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

by Margaret Coel

  Vicky read the article again. Nothing that gave her a glimpse into Pratt, aside from the fact he was an astute businessman, focused on the bottom line. A faint whiff of admiration ran through the piece. And yet, Trevor Pratt had donated a million dollar collection to the Arapaho Museum. She wondered why.

  She moved onto the next Web site, and here was something new. Recent purchases of rare Plains Indian regalia for sale. Telephone auction to be held on August 23. Sign up below to take part. Pratt and Hyde Indian Antiquities.

  Below the announcement were pages of photos of white deerskin shirts and dresses, headdresses, gloves, vests, leggings, pants, all beaded and painted; tools of all kinds, carved from stone—hatchets, hammers, chisels; pipes decorated with strings of beads and feathers, hoops and shields, parfleches of various sizes that the people had used to carry their belongings, exquisitely beaded medicine bags. The sign-up sheet to join the auction filled the last page, along with a paragraph of ground rules. Items would be auctioned off individually. Pratt and Hyde reserved the right to begin each auction at a baseline price. If the price was not matched, the item would be withdrawn.

  Vicky went back to the search page and typed in Pratt and Hyde. Another page of Web sites scrolled into view. She clicked on the first site, and skimmed through an article from a trade magazine: Julia Hyde of Hyde’s Fine Collectibles in Kansas City has joined Trevor Pratt Collectibles. Pratt was unavailable for comment but Hyde returned our call and confirmed the new partnership. She has closed her store in Kansas City. The new business will be based in Colorado, she said, and will operate on the internet.

  Pratt had never mentioned a partner, Vicky was thinking. She typed in “Julia Hyde” and the name of the store in Kansas City. Only two sites materialized, and she clicked on the first. A blond woman, smiling, in her thirties, with the small, toned figure of an athlete, arms crossed over the jacket of her dark suit, posing in front of a brick store with “Fine Collectibles” written in white across the plate glass window. A half inch of text ran below the photo: Looking for the unusual gift? The perfect piece that says your home is as unique as you are? The piece from the past that cannot be duplicated? Come and see me at Fine Collectibles. I am an interior designer and I know how to incorporate beautiful antiques into your modern home. My decorating services are free with every purchase. I will help you turn your home into a show home.

  Vicky scrolled through several pages of photographs: all types of antiques, tables and chairs, chests, bookcases, desks with curved, rococo legs and what looked like fine wood-inlaid surfaces. Then came the accessories: lamps, vases, bowls, pitchers, candlesticks, place settings of china, silver knives, forks and spoons, heavy-looking silver coffee and tea services on large trays, the kind of household items she had seen in movies.

  She moved onto the next site. Dear Customers and Friends. Life is filled with changes. Don’t we all know that to be true? Changes are usually a mixture of sadness and expectation. I am sad to announce the closure of Fine Collectibles and will miss being able to help all of you furnish your home with one-of-a-kind pieces that have their own history. But I look forward to expanding my knowledge of antiques by joining Trevor Pratt in a new adventure, Pratt and Hyde Indian Antiquities. We will be based in Colorado and will specialize in unusual, hard-to-find items from the rich culture of the Plains Indians. We will be on the internet and will always be available to you by e-mail or telephone. Look for the details on our Web site which will be up shortly.”

  Vicky went to the next site: Another photo of the blond Julia Hyde, older, with squint lines at her eyes and a sunbaked look about her. The text was brief. My dear customers and friends. After four years, Pratt and Hyde has been dissolved.

  A buzzing noise zigzagged through the quiet. Vicky pulled away from the laptop, walked over and pushed the button on the intercom. “Who is it?” she said. She knew the answer even before Adam’s voice filled up the space around her

  “May I come up?”

  She pushed another button, listened to the beeping sound followed by the noise of the elevator creaking into action, then cracked open the door and went back to the laptop. Pratt will continue to operate the Plains Indian antiquities business, while I return to my first passion: Victorian Americana. My store is now in Dubois, Wyoming, a small, beautiful town that still has wooden sidewalks.

