“You told Gianelli this?”
“I told him.” Cam got to his feet. “Mind if I help myself to more coffee?” he said, refilling his mug. He swung the coffeepot toward the table. “How about you?” Without waiting for an answer, he topped off Father John’s mug, set the coffeepot back and took his chair. “All he’s got in his head is what Mickey Tallman told him. How I been wanting to get even for him snitching on me, how I been waiting my chance. So I stole his ancestors’ stuff, just like he keeps saying Sonny stole Black Heart’s regalia.” He cupped the mug, sipped for a long moment, then said, “You gotta talk to him, Father.”
“Gianelli?”
“Mickey. You gotta tell him I never wanted his ancestor’s stuff. What would I do with it? Sell it? Who’d I sell it to? Couple of guys that show up at powwows? Hell, they showed up two weeks before the stuff even arrived.” Cam seemed to grasp the implications of what he’d said, because he leaned back. His forehead creased in thought. “Mickey must think I made a deal to get the regalia and sell it to them guys. I swear on my ancestor’s grave, wherever Sonny’s buried, I didn’t do that. You gotta make him believe that, so he’ll get the fed off my back.”
“I can try to talk to him,” Father John said. He doubted it would do much good. Grudges between families took on lives of their own, moving downward through generations until nobody remembered how or why they had started. Still families nurtured the grudges, fed and tended to them as if they were some sickly, diseased creatures they had inherited and had to keep.
* * *
FATHER JOHN STOOD at the window in his study and watched Cam Merryman’s taillights flicker and jump around Circle Drive and out into the cottonwood tunnel that led to Seventeen-Mile Road. It was a moment before the sound of the pickup faded, leaving the mission grounds plunged in quiet, streetlamps carving out circles of light in the darkness. He prayed for Cam Merryman and Mickey Tallman and all the Arapahos caught up in a tornado of evil moving across the reservation. He prayed for the soul of Trevor Pratt. Most of all, he prayed for Eldon White Elk who was somewhere out there in the vast, empty darkness.
23
“PETEY GOT FIRED from his job.” Mary Many Horses wrung her hands on her jeans-clad lap. White knuckles bulged like pebbles in the dusty ground. Her chest rose and fell beneath the pink and white blouse with a dipping neckline that showed her cleavage. “Everything crashed around him. He just couldn’t take it. The counselor says he’s…” She ran her eyes across the ceiling in search of the words. “Vulnerable, fragile. Even the drugs don’t guarantee he won’t try to kill himself again. Oh, God.”
The woman pressed both hands against her eyes, as though she might block out the image. She was nearing fifty, Vicky guessed, not far from her own age, and she was quite beautiful, with a golden glow to her dark skin and straight, black hair stylishly cut. The anguished look on her face heightened the symmetry of her features. She carried a few extra pounds, but Vicky suspected that thirty-five years ago, when Adam met her, Mary Many Horses probably had the figure of a Miss Indian America contestant. The type of beauty that could stop trains, and stop Adam Lone Eagle. Vicky pulled her lips tight to keep from laughing. She had to give it to Adam. He had never been able to resist a beautiful woman.
“I understand Petey worked for a security company the night the Arapaho artifacts were stolen,” Vicky said.
“First job since he got laid off from the highway department last year,” Mary said. “He’s been trying to save enough money to go back to college. Everything was going great. Then, wham, it’s like he gets hit by a bolt of lightning. Adam’s been such a good friend,” she said. “A real comfort.”
“I’m sure,” Vicky said.
“Please don’t get me wrong,” Mary said. “Adam told me he was hoping to work things out with you. What Adam and I had, well, that was a long time ago. Two Lakota Indians lost in L.A. Oh, Adam had a good job with a law firm, and I was working in a hospital. Nurse’s aide, basically. Friends from Pine Ridge got us together. Loris, my husband, had taken off. It was just me and Petey. Adam was real good to Petey, tried to fill that big gap that his daddy left. Didn’t work out, but we’ve stayed friends, Adam and me.”
