“Who’s that?”
According to the stack of business cards on the counter, Betty Smallwood was an attorney-at-law and a notary public. And she had an office on top of the convenience store.
“She’s in. She might let you use it for a dollar or two.” He pointed toward the back of the store, on the left, where a glass door was labeled with black and gold stick-on letters, B. Smallwood, Esq., Notary, Tribal Genealogist.
I climbed the too-shallow stairs up to Smallwood’s third-floor office and knocked.
“Come on in.”
My first view of her was of her butt, pushed in the air while she was kneeling on the floor watering her plants. She stuck a finger in the potted palm to check its moisture level before giving it any more water.
“Good idea.” I said hello and she scrambled to her feet.
“I thought it was Georgie.” She laughed. “From downstairs.” She brushed her hands on her pants and we shook. Against the far wall were file cabinets of various colors and heights, giving it the appearance of a fake skyline, like something you’d see in an off-Broadway show. Above and on top of the cabinets were Native American memorabilia. There weren’t many office machines but she had a small combo printer/scanner/fax machine similar to the one I had at home. Bingo.
I told her why I’d come and without needing a moment to think about it she cleared off a space on her desk for me to set up my laptop. My battery was running low so I needed to plug the computer in and that meant she had to find one of the overworked extension cords in the office and swap something out.
“So, you’re a tribal genealogist?” I said, making small talk while she looked for something noncritical to unplug.
“Yeah. I know, everyone expects braids and lots of turquoise jewelry. I only wear it on special occasions, to please my family. Most of the time we just look like everyone else.”
She might not have looked like Pocahontas that day, but she certainly didn’t look like everyone else. She had thick dark hair that fell in sheets around her face and would have cost seven to eight hundred dollars for Japanese straightening if she hadn’t come by it naturally. Her skin was a perfect even caramel color and it made her teeth and the whites of her eyes seem even whiter than they were.
She plugged in my computer and we sat opposite each other at her desk waiting for my computer to power up; I sent her the e-mail attachment with Lucy’s photo. As it printed out she said, “So may I ask you what this is about?”
I told her about Lucy and debated whether or not to mention the Crawford brothers. As soon as I did the atmosphere in the room changed.
“Have I said something?”
“You know you did. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” She was upset, thinking I’d somehow tricked her.
“I’m here because I needed a fax machine and I didn’t think the Laundromat had one.” Then I got it. She was the attorney the Crawford brothers had kidnapped.
Twenty-eight
“I’ve told this story a hundred times. My clients didn’t kidnap me. I was never in any danger. My father just overreacted because he couldn’t reach me for a day or two.” Betty leaned back in her chair, a bemused look on her face.
“It was all a misunderstanding,” she said, “but people in this area have long memories. My father in particular.” She handed me Lucy’s picture and the printed confirmation that the fax had been sent to the police station. Then she sat there for a while with a strange smile on her face, rolling down the sleeves of her soft plaid shirt.
Was that what I was doing? Overreacting because I couldn’t reach Lucy?
“Stacy Winters is going to have a laugh when she sees where that fax came from,” she said. I didn’t get the joke.
Betty Smallwood represented the two surviving Crawford brothers in a number of legal matters, most significantly their dispute with the rival faction of the Quepochas tribe. I told Betty that Lucy was working on a story about Native Americans in Connecticut and gambling. I wanted her on my side so I let her think Winters was the one who’d planted the seed that the Crawford brothers might have had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance.
“That woman needs to get out and find some new suspects. Every time anything goes wrong within a fifty-mile radius she wants to blame Billy and Claude. She’s even tried to implicate them in Nick Vigoriti’s death, which is preposterous.”
“People are lining up and taking sides,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s as if they can smell recognition coming and they’ve all got their hands out. Waiting to cash in. Bobby, the oldest brother, wasn’t like that.”
Bobby Crawford might not have been like that, but it was understandable how some people were when individual members from recognized tribes with casinos were pulling down at least $100,000 a year and tribal leaders as much as $1.5 million a year. Just for being a member.
“It’s complicated. State recognition is a start, but only federal recognition opens the door for gaming. And it’s based on specific federal criteria,” she said. “Membership in a tribe is simply determined by the members of that tribe.”
“So if the leader enrolls you as a member, you’re a member?”
“No one wants to think it happens like that, but yes, it can. Bobby used to call them the Wantabees and the Ihopesos.”
Most people who claimed Native American heritage were only one-eighth or one-sixteenth. Betty herself was only one-quarter Quepochas. The Crawfords were going head-to-head with a faction of the tribe who wanted to admit hundreds of new members to get their numbers up in the hopes of solidifying their case before Congress.
“That’s why they got in touch with me. Bobby Crawford was the tribal leader at the time.”
“So why snatch you?” I asked. “Wasn’t there a lawyer they could simply call?” I waited for her to refute my use of the word snatch, but she didn’t.
“I was on my way back to New Haven. I hadn’t spent more than four weeks on tribal lands since I’d left for college seven years earlier. I was an apple—red on the outside, white on the inside. Maybe they wanted to make a statement.”
