.
Lucy appeared at the far end of the corridor when he stepped inside. Walks-On pushed ahead, shaking off his coat, sending droplets of moisture over the floor and the stucco walls. “Good. You’re here,” Lucy said before ducking out of sight.
Walks-On had already settled himself on the rug as Father John hung up his jacket and set his cowboy hat on the coat tree. He could hear Lucy’s footsteps coming down the corridor.
“What’s up?” He was at his desk when she popped through the door. She was bundled for the outdoors, jacket zipped to her chin, a scarf tied at her neck.
“Could you sign this?” She walked over, holding out a sheet of paper as if she were handing him a package in a store.
“What do we have here?” He took the sheet and read the bold type at the top: Central Wyoming College Recommendation. The recommendation itself had already been written. He glanced through the paragraph: Industrious. Trustworthy. Observant. Organized. Self-starter. The words jumped out from the lines of black type.
He laid the sheet next to the little stack of messages she had left for him. He had the sense she was holding her breath, a mute statue on the other side of the desk. “I couldn�
�t have done a better job,” he said.
She broke into a smile and took in a long breath. “I gotta turn it in today. Thought it would save you a little time if I wrote it.”
“It was good of you.” He selected a pen from the holder where she had corralled his pens. After organizing the file cabinet, she had proceeded to his desk, which, apart from the stack of messages, the new metal stand for folders, the phone and the pen holder, was completely clear and even dusted. He could see the pattern of grain in the wood. “But you forgot something.” He pulled over the sheet and wrote: Lucy Running Bear is an intellectually curious, hard-working young woman who will make an excellent student. He signed his name.
“What changed your mind?” he said, handing her the paper.
“You said I’d make my own decision, so I did.”
He nodded. “The college doesn’t require a high school diploma?”
“Oh, that.” She rolled her eyes. “I signed up for a stupid social studies class this summer so I’ll get my diploma in August. I already know that stuff.” She bit at her lower lip a moment. “I’m gonna do it anyhow.”
“You’ll like college,” he said.
“Yeah? Well, we’ll see about that.” She spun around, started for the door, and stopped. She gave him a sideways look. “Your boss called again. I wrote down the message. Sounded a little mad, know what I mean? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No more than usual,” he said. She gave him a little wave and vanished past the door. There was the swoosh of the front door opening and closing. He found the message in the middle of the stack: Been trying to reach you all week. Important. Call immediately.
Father John picked up the phone, dialed the provincial’s office, and listened to the noise of Lucy’s pickup belching into life over the sound of a phone ringing somewhere in Milwaukee. He could feel his muscles pulled tight around the dull throbbing in his ribs and something else—the familiar thirst coming over him. How a shot of Jim Beam would steady him, give him courage. He had been back barely a month, but what had the provincial said? A month, six months, a year?
The Silent Spirit (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 29