  She could hear the elevator clanking upward, the swoosh of the doors opening and the familiar footfalls coming down the hallway. A part of her was glad that Adam was here, that she wouldn’t be alone. Woman Alone. The Arapaho grandmothers had given her the name. There were times when the truth of it had stung like a whip.

  She made herself read on: A perfect place for a Victorian antique shop on Main Street. If you are out in Wyoming, be sure to put Dubois on your itinerary. Stop in and see the exceptional items I have collected.

  She was aware that Adam had come through the door and shut it behind him. Still she kept her eyes on the screen. A woman named Julia Hyde had been in business with Trevor Pratt. The mysterious Mr. Pratt, the magazine piece had said, but Julia Hyde knew who he was, and she was in Dubois.

  10

  “YOU OKAY?” ADAM said.

  Vicky got to her feet and went over to the counter that divided the kitchen from the dining area. Adam leaned against the door, one hand wrapped around the knob, as if he half expected her to ask him to leave. He might have stepped out of a poster advertising a movie about the modern Native American, blue-checkered shirt, blue jeans, and belt with silver buffalo-head buckle, black hair brushed back from a wide, intelligent forehead, jaw set in confidence and eyes that seemed to take in everything about her, even the things she wanted to keep from him.

  She ignored his question. “You heard the news?”

  “I’d have to be deaf not to have heard. It’s all over the radio and TV. Heard it on the moccasin telegraph first. Word is that Trevor Pratt donated the artifacts from the Buffalo Bill show. Is that true?” When she didn’t say anything, he nodded, as if he had the answer. He pushed himself off the door and stepped around the counter into the alcove that served as a kitchen. “Any hot coffee?”

  Vicky nodded toward the half-empty coffeepot next to the stove. She had brewed the coffee when she got home from Trevor’s ranch. The thought of food made her stomach churn, but she had sipped at a mug of coffee while she searched the internet for an explanation of why Trevor Pratt might have known the thieves. Trevor was so alive in everything she had read. The mysterious Trevor Pratt. Collector and dealer of Plains Indians artifacts, authority on dates and history and value. She slammed the palm of her hand onto the table. “It’s stupid and senseless,” she said. “Trevor knew how valuable the artifacts were. He should have known that the people who stole them were capable of anything. He shouldn’t have put himself in danger.”

  “You’re saying Trevor knew who took the artifacts?” Adam poured the last of the coffee into a mug and turned toward her.

  “He was furious yesterday when the artifacts were missing. He tore out of the museum. I followed him and tried to talk to him. He brushed me off and drove away.” She could feel the anger blossoming in her cheeks. Stupid, stupid. “He was going to solve the crime all by himself, a one-man posse out to bring the bad guys in for hanging. He was like Buffalo Bill presenting the Wild West, telling the whole story of the West as he saw it. Well, Buffalo Bill’s dead now.”

  She slumped back into the chair and Adam walked over and plopped down on the chair next to her. “I’m sorry, Vicky” he said. “I’m sorry you had to find his body. I heard you weren’t alone. I’m glad for that.”

  “The thing is, I keep thinking there’s something I should have done.”

  “You were his lawyer, not his keeper. You couldn’t follow him around, try to talk him out of going after the thieves himself.”

  “There must have been a way,” she said. “I didn’t know him well enough to know how to help him.”

  Adam got up and leaned toward her. “I got a
phone call after I left your office today,” he said. “It made me realize the kind of law you practice.”

  “What are you talking about?” She glanced away, her thoughts still on Trevor Pratt.

  “Personal law. Everything is personal to you. Clients don’t just walk in off the street or pick your name out of the phone book. They’re your personal responsibility. You have to help them, advise them, protect them, and if a client ends up murdered, it’s because you failed somehow. You didn’t know him well enough…”

  “Please,” Vicky said, lifting the palm of her hand. “You didn’t see Trevor with a hole the size of a baseball in his chest.”

