Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  The familiar voice, low in her ear. “This is Skip Burrows. Sorry you’ve missed me. Leave your number. Chou!” She hit the end key, realizing she should have called the office. Skip always came in early. Brewed coffee. Answered e-mails, dictated letters, and read documents, the mundane work of a law practice that he couldn’t get done during the day with the phone ringing and people dropping by.

  She called the office. “You’ve reached the law offices of Skip Burrows, attorney at law.” It was her own voice. She tapped the off button again and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.

  How many times had the general stopped by? Two? Three? Never an appointment. “My buddy Skip in?” he’d say, and Skip would appear in the doorway and beckon the man into his private office. Everybody in town knew they could stop in and chat with Skip whenever the notion struck them. Coffee always hot. But the general wasn’t a townie. She had no idea where he came from, only that he would show up from time to time.

  Angela drove through the residential street, swung right, and worked her way down the block toward the white-painted brick building that faced Main Street. They had argued, Skip and the general, the last time Garrett had dropped by. Tuesday? Wednesday? She used to jot the names of drop-ins in the appointment book, until Skip told her not to bother.

  She turned into the parking lot behind the building and pulled into the vacant spot with Burrows Law Firm painted on the curb. Skip’s slot next to her was empty. Odd, she thought. He was always in the office before she arrived.

  She got out into the warm breeze that swept across the pavement. Sunlight bounced off the chrome on the other parked cars. A new thought hit her, rose out of nowhere, and she knew it was part of the uneasiness she had been trying to ignore: Where had Skip gone last night after he’d left her? The ex-girlfriend’s place in Riverton, Deborah something? A little pain sliced through her. She wanted to trust him. Why didn’t she trust him? She fixed the strap of her bag across her shoulder and tried to steady her footsteps on the pavement, images of Skip floating ahead. Dark blond hair tousled on her pillow, sleep-logged eyes blinking at her, the slow smile when he said “Good morning, beautiful.” Oh God, she loved the man.

  The back door swung open as she reached for the knob. She had to swerve sideways as Bob Peters, the accountant across the hall, plunged outside. “Sorry, Angela,” he said, holding the door for her. “Heard about Custer?”

  “General Garrett? Yeah, I heard.”

  “Who could have done it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “They’re your people,” heading toward the car parked at the curb.

  “You have some inside information?” She called over her shoulder. She felt a mixture of anger and puzzlement as she headed down the hallway. Something was missing: the familiar smell of hot, brewed coffee that usually floated toward her.

  She grabbed the doorknob beneath the pebbly glass window with two rows of painted black letters: Skip Burrows, JD, Attorney at Law. The knob jammed in her hand.

  There was the swish of the back door opening and closing, the sound of footsteps pounding down the hallway. “Didn’t see him come in this morning.” Peters was holding a brown envelope. He leaned into his own door, pushed it open, and disappeared.

  Angela knocked on the glass and waited for the sound of Skip pushing himself away from his desk, crossing the office, muttering out loud, “Use your key!” She wanted to talk about Garrett getting shot, go over what they knew, try to digest the information. She wouldn’t mention the argument between Garrett and Skip. She didn’t want to watch the confident expression dissolve at the edges as he digested the implications. He’d argued with a murder victim!

  She swung her bag around and dug into an inside pocket past the comb, lipstick, package of gum, and assorted receipts. Squeezing the key between her thumb and index finger, she dragged it out of the bag and stuck it into the lock. She stepped into the office and stopped, feeling as if she had hit an invisible wall. Drawers hung open; batches of papers and files littered the floor. Motes of dust floated in the sunlight drifting past the blinds. The surface of her desk was clear, just as she had left it Friday evening with Skip urging her to hurry. He’d see her at her place later, he’d said. She had tried to hurry, which had made her drop a glass of water, which bounced off the edge of the desk and took up more time—picking up the pieces of glass, patting paper towels against the carpet.

  The little table next to her desk was vacant. Her computer was gone!

  An eerie quiet hung over the office. She dropped the bag on her desk and walked to the side door. A car passed outside, a door slammed somewhere in the building. Her hand trembled as she opened the door.

  She stood frozen in place. A tornado? Bomb? Vandals? Skip’s desk overturned, drawers hanging open. File folders and papers strewn over the floor, books tossed off the shelves. No sign of his computer. The neatness, the everything-in-its-place that Skip insisted upon, had been desecrated, Skip’s personality obliterated. Someone was screaming. She jammed her fist into her mouth to stop the noise and forced herself to walk into the office, her mind a jumble of thoughts. Skip could be lying behind the desk, hurt, dead. It was a crime scene, and his voice went round and round in her head: Damn fools! Don’t know better than to touch anything at a crime scene.

  Only the blizzard of papers littered the floor behind the desk. She used the ends of her blouse to turn the knob on the bathroom door and peered inside. Empty, and as clean and groomed as Skip himself. He wasn’t here, and a faint sensation of relief trickled through her. Then she saw the opened window, the right pane pushed across the left, leaving a gaping hole that overlooked the parking lot. And here was something—a trail of blood drops on the windowsill. When she looked closer, she saw the drops of blood among the papers between the desk and the window. Outside, the window screen lay in the branches of the bush below.

