Murder on the Red Cliff Rez

by Mardi Oakley Medawar

  The yard was two parts au naturel and one part messy old man. Shutting down the truck’s engine, Tracker waited for the hounds of hell to come bolting out, baying and snarling. But this morning the dogs were unusually tardy. As she waited in safety inside the truck, she began to notice the eerie silence. Then too, the old trailer seemed to sag more than normal, as if it had been … abandoned. Tracker instantly tossed the thought aside. Uncle Bert had lived on this assignment since Moses was a boy, first in a plank cabin that had eventually fallen down around his ears, then in the trailer—a gift from the tribe—back in the days when the trailer had been brand spanking new. Uncle Bert would never abandon his private chunk of forest.

  Absolutely never.

  “He’s got to be running bears,” Tracker mused aloud. Being Bear Clan, Uncle Bert wouldn’t ever intentionally kill a bear. But that little taboo never stopped him or his dogs from trying to run the legs off the bears. Anticipating the imminent return of Uncle Bert and his pack of slathering mongrels, Tracker knew it would be best if she just stayed put. Which meant—hey! Ciggie time. Snapping off the shoulder belt she reached for the glove compartment, extracting the box of Marlboro Ultra Lights.

  Tracker had been a smoker since she was thirteen. Not a heavy smoker, but a smoker nonetheless. And now that she lived like a cloistered nun, rarely drank, certainly didn’t overeat, what else was there? Lighting up, she tried to ignore the almost sinister silence. Come to think of it, Mushy was a bit too quiet. Her eyes flicked in the dog’s direction. Mushy was perfectly still, watching through the window, ruff smooth and flat. All very un-Mushy-like. But then, the hush hanging over this neck of the woods was equally unlike Uncle Bert.

  Finally, cigarette smoked down to the filter, she stabbed it out in the ashtray and ordered Mushy to stay. Still leery of the hell hounds, she opened the cab door.

  Seconds after she opened the unlocked door, she was engulfed by a stench emanating from the trailer’s central area. Coughing, waving a hand in front of her face in an attempt to fan up a whiff of clean air, she entered the gloomy interior. Uncle Bert did have electricity, but because of the darkness, locating a light switch was as difficult as selecting a particular raindrop in a downpour. Uncle Bert had never been one for windows. Every window on the trailer was boarded over from the inside. He maintained that when he wanted to enjoy the beauty of the day he’d go outside. Actually, what he didn’t like was the thought that anyone driving along Raspberry at night would see his lights. As he so quaintly put it, “Folks comin to see ya in the dead of night only want one of two things: either to rob ya or to ask for a loan. Either way, you’re out money.”

  In this case, his boarded-over windows did more than keep daylight out. They trapped the smell inside. Unable to stand it, she fled, retiring to the rickety porch. She knew she couldn’t just leave the situation like this. Her uncle might be in there dead or close to it. But the thought of groping around in the dark while the stench of the place permeated her clothing, skin, and hair caused her to shudder. Then she remembered the portable spotlight.

  Ignoring Mushy’s high-pitched pleas she rooted around in the extended cab until she found the portable spotlight, an item useful when hunting deer. That is, if Tracker’s way of taking a deer could be glorified with the term hunting. Dear were everywhere, and taking one typically meant stopping the truck, popping on the light just long enough to get a fix, then shooting right out the truck window. After that, all that was left to do was to heft the carcass into the flatbed. On the rez, especially on Elderly Hunt Day, the meat processor who worked for free for that one day only knew immediately those who’d been former poachers and those who, because of the loosening of the gaming laws, had never needed to poach. Ex-poachers shot the deer in the neck, dropping it where it stood. Other hunters hit the deer in the shoulder, a bigger target.

  Tracker was a neck shooter—one of the precious few neckers too young to have seen the inside of Bayfield County Jail.

