The Boy Must Die

by Jon Redfern

  Billy stood up, held his stance for a second while the pounding in his temple subsided, then removed his suit jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. He was already sweating from being out in the parking lot, and for some reason the usual cool air in Butch’s office had not kicked in. Billy went out and through a door that led into a dimly lit, stifling room. He looked up at the ceiling where the air-conditioning vent had been pulled off by a repairman, then at a small round fan busily whirring back and forth on a metal table.

  “Cooler in here, once you sit down.”

  The strained, heat-tired voice came from a man with small, washed-out green eyes, facial skin the colour of raw hamburger, and jowls pitted from adolescent acne. Blue veins crisscrossed the man’s large nose and puffy chin. His girth seemed all the more enormous since he was perched on the edge of a large oak chair, huge arms folded over his chest, and pudgy hands, the colour of lard, resting on the swell of a firm but massively rounded belly. Looking into the flushed cheeks, Billy hoped the man would open things up, make the last few days’ events come together in a way he was fearing they may never.

  Clive Erdmann introduced himself. He spoke in a low drawl, and the pace of his speech was as leisurely as if he were sitting by a river casting for rainbow trout. He was a longtime RCMP constable stationed on the Peigan reserve, fifty minutes from the city. He’d been a constable for thirty-six years, and he figured he’d spent all of those years dealing with the Natives. Erdmann shook Billy’s hand with a hard, callused grip, letting go only when he sat back down. He talked without pause, as if he were in a doctor’s office explaining a symptom, telling Billy he was a man with two grown-up sons and a dead wife buried in the cemetery at Fort Macleod.

  “They call me Straight Eyes at Brocket. That’s a compliment, by the way. The Peigan think I’m fair-minded. I say with pride I’m not one for violence. I seen it, though, over the years. Family beatings and gun-crazy boys wild on liquor and dope spoilin’ to shoot the nostrils off any white man within thirty yards of a Winchester barrel.”

  Butch came into the room.

  “Clive, you still stewing in here? I’ve got. . . .”

  “No matter, Eddy. I’m sittin’ easy with your detective inspector. I still didn’t catch your name.”

  “Billy. Billy Yamamoto.”

  “Your folks from Raymond area, the sugar beet people? Worked at that factory before the war? A lot of Orientals around there, Japanese people.”

  “My father was sent here in 1942. As a political prisoner.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. Good folks they were, all hard workers. Bad done by, some of them. Your mother was white?”

  “Scottish. A Naughton. She was a nurse — a VON — for the city’s health unit back then.”

  “They both passed on?”

  “Yes.”

  Clive lifted his right hand and wiped sweat from his upper lip.

  “Billy, I don’t mean to take your time this afternoon.”

  “Quite all right, Clive.”

  “My problem is simple. One of our sergeants plays golf with one of yours, a gal named Johnson. Johnson was tellin’ Sergeant Blacker about her case. A boy hanged in a basement. She told Blacker about a lead — a long shot — a man named Hill. Drives a green Chevy halfton with a long bed. I need to get a hold of Hill, and I come to you now to locate him. He is a man I want to question about Miss Mary Running Rabbit.” Clive shook his head. “Poor gal got beat up pretty bad.”

  “How is he connected with Woody Keeler?”

  “Monday, young Wilson Running Rabbit come to my door lookin’ like he stepped on a nest of rattlers. He come with a bad story, the poor Christer. Friday night he’s lyin’ at home with his mom, Lil, and his sister, Mary, when two drunk white men come a’poundin’ late on the front door. Wilson said it was real late, ’bout eleven, and these devils come in and slam old Lil and take Mary out for a joyride in a green Chevy half-ton. I get on over the next day to Steve Little Plume and find out from him about Woody Keeler and his buddy, Hill. Steve likes to drink with Keeler, and he was the one sent the two devils to Mary’s house in the first place. I reckon this is the same Hill who was out gallivantin’ and causing bodily harm with Mr. Keeler. Keeler wears a ponytail, and Wilson said he had on a red baseball cap with a crow feather stuck to it. Them two devils took Miss Mary and beat her up bad, raped her bad, too. She crawled home by herself. Mary ain’t no nun, on my word, but she’s no more deservin’ of a rape and a beatin’ like these two white scum give her.”

