The drumming stopped, and slowly the mourners began walking toward the pickups parked on cemetery road, boots scraping the snow. Andrew and Mamie huddled together a moment before starting after the others. After everyone had left, Father John spent a few moments praying over the grave. Kiki’s hat and the other items were scattered over the top of the coffin. “May you find peace and rest.” He spoke out loud, as if Kiki were there—in a counseling session or stopping by to say hello after Mass. He couldn’t remember Kiki ever coming to Mass. Maybe when he was a kid. It was hard to connect a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kid with the prison-hardened and jumpy young man he had picked up on Seventeen-Mile Road.
He gathered up the backpack and started toward the pickup, the only vehicle still parked at the cemetery. Red taillights flickered in the gray daylight as the last vehicles turned out of cemetery road and headed back toward the mission.
“THEY’RE TAKING IT pretty hard,” Elena said. Father John glanced over at the table where Andrew and Mamie sat with some of the other elders. The rest of the mourners were scattered around the other tables, and several grandmothers were setting out plates of food at the long side table. The smell of fresh coffee filled Eagle Hall, and other smells were coming at him: the pungent odor of simmering stew—beef, potatoes, and carrots—the smells of hot apple pie and bananas in a cake.
“Andrew’s waiting to talk to you,” Elena said. He felt her fingers on his arm, nudging him toward the table. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
Father John took off his jacket and hat, set them on top of the jackets piled over a chair, and headed across the hall. Andrew caught his eye and started to get up—a halting, stumbling motion. For an instant, Father John thought the old man would topple over. He sprinted toward him, knocking over a folding chair that thumped against the floor, but Andrew seemed to find his own balance. He moved sideways toward a vacant table and eased himself onto a chair.
Father John sat down beside him. “This must be very tough for you,” he said.
The old man balled his fists, then ran the back of his fingers over his cheeks. Moisture glistened on the knobby knuckles, a fact he seemed to realize because he folded his hands together and hid them under the table. “I gotta be strong for Mamie,” he said. “That boy was all the relatives we had. I’ll be going with Kiki soon, and she’s gonna be alone. Oh, the people won’t forget her, stuck out in the house alone.” He threw a glance around the room. “They’ll see that she’s got fuel for the winter, some food in the cabinets. Won’t be anybody that loves her like family.”
“I’m sorry, Grandfather,” Father John heard himself saying. The words sounded small and unimportant, like leaves tossed into a river of grief.
“Can’t stop thinking about the boy,” Andrew went on. “Nothing left of him on this earth now, except for the kind of boy he was, his reputation. All a man has is his reputation.” He leaned sideways, bringing his face close. Father John glimpsed the pink scalp showing through the thin, white hair, and the little tufts of white hair in the old man’s nostrils. “The fed come to see us yesterday,” he said. “Not much we could tell him, ’cept we want him to find the SOB that killed Kiki, Mamie and me. Our time to go, we want to know there was justice for Kiki.”
Elena appeared, set two mugs of coffee on the table, then moved away. Father John took a sip from one of the mugs—steam rising off the top, the odor so strong it made him realize how hungry he was, the coffee itself infused with cream.
Andrew took a couple of sips, then wrapped the mug in both hands and stared at the coffee. “All the questions the fed asked. When did we see Kiki last? How could we be sure he was clean? Maybe he was using drugs and we didn’t know it?” The old man lifted his eyes. They were rheumy and tear-filled. “Wanted to know who Kiki hung out with since he got out of prison. What about Jason Bellows? I told the fed that maybe Kiki used to hang around with the likes of Bellows, but not anymore.”
Father John didn’t say anything. He had never met Bellows, but he had heard of him. There probably wasn’t anybody on the rez who hadn’t heard of him: gang leader, drug dealer, but he was like a wisp of smoke blowing across the plains, gathering in the arroyos and on the riverbanks, selling meth or pot or cocaine—whatever the customer wanted—and vanishing. Customers and other dealers knew how to find him. Kiki had been one, and he ended up in prison. But Father John had never heard that Bellows had been arrested.