  Back inside the trailer, Tracker shone the spot around, finding at once the cause for the stink: trout, two strings rotting on the card table Uncle Bert used for everything, including dining. Judging from the condition of the fish, they’d been awaiting the gutting knife for at least three days. She whipped the beam away from the card table, scanning the living room. A heavy layer of dog hair coated everything, even the walls. Wading through the debris covering the floor, she inched forward. The thought of what she might find in the trailer’s only bedroom had her heart hammering against her ribs.

  Traveling to Tulsa from Duluth wasn’t quite the snap Imogen’s father had made it sound. Imogen knew this, having made the trip a dozen or more times. But during those past trips, Jud had been there to help—that is, when he’d taken it into his head to help. Now she was completely on her own, scared out of her wits, and frustrated by the Duluth International (flights into Canada qualified as International) Airport way of doing things.

  Or not doing them.

  The tickets had been waiting for her at the counter just as her father had promised. The trouble was, there weren’t any flights until the following morning. Which meant Imogen had to bundle the children off to the Holiday Inn on Second Street, where she spent the night watching her children sleep. In those hours, the events of the last day replayed in her head like an exceptionally awful horror movie. Plate in hand, she’d gone to her husband’s office to deliver his supper. The minute she stepped into the building she’d felt an odd foreboding. Shaken by what she could describe only as an unknown menace, she walked the corridor, pausing before the closed door of her husband’s office. “Don’t go in there!” she imagined a matinee audience screaming. Yet like the stiletto-wearing B-movie heroine who invariably twists her ankle when she runs away from the monster, Imogen had turned the knob. And then she’d heard her own screams.

  Benny Peliquin was Jud’s cousin. That was all he’d been to her for many years. When the trouble in her marriage escalated, became physical, Benny became her white knight, the man she could call any hour of the night or day. The only man in Jud’s family willing to step between her and Jud’s fists. In the past few months he underwent another transformation, becoming her gentle lover. The man responsible for the unborn child sleeping snug inside her womb. She shouldn’t have told him. She really shouldn’t have. Her confession to Benny had only expanded the fierce tensions, Jud’s reactionary violence.

  “You have to leave him, Jeanie. You have to come to me. You have to let me protect you.”

  “And who’s going to protect us from the crap that will start flying around this rez?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “No! Don’t push me, Ben. Please, just don’t push. I have to have time to think.”

  “And if Jud starts knocking you around while you’re thinking? Am I suppose to just let that happen?”

  “I’ll call the cops.”

  Benny’s mocking laugh had been hard. “Yeah, like they’re such a help.”

  “But this time I’ll file charges. I really will, Ben.”

  He’d merely looked at her, both of them knowing she wouldn’t. Imogen preferred bruises to disgrace. Her father, the career politician, had taught her and her mother only too well that outward appearances to the voting public were absolutely everything. Which was why when Jud began knocking her around early in the morning, Imogen had done nothing more than yell to her children to run outside and hide. Once they were gone, she had done what she could to protect herself and her unborn baby from Jud’s uncontrollable temper.

  Now Jud was dead.

  Given the fact that his unnatural demise had occurred just hours after their latest physical go-round, and knowing that on Red Cliff rez it would have taken less than an hour for Benny to have heard all about it, Imogen hardly required the services of Sherlock Holmes to work out this particular little whodunit. Which was why she was running. She couldn’t allow her children to be caught up in the cross fire. She had to get them to safety. Then and only then w
ould she come back—never mind that her father would forbid it—to stand by Benny’s side. She owed him that. After all, he’d killed Jud in order to protect her.

  Protect their baby.

  Hadn’t he?

  The five-thirty wake-up call came, but Imogen hardly needed it. She roused the children and got them ready to face the Northwest puddle jumper, then the mad dash through the Minneapolis airport to make the connecting flight. With every nerve in her body buzzing, Imogen hustled the two children from one flight to the next, tried to coax them into eating airplane food, and then begged them to sit still during those moments they aggravated the other passengers. It wasn’t until she and the children deplaned in Tulsa and she saw her father and mother waiting that Imogen finally allowed herself to cry.