  “All I’m saying is that I finally understand the way you practice law. We have different ways. My approach isn’t personal. I’ll do my best for my clients, but I won’t own them. I don’t care about their other problems. I don’t want to know where they go or who they talk to. I give them good advice. If they don’t take it, I don’t worry about it. Two different approaches, that’s all. I’m not saying one is better than the other, only that I’m finally beginning to understand.” He paused. “And appreciate your approach. The woman who called me today…” Another pause, and in that instant, Vicky understood the call hadn’t come from a random woman looking for a lawyer. “An old friend,” he hurried on, throwing up both hands as if to demonstrate there was nothing to hide. Vicky wondered where this was going. Why was he telling her this? Adam didn’t talk about his former lovers, still they hovered in the background, forgotten, he assured her. But the woman on the telephone hadn’t been forgotten.

  She tried to concentrate on what Adam said next: how he and Mary Many Horses went back a long time, how she was someone he had once cared about.

  “I haven’t heard from her in years, but she’s living on the reservation now. Moved here to be close to in-laws after her husband died. Anyway, she called the office, said she needed to speak with me and Annie gave her my mobile number. She’s having trouble with her son. Good kid. Graduated from high school, enrolled in classes at Central Wyoming College, got a part-time job. He’s been depressed for a month or so, but seemed to be coming out of it. Then last night, he tried to kill himself. Botched up job. She came home from work and found him lying on his bedroom floor. He’d swallowed some pills. Riverton Memorial has him on suicide watch. She asked me to talk to him.”

  Adam walked around and perched again on the stool. “When I knew Petey, he was five years old, missing the dad that left him. For a while I tried to fill that empty place, but when things didn’t work out between Mary and me, I moved on. Now Petey’s in trouble. I don’t know if talking to him will do any good. I don’t know if he’ll confide in me, and I don’t even know if he needs a lawyer. But Mary’s worried he’s mixed up in drugs. What I’m saying is, it’s personal. I intend to do whatever I can to help them, and I realized I was thinking like you. Some poor guy from the rez comes looking for a lawyer and you’re ready to move mountains to help him. So I get it, Vicky. It doesn’t mean I want to practice personal law twenty-four-seven. It’s not my expertise. But it does mean I’ll be a better partner.”

  Vicky set her elbows on the counter and dropped her face into her hands. Adam Lone Eagle was persistent. He never gave up. She had seen oil executives wince when he walked into a conference room with Arapaho tribal officials because the executives knew they would not be walking out of that room until Adam Lone Eagle had gotten the agreement he wanted.

  “Please, not now,” she said. Still in front of her was the image of Trevor Pratt slumped in the stall, the black hole gaping in his chest. And hovering about the image was the attractive blond woman named Julia Hyde who had been Trevor’s business partner and might also know the identity of the thieves who had stolen the artifacts and most likely murdered Trevor. If the thieves made the same connection, Julia Hyde could be in danger.

  “Okay. Okay.” Adam lifted the mug and took a long drink of coffee. “But we have to talk about it,” he said. “Whether we’re going to put the firm back together and whether there’s a chance for us.”

  Vicky dropped her hands and turned her head to the man beside her. A year ago he had walked out of her life. He had agreed to represent the Crow Tribe and needed to be in Montana, close at hand for the endless negotiations with coal companies and federal regulatory agencies. The firm would go on, he had said; one of the partners would be elsewhere. A simple matter for Holden and Lone Eagle, Attorneys at Law, and complicated at the same time. He would call regularly, drive back to Lander. They would still be together. Except the silence between calls grew longer and the trips fewer, until Vicky had called and told him she intended to dissolve the firm and move back into the one-woman-law-firm-size bungalow where she had once practiced alone. She had taken Annie and Roger Hurst with her. Ironically, the number of small cases—adoptions, wills, insurance claims, DUIs, and assaults—had grown enough to keep both her and Roger busy. Everything was settled now, running as smoothly as a thoroughbred horse.

  “Why did you come back?” she said. “Why didn’t you stay in Hardin? Or go to Lame Tree and help the Cheyennes protect their resources? Or move to L.A. and practice natural resource law from a fifty-story building in Century City? Why here?”

  “I’ve told you,” he said.

  “This isn’t a good time.”

