Digging through her black bag for a business card, Vicky crossed to the counter, heels clacking against the brown-tiled floor. She handed the card to a policewoman behind the counter and asked to see Detective Clark.
“Gotta have a look at your driver’s license,” the policewoman said, examining the card.
Another fishing expedition in her purse, and Vicky slid the license across the counter.
The policewoman studied the miniature photo, glancing up at Vicky several times. Then: “Detective Clark know what this is about?”
“Please ring him,” Vicky said, using her lawyer tone.
The policewoman picked up the telephone. There was a quick exchange of information, followed by a nod toward the roped-off area. “Wait there.”
Vicky took a seat offering an unobstructed view of the elevators. A couple of young women in cutoff jeans and T-shirts slouched on chairs to her left. Across from her were three middle-aged men, bony, roughened hands clasped between knees, red-rimmed eyes staring at the floor, exuding an air of resignation and hopelessness. What had brought them here? she wondered. What terrible events?
There was a loud ping, and the elevator doors parted. Steve Clark stepped out. Vicky jumped to her feet and hurried over to the gate in the railing that he held open. “A social call, I hope,” he said.
“I’ve got some new information,” Vicky said, her arm inadvertently brushing his as she walked past.
Steve snapped the gate into place and hit the elevator button. “I’m in the information business,” he said as the doors splayed open and they stepped inside. He pushed another button and leaned against the side wall, smiling at her.
They exited on the fourth floor and walked down a carpeted corridor past a series of closed doors. The air felt warm and close, as if the air-conditioning didn’t extend into the corridors. From somewhere came the soft clacking sound of a keyboard, the muffled screech of a phone. Another policeman in civilian clothes, a thick file folder in hand, came toward them. There was the typical hurried male exchange, Vicky thought, that had nothing to do with communication: “How’s it going? Can’t complain.”
Steve opened a door and motioned her into a large room with about a dozen desks arranged in rows, a chalkboard covered with white scribblings on the left wall, and on the far wall, windows that framed a patch of blue sky and the white peaks of the mountains. The room was deserted except for two men huddled together at a desk in the center, voices low and intense. Neither looked up as Steve led her over to the desk against the window.
“This is where I ponder the world,” he said, one fist thumping the desktop. Neat stacks of folders and papers trailed around the edges. In one corner, the photo of a little girl with long blond hair looked out from a small silver frame. “Kathy, my daughter,” he said, following Vicky’s eyes.
Vicky smiled at him. She didn’t know Steve had a child. Fatherhood suited him, she thought. She took the chair he’d pulled over for her.
“So what do you bring me?” The detective dropped into the swivel chair behind the desk and leaned back toward the window.
“A theory.” Vicky felt the jittery flutters in her stomach that she always felt when she was about to sum up a case before the jury, pull together scattered pieces of evidence, weave a story that made sense. She launched into what she had pieced together: a graduate student documenting the sites of his people’s villages and battlefields, stumbling across a ledger book lost in a museum, recognizing the story of a massacre that occurred more than a hundred years before, ending up murdered because he had found the book.
Little furrows came into the detective’s forehead and questions flashed in his eyes. The story sounded far-fetched even to her own ears, a tale as thin and insubstantial as the pages in an old ledger book. She hurried on, explaining how the government had promised lands in Colorado to the people of Sand Creek—lands never actually allotted—and how the ledger book proved Arapahos had been in the village.
Steve ran his fingers along the edge of his chin. “If what you’re telling me is true, the museum will have records.”
“They’re gone,” she said. “Anything that connects the ledger book to the museum is gone. That’s why the killer ransacked Todd’s apartment and took his computer—to destroy any reference to the book.”
The detective swirled sideways and glanced out the window a moment. “Let me get this straight,” he said, looking back. “Todd Harris was murdered over an old Indian ledger book and a massacre that happened way back in history.”