  David’s only real duty was to keep the crime scene intact. He also had to keep Doc Ricky halfway calm and in attendance. The latter was proving to be more difficult by the minute as Doc Ricky became increasingly insistent about leaving. He’d been on emergency duty all night long and this morning was expected at the well baby clinic. Doc Ricky’s strong opinion was that his continuing attention to one dead man wasn’t worth the health risk to even one live baby. The man had a valid point, but the Bayfield County coroner told David point-blank over the telephone that he felt no compunction to haul himself out to Red Cliff. “Hell, Rick’s forgotten more about forensics than I’ll ever know.”

  When David duly passed on the message that the coroner had lobbed the ball back into Ricky’s court, Doc Ricky had turned sullen. Ricky’s physician assistant would have to see to the babies. Ricky didn’t care for that, and judging by the one-sided telephone conversation, Wanda, his assistant, wasn’t especially thrilled either.

  David had completely cordoned off the back of the building and dismissed all nonessential personnel. He hadn’t really had the authority to give the staff a day off, but as the Tribal Chairman continued to confer behind closed doors, David had been left to assume that authority. Frenchette would most probably bust a gut when he poked his head out and realized that for all intents and purposes tribal employees were enjoying an unscheduled day off with full pay, but David couldn’t do his job with a flock of onlookers sticking to him like gum.

  Standing in the small parking lot staring at the tips of his boots, David listened to his officers. He was not pleased with what they had to say. “What do you mean, you can’t find the widow?” He directed this question to his youngest patrolman, Melvin Paris.

  “She’s just … gone, David,” Melvin whined. “When she didn’t answer the doorbell, we broke in.”

  “Just on the off chance that whoever shot her husband had gotten her, too, right?”

  “Yeah!” Mel agreed, taking his cue from David as to why he had broken down the Boiseneaus’ front door. A bit more confident now, Mel went on with his account. “The station wagon she drives wasn’t in the driveway, but that didn’t mean anything. She coulda been laying on the living room floor just as dead as her husband, and the killer coulda stole her car. So we put our shoulders to the door, and after we were inside, we had a good look around.” Melvin shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe that place. Everything’s so damn … neat. Kinda like folks didn’t really live there, ya know? The beds were all made, no kids’ stuff laying around, no dishes in the sink.” Mel went quiet as he recalled the eat-off-the-floor quality of the Boiseneau home. Then he remembered the one thing out of keeping with the rest of the house.

  Snapping his fingers, he blurted, “Hey, there was a covered plate of food on the kitchen table. Looked like Jud’s supper. Kinda funny it wasn’t in the oven. My mom always puts plates like that in the oven. So’s the food’ll stay warm.”

  As interesting as this was, David was more interested in the preservation of any and all scenes and evidence. “Did you leave everything just like you found it?”

  “Yeah. Except for the door, we sure did, boss.”

  David turned his head away, thinking out loud. “If we can’t locate the widow in an hour, I’ll go over there and have a look at the house myself.” As if coming back to himself David turned toward Joey Du Bey.

  Joey was his most reliable officer, which meant he could depend on him to think on his own instead of calling in for further instructions. Now there was a handy attribute. The pity was, David and Joey disliked each other. Their animosity was strictly personal and both did their best to leave it outside the office, but too often it just cropped up.

  “Benny’s missing too?”

  “Oh, you know it,” Joey scoffed. “When I couldn’t raise anyone inside his trailer house, I went over to Willard’s.” Joey didn’t need to elaborate further on the reasoning behind this move. Benny was a fisherman, the boat he worked off belonging to his cousin Willard. “I talked to Debbie,” Joey continued, meaning Willard’s wife. “According to her, Willard’s pretty pissed because he’s got two gangs of nets out and Benny didn’t show up to help with the lifting.

  “The next thing I did was take a drive to the high school. I took Benny’s son and daughter out of their classes and drove them home. Ben’s daughter Pearl used her key.” Joey emphasized the last word, intentionally pointing up the fact that he’d taken the preferred route of legal entry. “Pearl couldn’t tell if anything was missing. Said she couldn’t say if her dad had been home during the night or not. She did admit that she and her brother Darren had fixed their own supper and that their dad wasn’t home when they went to bed about eleven. Pearl and Darren did insist that even though Benny’s bedroom door was closed when they were getting dressed for school, they could hear him snoring. Then I asked if they thought he was sleeping regular or passed out drunk. The kids wouldn’t answer me.”