“Tell me about Petey’s job,” Vicky said, trying to keep the conversation on track.
The woman lifted her eyes back to the ceiling. “First, I want you to know why we moved to the rez. Loris came from here. Maybe you knew him? Loris Many Horses?”
Vicky nodded. The Many Horses were a large family that sprawled over the reservation. She was struck by the effort Mary was making to convince her that Adam Lone Eagle played no role in her decision to move to the rez.
“Couple of years ago, I heard Loris got killed on the freeway near San Diego,” Mary was saying. “Petey took it real hard. Always had a dream he was gonna get together with his father, and that wasn’t gonna happen. That’s when he had the first of his… episodes. Real bad depression, like he thinks he’s to blame for every thing wrong in the world. Blamed himself for his dad leaving. Even blamed himself for his dad getting killed.” She waved a hand between them. “Only reason I’m telling you this is so you’ll see why Petey’s got himself into another depression. Anyway, I talked him into moving to the rez where he has family. I figured maybe Loris’s people might take an interest in him, give him a sense of belonging. Hard to belong in L.A. when you’re Indian.”
“Is Petey here?”
“You will help him, like Adam said?”
“I don’t know how I can.” Vicky felt as if she were being sucked into quicksand. She had to make a decision to keep sinking or jump out while she still could. Any lawyer could talk to Petey Many Horses, find out why he was fired, see about the possibility of filing a wrongful termination suit, but Adam had asked her for what he’d called a favor. A favor for whom, she wondered. For Adam? Was this a way to draw her to him, bring her into a case that he cared about? Or had he just asked a favor that might help relieve the mind of a beautiful former girlfriend? She tried to blink back another thought. What if Adam hadn’t trusted himself around Petey’s mother?
“I’ll get him.” Mary jumped to her feet. Beneath the long legs of her blue jeans, she wore black high-heeled sandals that clacked across the vinyl floor as she walked down a hallway. The flowery smell of perfume trailed behind. A door opened and closed, followed by the hushed, clipped sounds of an argument. A moment passed before the door swooshed open. There was the syncopation of footsteps in the hallway.
Mary walked into the living room first; Petey a few feet behind, hanging back in a rumpled white shirt and jeans that hung low on his hips, and barefooted. He had a marine haircut that emphasized the redness around his eyes, as if he’d been crying for a long time. His nose was veined and red, his face flushed. Still he was good-looking, in his early twenties, Vicky thought, with the carved features of an Arapaho warrior in the Old Time. She held out her hand. “I’m Vicky Holden,” she said. “I’m a lawyer. Adam asked me to speak with you.”
“Where’s Adam?” The young man threw a frantic glance around the living room, as if he could conjure Adam Lone Eagle from the sofa or chairs or among the papers stacked on a side table.
“Adam thinks Vicky here is the one to help you,” his mother said.
Petey sank onto the sofa. His mother sat down beside him and tried to take his hand. He pulled away and leaned into the armrest. “You gonna get my job back?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me what happened,” Vicky said.
“Nothing happened!” The words came like a shriek of pain. “Except the world’s out to screw me. What’s his name, Gianelli, comes here, says how come you weren’t making your rounds the night the artifacts got stolen. I said, ‘What’re you talking about?’ He says the boss told him I never clocked in for work. Hell, no, I didn’t clock in. They switched my schedule so I was supposed to work on Saturday night. I got a call from the office about six o’clock saying don’t come in.”
Mary
scooted forward on the sofa. “I’d gone out to run a couple errands in the afternoon, but I called Petey to make sure he was all right. He’d been a little under the weather, so I told him he should stay home from work and rest, but he said work would make him feel better. I was home when they called. I heard Petey say, ‘What’d’ya mean, you switched me?’ Then he said ‘okay’ and hung up. He was in his uniform ready to go to work.” She turned sideways toward her son. “You ask me, that’s when you started feeling bad again, before anything else happened.”
