Buffalo Bill's Dead Now (A Wind River Mystery)

by Margaret Coel

  John O’Malley gave her a slow smile. “Showed up here, said he’d heard the museum was going to mount an exhibit on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and offered to donate Arapaho artifacts for the show. I introduced him to Eldon.” He turned partway and looked up at the banner snapping in the wind overhead. “It would have been a special exhibit.”

  Vicky started for her Jeep. The sun glinted in the little clouds of dust the SUV had stirred around Circle Drive. The low roar of the SUV’s engine drifted back from Seventeen-Mile Road. She opened the door, sank inside, and turned the ignition. She watched John O’Malley disappear inside the museum as she drove into the tunnel of cottonwoods that led to Seventeen-Mile Road. It hit her then. “My God,” she said out loud. “Trevor knows who the thieves are. He’s going after the artifacts.”

  4

  FATHER JOHN FINISHED saying the early morning Mass, hung his vestments in the sacristy, and made his way down the aisle of the church, a chapel, really, built by the Arapahos themselves. Arapaho symbols painted on the walls—lines for the roads of life, a cluster of tipis for the people, a cross for the morning sun and for Christ. The early sun itself flared in the red, white, blue, and yellow stained glass windows, colors of the Arapaho. He scanned the pews for left-behind rosaries, scarves, and wallets. Not more than twenty parishioners this morning, and most of them elderly, on their knees, arms supported on the pew ahead, rosary beads moving through wrinkled, worn fingers. Most had gone to St. Francis school in the old gray stone building. “Come and teach our children,” the leading men had pleaded with the Jesuits in Omaha. That was in 1884, the Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation only six years. The Jesuits had come. Always at the edge of his consciousness was the sense that he was part of a long line of Jesuit priests at St. Francis. They stared out at him from the framed portraits in the corridor of the administration building, wide-eyed and all seeing behind wire-rimmed glasses, following him through the days. He never wanted to let them down.

  The morning was warm with a hint of autumn coolness. The sky the color of blue iris, as clear as an inverted glass bowl; little gusts of wind ruffled the cottonwoods and the wild grasses. He cut diagonally across the grass field on the path that had been stamped out by past Jesuits, took the steps in front of the residence two at a time, and let himself into the entry hall. Aromas of coffee and hot oil floated toward him. Walks-On, the golden retriever he had found in the ditch along Seventeen-Mile Road, scrambled down the hall from the kitchen. He had taken the dog to the vet and brought him home when no one had inquired about him. Home to the mission, missing a hind leg, which had never seemed to bother him in life. That was six or seven years ago, Father John guessed. He couldn’t imagine a time at St. Francis without Walks-On. He tossed his cowboy hat on the bench, scratched the soft fur behind the dog’s ears, and followed him back into the kitchen.

  Bishop Harry was partway through breakfast, pushing thick pieces of pancake around a plate full of syrup. Sunlight filtered through the window and glistened on the bald spot of the old man’s head. A stack of pancakes looked as if it might tumble off the plate in the middle of the table. They took turns saying the early Mass, but even on mornings when he could have slept in, the bishop was up early, ready to work, as if he were the assistant pastor when, officially, he was at the mission to recuperate from two heart attacks and bypass surgeries. Except the bishop, who had spent thirty years looking after the welfare of thousands of Catholics in Patna, India, didn’t take to the notion of recuperating. “I’m not ready to be put out in any pasture,” he had said when Father John urged him to take it easy. “Plenty of time to take it easy when I’m dead.”

  So they had reached an unspoken agreement. Bishop Harry took half of the morning Masses, filled in wherever Father John needed an extra hand, and zeroed in on the social welfare committee and the education committee. “Can’t get anywhere if people are hungry and scared,” he’d said once. “Can’t get anywhere without education.” He’d spent his time in India championing both causes.

  “Pancakes, Elena? What’s the occasion?” Usually breakfast was oatmeal, toast, jam, and two mugs of coffee. The same every day, a ritual he’d become accustomed to. He opened a cabinet, sprinkled food into the dog’s dish, and set it on the floor before he took the chair across from the bishop.