  She swung around, threw herself toward the door and across the outer office. She managed to yank the cell out of her bag, her fingers skittering like butterflies as she punched in 911. “Your emergency?” The woman sounded half-asleep. “Something terrible has happened,” Angela heard herself saying. “Somebody broke into Skip Burrows’s office on Main Street. Something’s happened to Skip.”

  “Your name?”

  Angela gave her name, then heard a disembodied voice rambling on about how she was Skip’s secretary and had just gotten into the office and found the chaos.

  “Officers are on the way.”

  At the edge of her view: a shadow moving across the glass door. “He’s back!” she shouted.

  “Who’s back?”

  “Whoever did this. He’s in the hallway!”

  “Angela ?” It was Bob Peters’s voice, his fist pounding the wood paneling.

  “It’s okay,” she said. Her legs felt rubbery; she propped herself against the edge of the desk to keep from falling. “It’s the accountant from across the hall.”

  “Don’t let anyone in. Understood?”

  Angela said she understood, then pushed the end key.

  “Angela!” Peters had already let himself in. “Are you all right? I heard somebody scream.”

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth had turned to sandpaper.

  “Good heavens.” Peters started across the outer office toward the opened door that framed an oblong view of Skip’s office.

  She lunged for his arm. “You can’t go in there. Police are on the way.”

  When he turned toward her, she saw her own shock mirrored in his eyes.

  “Skip’s gone,” she managed.

  “What do you mean, he’s gone?” He wrinkled his nose and turned his head, sampling the air. “I don’t smell any coffee.”

  Angela had to stop herself from grabbing hold of Peters’s white shirt and shaking him. “You must have heard something. What did you hear? How could anyone trash the office and force Ski
p out the window and you not hear a thing?”

  Peters was shaking his head. “Sorry, Angela. Only thing I heard was you screaming.”

  * * *

  THE TWO UNIFORMED officers stepped around the office, craned their necks outside the window, apprised the parking lot. The cars, people hurrying over. Angela looked away. She leaned against the door frame and watched the officers moving about like robots, silent, lips pressed together. Finally they started toward her, and she backed into her own office. Peters was bent forward in a side chair, hands clasped between the knees of his khaki trousers. He looked up as the officers planted themselves in the center of the room.

  “He’s hurt,” she said. “You have to find him.”

  No one spoke. The tall, blond officer started scribbling something in a notepad and took a couple of steps toward Peters. “What time did you arrive?”

  “Just before eight.” Peters straightened his shoulders and gripped the armrests. “Skip comes in early most days, like me. His car wasn’t in the parking lot.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Know him? Not well. ‘How’s it going? Another hot day.’ The kind of stuff we talked about. Skip was never very serious, if you get what I mean.”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” The other officer tossed the question over his shoulder and moved closer to Angela. She felt as if she might jump out of her skin. Skip was out there someplace, hurt. He could be dying. They should do something! She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears.

  “Hey, Angela here will tell you. Skip’s everybody’s friend. Always got a friendly hello, how-you-doing for folks. People love the guy. Isn’t that right?” Peters glanced at Angela, as if he’d stumbled out onto the edge of a cliff, and it was up to her to pull him away. “Isn’t that right?” he said again.

  “Right,” she managed. Skip Burrows, the best-liked man in town. He knew everybody. Everybody knew him. Want to hear a new joke? Need a laugh? Need a friendly clap on the back? Stop in and see Skip Burrows. It was a wonder he ever got any work done. How many times had she apologized to his scheduled appointments, left flipping through magazines while Skip and one of his friends told jokes in his office?

  The officer with the notepad gave her a long, narrow-eyed look. “What’s his license plate?”

  “Ten something,” she said. “I don’t know. He drives a silver BMW.”

  The officer nodded; the pen scratched the notepad.

  “When did you say you last saw him?”

  Angela pulled her lips between her teeth. She hadn’t said. No one knew about her and Skip. It was their secret. She wiped a palm across the moisture blossoming on her face.

  “He was at his desk when I left at 5 o’clock Friday,” she said, and the officer jotted in the notepad and didn’t push her, didn’t inquire if she and Skip had a relationship outside the office.

  When he looked up, he asked if Skip had any family.

  “He was married once,” Angela said. This caught both officers’ attention. Eyebrows shot up in unison. “He told me they had been divorced for twenty years. She left him after he got back from Desert Storm. He said she married a college professor who would never join the military and moved to Alabama.”

  Scribbling. Scribbling. The officer flipped over a page in the notepad and continued writing. “Any enemies?” he said without looking up. “All these fine people stopping in to shoot the breeze and drink coffee. Anybody not so friendly?”

  Peters let out a short guffaw, as if the idea of Skip Burrows having an enemy was as unlikely as . . .

  Angela closed her eyes against the rest of it: as unlikely as someone shooting Custer in the middle of Main Street.

