by Brad Smith
“For car theft?”
“Nah. They nailed him on conspiracy, maybe racketeering even, trying to get him to roll over on the big Algerian cheese. I never worked the case. The first I laid eyes on him was when he got out. Now, that was interesting. Ronnie went into stir a goofy redheaded carjacker and walked out a sure-enough Injun.”
Virgil took a drink of beer. “How does that happen?”
“Opportunity,” Buddy said. “Story is he fell in with some militant Native types in the joint and found out there are certain advantages to being an Indian in today’s world. Now, Ronnie’s always known that this Levack guy I mentioned, the guy who might be Ronnie’s papa, was a quarter Native. Or at least Levack always claimed it anyway. That makes Ronnie one-eighth Indian, which apparently is Indian enough, for certain purposes. After he gets paroled, he heads back to Watertown and pretty soon he’s strutting around in a buckskin jacket and wearing fucking feathers in his hair. It’s a mildly amusing act, to tell you the truth. But Ronnie’s more than just an act. Matter of fact, he’s a pretty smart cookie. He ends up on the Sumac reservation, which at the time was a shithole of third-world dimensions, and before you know it Ronnie’s managed to secure a casino license.”
“With his record?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, the license isn’t in his name,” Buddy said. “But he was driving the bus. He did time with guys who knew this shit inside and out and he learned it well. By the time Ronnie showed up at the rez, it was like the Messiah himself had arrived. Within a year they broke ground for the casino and now the place is pumping money like a Saudi fucking oil field. They’re building a golf course that’s supposedly going to host a PGA Tour event.”
“And what exactly is Ronnie’s role there?” Virgil asked.
Buddy laughed. “Ronnie is . . . the Great Father. One hand on the throttle and the other in the cash box.”
“And was this Levack guy a Sumac?”
“Probably not,” Buddy said. “I have serious doubts that he was even Ronnie’s father. I mean, look at the guy—does he look like an Indian to you? Can you imagine him in a John Ford movie, all that red hair and those freckles, charging over the hill on his pony, shooting arrows at the covered wagons? John Wayne would pop a fucking vein.”
“They could find out easy enough,” Virgil said. “DNA or whatever.”
“Who’s going to question it—the tribe?” Buddy asked. “Would you? One day you’re living in a fucking shack, eating squirrel and hickory nuts, and the next you’re collecting a big fat monthly check and driving a Lincoln Navigator. All because of Ronnie Red Hawk. You gonna be the guy who calls him out?”
With that Buddy stood up and went to the cooler for two more cans of Miller. He tossed one to Virgil and then stepped around the corner of the house to take a leak. As he unzipped he leaned backward to look at Virgil.
“So why are you so interested in Ronnie Red Hawk? Don’t tell me you lost your farm at the casino.”
Virgil could hear the piss hitting the baked clay ground around the corner. “I’ve never been to the casino.”
“You have a run-in with him?” Buddy asked, returning, one hand pulling at his zipper.
“Never met the man.”
Buddy sat down. “I give up.”
Virgil popped open the second beer and gave Buddy a condensed version of the events of the past few days. As he listened, Buddy leaned back in the rickety chair, his eyes half-closed, the cold Miller against his bare thigh. Every now and then he would smile at something Virgil said and after he smiled he would take a drink of beer, enjoying himself immensely. When Virgil stopped talking, Buddy shifted in his chair to look at him.
“You’re working on a fucking movie?” he said incredulously. “You?”
“Sort of.”
“I’ll be dipped in shit.” Buddy had another drink. “Well, I read about them finding the actress in the creek but the rest is news to me. But then again that’s why I keep on my own little patch here. So I’m not corrupted by the vile malfeasance out there in the world.” He gave Virgil another pointed look. “That used to be your position too, buddy. So what’s going on—you got a dog in this fight?”
Virgil gave it some thought before shaking his head.
“Claire Marchand working this?” Buddy asked.
“Yup.”
“You and her still playing the old slap and tickle?”
“What are you—twelve?” Virgil asked.