“Trouble is,” Andrew said, “I’m worried the fed’s not ever gonna find the guy that hurt Kiki and left him to die at the river like a dog ’cause he’s already convinced himself that Kiki was dealing drugs and that’s how come he got killed.”
Father John took another drink of coffee and waited. In years of counseling, he’d learned to recognize the signs. Andrew hadn’t told him everything yet; there was more to come.
“Everything’s gonna be taken from Kiki,” Andrew said finally. “First his life, and now the man that he was. Just like what happened to my father. Went off to Hollywood to work, get some money and food for his wife and the kid he was gonna have, and they took his life. Then they took his reputation. Said he ran away from his wife and kid. But my mother carried the truth here . . .” He balled up a fist again and thumped at his chest. “In her heart she knew what kind of man he was. He wasn’t never gonna leave her and his kid, unless he was dead.”
The old man leaned in close, moisture glistening in the furrows of his cheeks. “Somebody out there,” he said, waving a hand toward the window and the expanse of snow and gray sky, “don’t ever want people to know what happened. Kiki found out the truth, and that’s why he got killed.” The muscles in the old man’s jaw clenched; the cracked lips came together in a tight, pink line.
Father John leaned back against the chair; the rungs pressed against his spine. It seemed preposterous—an old man stuck in the past, a lifetime spent trying to understand why his father had left him, and a grandson hanging onto the family stories, maybe trying to come to terms with the fact that his own father had driven off a cliff. Yet Kiki had messed up and gone to prison. Then he had gotten off drugs. Maybe he had seen his chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his grandparents. There was power in the need for redemption, Father John thought. He had been trying to redeem himself for nearly ten years—trying to stay sober, honor the vows he had taken, bring a gift to all those who had believed in him, all the people he had let down—the provincial and the other superiors, his colleagues, his own family. Wanting to say, “I’ve changed. I’m not the man I used to be.”
He said, “Do you think Kiki found something in Hollywood that brought him back to the rez?” It was what the girl, Dede, had said. The truth had been here all the time.
Andrew nodded, a look of gratitude suffusing the old eyes. “Hold on.” He leaned on one hip and extracted something from the back pocket of his jeans. “Here’s the letter I told you about.” He held out a worn, frayed envelope that looked as if it had been opened and closed a hundred times. The address was in bold, black handwriting: Mrs. Wallowingbull. Indian Reservation. Wyoming. In the upper left corner, the same bold handwriting: Tim McCoy, Ambassador Hotel, Hollywood, California.
“This come for Mother,” Andrew said. “Was at the agency for months, and nobody told her. Day came she had to go see the agent about getting seeds for our vegetable plot, and the agent says, ‘You got a letter here, Anna. How come you ain’t come to get it?’ I can picture her standing at the counter, real small and quiet. Hard for an Indian lady, not having a husband to look out for her. So the agent pulls this envelope out of a box and throws it across the counter. She didn’t know how to read, and he knew that, but he let her stand there, looking at the envelope and not knowing what to do. He was enjoying himself, thinking she was stupid. She said he laughed when she asked him to read the letter to her.”
Father John slipped the letter out. The paper was yellowish and brittle, cracking a little at the fold. He was afraid it might fall into pieces in his hand. It was the s
ame handwriting on the envelope, with large, swooping letters, as if the writer had taken his time, thinking his way through the message.
Dear Mrs. Wallowingbull,
I am writing about your husband, Charlie. He was a very fine man. Everyone connected with The Covered Wagon thought highly of him. I have spent many hours in an attempt to determine where Charlie might have gone. He did not appear at the Egyptian Theatre on the evening of April 10 to participate in the prologue show for the premiere of the motion picture. His friend, William Thunder, went to Cahuenga Pass to find him and reported that he was not in his tipi. His horse, Ranger, was in the corral. When Charlie did not appear the following morning, a search was gotten under way. The other Indians and I spent several days walking through Cahuenga Pass on the supposition that he might have gotten lost. I am sorry to report that we have found no trace of him. However, I have checked with the police and there are no reports of an Indian being found dead. I tell you this to keep up your spirits. I am sure that the studio is very concerned about the disappearance and will do everything to locate your dear husband. I myself will not give up the search.