“A ledger book worth more than a million dollars.” Vicky kept her voice steady, firm. “A ledger book that proves Arapahos are entitled to lands worth even more.” She jumped to her feet and walked over to the window. Traffic threaded along Thirteenth Avenue below, a silent procession broken by the occasional squeal of brakes.
She turned back. “Suppose the museum curator saw the chance to make a lot of money from an artifact everybody had forgotten existed. I happen to know Rachel Foster could use some money.” There was resistance in his eyes. She plunged on: “Suppose a scholar by the name of Bernard Good Elk claims that only Cheyennes were at Sand Creek. What would he do if a ledger book that proved otherwise suddenly surfaced?”
Steve was tapping a pencil against the edge of the desk, a hard, steady rhythm. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s assume this million-dollar ledger book exists, and Todd Harris discovered it. There is another possibility.”
“Don’t say it.” Vicky held up one hand, fingers outstretched. If he spoke the words, they would take on the weight of truth. “Todd Harris is not the one who took the book.”
“You don’t know that.”
That was true. She had no proof, only a sense of what was true, of what Todd would have done. She said, “Todd would have shown the book to someone in the museum—the research librarian, maybe the curator herself. He would have expected the museum to protect the book. That’s what museums do.”
Steve held her gaze a moment before sliding a folder off one of the stacks. “A million dollars buys a lot of heroin, Vicky,” he said, weariness in his voice. “It could pay off a lot of drug suppliers.” He opened the folder and lifted out a printed page. “The autopsy report,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to tell you. Todd Harris’s system was full of heroin.”
Vicky was standing behind her chair. She grabbed the top. The wood grain felt rough against her palms. “There has to be some explanation, Steve.”
“Why?” An irritation in his tone now. “Because Todd Harris was Arapaho, and Arapaho kids never do drugs? Let me tell you, I’ve seen dead kids of every color and stripe shot up with heroin and a lot of drugs you haven’t even heard of. Why should Todd Harris be any different?”
“I knew him,” Vicky said slowly, measuring the words.
Steve leaned forward. “There were needle tracks on his right arm.”
“Right arm?” Vicky stepped around and dropped onto the edge of the chair. “Todd was right-handed, Steve. Somebody wanted it to look as if he’d shot heroin.”
“You’re a stubborn woman, Vicky.” The detective slipped the report back inside the folder and stared at her a long moment. Then: “Okay, there’s the possibility the tracks were fresh.”
“What? You knew this?”
“It’s a possibility. We don’t know for certain. The body was in the water at least twelve hours. It was pretty bruised.”
Vicky gathered her handbag and got to her feet. What was she thinking? That she could send a homicide detective on a wild-goose chase after a ledger book when the evidence he needed—the evidence he wanted—was at his fingertips? “You’re not going to look into the ledger book, are you?”
“Look into a ledger book that’s not in the museum and for which there are no records?” Steve pushed his chair back and stood up. “It would help to have some proof the damn book exists.” He came around the desk toward her. “But I’ll see what I can find out. Okay?”
She was about to thank him when
the phone at the far edge of the desk emitted a screech. “Look, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t care if you are involved with somebody else. We could still have dinner tonight, couldn’t we? Two old friends.” Stepping back, he picked up the receiver, mouthing the words, “Think about it.” Then, into the receiver: “Detective Clark here.” There was a long silence broken by the sound of his pencil scratching on a sheet of paper.
After a moment Steve snapped the receiver into place. “Before you turn me down again, I’m withdrawing the invitation. We’ve got another homicide victim just washed up in the South Platte.” He reached toward a coat tree near the window and lifted off a blue blazer.
“Who?” Vicky heard the fear in her voice.
“Hispanic or Native American.” He pulled on the blazer. “A lot of bruises and contusions on the body.”
“My God,” Vicky said. “Just like Todd.”
“Wrong, Vicky.” He came around the desk. “This homicide’s a woman.”