  The housekeeper flipped another couple of pancakes on the grill, then glanced around, gray, curly hair framing the serene, wrinkled face of a half-Arapaho and half-Cheyenne grandmother, a woman who had passed through the first three stages of life and was now in the last. She had to be in her seventies. She had been at St. Francis so long that even she didn’t know the exact number of years. Cooking and cleaning and looking after generations of priests. Seeing that they ate right and showed up for meals on time. He tried, but he had never been good at marching to orders.

  “I figured you needed a little pick-me-up.” Elena stepped over to the coffeepot next to the sink, filled a mug, and set it down in front of him. Walks-On let out a gulping noise and settled onto his rug in the corner. The bowl had been licked clean.

  Father John slid a couple of pancakes off the stack and onto his plate, spread on the butter, and poured on a quarter cup of syrup. This was a treat. “Somebody’s birthday?” he said.

  “I’m pretending it’s mine,” Bishop Harry said. He had blue eyes that twinkled when he looked up. “And this is the best present I ever received.”

  Elena had moved close to the table, wringing both hands in her apron. “Just seems to me, with the artifacts missing and everybody crying about it, saying how terrible to lose them after all we already lost, going on about it not being fair and when was it going to stop. Seems to me we need to think about what we have, the good things, like pancakes.”

  “Here, here.” Bishop Harry held his coffee mug aloft a moment, then took a long drink.

  “Thank you, Elena,” Father John said. It didn’t surprise him that people on the rez were upset and angry over the artifacts. No loss stood by itself. Every loss added to the accumulation, as Vicky had said. He realized that pancakes were Elena’s attempt to accept this new loss. She didn’t believe the artifacts would ever be found.

  “Eldon should’ve kept his mouth shut,” Elena said. She turned to the sink, plunged both hands into the water, and scrubbed at a bowl as if she wanted it to disappear. “Every time you turned on the TV, there was Eldon talking about the artifacts. How great they were, how rare and valuable. No wonder crooks came and got them.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t tell me how the fed’s gonna investigate and find the thief. What does he care?”

  “It’s a major theft,” Father John said. “I think Gianelli’s taking it very seriously.”

  “Indian stuff stolen, that’s all it is,” she said, working hard on the bowl.

  Father John exchanged a glance with the bishop. Understanding flickered in the old man’s eyes. The assumption, unspoken but as detectible as a bad odor, that as long as nobody got hurt, and only Indian stuff was stolen, then what happened was Indian business. Let the Indians take care of it themselves. He finished his coffee, thanked Elena for a gourmet breakfast, and started down the hallway.

  “I’ll be in the office in a little while,” Bishop Harry called after him. He could hear the kitchen chair scrape and the coffeepot clink as the old man got up to top off his mug.

  IT WAS CLOSE to noon when Father John heard the engine cut off in front of the administration building and the car door slam. Past the corner of the window, he could see the white roof of Gianelli’s SUV. Footsteps scraping the front steps, the front door opening and shutting. There was a whoosh of air. Then Gianelli crossed the office and dropped a CD on Father John’s desk. “Bet you don’t have that,” he said.

  Father John picked up the plastic envelope. Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. It was the only Puccini opera he didn’t have on a CD. He had never expected to find another opera buff on the reservation, but Ted Gianelli loved opera as much as he did and, Father John had to a
dmit, probably knew more about it. Tough as nails. He’d no doubt faced down three hundred pounds of solid flesh without flinching, but Gianelli had a soft spot when it came to opera. Most of the time, Father John had an opera playing in the office, and he had seen tears come to the fed’s eyes during a particularly beautiful aria.

  Gianelli poured himself a cup of coffee over at the little metal table behind the door and took a side chair. “Any guess why Puccini decided to compose an opera about the American West?”

  Father John got to his feet and inserted the CD into the player on the shelf behind his desk. “Hello, Minnie!” burst into the air. “He went to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West?” he said.

  “Exactly!” Gianelli pounded the palm of one hand against his thigh. “Got all caught up in the cowboys and Indians, went home and wrote about it.”

