Again, Daniel pointed to the gas lamps on the wall. “When we found you the next morning, the lamps were on, but the fire had been put out.” He pointed to the window. “And the window was shut and even latched.”
Flint cleared his throat, then added, “The door was locked. We found a key on the table.”
“School Father Pratt kicked the door open,” Daniel added. “We barely got you out before you began the great journey.”
His eyes closed tightly, Quanah lay there, not moving except for the slight shaking of his head, as he tried to comprehend everything.
“Could … ?” Flint hesitated, tried again. “Could that puhakat … could he have made a mistake?”
Eyes still closed, head still moving, Quanah said tightly, “No.”
“He was tired,” Flint said. “As you were. He had been up till midnight with the Tejanos. Is it possible … ?”
“He would not have blown out those lamps,” Quanah said, his eyes open, blazing. “And what kind of fool would have closed the window. The windows in my Star House are always open during the summer. Otherwise my wives and I would not be able to live in such a place.”
“Then it is settled,” Daniel said. He did not want to upset the great Kwahadi any more.
“I meant you no disrespect,” Flint added.
“We just need to know for certain,” Daniel said.
“The key?” Flint said cautiously. “What of the key? Did you lock the door?”
This time Quanah thought for a minute or two, recalling details from a memory clouded by a coma.
“We had one key. The man gave it to us in the hotel.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. He pressed his lips together. “I do not believe in locking doors. If anyone wants to visit me, my door is open. At my home. At the many hotels I have stayed in pale-eyes cities.” Another pause to remember. “When we got to our room, I put the key on the table by the bed. It was always there.”
Daniel straightened. “The night table?”
“Haa. I put the key by the Jesus book.”
Flint looked at Daniel, then back at Quanah. “Not on the dresser? The wooden tower with boxes where Pale Eyes keep their clothes.”
“The table by the bed. It was there when I went to bed. I know this because I thought to pick up the Jesus book, but I do not understand all of those marks.”
Again, Daniel and Flint stared at each other.
“Why do you ask me these questions?” Quanah said. “What does this mean?”
Daniel looked at the sick chief of The People. “Tsu Kuh Puah, I do not believe this was an accident,” he said. “The window was found shut, locked. The key was found on the dresser, not on the table by the bed. The lamps were on, the flames blown out, filling the room with poisoned air. We found red markings, prints from someone’s thumb, on the lamp’s globe, and on the glass of the window. I believe that someone was trying to kill you.”
“And the father of my favorite wife?”
“His death was an accident,” Flint said. “You were the one he meant to kill.”
Far off in the distance, thunder rolled across the night sky. The rain had stopped, and the streets of Hell’s Half Acre became alive again.
Quanah’s tears resumed their flow. “Who would want to kill me?” he asked, and choked back a sob for Yellow Bear.
“That is the question we must answer,” Flint said.
The sobs ceased, and Daniel saw that Quanah was asleep. Good. He needed more strength, and Daniel felt guilty for draining Quanah so. He should have waited, asked Quanah these questions later. On the other hand, he had read in the National Police Gazette that it is best to interview witnesses immediately, and not wait until their memories are clouded by ideas of what they thought they had seen, thought they remembered. A detective should, he recalled, have all his questions written out before him. A good detective must know what to ask. His Old Glory tablet was in his room down the hall. He hadn’t even thought to bring it to the Tivoli Hall.
Some detective I am.
“I have told you,” Charles Flint said, “that you think my father did this, but I say he did not. I will prove to you that he did not.”
“We must work together,” Daniel said.
Flint stared, eyes as black and as untrusting as Isa-tai’s.
“Do you know what an alibi is?”
“It is …” Flint finally flashed a rare smile. “It is something one need not know to keep books for a trading post.”
Daniel grinned back. “It is something that proves one did not, could not commit a crime.”
“My father could not have committed this crime.”
“So he must have an alibi. He has motive, and this you cannot deny. He had opportunity.”
“Then his alibi is that he was asleep in the same room with Nagwee.”