  “You have a warrant out on Hill?” asked Butch.

  “Only an arraignment. I need Lil to look at him and Keeler in a lineup. If she and Wilson point the finger at ’em, I can persuade Miss Mary to testify in court. Steve Little Plume owes me a favour. Keeler, you may know, has left behind a bad smell in Brocket. From that case years back, the Born With a Tooth boy gettin’ beat up. Somebody told me Hill and Ervin’s mom were runnin’ together for a time. So I’d appreciate some help, Eddy, if you can oblige.”

  “Johnson was with Hill earlier today. She claimed he was too sick to talk,” Billy said. “He’s in for a surprise.”

  The afternoon air was thick with the smell of damp foliage and rising heat as Billy and Butch agreed to follow Clive Erdmann over to the RCMP headquarters. Once Clive had picked up a deputy, a short man armed with a .45 and wearing a flat brown rimmed hat, the two cars headed south through streets shaded by willows and cottonwoods. Clive got out at the top of Perry Hill’s street and told Butch he and the deputy would go in the front if Butch and Billy would drive down the alley behind the house and cover the back in case Hill made a run for it.

  Billy drove slowly down the muddy alley, the puddles splashing up goo on the tires. Ahead, the green Chevy half-ton was still parked by Hill’s back fence. Billy cut the engine. He took out a pair of handcuffs Dodd had given him at the station. Butch wiped sweat off his neck and forehead, and the two of them waited until Clive Erdmann made his way ponderously up the steps to Perry Hill’s front door. Billy and Butch opened their doors, checked the fence in front of them, then got out of the Pontiac. They crouched down, moved quickly up the alley to the corner of Hill’s back fence. From behind a large honeysuckle, they could see Clive ringing the Hill doorbell. Then he pounded his massive fist on the door. His deputy, his hand grasping his holster, went around to each of the windows knocking on them and calling out Perry Hill’s name. The leaves on the honeysuckle hung motionless with the moist heat. Billy watched a white cat dash from under Hill’s green half-ton. He felt Butch nudge him with his elbow.

  Perry Hill’s mother was hiding under a lilac, its boughs and brown-faded blossoms shading her frail figure and camouflaging her. The lilac tree straddled the back fence between her house and Perry Hill’s. How the hell did she get out here? Billy wondered. Had she seen the cruiser pull up at the top of the street? But that would mean she had warned her son. Bette Rae waved her right arm in a gathering motion. A thin unshaven man grabbed hold of the top of the wooden fence beside her. He hauled himself up and slid over, his T-shirt catching on the wood splinters. His mouth formed an O as he toppled to the ground next to her. An ugly fresh scrape appeared on his exposed chest. He lay there, writhing, wanting to howl while Bette Rae slapped her hand over his mouth. Blood lay streaked in a jagged line along the length of his T-shirt.

  “Meet Perry Hill,” whispered Billy. “Come on.”

  Billy and Butch cleared the six yards from the honeysuckle to the back fence in a few quick steps and burst through the broken gate into the shade of the lilac and the astonished shock of Perry Hill and his now-shrieking mother. Hill’s head looked up, his face haggard, and his thin right wrist was suddenly clamped with a ring of steel. Butch crossed Hill’s left arm behind his back. “Got him here, Clive,” Billy yelled, as Butch connected the cuffs with a loud metallic snap. Bette Rae started beating her fists against Butch’s shoulders. Billy moved in and managed to pry her away. Just then the deputy and a huffing Clive Erd
mann entered from the front yard. Clive held a notice of arraignment in his left hand.

  It felt odd, witnessing an arrest again after seven months away from active service. Once routine, now the locking of an individual into wrist irons seemed suddenly bizarre and extreme. Billy knelt and scanned the area under the lilac tree, looking for coins or keys from Perry’s pockets. Butch handed Perry over to Clive, who read the arraignment and at the same time apologized for the handcuffing. Perry was too hungover and hurt to speak.

  “He’s done nuthin’!” his mother screamed.