Buddy laughed. “I wish.” He took another drink. “So what would you like to know about Ronald McDonald Levack Red Hawk that I haven’t already told you?”
“Well,” Virgil said slowly, “so far all I’ve heard is that he’s a small-time thief and ex-con with enough balls and bullshit to grab himself a big piece of a lucrative Indian casino. It’s your standard rags-to-riches story. The question is—is he the type of guy who starts killing people to get his own way?”
“From what I know of him—no,” Buddy said. He paused a long moment. “But he’s the type of guy who would hire it out.”
“Which is one and the same.”
“It is.”
Virgil got to his feet and stretched. His eyes fell on the ancient soda cooler in the shade and he leaned over and flipped open the lid to have a look at the fish inside. “Nice size walleye,” he said. “Where’d you catch them?”
“Off Kimball’s Point,” Buddy said. “You know Kimball’s Point, don’t you?”
Virgil closed the lid and nodded. He knew the location. Two years earlier, after a day of fishing, he’d hooked a steel cylinder on the river bottom there with his anchor. The cylinder had been full of pure cocaine and Virgil had spent the next few weeks being pursued by crooked cops, vengeful drug dealers, and a mad, murderous Russian with a cowboy fixation. Virgil had been lucky to get out alive.
“So do you follow it, or does it follow you?” Buddy asked.
“What?”
“Trouble.”
Virgil smiled and finished the beer. He placed the can on the arm of the lawn chair. “Thanks for the info, Buddy. And the beer.”
“Why don’t you come out fishing one day?”
“I’ll do that.”
“Bring Claire.”
“Okay.”
“And leave the police work to the professionals.”
“I intend to,” Virgil said, and he left.
• • •
Claire had never been to Fairfield Village. It was the type of place she tended to avoid, even though she had no idea what was actually there. Leaving home Thursday morning, it occurred to her that she might, if it were possible, like to visit a genuine nineteenth-century pioneer village, but to do that she would require a time machine. She was just not comfortable with the whole notion of something being re-created. To Claire, re-created meant fake. She refused even to wear faux fur. Of course, she didn’t wear real fur either. She once dated a guy who wanted to buy her a coat made from a wolf hide. He had a fantasy of the two of them making wild love on it, and he’d assured her over and over how gorgeous she would look wearing it. Claire had finally told him that she thought wolf hides looked better on wolves than on people. The relationship, if that’s what it was, didn’t last much longer.
The guy, whose name was Wayne Anderson, sold ad time to radio stations, and while he spent a lot of time telling Claire how beautiful she was, he was constantly urging her to change little things about herself. It wasn’t just the wolf hide; he wanted her to wear thongs, he encouraged her to go bra-less in the summer, he bothered her to shave areas she didn’t want to shave. He apparently was all right with what Claire perceived to be her character flaws—her impatience, her too-quick judgment of people, her tunnel vision when she had a task at hand. It seemed that these traits would lose their significance once she got naked and donned a fur coat.
Virgil Cain, on the other hand, never asked anything of her. And while he rarely told her she was beautiful, he showed her that to him she was, with his eyes and his touch. She loved h
is calloused hands, his fingers like fine sandpaper on her skin. It was true that most of the time she didn’t get a hell of a lot out of him verbally, but that just made what she did get that much more tangible.
Claire’s sister, Eileen, had visited from North Carolina in the spring. She and Claire and Virgil had gone to Bearsville for Easter Sunday lunch and afterward Virgil had begged off, as he had a neighbor coming to the farm that afternoon to help him castrate some bull calves. Apparently it was a two-man job; given the nature of the task, Claire imagined it would be at least that. After Virgil had left, Eileen had started in on Claire about their relationship. Eileen liked Virgil, she insisted—and that Claire believed because her sister had flirted with him throughout the meal—but she couldn’t see things between the two of them going anywhere. Virgil was stuck and unlikely to get himself unstuck anytime soon. Claire had nowhere to go with him.
Claire replied that she was okay with having nowhere to go, as she liked where she was. Then she ordered dessert.