“We will ask Nagwee about that night. My friend Hugh Gunter, a Cherokee policeman, says that one must investigate a crime with an open mind.” Actually Hugh Gunter hadn’t said that at all. Hugh Gunter’s philosophy was often: If I think the sum-bitch did it, he did it, and I’ll prove he did it, and see the bastard gets what’s coming to him. “I have an open mind. I do not wish ill upon Isa-tai. I hope he did not have any hand in this. And he is not the only person who is what Deputy Marshal Harvey P. Noble calls a suspect.”
He let Flint digest this. Maybe he could make Charles Flint a Metal Shirt. As sergeant, he could always use someone willing to risk his life and hair for $8 a month, someone who didn’t mind the taunts from The People. Someone who could be spit on in the afternoon by a grandmother for arresting her son or grandson.
“We eliminate the suspects,” Daniel explained. “We find who has an alibi that says they did not commit the crime. But first we must find out why the crime was committed.” He posed the question to Flint. “So who would want to see Quanah dead?”
While Flint chewed on that, Daniel was already thinking: Who was in the room when I saw the key on the dresser? Nagwee and Isa-tai. Flint and School Father Pratt. George Briggs. Burk Burnett. Dan Waggoner.
He frowned.
Or there could have been another key. That gave him more suspects. Sol Carmody. The thousands of Pale Eyes who hate The People and were in Fort Worth. And what do I really know of this Pale Eyes newspaperman, Kyne? Why is he so curious about what happened?
Still, another thought struck him.
Or Quanah could be wrong, and Flint right. Yellow Bear might have moved the key. No matter how intelligent he was … and in my heart I know he was a great, wise man … this is not the land of The People. He could have locked the door, closed the window, blown out the lamps.
Daniel sighed. Tonight, he would fill up his Old Glory tablet. He’d have to buy another at the Taylor & Barr mercantile tomorrow morning.
Chapter Seventeen
He studied the list:
Isa-tai
Nagwee
Pratt
G. Briggs
Burnett
Waggoner
Carmody
Kyne
Capt. Hall
Cowboy in alley?
Tetecae
Nagwee would not have tried to kill Quanah. Never. Nor could Daniel suspect School Father, even though both the holy man and Pratt had been in the room, and could easily have placed the key on the dresser. Captain Hall was the only one who hadn’t been upstairs in the room. So Daniel had scratched their names off his list of suspects. He thought about the cowboy he had seen in the alley, and while Daniel knew the drunken man who worked for Sol Carmody was in the alley when he heard the door close, he had put a question mark beside that entry.
Kyne had been right. Daniel needed to find this cowboy who worked for the Comanche-hating Sol Carmody. Needed to ask him some questions.
He looked at Flint’s name. At first, he had scratched through it, but then he had to reconsider. He liked Tetecae well enough, wanted to like him even more if only for no other reason than he needed someone to trust.
“I do not un
derstand those bird-track marks,” Ben Buffalo Bone said from over Daniel’s shoulder.
Which made Daniel smile. He was glad that his Kotsoteka friend had joined him in Fort Worth. He could trust Ben Buffalo Bone.
“Do you remember how we used to steal the chickens from the coop at the missionary school after I first arrived on the reservation?” Daniel asked.
Ben Buffalo Bone had a hearty, rich laugh.
“My father would say that The People have fallen on hard times,” Ben said, “when their young braves must go on raids for stupid birds that cannot even fly, and not horses or Mexicans to turn into slaves.”
Tears welled in Daniel’s eyes. “My mother would just shake her head, when I showed her our plunder. But she would glare at the Black Robes when they came to tell her that we must be punished, that stealing was wrong in the eyes of their Lord.”
“What does a taibo god know about The People?”
School Father Pratt’s words echoed in Daniel’s mind: Kill the Indian, not the man.
Ben’s broad hand slapped his shoulder. “Those were fine days, bávi. Not as fine as when the Kotsotekas, and you, the Kwahadis, roamed free to hunt, free to do as we pleased, but we made the best of those days, did we not?”
“Surely, we did.”
A fat finger pointed to one of the words. Tetecae’s name.
Daniel frowned. He just could not get around the fact that Charles Flint had been in the room. He could have slipped the key onto the dresser.