Vicky followed him across the room, past the other two detectives still huddled over the desk, intent on the papers spread before them. “Let me come with you.”
“No way,” he said. “You don’t need this.”
They hurried down the corridor. “It might be a friend of Todd’s,” Vicky persisted. “It might be someone I know.”
“You don’t want to see another body.” Steve punched the elevator button and stared at the closed doors, as if he could will them to open. Another moment and the doors parted. They stepped inside the small space filled with a faint odor of cigarette smoke. She felt the floor dropping beneath her. Then the hard stop, and they walked out toward the railing. He took her arm and pulled her out of the way of two uniforms coming through the gate.
“Where did they find the body?” she asked.
He leaned toward her. She could smell the aftershave, the trace of coffee on his breath. “Okay,” he said. “I can’t stop you from going, but I’m not going to take you. The victim’s at Confluence Park.”
* * *
A large crowd had already gathered as Vicky wheeled into a dirt lot behind three police cars, an ambulance, and a white Blazer with a gold City and County of Denver insignia on the side doors. Not far away, the rush-hour traffic streamed along I-25, tires crying out against the asphalt. She ran toward the crowd of bikers and joggers blocking the pathway along the South Platte River. Shouldering past the perspiring, Lycra-clad bodies, the handlebars and spoked wheels, she reached the top of a little hill overlooking the placid, gray-blue river. Below, a line of yellow police tape marked off a half circle on the rock-strewn bank. Inside the tape was another crows—medics, uniformed policemen hovering over what looked like a small, twisted bag of rocks caught among the boulders.
Steve Clark stood in the middle, like a bandleader—directing, admonishing—as the medics lifted the body onto a stretcher and started up the slope, huffing with the weight, although the girl was small, scarcely more than a child. Vicky saw the face, the red marks, the swollen eyes. A black braid fell loose over the edge of the stretcher.
The crowd climbed up, Steve in the lead. He veered toward her. “One of the officers found a wallet over there.” He nodded toward the clump of wild grasses spiking the rocks. “Could be the victim’s. Name is Julie . . .”
Vicky closed her eyes a moment. The face isn’t what you’re gonna want to see every time you close your eyes the rest of your life, Steve had told her when she had insisted upon going to the morgue. Todd’s face had been in her mind since. And now there would be another. She turned away and started back to the lot.
“Last name’s Clearwater,” the detective said, walking alongside her. They waited as the white Blazer backed up, then turned into the street, bound for the morgue, Vicky thought, where Todd had been taken. And who would claim the body, who would grieve for Julie Clearwater? A grandmother somewhere on the Rosebud Reservation? A brother or sister? A friend?
Vicky swallowed back the lump forming in her throat. She would not cry again, she told herself, hurrying toward the Taurus, the detective beside her.
“What do you know about Julie Clearwater?” he asked.
Sliding inside, she gripped the steering wheel—the solidity, the steadiness. Nothing, she thought, staring through the windshield at the police officers milling around the lot, the bikers starting to roll down the path. She knew nothing about the girl. Except . . . “There’s a student at CU-Denver. Tisha Runner. I met her at Indian Services. She might know something.” Drawing in a long breath, Vicky turned toward the detective. “Todd told Julie about the ledger book. So they killed her.”
Steve dipped his head. She couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t gauge his thoughts. She heard the quick intakes of breath—in and out, in and out. Slowly he brought his eyes back to hers. “They were doing drugs together, Vicky. They met up with some bad people, the kind that beat kids to death if they try cheating the dealers, start thinking they’re smarter. Both murders have drug-deal-gone-wrong written all over them. I’ve seen enough to know. Forget about your ledger-book theory. There’s no proof.”
Vicky gripped the wheel harder, nails biting into her palms. “You’re wrong,” she said.
“Did you see the victim’s arms?” His voice was softer. “There were needle tracks all over them.”
