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

by Margaret Coel

  “Enough!” Bernard Tallman slammed down the leg rest on the recliner and straightened himself against the back. “Black Heart never blamed Sonny. He loved him like a true son. Don’t accuse Cam ’cause he happens to come down from Sonny’s sister.”

  Mickey took a moment. His voice was quiet when he said, “They’re no good, those Merrymans. You know that’s the truth, grandfather. Fruit don’t fall far from the tree. Cam’s just like his great-uncle. Seen the chance to make a big score and grabbed it. He already spent time in prison for hijacking auto parts and selling them. How’s that different from hijacking a truckload of artifacts? Besides, he hates our family. This was his chance to get revenge.”

  “You’re the one he’s got a beef with,” Bernard said.

  “So I blew the whistle on his hijacking business. So what? The sheriff was looking to pin it on me. Didn’t leave me much choice.”

  Father John got to his feet. “You’re saying Cam Merryman has a score to settle with you. But Trevor Pratt bought the artifacts for the museum. How does that settle any score?”

  “’Cause of Grandfather.” Mickey nodded toward the old man in the recliner. “Meant a lot to him to get Black Heart’s things back, so it meant a lot to me. Man, he could settle the score and make more money than he ever dreamed of.”

  FATHER JOHN LEFT the old man leaning back in the recliner, legs forward, gray holes in the boots pointed upward. The whole experience seemed to have worn him down like the soles of his boots. The loss of the artifacts was a heavy burden. There had been a flicker of hope in Bernard’s eyes that maybe Father John had good news. The hope had faded, leaving behind a sadness at the idea of one of the people stealing the artifacts. He had patted the old man’s shoulder and assured him he would let him know the minute he had any news. Mickey had led him outdoors, climbed over the fence and gone back to brushing the Appaloosa, without saying anything.

  He had said too much, Father John thought, and yet none of it mattered. Gianelli wasn’t likely to spend time investigating Cam Merryman based on Mickey’s suspicions. And yet, Mickey might be on to something. Even in the Old Time, the most accurate assessment of a warrior’s character came from other warriors. Men who grew up together, rode side by side to hunt the buffalo and fight the soldiers and other enemies. Each warrior knew who was brave and honest and who would turn his pony and run. When was it, three years ago that Cam Merryman had served time in Rawlins? And Vicky had defended him.

  He stopped at a stop sign, then turned right and drove for Lander. Twenty minutes later, he was on a tree-lined street of bungalows, kids throwing a ball in a front yard, a young woman pushing a stroller down the sidewalk. He felt her head swivel in the direction of the Toyota as he passed, and realized his windows were open. Puccini blared from the CD player. On the corner ahead was the redbrick bungalow with the small sign in front that he knew said, “Vicky Holden, Attorney at Law.” Just as he pulled into the curb across the street, the front door opened. He knew the man heading down the steps: black hair, bronze skin against the white shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, the stride and confidence of a warrior. He sucked in his breath. Adam Lone Eagle was back.

  7

  VICKY FELT THE pull of air as the front door opened. The sound of a thud broke the office quiet. She kept her eyes on the black text that filled the computer screen, ignoring the tremor in the floor boards. Adam. Forgot to tell her something, make some point crystal clear so she wouldn’t misunderstand. He had spent thirty minutes in the office trying to talk her into going into practice with him again. When that failed—this wasn’t the time; she had insurance forms to complete for a client—he had made himself at home, hitching a thigh over the corner of Annie’s desk, chatting and joking, Annie bestowing an upward, adoring gaze. Then he had disappeared behind the beveled glass doors that closed off the office from the reception room, boots clacking down the hall between the conference room and Roger’s office.

  Eyes still glued on the screen, Vicky tried to ignore the blurred hum of voices. Adam asking about the conference room. Roger confirming that they hardly ever used it. No reason Adam couldn’t take it over for his private office. Annie giggling when Adam reappeared, saying how great it would be to have the old firm back. Everything in place. Adam striding about, in control, and Annie and Roger falling into step.

