The Silent Spirit

by Margaret Coel

  “What did Kiki say when you told him all of this?” Vicky asked.

  “Didn’t say anything at first,” Norma said. “Just stared out at the ocean. Then he asked me what I thought happened to his great-grandfather. I told him what I heard Mother and Dad talking about the day Missy died. One night, Charlie didn’t show up at the Egyptian Theatre for an Indian show. I remember how Dad took a long sip of scotch. The sun had set, and the pool and patio were in shadows. It was eerie the way he said, ‘Poor fellow got himself killed, and nobody’s ever gonna know about it.’ ”

  “What made him think that?” It made sense, Vicky was thinking. It was what Kiki had believed. He had come to Hollywood looking for Charlie’s killer.

  Norma drew her red lips into a thin line, the wrinkles in her brow deepened. “That’s all Dad said. He knew how things were around here.” She turned to Hugh. “Tell them what you told the boy.”

  Hugh cleared his throat, eyes narrowed in concentration. An actor preparing for the scene. “About 1933, my folks threw a big party by our pool. Everybody was there. Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Ron Colman, the Marx brothers, Bill Hart, and Tim McCoy. McCoy was a big star in Western movies then. Jimmie Cruze put in an appearance, and right in the midst of the merriment, McCoy and Cruze got into a shouting match. Dad ran over and tried to separate them. Naturally I got up close to the goings-on. McCoy accused Cruze of knowing what happened to his friend Charlie Wallowingbull ten years before. Cruze told him he was crazy. The Indian had walked off, that was all. But McCoy wouldn’t give up. He said Charlie’s family had the right to know the truth. ‘Tell them he went to Mexico,’ Cruze said. Took Dad and two other guys to pull McCoy off him.”

  Vicky took a moment, letting the pieces fall into some kind of order. Finally she said, “McCoy thought the director knew something.”

  Hugh shook his head and pulled on the goatee. “Never thought about it until that young man came around asking questions. But McCoy probably felt responsible somehow. Everybody knew he talked the Indians into being in the movies. Charlie was the only Indian that ever disappeared, and McCoy was the kind of man who wanted answers. My guess is he never stopped asking questions.” He leaned back, rested his elbows on the armrests and made a tipi of his hands under the goatee. “You have to understand something,” he said. “The studios controlled everything back then. Newspapers. Police. District attorney. Anything that could cause a scandal and hurt the box office was hushed up. There was a code of silence. McCoy was beating his head against a brick wall. Nobody was ever going to break the code.”

  29

  GIANELLI WAS AT the top of the steps when Father John walked over to the administration building this morning. He made a fresh pot of coffee, filled a couple of mugs, popped in a Favorites of the Opera CD and spent a half hour answering questions. Yes, Bellows and the other guys had taken a few swings at him the other night, but he had landed a few himself. Gianelli didn’t laugh. What about the parking lot at Tracers? Father John said he wasn’t certain he could identify the two men who attacked him. Every few minutes Gianelli stopped to listen to Placido Domingo singing “La donna è mobile.”

  “First performance of Rigoletto took place where?” he said. It was an ongoing trivia game between them. Father John said that if he ever knew, he had forgotten, and Gianelli slapped his thigh and gave out a loud guffaw. “Teatro La Fenice. Venice,” he said.

  Father John shrugged. The steady, dull pain in his ribs was so familiar, it might have always been part of him. The man on the other side of the desk knew more about opera than he did, a fact that he hated to admit. “How did you know about Tracers?” he said. The front door opened and slammed shut, and he waved at Lucy as she passed his office.

  “Come on, John.” Gianelli had on blue jeans and boots and a leather vest over a white shirt. “I’ve been investigating Bellows for months. You and Vicky at a bar? You get attacked in the parking lot? That’s the kind of news people like to talk about.”

  Father John explained how Vicky had wanted to see if Bellows was the one who had been calling her, and he had gone with her.