  “What is it?” the dark-haired officer said.

  “I heard him arguing with a friend last week.” She had no idea what had pushed her to say it. She loved the man; such a thin line between trust and distrust. “The man stomped out. ‘Win some, lose some,’ Skip said.”

  “You have a name?”

  Yes. She had a name. Colonel Edward Garrett. She had called him “General,” because Skip said the man liked that.

  6

  THE LONG VIEW of Main Street, wide-laned and lined with hanging baskets of flowers, took Vicky Holden by surprise, it looked so peaceful. Except for the yellow police tape that fluttered in the street a half block away. Vicky had stopped in the doorway of the coffee shop, barely aware of the pressure of Adam Lone Eagle’s hand on the small of her back, ushering her outside. Shadows and sunlight mingled in wide rectangles on the sidewalks, a robin’s egg blue sky all around, not a cloud in sight. And yet, a man had been shot to death not twenty-four hours ago. A thin line of pickups and cars moved slowly toward the tape before turning onto a side street.

  Adam guided her onto the sidewalk and pulled the glass door closed behind them. In the distance, sirens rose and fell like a memory. Adam’s hand felt firmer, more protective, against her back. “Probably an accident,” he said.

  They had grabbed coffee and scones and carried them to a small metal table against the brick wall. The shop was always crowded in the morning. People coming and going, the little bell on the door jingling nonstop, conversations buzzing. Snippets of conversation cut through the noise: We were right there. Saw the whole thing. You saw him go down? Saw him laying there soon’s the Indians rode ahead. One of them shot him, poor man. Just because he pretended to be Custer.

  Vicky had squeezed her eyes shut for a moment against the earnest faces bending toward one another, theorizing, guessing. An image swept over her. She was a child begging Mama to take her to the movie theater in Lander. One of the fairy tales, maybe Snow White, and Mama saying, Not in town. We’re not welcome in town.

  She lived here now. In an apartment building filled with whites. She chatted with them on the elevator, waved in the parking lot. Once, when she had the flu, the widow next door had brought chicken soup. Her office was here. A small bungalow on a corner in a residential neighborhood. She and Annie, her secretary, the only Arapahos within blocks. But Arapahos drove to her office every day from the rez. No one bothered them or called them names. She remembered that, too: The rodeo grounds outside town, and white kids saying, What’re you doing here, Injun. Go back where you belong.

  “Don’t let them bother you.” Adam had leaned across the table toward her. “Nobody knows what really happened yesterday. There will be a major investigation, you can bet on it.”

  “An investigation into every Arapaho in the parade? Turning their lives upside down? Assuming one is guilty? The only question is, which one to pin it on?” She had felt a sharp prick of annoyance. Adam seemed distant, removed from what had happened, and yet it was his people who had defeated Custer and the 7th Cavalry, his people who were the heroes—Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Some Arapahos had ridden north to join Sitting Bull, the chief who refused to be ordered around by white people. Arapahos had wanted to be like him, free on the plains with the buffalo and the sky and the endless expanse of prairie like a grassy sea around them.

  “Is that what you believe?” She had challenged him. “An Indian killed Custer again?”

  Adam had sipped at his mug of coffee, eyeing her over the brim. Finally he’d said, “You’re not making sense. Somebody shot a man named Edward Garrett. An actor. He could have been playing Shakespeare.”

  “But he wasn’t. He came here as Custer. Custer, in Indian country!” Vicky had taken a bite of scone and washed it down with a drink of coffee. “You know what this means to White-Indian relations here.”

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything.” God, he was so sure of himself, so handsome and confident, with strands of gray shining through the thick black hair that he wore short, neatly trimmed around his ears. And his hands: the long brown fingers and manicured nails. A Lakota who walked into the high-rise offices of oil and gas and coal companies around the country and faced down lawyers from th
e biggest and richest firms. Never doubting that they would both continue to come and go in town without worry. To live as they had lived. That no one would toss a brick through the window of the house he’d bought last winter. That he would practice natural resources law from the study that overlooked the quiet, tree-lined street where kids played kickball and neighbors pushed strollers along the sidewalk. Her stomach churned. The killing could change everything.

  In the distance, the sound of sirens. She tried to concentrate on what Adam was saying. Something about letting things go, the investigation taking its course. She finished her coffee, wrapped the scone in a napkin, and got to her feet. She dropped both the empty cup and the scone into the trash receptacle and headed for the door, aware of the scrape of Adam’s chair behind her, the tap tap of his boots on the hard floor. Now she found it hard to take her eyes away from the street flowing into the horizon. The sirens were coming closer.

  “Accident on the highway,” Adam said, his hand still on her back. “I’ll drive you to the office.”

  She turned toward him, thoughts jamming together like snarled traffic. “I’ll walk.” She tried to ignore the puzzled look in his black eyes.

  “You’re worried about a change in White-Indian relationships, yet you insist upon walking?”

  She watched him swallow back the rest of the thought that worked through his expression: I’ll never understand you.