She swung around in her chair and pointed to a picture hanging on the wall behind her desk. “That’s my father, Daniel Smallwood. He’s the only other lawyer in Shaftsbury. He’s also the leader of the rival faction.”
Then again, maybe that was it.
“At the time I felt no more Quepochas than you probably feel . . .” She looked me up and down. “Scotch-Irish?”
“Close. Italian-Irish.”
“Don’t get me wrong. There weren’t a lot of squaws at Yale, and if a professor wanted to give me extra points for it, I let him. My way of helping to assuage his white Anglo guilt. But I didn’t play it up with a lot of fringed leather and beaded jewelry.”
I believed her. She wasn’t denying her heritage, it was just that she didn’t think about it that much. Until the Crawfords came back into her life.
“My father was disappointed when Bobby married someone outside of the tribe. I guess he had hopes Bobby and I would one day bring the tribe together.” Betty said this so unemotionally I had a hard time believing her.
“Bobby and Chantel had a child right away. No surprise, she had a bump on their wedding day. Then he died and she really embraced the tribe, as they say.”
I bet she did. Free room and board courtesy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the knowledge that she and her little boy would be enrolled as members of the Quepochas tribe. And possibly a very rich member if she sided with Daniel Smallwood.
“As a licensed attorney I went before the tribal council to make the Crawfords’ case. We won and the tribe agreed not to add any new members without a rigorous approval process.”
“DNA testing?” I asked.
“Not that rigorous.”
Betty told me they’d tried that ten years earlier and the results sent shock waves through the small community. Some leaders had less blood than they claimed, some members found out their fathers weren’t their f
athers, and other even more awkward bits of news surfaced, so the testing was halted and never resumed.
“Were the Crawfords ever arrested for the incident with you?”
“Arrested, but not charged. I wouldn’t press charges. Without that it was purely a tribal issue. Red on red offense on tribal lands . . . the council had jurisdiction. They held a pretrial intervention on behalf of the Crawfords. We made it go away. It wasn’t in anyone’s interests to pursue.”
On top of that, she’d come over to their side. She learned a lot about her own heritage from them. Bobby, really. He was the smart one; the other two were not as bright. Or as passionate about their cause.
The original stunt had worked. Now I wondered if the surviving brothers were dumb enough to try something similar on a nonnative off tribal lands, where it wouldn’t be a tribal issue swept under the rug but a federal offense.
“Is the reservation near here?”
I tried to sound casual, but Betty Smallwood knew what I was thinking.
“They wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not? They shamed and charmed you into seeing their side. Maybe they thought they could do the same with a TV journalist.” Lucy would have been happy to be referred to that way, although she’d be the first to admit that she cranked out low-budget reality television shows.
I waited for Betty to answer, and she searched my face trying to guess how I’d use the information.
“It’s adjacent to the Titans Hotel, on the north side.”
“Thank you.”
We heard huffing and puffing, and the stairs creaking as they had when I climbed them. I thought it was the elderly salesclerk, then the door swung open.
“You better have some water up here.” It was Detective Stacy Winters. She leaned against the doorjamb, hands low on her bony hips, and Betty pointed to a cooler near a dirty casement window.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“Papercups?”
“C’mon, let’s not waste each other’s time. Billy and Claude. They were seen at the hotel and as of this morning I’ve got physical evidence linking them to Nick Vigoriti’s murder.”
So now the Crawfords were officially wanted for questioning in the murder of Nick Vigoriti. My temporary status as a “person of interest”—bestowed on me by the local press, who had to say something even if it was vague and ultimately untrue—was rescinded. And if Lucy’s disappearance had briefly registered on Stacy Winters’s Richter scale, it had gone poof with this new evidence against her favorite suspects.
“Physical evidence, right at the scene. So I’ll ask you again. Where are they?” Winters said. It was a scene I had a feeling they’d played out before, with Betty leading in the head-to-head matchup.
“What is your problem with them? One of them not ask you to the prom or something? I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I wouldn’t have to. Presumably you do know something about the law, since you’re in law enforcement.” Betty was in lawyer mode, but this smacked of something a tad more personal.
At a loss for words, Winters turned to me. “And what are you doing here?” She walked over to the watercooler, ran a finger across the top of the dusty glass jug, and decided against it. “I heard about your little escapade in Springfield last year. Some cop friend of yours called me. I hope you don’t think you’re going to start sticking your nose in police business up here.”
Betty’s crack about the prom and Winters’s inability to deliver a quick comeback made me bold. “Lay back. I just came to send you the fax. It’s not like there’s a Kinko’s in this burg.” I was tempted to say, If your office had a working computer I wouldn’t be here. I handed her the picture of Lucy that I’d just faxed to her office. She didn’t even look at it—just folded it in four and stuffed it in her inside pocket.
“Okay. Mission accomplished. I got the fax.”
She stood with her hands on her hips, dismissing me. Jeez, what a bitch. Part of me wanted to stick around for the cat fight, but I didn’t need to be hit over the head—she wanted me gone and I was happy to oblige. I yanked out the power cord and shoved the cord and the computer in my bag. “What do I owe you for letting me use the computer, Ms. Smallwood?”