  “The caller with no name. Claims he killed Kiki in self-defense.” Gianelli took a drink of coffee, then swung the mug in the air, conducting Verdi. “Bellows hasn’t managed to stay out of prison by making anonymous phone calls. You could have gotten yourself killed at Tracers. Looks like Bellows and his gang came here to finish the job.” He got to his feet and set the mug on the table. Then he pulled on the jacket he had hung over the coat tree. “I don’t need your help solving Kiki’s murder. And I sure don’t need you or Vicky getting yourselves killed. You run the mission, and I’ll handle my job. We got a deal?”

  “Look, Ted.” Father John stood up. “Kiki wasn’t mixed up with Bellows anymore. He was out of the drug business.”

  Gianelli threw out both hands as if he had just watched the other team make a touchdown despite his best efforts. “You ought to get the CD with Joseph Calleja. Different interpretation of the Duke of Man tua’s character,” he said, hauling himself around and disappearing into the corridor.

  The instant the phone rang, Father John picked it up, conscious of the surge of hope in his chest. This could be JoEllen Redman finally getting back to him. Each time the phone rang over the last couple of days, he had tried to grab the receiver before Lucy had the chance. She would still pick up. “St. Francis Mission,” he would hear her say, not realizing he already had it. He would hear the click as she hung up.

  “Father John,” he said, the sense of hope making a fire cut through him.

  “Oh, Father.” He recognized the voice of Lucinda, Lucy’s mother. He listened for the familiar click, but it didn’t come. “I just wanted to see how Lucy’s doing?”

  “She’s quite the manager,” he said. He could hear the faint noise of Lucy’s breathing. “Answers the phone and greets people who stop by, makes sure I get all the messages. Organized my filing cabinets for the first time. I would say she’s doing great.”

  “What about school? Has she talked about going back to school?”

  “Not exactly,” he said. But it was better that way, better to talk around the subject.

  “I worry about her all the time, Father. I keep praying for her.”

  “That sounds better than worrying,” he said. Then he spent a few minutes trying to explain how kids sometimes had to work things out in their own way and how that could take a while. Lucy was bright; he was confident she would make a good decision. The click came seconds before he told Lucinda good-bye and hung up.

  Lucy was in the doorway, as if she had floated down the corridor on a silent conveyor belt. “Who was that?” she said, mischief and innocence working through her tone.

  “Just a mother with a troublesome daughter.” He sent her a smile.

  “Oh, thanks a lot,” she said. “You said I was bright.”

  “You are bright, Lucy.”

  “And I can make my own decisions.”

  “I said I think you’ll make good ones.”

  “You do?” She stayed still a moment, then propelled herself across the office. “What’s the name of that woman you’ve been waiting to hear from?”

  “JoEllen Redman,” he said. Such a weak rope he had grabbed onto—Andrew Wallowingbull’s belief in his grandson. The fact that a drug gang leader had been arrested for Kiki’s murder wouldn’t shake Andrew’s belief.

  “I seen an Arapaho over at the bank named Redman this morning,” Lucy said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I don’t remember the first name, but Redman was on her badge. I seen her the other day when my mom made me go to the bank and get a savings account, now that I’m making so much money.” She paused, and he gave her the smile she’d asked for. “Anyway I thought it was pretty cool the teller was Arapaho. I told her so. I asked her how long she went to school.” She stopped, as if she realized she had stepped onto a slippery slope and there was no going back. “Two years a
t some college in Oklahoma,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “There’s something else I should have told your mother.” Father John had gotten up from the desk and was pulling on his jacket. He grabbed his cowboy hat off the coat tree. “How observant you are,” he said. Then he told her he’d be back in an hour or so.

  FIVE CUSTOMERS IN line for the tellers at Western Bank. Two tellers behind the counter, and from his place at the back of the line, Father John could make out the name Redman on the badge of the teller on the right. She looked Arapaho, with prominent cheekbones and black, serious eyes and straight black hair going gray tucked behind her ears. Fast, confident hands counted out a small stack of bills. The customer stuffed the bills in her bag and walked off. Four customers in line now, then three when a cowboy headed toward the door.