  When Perry Hill walked off with the deputy, his mother covered her face with her hands. Clive Erdmann folded the arraignment paper and put it into his right pants pocket. “I’ll need a statement from you, ma’am,” he said. “I won’t need to trouble you much.” Bette Rae walked towards the front yard with Clive, her head hung low.

  Billy went down the alley and walked to the green half-ton and pulled back the tarp to see if he and Johnson had missed anything. When he went over to the RCMP cruiser, Perry Hill was sitting slouched behind a steel mesh partition separating the prisoner zone from the front of the cruiser. His hands were cuffed behind him, making him sit up straight. Billy thanked the deputy, who glanced at Hill. With a sneer in his voice he said, “Nasty!” and tipped the rim of his brown hat.

  Just after three, a sudden rain shower pelted the car as Butch and Billy drove back to the station. Clive had invited the two of them to the lineup tomorrow. He also finished telling them the details of the beating of Mary Running Rabbit and Woody Keeler’s involvement.

  In the station, Billy washed his face with cold water and asked Butch if the officer at the reception desk had any aspirin since his temple and his knee were aching. He also needed to get to a garden store before driving home. He went to the canteen, got a Coke, and swallowed the pills, hoping they would kick in.

  Butch drove Billy to the garden store in the North Side Chinook mall. It was 3:30; the sky was clearing, and a soft wet breeze was lifting the plastic flags strung around the parking lot. Over the western horizon, bright sun cut through the black flat-bottomed rain clouds, and huge shafts of rain-soaked light swept southward towards the Livingston range and the Montana border. Butch opened the gate to the compound where the trees and shrubs were on sale in the Wal-Mart warehouse garden centre.

  “Anything wrong?” Butch asked.

  “Yes. There is. I’m beginning to ache from head to toe. Wonder if I’m getting a fever?”

  “I’ll take you home if you like.”

  “I must be getting old, Butch. Letting a head wound get me down.”

  “Take heart, buddy.”

  “There’s a beauty.”

  Billy stopped and pointed to a small fir tree in a stiff brown paper pot casing. He leaned down and inspected the needles, the size of the trunk, and the price tag. A store employee approached wearing a red Wal-Mart apron and a name tag with black letters spelling out the name of Slade.

  “Afternoon, Uncle Butch.”

  Butch grinned, and Billy stood up slowly, holding his hand on his forehead before focusing on the six-foot young man. His hair had been cut into a buzz with a Samurai-styled ponytail tied back with a swatch of black cloth.

  “Billy, meet Slade, Lorraine’s kid brother.”

  “Pleasure.” Slade shook Billy’s hand with a sudden tight grip. “You got another blue spruce anywhere, Slade?” Billy asked.

  “Over here,” Slade replied. “Small this year. Not a lot of snowfall this past winter where they were harvested.”

  Billy looked over the specimen. It was shorter and narrower than the first one he’d seen, but its needles had that blue-green glow that made the tree stand out against the snow of a plains winter. “I need a flowering crabapple, too,” Billy said.

  Slade went into the storeroom at the end of the outdoor compound and returned a few minutes later carrying a spindly thing with roots wrapped in burlap sacking. “It’ll be a year before this one takes hold, but she’s a tough little plant,” Slade said.

  Billy paid for the two spruces and the crabapple, and then he watched Slade and Butch carefully lay them on their sides in the trunk of the Pontiac.

  When he got back into the passenger seat, Billy knew he should get straight home to the ranch and go to bed. That would be the reasonable and wise thing to do. But he told Butch to take him to the regional hospital first, to the emergency ward, where he’d had his wound tended. The nurse recognized Billy immediately and took a quick look at the wound.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s clean. Bathe it tonight and try not to sleep on that side.”

  Billy then took the elevator up to the psychiatric ward and asked the station nurse if Blayne Morton had been checked out and registered in the detention home attached to the hospital. Butch stood beside him, reading over his shoulder the computer screen in front of the nurse. “Yes, sir,” she answered. “A Sergeant Dodd committed Mr. Morton this afternoon.” Billy thanked the nurse and then enquired after the woman Blayne had attacked. “She’s fine,” the nurse smiled in response. “Her nose wasn’t broken after all.”

  Twenty minutes later, Butch was driving the Pontiac west along Highway 3.

  Billy laid his head back.