  David’s eyes narrowed. “Benny’s not a hard drinker.”

  “He has been lately,” Joey countered. “I saw him in the Lanes a couple of nights ago. He helped close the place. And he was hammered, David. I’m talkin’ real hammered.”

  David leaned in, hollering at Joey. “And you let him drive!”

  Joey answered just as loudly, his quick temper rising. “Your niece Tootie took his keys off him and drove him home in his truck while her boyfriend Mark followed in Tootie’s car. It was all under control, David. I made sure of it.”

  David at once regretted his outburst. Throwing a tantrum in front of his other officers was a sure sign of weakness or jealousy. Once upon a time, Joey Du Bey had been a friend. In fact, David used to tease Joey about looking so much like Johnny Depp. But during the last year, it was all David could do not to drastically rearrange Joey’s moviestar face. His tone flinty, he said, “What else do you have to tell me?”

  Looking smug, Joey crossed his arms against his chest. “Just that I thought it would be better if Benny’s kids stayed out of school for the rest of the day, so I left Rodney to keep an eye on them and to wait in case Benny turned up.” Joey canted his head, his eyes narrowing. “This is lookin’ kinda bad for old Ben, eh?”

  Both men were separately walking the same trail, remembering not only the gossip concerning Benny and Imogen Boiseneau, but also those occasions when concerned neighbors had reported sounds of violence coming from the Boiseneau home. There hadn’t been much the police who responded to the calls could do because Mrs. Boiseneau had always flatly refused to say anything beyond “I fell.”

  David remembered all of those pesky rumors linking Mrs. Boiseneau to Benny Peliquin. In the beginning, about a year ago, he’d treated the rumors as nothing more than good old rez gossip. Who wouldn’t? Mrs. Boiseneau was half Benny’s age and an attractive, university-educated lady. Benny Peliquin was as plain as Red Cliff dirt, a commercial fisherman and a widower with two half-grown kids. But the rumors had persisted, even intensified. And if Benny had been doing some hard drinking lately …

  David stopped the thought cold. Sounding annoyed, he replied, “It’s not looking that damn good.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mel said. “They’re here.”

  All heads turne
d as a blue-gray car turned into the Council Office parking lot. Almost forty minutes past their stated ETA, the Bayfield County sheriff and deputies were finally on the scene.

  “Five bucks says they got lost,” Mel offered.

  No one covered his bet.

  Michael wheeled into a vacant parking slot. The technicians piled out and were at the back of the car retrieving their work kits from the trunk before Michael had even killed the engine. Turning off the ignition, he looked toward the group of Indian policemen. Four wore navy blue shirts and trousers, gun belts, and regulation black boots. They were not wearing hats. Neatly trimmed dark hair glinted blue streaks everywhere the sunlight touched. The odd man out was the officer standing head and shoulders taller than the rest. He was wearing a policeman’s shirt tucked into faded jeans, brown cowboy boots, and a navy blue Dukes baseball cap.

  Go, northern bush leaguers, Michael thought with a sneer.

  “Looks like the gang’s a-waitin’,” Bothwell said. He opened the car door, preparing to heave his bulk out of the passenger side. “Yep, we got an ambulance, which means the M.E.’s on site, and over there stands our red brother cops, every one of them eagerly awaiting our wisdom.” Bothwell looked back over his sizable shoulder to Michael. His round face broke into a smile. “And if you believe that for a minute, I’ve got a mint-condition used car with your name ready to go on the registration.”

  Michael placed a restraining hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I took the call, so this is officially my investigation.”

  “Oooh, I wouldn’t forget that for a minute, son. In fact, just the heady anticipation of watching you play big-city sleuth has me more excited than I’ve been in years. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said I was damn near all atwit.” Bothwell exited the car, tree-trunk-thick legs transporting him toward the waiting Indians.