Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

“Everything from where my mother moved in with Frank.”

  “And who was your mother?”

  “Doris Elkhorn, full-blooded Choctee.”

  “So that’s what it says on your birth certificate.”

  Little Feather shook her head. “The only time I ever saw my birth certificate,” she said, “my mother had to show it when I started school. I remember it said ‘Baby Elkhorn, female, father unknown.’ My Little Feather story is, I’ve never seen a birth certificate, wouldn’t know whom to ask. Investigators can look for a birth certificate under Farraff and never find one.”

  “And under Redcorn and never find one,” John pointed out.

  Guilderpost said, “John, if people start looking into Little Feather’s past, they can’t get further back than Shirley Ann Farraff. It’s clear she was born under some other name, but no one will ever prove that name wasn’t Little Feather Redcorn.”

  “But,” John objected, “she can’t prove it was Redcorn.”

  “DNA,” said Irwin.

  John nodded, absorbing that, then apparently grew tired at last of sitting on half his ass, squeezed in beside Tiny. Standing, shaking himself all over a little like a dog, he said, “Fitzroy, what I want to know is, how come you know all this? How come you can set it up?”

  “I’ve been setting it up,” Fitzroy told him, “off and on for six years. I was first putting together some Dutch land grants along the Hudson River, very nice paper, clouding the ownership of any number of valuable properties, and the owners were always relieved, even grateful, at the modest price I would ask to sell them the grants, ending all likelihood of later dispute and making it possible for them to sell their properties if they were ever of a mind to—a very nice enterprise, if I say so myself—when some collateral research led me to the Silver Chasm Casino and the died-off Pottaknobbees. I asked myself, Could one find a Pottaknobbee who could be tweaked into just one more living relative?” He gestured theatrically at Little Feather. “The result, you see before you.”

  John and Andy and Tiny looked at one another. Tiny shrugged, and the bed groaned, and apparently bounced Andy to his feet, where he turned and said, “Well, Fitzroy, it sounds pretty good.”

  “Thank you.”

  John said, “And tomorrow’s the day.”

  “It all depends on Little Feather,” Fitzroy said.

  “Thanks, I needed that,” Little Feather said.

  John said to her, “You’ll be okay. What time you gonna call them?”

  “Two in the afternoon.”

  “So whatever’s gonna happen,” John said, “we should all know about it by six, huh?”

  Fitzroy said, “We could meet here again tomorrow at six, if that’s your suggestion.”

  “Good,” John said.

  Fitzroy said, “And, if we’re not back yet when you arrive—”

  “That’s okay,” Andy assured him, “we’ll just let ourselves in.”

  “That isn’t what I was going to say.”

  Andy said, “You want us to stand out there in the cold, attracting attention?”

  Little Feather said, “No, he doesn’t.” Rising, she said, “If you three also think we got a shot, that’s good. Fitzroy, drive me back now, will you?”

  “Of course, my dear.”

  The two trios parted outside the door, with expressions of warmth and mutual respect, and then Little Feather reversed the process homeward: car to supermarket, shop, cab to Whispering Pines.

  Little Feather spent a quiet evening with her exercise tapes and her reading—she particularly liked biographies of famous women, like Messalina and Catherine the Great—and the next afternoon at two, she left the Winnebago to go to the Whispering Pines office to call the casino. She shut the motor home door, turned, and saw two men wearing dark suits under their overcoats walking toward her. One said, “Miss Redcorn?”

  Little Feather looked at them. Trouble, she thought. “Yes?”

  The man showed a badge. “Police, Miss Redcorn. Would you come with us?”

  Bad trouble, she thought. “Why?”

  “Well,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”

  14

  * * *

  Once again, they got to the Four Winds first. Kelp opened the door to Guilderpost’s room and they seated themselves the same as last time, Dortmunder settling himself in to operate the remote, except now what they watched was the local six o’clock news.