“But I do not understand why the Pale Eyes have to put down stories on paper. Some of them speak well, and there is nothing better than sitting around a circle, smoking, telling stories. The People do not tell stories this way.”
Daniel wrote another line—Accident?—and flipped to a new page in his new Old Glory writing tablet.
“But we do,” he told Ben Buffalo Bone. “We draw pictures on our hides to tell the stories of what happened during a year. We tell stories in pictures on our war shields.”
“Haa, but when we paint a chimal, this paper is only good for stuffing the insides so that a chimal might turn away the arrow of an enemy. And pictures make more sense than these marks.”
Ben Buffalo Bone walked around the writing table, and sat in the chair across from Daniel.
“Nagwee and Isa-tai say that Quanah is no longer in danger, and the Pale Eyes doctor agrees. Soon, we will return home. So what is it that troubles you, my brother?”
What troubled him was Rain Shower, and the nightmare. Maybe that had been not a dream, but a vision, foretelling of the ruction at the sporting house when Daniel had almost killed a taibo with his bare hands. He raised a finger, and gently touched the bruise between his eye and hair, just above the temple.
He left out his concerns about Ben’s sister, and told him instead about what he suspected had been an attempt to kill Quanah Parker.
Typical of The People, Ben Buffalo Bone’s face betrayed no emotion, and he never interrupted Daniel to ask questions. When Daniel had finished, his friend just sat there, staring, thinking.
“One Nermernuh would not kill another Nermernuh,” he said at last. “I will not believe that.”
“Even Isa-tai?” Daniel said.
“Especially Isa-tai. It is true that Isa-tai and Quanah do not often agree on what is best for The People, but Isa-tai is a powerful puhakat. It was not his fault for what happened all those years ago. The stupid Striped Arrows brave killed a skunk and destroyed Isa-tai’s puha during the raid. Isa-tai vomited up thousands of cartridges for our fast-shooting rifles. My own father saw this with his very eyes.”
Daniel glanced at his list. “Then one of the Pale Eyes cattlemen. This Sol Carmody, he despises The People for what they did to his family.”
Daniel’s mind flashed to another cattleman, a Tejano named J.C.C. McBride who had hated The People. Immediately Daniel tried to block out that memory. He had killed the rancher, and had done it in a way that The People of old—especially his father, and old Isa Nanaka, and Quanah, too—would have appreciated, except that he had not taken the taibo’s scalp.
“I do not know this Pale Eyes that you call Sol Car-mo-dy.” Ben Buffalo Bone shook his head.
Daniel stood and walked toward his bed, found the original Old Glory tablet in his valise, and returned with it to the desk. He flipped through some pages, read a few notes, and looked up at Ben Buffalo Bone.
“His cattle graze at The Big Pasture. Weeks ago, you rode there when we learned that there were longhorns eating The People’s grass. Do you recall this?”
Ben Buffalo Bone’s head bobbed. “Haa, I rode there. There were cattle. Twice Bent Nose came with me. Many cattle. Three Tejanos.”
“But they had no right to be in The Big Pasture.”
“No, bávi, they did. One of the Pale Eyes shows me a piece of paper with the scratch marks. He says it gives him the right. I do not know about this. Nor does Twice Bent Nose. But the Tejano says that I can take it to show Biggers. This I do.”
“And what did Agent Biggers say?”
“He reads the markings and says that the paper seems to be … I do not remember the taibo word … But that the cattle should stay in The Big Pasture for now.”
“What did Quanah say?”
“I did not tell Quanah.”
Daniel pressed his lips tight. “Why did you not speak of this with Quanah?”
Ben Buffalo Bone could only shrug, but now his face showed emotion.
Smiling, Daniel reached across the table and put his hand on Ben Buffalo Bone’s shoulder. “It is all right, my friend. You did nothing wrong. Did Agent Biggers keep the paper?”
The young Kotsoteka nodded.
Daniel found his new writing tablet, flipped back a page, and studied the list. George Briggs … Burk Burnett … Dan Waggoner.