  “When is a good time? When wouldn’t you be involved in some case that hadn’t taken you over, occupied all of you? Your thoughts and feelings. Look at you! It’s past ten o’clock and you’re still working!” He tossed his head toward the laptop on the table. “Searching for some random piece of information to figure out who killed your client. It’s not your job, Vicky. Let the sheriff’s detectives figure it out. Listen, what I’m saying is…” He leaned in close, his face inches from hers, his breath heavy with coffee. “I’m making an effort to understand the kind of lawyer you are. If there’s a future for us, I need you to see my point of view. I need more of you, and as I see it, the law has all of you.”

  Adam stood up and slammed his fist down hard, setting the mug dancing on the table. “Whoever said the law is a jealous mistress got it right. In your case, the law is a jealous lover.”

  “You’d better go,” Vicky said.

  “Go?” He took a moment before he swept his palm down the edge of the table, as if he could wipe away the crumbs and detritus of the past. “Okay. I get it. You’re upset about today, and I don’t blame you. But I need to know what kind of a relationship we might have. Just business? I’m not interested. Business and personal, yes.”

  Vicky studied the edge that he had just swiped clear. A blank page, she thought. She could write anything she wished, only she wasn’t sure what she wanted to write. She only had to look up at him, she knew, and he would stay the night. They would be back together, figuring out how to go forward. And she would be back in a halfhearted relationship. Adam was right about that; she had never been able to bring all of herself into their relationship. He had blamed it on the law, but she knew that he knew the truth. There was a part of her that wished John O’Malley were not a priest, that things were different, that he might someday leave the priesthood. Always a part of her hanging on to the thinnest thread of hope. Stupid.

  She could feel the heat of Adam’s gaze burning into her. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him swing around and head for the door. Small tremors ran through the floor when the door slammed shut.

  11

  Berlin

  July 23, 1890

  THE DINNER GONG had sounded five minutes ago, and groups of Indians were making their way toward the big tent at the far side of the camp. Sonny Yellow Robe held back, not taking his eyes off the interpreter on the other side of the grassy road. The interpreter stood at the opened flap of Chief Black Heart’s tipi, arguing again with the chief over the regalia. Sonny knew they were arguing. He had observed the conversation for the past twenty minutes. He could guess how it had gone. Marks had offered a ridiculously low price for a headdress
worn by Black Heart’s father in battles on the plains, even the battle against Custer. The chief just shook his head, saying nothing. Marks had cajoled and explained. He was offering more money than Black Heart had ever seen. He was angry. Arms flying sideways, head lowered like a charging bull. Probably calling Black Heart all kinds of names: fool, dumb Indian, too stupid to help himself. An Arapaho family hurried past, blocking the view for an instant. Then Sonny saw Marks stomp out a little circle in front of the tipi. Black Heart kept shaking his head. It made no difference what Marks promised or threatened, the chief would not sell what belonged to his ancestors. The argument was over, Sonny realized, but with Marks, the argument was never really over.

  Marks broke away and, head still down, set out for the dining tent. Sonny followed, hugging the long, jagged shadows of the tipis, pulling back when Marks looked around. He had kept an eye on Marks for the last two hours, ever since the afternoon performance had ended and the Indians rode back into the camp. They had run the ponies into the corral where the younger Indians—training to be warriors, he thought, like the Old Time—had fed and brushed them and gotten them ready for the evening show. Marks had worked his way through the crowd spilling out of the arena and into the Indian camp. He had stopped at several tipis before he reached Black Heart’s. Sonny had watched as Indians handed over beaded vests or leggings, sometimes a bow and quiver of arrows or a hatchet, and Marks placed a roll of bills in outstretched brown hands.

  The feeling of shame, so strong Sonny could smell it, had welled up around him. He’d had to stop himself from running over, grabbing the relics out of the interpreter’s hands, throwing the filthy wad of bills onto the dirt. The Indians needed the money, he knew. Jobs were hard to find on the reservations. They came and went. Even if an Indian landed a job driving a wagon of hay for a week, he didn’t know how he would feed his family when the job ended. The wads of bills, along with the pay the Show Indians earned—well, it was a lot of money.