  Guilderpost and Irwin and Little Feather were really very late, so they still hadn’t returned, and Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny were still watching the local news, at 6:16, when Little Feather walked across the screen, in handcuffs, with hard-eyed guys flanking her, each holding an elbow. Little Feather didn’t look at all happy with her situation, and Dortmunder sympathized, a lot.

  “Holy shit!” Kelp cried, and Tiny said, “Sharrap.”

  “Arrested at Whispering Pines Campground on Route Fourteen this afternoon,” the voice of the newsperson said, while the perp walk continued, the camera panning to show an official-looking old building, a pile of stone and brick that had probably been moldering there since the twenties, “was a woman claiming to be Little Feather Redcorn, last member of the Pottaknobbee tribe, one of the three tribal owners of Silver Chasm Casino.”

  Little Feather and her escort, moving amid many newscasters and newspersons, were engulfed by the pile of stone and brick. The news gatherers remained clustered outside.

  “Charged with extortion, the woman, one of whose names is Shirley Ann Farrell, is being held in the Clinton County House of Detention.”

  Another shot of the pile of stone and brick, apparently taken later in the afternoon, had a newsperson in the foreground, with a microphone, speaking directly to the camera: “News Eight has learned that Ms. Farrell has been a gambler and showgirl in Las Vegas until very recently. Why she is making this claim at this time, police hope to determine.”

  Now there was a shot of some kind of office, with dark-paneled walls, glass shelves with trophies, head-shot photos of smiling people in frames on the walls, green glass table lamps, and two sleek, smooth guys in their fifties, one seated at an elaborate dark wood desk with a black stone top, the other in a comfortable dark red leather chair just beside him. One of the men was talking, because his lips were moving, but his words couldn’t be heard. Off-camera, the newsperson could be heard saying, “Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda, who received the letter of extortion from Ms. Farrell in their position as co-managers of Silver Chasm Casino, and turned it over to the police, say they’ve never been faced with a matter like this before but are not surprised.”

  Now the talking man’s words became audible: “We’ve always known it was a possibility that someone would try some fraud like this, and we’ve guarded against it and we’re ready for it, and I want to assure our tribespeople, Mr. Oglanda’s Kiota and my own Oshkawa, that their investments in our tribal property are safe from all the flimflam artists in the world.”

  The other man, Oglanda, said, “Years ago, both our tribes made an exhaustive search for any surviving Pottaknobbees, and we have the results of that search, every bloodline followed right down to the end, and although it’s sad, I’m afraid it’s also true, and it must be said, there are no surviving Pottaknobbees. None.”

  “I feel sorry for this misguided young woman,” Fox said, and smiled in an unpleasant way.

  Then they were back in the studio with the primary newsperson: “The search for the black box—”

  “Off,” Tiny said, and Dortmunder offed the set.

  In the silence, they looked at one another, until Dortmunder said, “The only question is, do we have time to go back to the Tea Cosy for our stuff, or do we just drive south straight from here?”

  Kelp said, “John, don’t be such a pessimist.”

  “Why not?”

  Tiny said, “Because Little Feather won’t flip.”

  Kelp said, “If she was going to, the cops would come here, not the Tea Cosy. And anyway, Tiny’s right. Li
ttle Feather’s stand-up, we can count on her.”

  “More than the other two,” Tiny said.

  “You’re probably right,” Dortmunder agreed, and sighed, only partially in relief.

  Kelp said, “Well, at least now we know why they’re so late. How much longer do you suppose they’ll hang out at the supermarket and wait for her?”

  “Well, however long, we gotta wait for them,” Dortmunder said, and the door opened, and in came Guilderpost and Irwin, both looking very worried, Irwin saying, “She didn’t show up.”

  “We know,” Dortmunder told him, but before he could add any more, Guilderpost said, “I don’t understand it. We all agreed on the time, but we got there and we looked and we waited, and we never saw her.”

  “We did,” Dortmunder told him, and pointed at the television set. “On the six o’clock news.”