  Father John sat down at his desk and tipied his hands, letting the opera wash over him. Elena’s words punctuated the music. “Level with me,” he said. “How important is this case?”

  “To the bureau? To me personally? Tell your Arapaho friends it’s damn important.” Gianelli sipped at his coffee a moment. “What we don’t know is whose jurisdiction it’s going to fall in. Depends upon where the artifacts were stolen. If they were stolen and moved across state lines, it’s federal. If they made it to Riverton, it’s local. You might want to bring Eldon in.”

  From outdoors came the sound of footsteps on gravel, the hard thump of boots on the steps, as if on cue. “I suspect he’s already here,” Father John said as the director came through the door.

  “I saw you drive up.” Eldon pushed another side chair close to the desk with his boot. He was blinking rapidly, face flushed, as if he had sprinted from the museum. “What about the artifacts? Have you found them?”

  “We know they reached New York,” Gianelli said. “X-rays by Customs and inspections by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife confirm that twelve artifacts were inside the cartons unloaded from the airplane’s cargo hold. Fish and Wildlife inspectors actually opened the cartons and made certain that the eagle-feathered headdress matched the description in the documents on the outside of the carton.” He cleared his throat. “Documents Vicky prepared.”

  “That’s all you know?” The color in Eldon’s face had drained to a dull gray. “The artifacts arrived in the U.S.? What happened then?”

  “A couple hours in a warehouse at JFK, transfer in Denver and sixteen hours in Riverton,” Gianelli said. “Plenty of time for someone to break into the cartons. We have to assume the thieves had a well-planned operation that went off just as they hoped. Agents have been interviewing warehouse workers and clerks at JFK and Denver who had contact with the cartons. It’s possible somebody may have noticed the cartons had been tampered with. If so, we can narrow down the time frame.” He worked at the coffee another moment, then turned to Eldon. “Something I don’t understand. The cartons were off-loaded in Riverton, Monday at 4:34 p.m. They were scheduled to be trucked directly to the museum, and I was under the impression you were eager to have them delivered. But the trucking company had instructions to store them in a warehouse at the airport overnight. Who gave the instructions?”

  Eldon sat very still, elbows braced on the armrests, fingertips touching as if he were holding an invisible globe. He started to say something, then cleared his throat and started again. “Trevor thought Bernard Tallman should open the cartons since the artifacts belonged to his grandfather. Trevor wanted him to have the honor of placing the items in the exhibit. It was a matter of respect. We decided to have a little ceremony in the morning. You know, Bernard lifting his grandfather’s things out of the cartons, blessing their return. That kind of thing. Trevor asked me to call the trucking company and arrange for the artifacts to be kept in the warehouse. It was a good idea. I didn’t want them delivered here until we could secure them behind the locked, Plexiglas doors.” He gave a half-committed shrug. “I guess they should have been brought here. I could have guarded them all night with my rifle.”

  Gianelli slipped the notepad past his leather vest into the pocket of his white shirt. He’d keep them posted, he said, setting the coffee mug on the table as he headed into the corridor. Eldon waited a moment, staring at the window, sunk in thought. Then he got to his feet. Slouch-shouldered, head down, a man of regrets and defeat, Father John thought, he flipped one hand in a wave and disappeared into the corridor. The sounds of boots scuffing the gravel and an engine turning over melted through the thick walls, then dissolved into silence.

  Father John turned on his laptop and watched it whir into life, the blue screen peopling itself with small, colorful icons. He tried to focus on something that had bothered him from the day Trevor Pratt had walked into his office and offered to give the museum a collection of Arapaho regalia from the Wild West Show. He typed in a search for “Indian regalia,” “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” Lists of Web sites materialized. Dozens of pages. It would take him all day to scan through them. He typed in another search for “Chief Black Heart,” “Wild West” and watched other sites come up. Three pages. A more manageable number. He read down the sites on the first page, then moved to the next and clicked on the second site. The familiar photo of Chief Black Heart came up, the same photo as in the exhibition hall. The chief in his bone breastplate and eagle-feathered headdress, feathers draped in back. In another photo, the chief galloped across an arena leading dozens of Indian riders, the hooves of his black horse suspended over the ground. The caption read: “The crowd cheers at the spectacle of Chief Black Heart leading Arapaho warriors into the Berlin arena, July 23, 1890.”