  Vicky could feel the knot tightening in her stomach. Why had he come back?

  She tapped the print key and swung toward the desk. Through the beveled glass, the tall, lanky figure in the tan cowboy hat and blue plaid shirt and blue jeans looked as blurred and distorted as the image in a fun house mirror. She felt the tension running away. She jumped up and flung open the doors. The printer had set up a swooshing noise. “Any news?” she said.

  John O’Malley turned toward her, leaving Annie smiling at whatever he had just said. No doubt he had been teasing her, wanting to know why her boss kept her chained to the desk on such a beautiful day. He had been smiling, too, but a shadow moved in his blue eyes. He shook his head. “Something else I’d like to talk to you about.”

  Vicky walked over to the printer on the table next to Annie’s desk, scooped up the white sheets it had spilled out and straightened them into a neat pile on the table. She glanced at her watch: 3:34 p.m., and still no sign of Trevor, who had agreed to stop by and sign the papers. Annie had been trying to reach him all afternoon. There was still time to get them signed and into the mail today. “I have to drive out to Trevor’s ranch,” she said, holding up the forms. “Why not come along? We can talk on the way.”

  VICKY DROVE HER Jeep, even though John O’Malley had offered to take the old red Toyota parked across the street. Every time she saw it, she marveled that it got him anywhere. Somehow it kept going. A rumor she had heard not long ago: one of the mission’s wealthy benefactors had offered to buy the pastor a new pickup. He had turned down the offer. Of course, he would turn it down. She couldn’t imagine him driving around in a fancy new pickup. Instead the donation had gone into the mission’s scholarship program for kids who needed help with college expenses.

  “I see Adam’s back,” he said. They were driving east on Main Street, sun glistening in the windows of the shops and restaurants, red and gold flowers spilling out of the baskets that lined the sidewalks.

  Vicky felt a little jolt of surprise. Adam. For a few moments, she had forgotten to remember him. She glanced sideways and caught the eyes of the red-haired man beside her, hat pushed back on his head. His eyes always startled her, as clear and blue as the sky. She guessed she was five or six years old before she saw anyone with eyes that color. All eyes were brown, she had thought, and some so brown they seemed black. All complexions were dark, all hair black, but that was when she had assumed that Wind River Reservation was the entire world.

  “Adam wants to practice together again,” she said.

  “Is that what you want?”

  The way he asked the question made her flinch, the words swollen with what was implied and left unsaid. Practice together, be together, a couple again, she and Adam. “I’m not sure,” she managed. She wanted to roll down the window and shout. She wanted to swear, utter a string of words that she never used. Instead she gripped the steering wheel and stared at the highway unrolling like a conveyor belt ahead, a scattering of pines and brush rushing past the windows. Why was she so comfortable with this man, everything so easy and natural, while everything with Adam was so complicated and strained? Unnatural, as if she were someone else when she was with him.

  John O’Malley didn’t say anything, but she knew what he was thinking. Do what is right for you, he had told her—how many times? She had lost track. Be happy. Be happy. She stopped herself from laughing out loud. She wasn’t sure what was right for her. She wasn’t sure how to be happy.

  “I’m sure we’ll work things out.” She threw him another sideways glance, and in the blue eyes, she could see that he was reading her thoughts.

  “If you want to talk…”

&nb
sp; “No, I really don’t, John,” she said. How ironic, she was thinking. What could they talk about? How it was impossible for them? A priest, for godssake. How they would never know if there could be anything between them? How Adam had gotten stuck somewhere in the middle of an impossible situation? Not his fault. For the briefest moment, she felt sorry for Adam, still trying to make something out of such a thin and fragile possibility. She drew in a long breath and concentrated on the road. A semi lumbered ahead. She pulled close to the rear bumper and waited for two pickups to pass before swinging out into the passing lane. Then she settled back, aware of the cool air blowing out of the vents and across her arms and neck, the tires humming on the asphalt.

  The silence lapped around them for a few minutes before John said, “I just came from Bernard’s house. His grandson, Mickey, thinks Cam Merryman is responsible for the missing artifacts.”