My best wishes to you,
Tim McCoy
Father John slid the letter back inside the envelope and handed it to Andrew. A connection to his father, he was thinking. “Kiki saw this?”
Andrew nodded. “Showed it to him lots of times. Told him what McCoy said when he come here . . .”
“You met McCoy?”
Andrew looked away and frowned at the memory. “I was maybe ten years old when a pickup drives up our road and a big, tall man, dressed in black and wearing a white Stetson gets out. Says he’s Tim McCoy. He’d been in lots of movies by then and everybody knew who he was. Moccasin telegraph was full of news that a movie star was on the rez. I remember the way he walked up to my mother with his big hand out to shake her hand. She just stood there, looking real small and scared, like she knew he was bringing bad news. We all went inside and Mother give him some coffee. He made himself comfortable and looked me up and down. ‘Look just like your dad,’ he said. Then he told Mother he was real sorry he never could find out what happened. He stayed a little while, drank some more coffee, like there was lots of things he’d been thinking about that he wanted to say, but he didn’t know how. Then he got up and said his good-byes. That was the last we heard about my father.”
“You think McCoy knew what happened?’
Andrew took a couple of seconds before he said, “He knew, all right.”
Father John drained the last of his coffee. It was possible that Kiki had found whatever it was that McCoy knew, and it had brought him back to the reservation. The truth was here all the time. It would explain why Kiki hadn’t gone to see his grandparents after he got back. He was looking for the rest of it.
“I can make some inquiries,” he said. He could see the hope running through the old man, the light coming on in the dark, watery eyes. “I can try to find out who Kiki might have talked to after he got back. Maybe I can learn something that would convince Gianelli to take a different tack.”
The old man slid the envelope across the table. “Take this,” he said. “Might help you some way.” Then he took hold of Father John’s hand. It surprised him—the strength in his grip. “Let Kiki have justice,” he said. “It would be a gift.”
12
“LET ME GET this straight.” Ted Gianelli leaned back behind a desk stacked with an array of papers and file folders. He crossed his thick arms over his chest. Bushy black eyebrows started to lift, creating fissures in his forehead. The flat-faced buildings on Lander’s Main Street floated in the window behind him, snow pillows on the roofs. There was the muffled sound of traffic working through the snow-clogged streets. “You have a client who admits he killed a man.”
“Just someone who talked to me.” Vicky tapped the ballpoint against the notepad on her lap. She had climbed the narrow black steps to the second-floor offices of the local FBI, conscious of the hopelessness, the ridiculousness of her mission. Reaching for a confidence she didn’t feel, she said, “He says it was self-defense. He didn’t mean to kill anyone. Last I checked, taking another life in an act of defending oneself or someone else is justifiable. What evidence do you need that it was self-defense?”
“We’re talking about the death of Kiki Wallowingbull?”
“It’s possible.” She tried for a stone face.
“What’s his name, this client of yours?” Arms on the armrests now, a more expansive, open look, as if he might consider her request. The fronts of his black leather vest fell open over a gray, Western shirt with silver buttons. Wisps of black hair curled over the cuffs. On one hand was a silver ring in the shape of a bull’s head. Vicky could still picture the feds on the rez when she was a kid: dark suits, white shirts, and blue ties, riding around in SUVs that the people called G wagons. You could spot them a mile away. Everybody scattered ahead, hiding, refusing to talk to them.
“Technically, he’s not a client. Just someone I’m trying to get information for. I can’t give you his name,” she said. She didn’t know the name—the reality of it hammered in her head. All she knew was a voice on the phone, a man in the shadows. She kept her features still, hoping Gianelli wouldn’t read her thoughts. “He’s scared,” she went on. “He has priors.”