  At one point, JoEllen Redman had let her eyes run over the customers behind the black belt strung between metal stands. She had spotted him, he was certain—the quick blink, the almost imperceptible flinch—then looked back at the new customer on the other side of the counter. When it was his turn, he stepped to the side to let the woman behind him go to the teller next to JoEllen. He waited until her customer departed, then walked up to the counter.

  “I’m Father O’Malley from the mission,” he said.

  “I know who you are.” Her eyes flitted toward the glass cubicles at the end of the tellers’ stations. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes?”

  “I’m working.” For the first time, she lifted her chin and locked eyes with him. “If you don’t have any bank business, you’d better move along. There’s other customers.”

  “It’s about Kiki Wallowingbull,” he said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to him. It’s for the old people, Andrew and Mamie. They want to know the truth.”

  “God,” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  Her eyes were on the glass cubicles again, and something new in them—a spark of fear. “You have to go,” she said. “I can’t be having personal conversations on bank time.” She drummed her fingers on the countertop, and when he didn’t move, she said, “I’m working a short day. I’ll be off in twenty minutes. There’s a coffee shop across the street.”

  FATHER JOHN HUNG his jacket over the back of the chair at a vacant table in front of the plate-glass window. He went to the counter, ordered coffee with cream, and carried the mug over. A border of frost ran around the edges of the window, but he had a clear view of the entrance to the bank and the side door that opened onto the parking lot. The row of vehicles at the far end of the lot, he suspected, belonged to employees. He watched customers emerge from the front and make their way around clumps of snow on the sidewalk to the pickups and sedans parked in haphazard rows around the lot, as if they had slid into place.

  He sipped at the coffee—slightly bitter and so hot it burned the tip of his tongue. The shop was getting full, the door opening and closing, customers stomping snow off their boots, and odors of wet wool mixing with the smell of fresh coffee. The window had started to steam up, and he reached over and wiped a clear spot with his shirtsleeve. The reaching made him wince with pain, like needles driven into his ribs.

  Four customers exited the bank and headed into the parking lot, except for the short man in a bulky jacket who hoisted himself into a truck parked at the curb. Black exhaust burst out of the tailpipe as the truck pulled into the street ahead of two pickups, and he realized he had almost missed her. JoEllen Redman, hunched forward in a long beige coat, hurrying from the side door that was still closing toward the vehicles parked at the back.

  Father John grabbed his jacket and yanked open the door. He managed to pull on his jacket as he crossed the street and hurried through the lot, wincing with the sharp jabs of pain, dodging a couple of pickups, not taking his eyes off the woman unlocking the door of a red sedan. She had dropped behind the steering wheel and was about to pull the door shut when he reached the car.

  “I promise to take only a few minutes of your time,” he said, as if this were the place they had agreed to meet.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  “You’re descended from William Thunder, right? Are you his granddaughter?”

  “What difference does it make? Kiki Wallowingbull was in a gang, and he got killed. End of story. Why should I get involved? I don’t know anything about it.”

  Father John waited a moment before he said, “Jason Bellows has been arrested.”

  “So I heard.” There was the hint of a smile at the corners of her lips. “He killed Kiki.”

  “That’s what the indictment says.”

  “Then it’s all over.” She tried to pull the door shut, but Father John kept one hand on the edge. “Let me go,” she said. “What’s his murder got to do with me?”

  “Did you talk to Kiki?”

  She stared straight ahead, holding on to the steering wheel. He could see the muscles of her jaw clenching. “Listen, JoEllen,” he went on, “Kiki was trying to straighten out his life. That’s the way his grandfather wants him remembered. He thinks Kiki died because of what he learned about his great-grandfather. I’m trying to help him find the truth.”