He made a mark through Burnett’s name. Like Captain Lee Hall, Burk Burnett needed Quanah. So did the Northern Texas Stock Growers’ Association. Quanah supported these cattlemen, and they, in turn, supported Quanah. Quanah’s death would have complicated any future lease on The Big Pasture or the other grazing areas controlled by The People.
That brought him to the names of Briggs and Waggoner.
Waggoner needed grass, or his ranch might be ruined. He had said so himself, but, then, if he could trust his memory, so had Burk Burnett. Yet Waggoner’s words had been the sharpest, and Waggoner had been seen with his foreman in the Tivoli Hall, sharing drinks with Sol Carmody and his segundo. On the other hand, Dan Waggoner hated Sol Carmody. Or had that been an act? Or maybe … if Waggoner were desperate enough, would he have aligned himself with Carmody?
The ways of the Pale Eyes Daniel had learned. Quanah had signed one agreement, or was about to, that would lease The Big Pasture to Captain Lee Hall and his organization. Isa-tai had signed an agreement with Sol Carmody. They would fight this out for months, maybe even years, in courts. He thought of Greer County, a section of land north of the Red River that bordered the federal reservation of The People, the Apaches, and the Kiowas. Texians claimed that land belonged to the state of Texas. The government in Washington City said it was part of Indian Territory. Nothing had been decided, and this argument had been going on since before Daniel had been born.
So if two men said they had rights to The Big Pasture, what would happen? Lawyers would get rich. Eventually somebody would win, but by then many cattle might be dead from starvation. The Northern Texas Stock Growers’ Association had no cattle on the land of The People. Sol Carmody did, and removing those cattle might take forever under the pale-eyes law. When you considered that, Daniel thought, it would make practical business sense for Dan Waggoner to agree to a truce with Sol Carmody.
“Would a truce be enough to commit murder?”
He hadn’t realized he had said those words aloud, until Ben Buffalo Bone asked what he meant.
“Bávi …” Daniel gave him a weary smile. “I don’t know what I mean.”
It was a whole lot easier trying
to solve disputes in the Nations, even if The People looked down on Metal Shirts. Judging a horse race would not cause Daniel’s head to ache as it did now. Putting his elbows on the table, he reached up and massaged both temples.
If Quanah were dead, who would become leader of The People? Nagwee? Maybe, but he was no leader, just a holy man. Isa-tai? The Pale Eyes did not like him much, but they could not ignore his influence with The People. They might think that by naming him chief—which The People always considered silly for no one man led all the bands—it would make him easier to control.
Of course, they had thought that about Quanah, too.
He dropped his arms, staring at the names, thinking something else. Nagwee would not replace Quanah. Nor would Isa-tai. The Pale Eyes would first look to Yellow Bear. He was not only Quanah’s father-in-law, but perhaps the most powerful puhakat on the reservation, even more powerful than Nagwee. Yellow Bear was a man much respected by both The People and the government of the Pale Eyes. Agent Biggers had once told Yellow Bear how much he enjoyed the old man’s company, despite the fact that Yellow Bear spoke hardly any English and Biggers understood only a few Nermernuh words, and despite their different opinions on religion.
Yellow Bear would have replaced Quanah.
Charles Flint had said that Yellow Bear’s death had been an accident—probably not the correct taibo word—and that Quanah had been the intended victim. Maybe the man who had blown out the lamps, closed the window, and locked the door had wanted both men to die. The more he thought about that, the more it seemed so reasonable.
Why haven’t I considered this before?
“Tell me what you are thinking, my brother,” Ben Buffalo Bone said. “I am no holy man, so I cannot read what is in your mind.”
After Daniel had explained, Ben Buffalo Bone shook his head. “I will never understand the ways of the Tejanos. Or the Long Knives. You think this taibo, or taibos, they wanted to kill both Quanah and the father of his favorite wife? That sounds crazy to me, bávi.”
Daniel shrugged. “I have known many po-sa taibos.”
Ben Buffalo Bone finally managed a smile. “That is true. And I have known many crazy Nermernuh. Maybe you should show this paper to Tetecae. He is smart, and understands both the taibo and The People.”
Kill the Indian Page 14