Looking back at Vicky, she said, “Petey doesn’t handle change very well. A big change moving here, and it’s been hard. Especially after he lost the job with the highway department. Now this.” She threw out both hands in a kind of supplication, as if she expected Vicky to make everything right.
“It made me mad, pulling me off the job when any day the Arapaho artifacts was gonna come in,” Petey said. “I started thinking, maybe they’re coming tonight. Maybe the boss wants somebody with more experience on patrol. Made me feel helpless, ’cause there’s nobody cared more about keeping the artifacts safe. Next morning I hear the news on the moccasin telegraph that somebody stole the artifacts. Oh, man, it was like fireworks popping in my eyes, I was so mad. Then I seen where this was going. I’d been set up. The fed was gonna say I didn’t go to work so the coast would be clear. He’d say I knew all about the theft. Maybe I was, what you call it, an accomplice?”
Mary was shaking her head hard. “I never seen him so terrified,” she said. “Started on a downward spiral. Then the fed shows up here and asks a lot of questions, just like Petey figured would happen.”
The room went quiet a moment before Mary said, “Tell her the rest of it.”
Petey chewed on his lower lip a moment, then rubbed at his eyes. Finally he said, “The fed told me he already checked with the boss, and the boss said, far as he knew, I was supposed to work my regular shift. He swore nobody changed my schedule.”
“Who called you?” Vicky said.
Petey shrugged. “Dean somebody. Said he was calling for the boss. I don’t know all the guys in the office. They work in town; I’m out at the airport. I sure as hell never clocked in.”
“How could he?” Mary said. “Petey was right here most the evening.”
“Did you go anywhere?”
“After a while, I figured, what the hell. I don’t have to work.”
“I tried to tell him it was like getting a little time off that he wasn’t expecting. Why not enjoy it, instead of getting upset.”
“So I went out and drove around looking to see if there was a party going on.”
“And was there?” Vicky said.
Petey closed his eyes and shook his head. “There’s always a party, but I didn’t know where to find it. So I came home.”
“You see the trouble he’s in?” Mary said. “The fed will make a case that Petey went out to the airport and stole the artifacts, when all he was doing was driving around the rez. The boss says Petey’s lying about getting a call. Who’s the fed going to believe? Some white boss at a security company or an Indian kid? That’s why I called Adam. He came right over and said we needed a lawyer to look after Petey’s rights, but he hadn’t practiced that kind of law for a long time. He suggested you.”
“That’s not all of it,” Petey said.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“If you want me to help you,” Vicky said, “don’t hold back.”
Petey clenched his jaw so hard, the veins in his temples bulged. “It got to me real bad. What right did those bastards have to take stuff that belongs to Arapahos! They’re gonna get away with it. That’s what made me lose it. I mean, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go find them and get the artifacts back. I wanted to kill them.”
“Petey isn’t very…” His mother worked her lips over the word a moment before she said, “Strong.”
“I’m strong enough.”
“I’m afraid he gets emotional over anything that has to do with his father’s people. Since we’ve been on the rez, he’s heard a lot of old stories about the injustices and crimes. Sometimes they set him off. But I tell him, it’s good to care so much,” she said, patting her son’s shoulder. “I been telling him, he needs to go back to college, become a lawyer like you and Adam, and use all that anger he’s got pent up to make sure bad things don’t happen anymore.”
Vicky glanced away from the image of herself that had materialized in front of her. Maybe she had cared too much, gotten too involved, taken everything too personally, on a one-woman mission to change the way things were. First she’d had to change herself. Stop denying that eventually Ben Holden would kill her if she didn’t get out of the marriage. Admit that her children, Susan and Lucas, would be loved and cared for by her own parents, and that what she had to do would be best for them in the long term. Woman Alone. I will go to school. I will become a lawyer. I will fight for the rights of my people. Rights? The grandmothers had mocked her. Since when do we have rights?
“Who is the boss?” she said.
“Max Ritter.”
“I’ll try to talk to him,” Vicky said. “Are there any other reasons he might have for firing you?”