  “Cam?” Vicky shook her head. “He made a mistake a few years back, and he paid for it. As far as I know, he’s kept his nose clean ever since he got out of Rawlins. I can’t imagine him getting involved in anything that would send him back to prison.” She took a moment, aware of the quiet breathing beside her. “Arapahos don’t do well in prison.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw John O’Malley nod. “Might as well drop us in a black hole. We’re plains people. We’re used to the prairie and the sky all around. Coop us up, and we fold our wings and die a little. No, I don’t think Cam would get involved. Besides…” She tapped out a rhythm on the edge of the steering wheel. “We don’t know for certain that the artifacts made it to Riverton. All we know is that the cartons arrived. The artifacts could have been stolen anywhere along the way. Trevor said there’s a huge international market for items from the Wild West.”

  “There’s no evidence against Cam,” John said, and she could sense the logical part of him asserting itself. “Just Mickey’s belief that Cam Merryman would steal the artifacts to hurt Bernard. Mickey says Cam would do anything to take revenge on Black Heart’s descendants for what happened to his family after Black Heart came back from the Wild West. I doubt Gianelli will spend much time following up.”

  Vicky took a moment before she said, “There’s always been bad blood between the two families. Everybody on the rez has heard the story. Black Heart came home, but all of his beautiful regalia were missing. Worth a lot of money even in 1890. When Sonny Yellow Robe didn’t return, people assumed Sonny had stolen the regalia and sold it to support himself in Europe, probably in fine style. Trouble is, Black Heart himself never believed it. He tried to tell people that Sonny would never have taken the regalia. Strange, when I think about it. Black Heart and Sonny were both southern Arapahos from Oklahoma. But when Black Heart and his wife moved onto the rez to be close to their daughter, people accepted him. He was a great man. Sonny? No one here knew him, except for his sister. He was considered the outsider. People blamed him. The worst kind of thief, one who stole from the man who had treated him like his own son. It was a black mark on the Yellow Robe family. I heard that Sonny’s sister never got over the way people avoided her and her children, shunning them, always letting them know they weren’t welcome here. Where were they to go? She was a widow, and not only had her brother disappeared, he was reviled. That sense of injustice can stay with a family through the generations. Maybe Cam blames Black Heart for not speaking up enough for Sonny, changing people’s minds. But that doesn’t mean Cam stole the artifacts.”

  Vicky slowed for the right turn onto a narrow dirt road that lifted itself across the dusty, sun-burned earth and scraggly sage brush toward the Wind River range. The foothills rose ahead, rounded like buffalo humps and as brown as the plains against the blue sky. Trevor’s ranch spread over a bluff that butted up against the base of the foothills. She was about to say that the collection of artifacts in the ranch house rivaled anything she had seen in a museum when a cloud of dust, like a tornado, spun around the curve ahead. It took a half second to realize that the dust was in the vortex of a vehicle speeding down the middle of the road. She jammed on the brakes and gripped the wheel hard as the Jeep rocked back and forth, rear wheels skidding. Borrow ditches ran on both sides of the road. There was no place to go. She managed to swerve to the right, out of the path of the dark sedan. Two men in the front, focused on the windshield. She could feel the Jeep begin to dig in and steady itself as the tornado slammed past, engine roaring, dust spraying over her windshield. She was still gripping the wheel, nails digging into her palms, when the Jeep came to a stop, nosed into the ditch.

  “My God.” In the rearview mirror, the tornado spun down the road she had just been driving. She pulled on the door handle and got out. Her legs felt like Jell-O. She had to lean against the door to keep her balance. Little clouds of dust hung over the road as the sedan swung around the curve and out of sight.

  “Are you okay?” Vicky was aware of John’s arm around her shoulders. She wasn’t sure when he had gotten out of the Jeep; he had simply materialized beside her, as if he had always been there.

  “They didn’t slow down or try to get over.” She could hear herself blurting out the words, as if she were a hurt child about to burst into tears. She swallowed back the urge to start crying and gave into the anger that moved through her like boiling water. “They could have killed us.” She turned in John’s arm and looked up. It was inconceivable that in the last few minutes, he could have been dead. Even more inconceivable, she thought, than that she herself might have been dead.