  “Maybe his grandfather doesn’t like the truth. Maybe he sent you on a wild-goose chase.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. It would help me if you told me what you told Kiki.”

  JoEllen shifted around and looked up at him, her face frozen in a mixture of fear and resolve. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  He tried for a smile of reassurance. “I’ve talked to better liars than you, JoEllen,” he said.

  She jerked her head around and went back to staring out the windshield. A gust of icy wind blew a piece of paper over the snow between her car and a pickup parked a few feet away. “I could scream, you know,” she said. “Someone would hear me and come over here. How would that look? I could claim you attacked me. You’d be arrested.”

  “What are you afraid of?” Father John said again. “Are you afraid that whoever killed Kiki might come after you?”

  She gave a little sob and bent her face into her hands. He could see her shoulders shaking. “Please,” she said, the words muffled in her gloves. “We don’t want any part of this.”

  “We?”

  She hesitated, then dropped her hands and looked up at him again. “You come around, taking up time at my station, asking questions that don’t have anything to do with the bank. What do you think my supervisor’s gonna say? I saw him in his cubicle looking over at me, wondering what the mission priest is talking to me about. What’re you gonna do next? Sic the fed on me? My supervisor sees the fed holding up the line, asking a lot of questions . . .” JoEllen shook her head and let out a laugh that sounded forced and painful. “I’d get fired five minutes after he left. You heard about Indians, last hired and first fired. I’ve got a son and he’s got a kid, okay? I need this job.”

  She sunk inside her coat, looking up at him over the folds of the collar. “Whatever happened a hundred years ago in Hollywood doesn’t matter anymore. Leave me alone. I need this job, Father,” she said again, a quiet, pleading note in her tone.

  Father John took a second, then let go of the door and stepped back. The door slammed shut, the engine turned over, and the sedan backed out, lurching past him over the ridges of snow. He watched the sedan pull around, jump forward, and bounce across the lot and out onto the street, JoEllen bent over the wheel. He saw her raise a gloved hand and wipe at her cheeks.

  He walked back across the lot, got into the pickup at the curb, and headed in the direction JoEllen had taken, but the sedan had disappeared in the traffic lumbering down the street. A woman, terrified of what? Losing a good job at the bank with family to support? That was part of it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else. I’ve got a son, she said. He’s g
ot a kid. And the man who called Vicky said he had a son. The man said he had killed Kiki.

  He drove south on 789, past the warehouses and tire stores and trailer parks, past the package liquor stores, and turned onto the reservation. JoEllen Redman knew the truth, but she would never admit it. She would protect her son. It kept coming back to that, the way the needle on a compass kept pointing to true north.

  30

  A BELL RANG in the darkness somewhere. Insistent and annoying, growing louder and louder. Vicky struggled into consciousness, gradually aware of the gray light slanting past the window shades. She started to reach for the phone on the table next to the bed, then realized that it was her cell ringing. She pushed herself off the bed and over to the chair where she had left her bag. It was a moment before she located the cell and pressed it against her ear. “Vicky Holden.” Her voice sounded sleep-logged and tentative. Her tongue felt like glue.

  “Vicky, it’s me.” Annie’s voice came from a thousand miles away, another world. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  Vicky cleared her throat and said that she was fine. “What’s going on?”

  “The office has been hopping all morning.” The words were like a gust of wind blowing through the apartment. “Lawyers from the water consortium called this morning. They are withdrawing the civil suit. They want to negotiate.”

  Vicky perched on the chair. An object inside her bag bit into her hip. She threw her head back and closed her eyes, allowing the news to settle in a moment. Then she heard herself asking Annie to set up a meeting in two or three days—as soon as possible, before anyone had a change of heart.

  “Meeting Wednesday or Thursday.” Annie said, enunciating each syllable, and Vicky knew she was writing a memo to herself. She heard the faint rustling noise of paper, then Annie saying that Roger wanted to talk to her.