  “You feeling sick, buddy?”

  “No, just meditating. Cooling down the brain.”

  “When did you get into this Zen stuff?”

  “About ten years ago. Found it’s a great way to relax and settle the mind.”

  “You just hum and trouble goes away, eh?”

  “Not quite. The Rinzai sect teaches us to think from different angles. There are always paradoxes — like ‘acting through not acting.’ Or like this Riegert case. We know much, yet we know nothing. I like za-zen — the meditation. The riddle or koan, as our teacher called it, is not an easy thing to analyze through reason.”

  “So how do you untie such a riddle?”

  “Well, meditation encourages intuitive insight. Flashes, if you like. What you’re after is a sudden illumination. Something your reason hadn’t considered before.”

  Butch shook his head. He thought for a moment. “I’d have a hard time sitting still,” he admitted. “Meditation makes me restless.”

  Billy closed his eyes. Butch drove down the concession road and over the Texas gate and parked by the side of the ranchhouse. Reaching into the back seat for his beat-up briefcase, he pulled from it a box of peanut brittle with his wife Lorraine’s initials on the homemade cover.

  “Here’s a thank-you from Lorraine, for helping her out.”

  Billy took the box of candy.

  “You always drive around with one of these in your briefcase?”

  “It doesn’t hurt to have a box with me,” Butch said with a smile. “Like now, for instance. Or when a lawyer asks me to come to his office in an official duty, takes me for a pricey lunch at the Lodge. I thank him with candy. It’s a touch no one expects from a gruff chief of police. I’m a small-town guy, Billy. I work with small-town people.”

  “Thanks, Butch. Tell Lorraine she’s more than welcome. I haven’t had her brittle in years.”

  “We got anything else on our agenda for tomorrow, other than the lineup with Clive and the horsemen?”

  “Marilyn Black.”

  “You’re not going to mess around with social services are you? They can be pretty territorial.”

  “How much do you think she can tell me?”

  “Maybe lots. Maybe zero. Sheree Lynn Bird is straight. At least that’s what I found out when I spoke to Miss Black last winter. Bird was downsized, the agency was cutting back. Zero.”

  “We’re still left with a mutilated teenager who may or may not have been murdered. And we’re still not sure what happened to Darren’s clothes. I asked Johnson to go back to Satan House and do a thorough search of the basement and attic. She called and said she’d found nothing.”

  The two men had a quick supper before Butch called Dodd to come to the ranch and pick h
im up. By the time Dodd and Butch had reached the end of the concession road and were on their way home, Billy was undressed and ready to climb into bed. He lay back carefully on the pillow, the wind gently whispering through the open window. Billy wondered when he and Butch would find the answer to the Riegert case. Almost a week had passed. The station was already busy with new cases — assault, petty theft — and Butch was eager to assign new duties to both Dodd and Johnson. Key evidence was not forthcoming. Billy worried, too, that his nemesis — insomnia — would cut into his life and make his days long and more anxious. He reached down and massaged his knee. Pull yourself together. From his side table, he took out a bottle of Tylenol and gulped back a couple of pills.

  “You’ll find an answer,” he said out loud. But he wasn’t certain he believed himself.

  THURSDAY, JULY 4

  By the time Billy had reached the RCMP barracks in Lethbridge, the domed clock tower showed 10:00 a.m. Billy crossed the parking lot, then took the cracking wooden stairs to the second floor, where the lineup chamber was located. It was a small, stuffy room with a long glass window separating it from an adjacent narrow room with a platform and a series of overhead spots. The spots lit up a gleaming white wall, and each standee held a number in front of his chest. Woody Keeler was number six; Perry Hill, looking pale and weak, held up number four. Lilian Running Rabbit was leaning against the wall of the lineup chamber, opposite the viewing window, when Billy silently opened the door and stepped in. Beside her stood a muscular but thin Peigan teenager wearing traditional pigtails and blue rodeo show boots. A sweat-stained Stetson dangled from his left hand. His right grasped Lilian’s small shoulders. Lilian was in her late forties, Billy guessed. She was wearing a buckskin vest with beadwork, a long plain grey skirt, and a red bandanna. Sunglasses, thick-rimmed and black, shaded her eyes.