“Forget it.”
I made my way down the stairs, nearly bumping into Georgie, who’d crept up to eavesdrop. “You might want to let them talk for a bit,” I said, trying to spare him.
“Is it about Billy and Claude?” he whispered, walking back down the stairs. “She don’t like them.”
I nodded. “Does everyone know about them?” I asked.
“I know everybody. They all come in to buy the Powerball tickets. I can tell who’s having fun and who’s desperate.” He fell just short of telling me what he meant by that. “You’re not a cop, too, are you?”
“Me? I’m a gardener.” That got me a smile but no more information from Georgie. I didn’t want to be around when Winters and Betty finished up, so I kept walking, to the front of the store, where I handed Georgie a dollar for a bottle of water. Across the street I saw the Big Y shopping cart and the walking bundle of rags.
“You know that guy?” I asked, cracking open the bottle and taking a long pull.
“Sure. He’ll be in later. I let him use the facilities—they don’t let him hang around the gas station no more; owner says he scares people away,” Georgie said. “I think it’s the owner scares them away.”
“Give him this, okay?” I handed Georgie a twenty and walked out to my car.
I had the sinking feeling that Lucy was mixed up in all of this—it had two handsome guys and a good story. I drove back to Titans trying to figure out what to do next. Just before the turnoff into the Titans lot was a hidden driveway I hadn’t noticed before and a small handwritten sign: PROPERTY OF QUEPOCHAS, STAY THE HELL OUT.
I didn’t.
Twenty-nine
In the early seventeenth century, well before it was a state, the Connecticut colony gave the Quepochas 17,000 acres of prime farmland. Who knows why? Guilt over killing so many of them with guns or disease? Fear that they would encroach on lands inhabited by European settlers? Whatever the reason, there was an acknowledgment of their existence even before the Revolutionary War. And an attempt was made to live amicably with them. Over the years, members moved off or assimilated. Large tracts of tribal lands were sold by tribal leaders until the reservation reached its present size of approximately 300 acres—small for a reservation but huge for a property in Connecticut.
For some lucky tribes, the reservation is a tax-free gated community where few people work, but that’s by choice. Why work when the money from gaming just keeps falling on your head? Other tribes suffer from as much as eighty-five percent unemployment—and that’s not because the members are staying in their mansions, eating bonbons.
The Quepochas reservation was neither. From what I could see, most of the reservation’s inhabitants seemed to be dead, as evidenced by the lack of homes and the dozens of listing, wafer-thin tombstones I passed driving the dirt road that ran through the property.
Betty Smallwood had told me that enrolled members of the tribe were not required to live on the reservation. Hell, most of them got away as soon as they could, and as far away as possible. Like Betty herself had done.
Unofficially, a handful did live there, scattered across the reservation, scratching out an existence in shacks and cabins and quietly dying out. Officially, it was just Chantel and Sean in a two-room cinder-block house close to the road.
The farther I drove the more the road narrowed and the potholes deepened. It reminded me of the road to Oksana’s place; she was on a reservation, too, in a way. The switchbacks took me higher and although I hadn’t noticed it on the way up, on one side of the mountain I could now see the top of Titans. There were fewer tombstones and still no houses, just the occasional dilapidated shack built into the side of the mountain. I pulled over to a carved-out spot on the road to enjoy the view.
Peak time was p
robably in the fall when the mountain would be awash in color, but it looked pretty good to me; I fished out my phone to take a picture.
Just then it rang.
“Where the hell have you been?” the woman asked.
It was Lucy.
She’d been trying to reach me for the past three days. When she called the hotel, I had checked out. When she tried me at home, I’d already left to come back to Titans. And the cell didn’t work until I drove up the mountain and got a signal.
“Where the hell are you?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not one hundred percent sure.”
“Can you talk? Are you safe?”
“Yes. I’m alone now. I don’t know when they’ll be back. Come get me.”
Thirty
Before Lucy and I were to meet at Titans, she’d had an appointment. With Billy and Claude Crawford. They were her sources for an exposé on casino gambling that involved some of the most prominent names in this part of the state and some pretty unsavory characters as well. The three of them had met in the parking lot outside of Titans. I watched the sun go down as she told me what happened.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to get into a car with two strange men?” I asked.
“I don’t remember the stuff my mother told me. Besides, I didn’t get in a car with two men; Billy had to meet someone in the hotel; he joined us later.” Lucy and Claude drove to the Crawfords’ attorney to discuss what they knew and how best to reveal it.
“You went to Betty Smallwood’s?” I asked, incredulous.
“You know her?” Now it was Lucy’s turn to be surprised.
“I just came from her office. I showed her a picture of you and she didn’t bat an eyelash. She didn’t utter a word about having met you.” That was one cool customer.
“After I left the message for you I called this other guy I was supposed to meet,” she said.
“Nick Vigoriti?”
“How do you know this?” she asked, exasperated that I was cutting into her story.
The Big Dirt Nap Page 13