  Guilderpost stared at the blank television set as though expecting to see Little Feather show up on its screen, while Irwin stared more usefully at Dortmunder, saying, “On television? Why?”

  “She was arrested,” Kelp said.

  Tiny said, “Extortion.” From him, it sounded like a suggestion.

  Dortmunder said, “Not the way we expected to see her on TV.”

  Guilderpost was having trouble catching up. “But—What went wrong?”

  “The casino guys did a preemptive strike,” Dortmunder explained. “Turned the letter over to the local cops, let them deal with it. They’ll all be buddies here, the casino a big employer, brings in lots of money, it doesn’t all stay on the reservation.”

  “Bum’s rush,” Tiny commented.

  “Oh, I see it,” Guilderpost said, calming down. With a sage nod, he said, “In fact, truth to tell, I’ve seen it in the past. Find a grifter in your territory, pull him in, shake him up a little, convince him to move on elsewhere, to greener pastures.”

  “The casino guys,” Dortmunder said, “don’t want to have to deal with Little Feather, so the local cops lean on her.”

  “They even gave her the perp walk,” Kelp said. “That’s how come we got to see her on TV.”

  “Intimidation,” Irwin said.

  Guilderpost cocked an eyebrow at his partner. “Intimidate Little Feather?” His smile was almost as unpleasant as the casino guy’s. “Anyone who tries to intimidate Little Feather,” he said, “is in for an unpleasant surprise.”

  15

  * * *

  The room was somehow both cluttered and bare. A lot of folding chairs in messy rows on the left faced a raised platform behind a wooden rail on the right, with a long table and more folding chairs on the platform. Straight ahead, opposite the door from the hall, windows showed a nearby stone wall, probably some other official building. The walls of the room were covered with posters to do with fire fighting, drugs, AIDS, the Heimlich maneuver, and the implications of school being open. One man and one woman sat behind the long table, and a few more people were scattered among the scattered folding chairs.

  “Sit there,” said one of the detectives to Little Feather, pointing at the nearest folding chair, and before she could tell him where he could sit, he went off to confer with people at the long table. So she sat.

  What Little Feather mostly was was furious. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, just hustled off like some penny-ante crook. There was supposed to be a conversation, a dialogue, an unfolding of events. It was as though the world had suddenly jumped to the last chapter.

  They’d taken her bag with her ID in it, and now the detectives and the people at the table studied all that for a while, then studied some other papers, and then the detective turned to crook a finger at Little Feather, who mostly by this point wanted to kick him in the shin. But she would contain herself, because sooner or later somebody would have to stop this folderol and pay attention.

  Or maybe not. She went over to the long table, and saw on it a three-sided brass plaque in front of the man, reading:

  MAGISTRATE

  R. G. GOODY IV

  R.G. himself didn’t much live up to the billing, being a spindly little balding man in a rumpled brown suit and crooked eyeglasses, who had no interest in meeting Little Feather’s eye. The woman beside him, schoolmarmish, was a steno or something, with pad and paper at the ready.

  “Shirley Ann Farraff,” Goody began, and Little Feather nearly corrected him, but why bother? This was clearly a flunky. “You have been charged,” Goody went on, and then, not looking up, concentrating on the papers in front of him, he reeled off a list of numbers and sections and subparagraphs, after which he said, “How do you plead?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Little Feather said.

  Goody looked at the steno. “Was that a not guilty plea?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “So noted.” Still not looking directly at Little Feather, he said, “Your Miranda rights were read to you.”

  “In the car,” she agreed. Mumbled to her, really.

  “Have you an attorney?”

  “No. I don’t see—”

  “Can you afford an attorney?”

  “What? No!”

  “Would you like the court to appoint an attorney?”

  “Well, uh . . .” Not at all what she’d expected. “Maybe I should,” she said.