* * *
Vicky wasn’t sure how she’d gotten to Marcy’s, what route she’d followed. She’d driven through the dusk on automatic. Stop. Go. Turn here. Turn there. Slow for brake lights ahead. On automatic she had wheeled through the drive-in, picked up a hamburger and Coke, feeling the hollowness inside, the light-headedness. Her thoughts on two dead Indian kids, so like her own kids, Lucas and Susan. About the same age, the same black hair and dark eyes, the same caramel-colored skin. It might have been them; what was to keep such unspeakable horror from her own kids trying to make their way in a city—in Los Angeles—where there was no one to look after them, no one to protect them?
She let herself into the man-made coolness of Marcy’s house. From out in back came the slow, rhythmic sound of drums. Through the patio doors beyond the kitchen, she could see a group of women sitting cross-legged in a circle—long hair falling across shoulders and backs, loose, robelike dresses billowing over the patio. Marcy curled over a small drum.
Suddenly the tapping stopped, and before Vicky could escape down the hallway, Marcy sprang to her feet and slid back the patio door. “Come join us,” she called.
Vicky held up one hand and began pleading exhaustion, work to do. She would have a bite to eat in her room, she said, and then fall into bed. She didn’t mean to be unsociable; she was sure they were having a good time—how should she put it—a meaningful experience.
She was rambling, grateful that Marcy finally broke in. “You could be so much help to us.”
Vicky stared at the woman framed by the patio door, like a butterfly pinned to the glass. She was thinking she’d been no help to anyone lately—not to Todd, not to a Lakota girl. Certainly not to the police.
She forced her mind back to what Marcy was saying: something about tapping into the strength and courage and endurance of Native American women. “You have endured, Vicky,” her friend said. “Through centuries of pain and disruption because of your spiritual strength.” Marcy stretched out her hand, as if she might reach across the space between them. “If you would just talk to us. Tell us how we, too, can tap into our spiritual strength and become whole and vibrant.”
In her mind’s eye, Vicky saw the broken body of Julie Clearwater. She had to fight the urge to run, get in the Taurus, and drive—across the city, across the plains, back to the reservation. She said, “It will have to be another time, Marcy.”
Ignoring the disappointment in her friend’s face, Vicky walked down the hallway to the bedroom. As she closed the door she heard the patio door slam into place, detected the little ripple through the floorboards, and felt a wave of regret that she was not the kind of friend Marcy seemed to need.
She sank into the pillows propped on the bed and tried to concentrate on the yellow legal pad and pen in her lap. What was she missing? Why couldn’t she see it? Somewhere there was proof the ledger book existed, that it had been in a carton stacked on shelves amid hundreds of other cartons.
She wrote in block letters: TODD. Under the name, SMEDDEN COLLECTION. And under that, LEDGER BOOK. She drew long, black lines between the words, around the words, trying to find some kind of connection. What was she missing? Why couldn’t she see the connection? She made more slashes—a series of lines nearly cutting through the paper. Then she threw the pad aside and dug into the white bag for the hamburger. The filmy curtains moved at the window in the faintest stir of air; the drumming was light and muffled, a barely perceptible tapping, like a small animal nibbling at the side of the house.
She had only eaten half the hamburger and taken a few sips of Coke before she fell asleep to the sounds of a drum beating in a faraway place and time.
21
The jangling noise came from far away, and for a moment Vicky thought she was on the reservation, where dancers were approaching the powwow arbor. Suddenly she jerked upright. A faint light from the street lamps outside drifted through the window. There was the soft shushing noise of the air conditioning. She was at Marcy’s, and the phone was ringing on the night stand.
She lifted the receiver.
“It’s for you, Vicky.” Marcy’s voice came over the line. Her friend had already picked up an extension.
There was a soft click, and another voice, more desperate. “Vicky Holden?”
“Yes,” she said, a slight sense of disorientation still present.
“Tisha Runner. You probably don’t remember me.”
“I remember you,” Vicky said, her senses alert now.
The Story Teller Page 15