  “Where’s the ranch?” he said, nodding toward the road that stretched into the foothills, gray clouds of dust hanging in the air like ghosts.

  “Up ahead. The road dead-ends at his gate.”

  “We’d better get up there,” he said.

  8

  LAZY Z RANCH was carved into the overhead post. Through the gate, Father John could see the log cabin ranch house, two stories high and a porch across the front with wooden chairs lined up behind the log railing. He could sense the anxiety in Vicky; it poured off her like perfume. It matched his own anxiety. The ranch house had a vacant look, half-mast blinds in the windows, flag whipping in the wind from a pole at one corner of the porch, as if it had been forgotten. Fifty yards beyond the house were the out buildings: barn, storage sheds, what looked like a garage that probably stored a truck or tractor. Three horses grazed in the fenced pasture that ran alongside the dirt road to the barn. A black SUV stood between the barn and the pasture, which made him think that Trevor Pratt was on the ranch. There was no sign of the cowboys who worked for him.

  It had taken a good twenty minutes to ease the Jeep along the borrow ditch, tires spinning and balking, churning up even more dust. Father John had walked along the ditch and collected branches and twigs, which he jammed in front of the tires, and Vicky had guided the Jeep at an angle until it stood level on the road.

  “Trevor knows who took the artifacts,” she had said as they drove toward the ranch. Bent over the wheel, talking mostly to herself, he had thought, worry seeping through her voice.

  “He should have told me.” She clenched the wheel, not taking her eyes off the road, as if another speeding vehicle might appear out of nowhere. “The way he acted at the mission. He was anxious to get out of there and talk to someone. God, I hope nothing has happened.”

  The plains had raced past outside the window. The sky hazy through the rolling dust. They had been going about sixty, he guessed, when the sedan had come at them. In the speed and dust, he’d made out the head and shoulders of a man crouched over the wheel, with a hard, angry intent. Another man in the passenger seat. What had propelled two men—white men, he realized—to flee the ranch at a hundred miles an hour, or whatever they had been doing.

  Vicky drove for the front porch and slammed on the brake. Before he could get around to her side, she was out of the Jeep and heading for the wooden steps, gripping the brown envelope in one hand, bag swinging from her shoulder. He followed her and waited as she pounded the brass knocker against the
wood door. From inside, nothing but a muffled echo. He moved closer, listening for the sound of footsteps or chairs pushing back, any disturbance that suggested someone was there.

  Father John lifted the knocker and slammed it down even harder. The door gave a little sigh. Still no sound inside, and after a couple of seconds, Vicky grabbed the knob. The door pushed open. “Trevor?” she called, leaning into the opening. “It’s Vicky and Father John. Are you there?”

  An air of vacancy drifted from the house. Vicky called again, then pushed the door back. Father John stepped inside close behind her. They stood in an entry with a woven Indian rug spread over the pine floors. Beyond the entry were a pair of rooms that flowed across the front, divided by a staircase that rose to a balcony that overlooked both rooms. On the far side of the balcony were a series of closed doors, like dorm doors. At one time, this was a working bunkhouse, he thought, with rooms for the cowboys. Hardly a home. It didn’t look much like a home now. Vicky was right. The house was like a museum, the front rooms filled with Indian artifacts on the walls, arranged on tables and stuffed inside glass-fronted cabinets. Even the furniture looked antique, displaced from another time. It took a moment to take it all in: displayed on the walls like paintings were dresses, shirts, and leggings, sewn out of the tanned, white skins of deer, embroidered in blue, red, orange, green, and yellow beads, with geometric images painted around the beads. Ceremonial clothing, he knew, worn only in the sacred ceremonies. Alongside the clothing were eagle-feathered headdresses—he counted five—that had been worn by the leading men who had earned each feather with acts of bravery, courage. Each feather had a story. There were vests that drooped with beads and chest plates made from layers of yellowed bones.