  Goody nodded, then beckoned somebody from the spectators, and Little Feather turned to see moving toward her, lugging a big heavy old black battered briefcase, a woman of Little Feather’s age, but pretending to be her own grandma, with narrow reading glasses tipped forward on her face, black hair pulled severely back into a bun, and makeup so slight as to be almost not worth the effort. She wore a bulky black sweater, shapeless brown wool slacks, and black hiking shoes, and she gave Little Feather a quick impersonal nod before saying to Goody, “Your Honor, I need time to consult with my client.”

  “She pleads not guilty,” Goody said. “She claims to be indigent. Did you want to seek bail?”

  “Your Honor,” the woman said, “as I understand it, Miss Farraff has no previous criminal record, and would not be a danger to the community, so her own recognizance would—”

  “The defendant,” Goody pointed out, “lives in a motor home, which would make the prospect of flight, I should think, very appealing. Five thousand dollars bail.”

  Five thousand dollars! While Little Feather tried to think where she’d get hold of money like that—Fitzroy? Forget it—more words were handed back and forth by the woman attorney and the magistrate, remand and calendar and other words not part of her normal vocabulary, and then the woman turned and extended a card to Little Feather, saying, “I’ll speak with Judge Higbee.”

  The card said she actually was an attorney-at-law and her name was Marjorie Dawson. Little Feather said, “Isn’t this the judge?”

  “This is the arraignment,” Marjorie Dawson explained. “Judge Higbee will hear the actual trial. I’ll report to you after I talk to him.”

  “But—” Little Feather said, and a hand closed on her elbow and she was taken away from there.

  After the arraignment, Little Feather was run through a process that was handled so easily and so calmly that it was clearly routine for these people, and probably routine for most of the arrestees as well, but it wasn’t routine for Little Feather, and it shook her confidence. She’d never been arrested, had never had a conversation with a suspicious or hostile cop, had never even had a traffic ticket. Sure, she’d been involved in a number of low-level scams in Nevada, mostly as decoration, but nothing that had ever drawn her to the attention of the law. The world these people lived in inside here contained a lot of assumptions about guilt and innocence, good guys and bad guys, freedom and obedience, that she didn’t like at all.

  But she had no choice, did she? They just walked her through it, the mug shots and the fingerprinting and the writing down on a long form all the personal effects they were taking away from her. Then a hefty woman deputy sheriff took her in a small bare room for a strip search she did
n’t care for in the least, after which, her own clothing was taken away, replaced by denim shirt and blue jeans; not the best fit, either one.

  “They don’t have different ones for women,” the deputy said, not quite apologizing, which was about as human as anyone got around here.

  And now she was on her way to a cell of her own. They walked down a long corridor, past the cells for male inmates, and Little Feather looked in and saw a concrete-floored communal area with a long wooden table and some folding chairs and a TV set tuned to the Weather Channel. Three losers in denim shirts and blue jeans like hers sprawled around on the chairs, gawking at the set. Down both sides of the communal room were cells with only bars for their inner walls, so you could never be out of sight.

  Well, at least, Little Feather thought, they’re not putting me in there. And then she thought, what do those clowns care about the weather?

  Past the Weather Channel fans at the end of the hall was an iron door. One of the two male deputies escorting her pushed a button beside the door, a nasty electronic buzz sounded, and the door popped open. “You go in there,” the deputy said.

  She wished she could think of an argument, but at the moment, there didn’t seem to be one, so she went in there, and they shut the iron door behind her, and here she was. The women’s quarters, looking very much like an afterthought. A fairly large long room had been fitted with vertical bars all around, just inside the real walls and over the large window at the end. When she went over there to look out the window, she could see some old brick walls and, in the distance, a white spire against a gray sky. That was it.

  The furniture in the room consisted of two sets of bunk beds on opposite side walls, each with a thin mattress on it, folded in half—you can’t fold a thick mattress in half—plus one sheet, one scratchy-looking wool blanket, one pillow, and one pillowcase, all neatly stacked on top of the mattress. There were also a square wooden table and two folding chairs like the men’s, but no TV set. For the weather, she’d have to rely on the window.