  On the next site was the headline: “Arapaho chief’s regalia recovered after 120 years.” The article he brought up, dated six months ago, was from what looked like a magazine for collectors. The regalia worn by Arapaho chief Black Heart in the 1889–1890 European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was found last month during the demolition of several nineteenth-century buildings in Berlin adjacent to the arena where the performances had taken place. The regalia had been missing since 1890. Chief Black Heart was known as one of the most flamboyant of the Show Indians. He wore spectacular regalia that his ancestors had worn during many battles in the West. When reporters in the United States asked to see his regalia, the chief was quoted as saying that his adopted son would bring the regalia when he returned home. It appears the regalia had been hidden in a concrete vault deep in the basement of a condemned building. “We were lucky we hadn’t set the explosive to bring the building down before we stumbled on the stuff,” said Heinrich Hoelscher, contractor. He turned the regalia over to Jens Heuter, dealer in American Indian artifacts. Heuter said the artifacts could be positively identified from old photos as belonging to Chief Black Heart.

  So this was the article Trevor Pratt had run across, he thought. This was where everything had begun.

  5

  Berlin

  July 23, 1890

  SONNY YELLOW ROBE dodged through the crowds in the Arapaho village. People straining to get a better view of women seated outside the tipis beading moccasins, bracelets, pendants, and anything else the whites might want to buy. Every few steps someone reached out and plucked the sleeve of his blue shirt. Touch an Indian for good luck, he thought. Strange customs, these Germans had. It was like a holiday, a festival, the entire city spilling down the streets and into the village on the grassy space outside the arena. The afternoon’s Wild West wouldn’t start for an hour, but the crowds had come early. A long line snaked from the ticket wagon.

  This morning the train had pulled into a siding alongside a row of run-down stone buildings from another time. Beyond the buildings Sonny had watched the grass-filled space stretch toward the metal poles and bleachers and canvas walls of the arena. The prairie wagons and stagecoaches, wagons loaded with buffalo and other wagons swaying under the weight of canvas tipis, tent poles, cartons of food, and more supplies than Sonny had ever seen on the plains had rolled off the train and paraded through the streets
of Berlin, winding back to the arena. Thousands had lined the streets, cheering and shouting. At the head of the parade was Buffalo Bill himself, long dark hair flowing across the shoulders of his fringed jacket. He rode tall and proud in the saddle, waving his white hat to the crowds on one side, then the other. Behind him rode the Show Indians, cowboys, and shooters. Sonny had felt a chill of anticipation and excitement running through him.

  By noon the Indians had set up their tipis. Arapahos here, Cheyenne nearby, Sioux over there. Tents for the cowboys and the stars, like Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, Little Johnnie Baker, and the other performers were pitched beyond the Indian villages. The large tent of Buffalo Bill with the buffalo head mounted over the flap stood between the camps of the performers and the Indians. Sonny had heard rumors of the tanned hides of mountain lions, bears, deer, and wolves spread over the grassy floor and the chairs with elk-horn armrests fit for a king.

  His own tipi stood at the edge of the Arapaho village, not far from Buffalo Bill’s tent. BB, everyone called him. Everything in place, and everything done with precision, following BB’s orders. The Wild West was used to moving, settling in, packing up, and moving on. Like the Old Time, Sonny thought, before the people were herded onto patches of their own lands that the government reserved for them. Reservations, they were called. Everything about the Wild West reminded him of stories of the Old Time. Warriors hunting buffalo, protecting the villages, attacking wagon trains and settlements that moved onto Indian lands. But the settlements and the soldiers had outnumbered the people. All the white people in the world had come to the plains, some of the old men said. The warriors had been forced to ride great distances to find enough buffalo to feed their families. They returned to the villages dusty and weary, slumped over their ponies, the future closing around them.