Petey stared at her as if she had uttered an obscenity. “What? I show up on time, do my job. I like keeping things safe. Especially things that belong to the people.”
“Anything else about your job you’d like to tell me?”
“What are you suggesting?” Mary said.
“There can be reprimands in a personnel file. Tardiness, slacking off on the job, not getting along with other employees. A company can start looking for a reason to fire an employee like that.”
“You forgot one thing,” Mary said. “Being Indian.”
“I’m saying,” Vicky said, turning toward Petey, “if your employment record is clean, we can make a stronger argument for reinstatement.” Not every case of injustice, she was thinking, was about race.
“I’m telling you it’s clean,” Petey said.
VICKY HAD TURNED onto Seventeen-Mile Road, heading east, when the cell burst into the first chords of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.” Fitting the Bluetooth into her ear, she said, “Vicky Holden.”
“How did it go?” Adam sounded so close, he might have been sitting beside her. My God, she had left Mary and her son not more than ten minutes ago, and the woman had already called him.
She sucked in her breath to give herself a moment before she said, “You didn’t tell me how unstable Petey is.”
“Let’s just say, he has a few emotional problems. But he’s been working on them. The job’s been a stabilizing influence in his life.”
“I’m on my way to speak with his boss,” she said. The blue billboard with St. Francis Mission in large white letters passed outside the passenger window. “It’s complicated. Maybe the thieves figured out a way to pull the security guard off the job, or maybe Petey just decided not to go to work.”
The line went quiet for so long that Vicky thought she had driven into a dead area. Then Adam said, “He had nothing to do with the theft, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Vicky stopped at the sign where Seventeen-Mile Road butted into Highway 749, waited for a semi to pass, and turned north. Warehouses, drive-up liquor stores, trailer parks bunched together on both sides of the highway outside of Riverton. “We’ll talk later,” she said, and pushed the End key. Odd, how Adam had rejected the idea that Petey could be involved in the theft. Why? Petey wanted to save money to go back to school. Maybe he’d seen the chance to pick up a nice sum. She tried to focus on what he and Mary had said without coloring the story with possibilities and conjectures. Now she wondered if Adam wasn’t trying to protect Petey from something more serious than not showing up for work.
24
VICKY WAITED AT the front counter while the woman at the first desk tapped the keyboard, eyes on the computer screen. Other clerks occupied the desks stretch
ing across the office toward a window that overlooked the alley in back and the redbrick wall of another office building. The air buzzed with the syncopated rhythm of clacking keys and ringing phones. Vicky had left the Jeep in the parking lot behind a sign that said, “Reserved for Security Services.” She had debated about calling ahead for an appointment, and rejected the idea. Surprise had a way of throwing people off balance, catching them before they’d had the chance to create a narrative. She had decided to take a chance that the manager was in and would want to see her. She rapped her fingers on the countertop. The clerk at the front desk bent closer to the screen. Finally Vicky spotted the small metal bell at the end of the counter. She walked over and slammed her palm against the ringer. The shrill, high-pitched sound reverberated across the office, breaking through the other noise.
The clerk looked up and made a show of swiveling her chair partway round. Placing both hands on top of the desk, she pushed herself to her feet. A large woman. Sand-colored hair spiked around her head, and she had narrowed, suspicious eyes. The short sleeves of her white tee shirt cut into the flesh of her arms. “What can I do for you?” she said, plodding toward the counter, as if she were walking in mud.
“I’d like to speak with Max Ritter,” Vicky said. “Is he in?”
“You got an appointment?”
Vicky slipped the small leather folder out of her bag, extracted a business card, and slid it across the counter. “I represent Petey Many Horses,” she said. Behind the clerk, the young man seated at the second desk—Arapaho, Vicky thought, in his twenties, black hair cut short, sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up over ropey, brown arms—looked over. Vicky could feel the intensity of his gaze on her. “Mr. Ritter will want to speak with me,” she said.
The young man jumped up, walked to the end of the counter, and bent down. He began rummaging in whatever was stored below.
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