“Of course he does.” Another lift of the eyebrows. “Let me guess. Any other charges, and he’s back in prison for a long time.”
“He has the right to be heard on his own terms. The right to tell his story about what happened.”
Gianelli leaned forward, laced his hands over a pile of papers, and said, “Bring him in. I’ll interview him, same as any other person of interest in the case.”
“He won’t come,” Vicky said. She jotted the words no success on the pad. “Not without assurances that you will consider the fact it was self-defense.”
“Your job . . .”
“I know my job, Ted.” Vicky smiled, an effort to soften the tone lingering in the air. “Advise him to come in, submit to an interview, tell the truth, and take his chances. We’re not talking about the average white guy in an SUV out there . . .” She tilted her head toward the window. “. . . who thinks the law is always on his side and can’t imagine any innocent person getting dumped into prison. We’re talking about an Indian who’s been in prison. He knows what can happen. He won’t take any chances, and frankly, I wouldn’t advise him to.”
“Nice speech, Vicky. We both know it’s crap. No matter what your guy claims, I would have to match it to the rest of the evidence, see if it makes sense. These things take time, and there are no assurances until the investigation is over and all the pieces are in place. Would help to get things started if your client said where this act of self-defense took place.”
“I heard Kiki was killed at the river.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear on the moccasin telegraph. I need to know where it happened. Bar? House? Barn? Outdoors? Where was it? Forensics would have to examine the site, see if what they find supports the story. Something else . . .” He leaned over the desk, pressing a fleshy stomach into the edge. “If your man took him to the river and left him to die, it’s a whole different ball game. He’d be looking at conspiracy, aiding and abetting . . .” He moved his hands apart, as if he were holding a ball over the desk.
Vicky scribbled on the pad, gaining time. Here was something that the moccasin telegraph hadn’t broadcast, or if it had, Annie hadn’t thought to include it in her daily report of the news. “Are you saying he froze to death?”
“Big problem right there,” Gianelli said. “Autopsy says Kiki was alive when somebody took him to the river. He had a concussion. There was a laceration on his forehead and a more serious linear laceration at the back of his skull. No drugs in his system.” He waited a moment, watching for a reaction, she thought. Then he went on: “Either your guy assumed he was dead and tried to dispose of the body, which could send him back to prison. Or he knew he w
as still alive, took him to the river, and left him to freeze to death. Either way, he has some explaining to do.” Gianelli sat back in his chair and regarded her for a long moment. “If drugs were involved . . .”
Vicky held up a hand. “You just said there were no drugs in Kiki’s system.”
“Doesn’t mean drugs weren’t involved.”
Vicky stuffed the notepad and pen in her bag and got to her feet. “Thanks for your time,” she said. And what would she tell the man in the tan truck the next time he called or showed up in the backseat of her Jeep or—God, here was a thought—pulled her into an alley somewhere? That she hadn’t gotten anything? What would he do, this man with a gun who preferred to die rather than return to prison. Decide she should die, too? He had already killed a man.
Gianelli came around the desk. “What do you really want? You knew I couldn’t give you any assurances. What are you after?”
Vicky faced him for a moment, not saying anything. How to explain to this white man? An Arapaho, one of her own people, desperate—crying with desperation. And she a lawyer, sworn to help desperate people. “I’ll tell him what you said,” she managed. “I doubt you’ll hear from him.”
“We’ll find him, Vicky. You know that. We’re talking to a lot of people on the rez, and sooner or later, some guy with his own problems will want to make a deal. He’ll give up your guy. We’ll go to his house and arrest him, and there won’t be any assurances.”
“You think there were witnesses?”
Gianelli shrugged. “Nothing ever takes place in total obscurity. Somebody always knows what happened. It just takes time to find that person.”
The Silent Spirit Page 11