Stopping at the station to pick up a cruiser, she noticed Sal Delano’s Camaro in the lot and went inside to talk to him. He was in the corner of the main office, drinking coffee with Marina from dispatch. Claire was pretty sure Sal had a crush on Marina from dispatch but for a smart guy he was on the clueless side when it came to women. Marina was interested and Claire had told her more than once that she would have to make the first move. For the time being it was still a stalemate.
The two fell silent as Claire walked over and sat on the edge of Marina’s desk. She suspected she’d caught them in the midst of some adolescent-type flirting.
“Anything on the departed director?” she asked.
“I finally got him on the phone,” Sal said. “He’s in France with his wife and kids. He doesn’t have anything good to say about the producers of Frontier Woman, but I definitely didn’t get the impression that he was, you know—homicidal. Plus, he says he was already in Europe at the time of death. Which would be easy enough to check out.”
“Let’s do that,” Claire said. “And we can cross him off the list. Not that we have much of a list anyway. Anything interesting moneywise? I assume there’s insurance involved when something like this happens.”
“The film is insured,” Sal said. “In this case, the insurance would cover whatever they’d already shot with Olivia Burns. Which wasn’t much. So it doesn’t seem like a big deal.”
“The actors themselves aren’t insured?”
“Apparently not.”
“But I’m always reading how these movies can’t get insurance because so-and-so has a drug problem.”
“They insure the film, not the actor,” Sal said. “That’s what I’m hearing. And I talked to someone from the insurance company that holds the policy on this.”
“Keep looking,” Claire said after a moment. She slid off the desk. “I’m heading off to the nineteenth century. You kids carry on . . . or whatever.”
Sal blushed and Marina smiled. Claire left.
Fairfield Village was pretty much as she would have imagined it, if she’d spent any time doing so. Log buildings, plank sidewalks, dirt streets, people walking around wearing long dresses and wool trousers in the ninety-degree heat. It looked as if the film production company had pretty much taken over the entire town. It was easy to spot the movie people; they were the ones wearing shorts and tank tops, with any number of clamps and clips and cables hanging from them. Claire had been on a film set just once before. Her cousin had a job as a still photographer on a movie about a mysterious virus that was threatening to wipe out all life from planet Earth. The movie was filmed in Connecticut and starred Meg Ryan. Claire didn’t think it was ever released. The experience of being on set had been interesting for the first couple of hours but turned boring after that. Claire had ended up going to a bar in town with her cousin’s girlfriend, where they drank beer and shot pool until he got off work.
Most of the film people were gathered around the fake courthouse in the center of the village, so Claire assumed they were shooting inside. She approached a woman wearing a short skirt and clogs who was struggling to push a rack of clothes along the dusty main street.
“Where can I find Ronnie Red Hawk?” Claire asked.
“Never heard of him,” the woman said without breaking stride.
The woman was either lying or inordinately stupid, Claire decided. Anybody working on the set would surely know by now of Red Hawk’s involvement, given the events of the past couple days. Claire let it go; maybe Red Hawk wasn’t as interesting to the crew members as he was to the law. She turned away from the courthouse and started for the row of trailers at the far end of the street.
As she drew near, the door to one of the trailers opened and Levi Brown stepped out. He saw her at once, and it seemed to Claire as if he resisted an urge to turn and go back inside. Instead he forced a smile and came down the steps to meet her. Before he spoke, he gave his head a quick little shake, tossing his long hair back so that it settled on his shoulders. It was a reflex with him, Claire thought, something petty and vain.
“Detective,” he said. “Something I can help you with?”
“I’m looking for Ronnie Red Hawk,” Claire said.
“Yes, I guess you would be,” Levi said. “Well, he’s not here.”
“Would you know where he is?”
“He went back to his casino, or so I heard. Rumor has it he’s preparing a suite for Ms. Karson for the weekend. No doubt he’s filling bathtubs with champagne and butchering some exotic roadkill for her to nosh on.”
As Levi smirked at his own cleverness, Claire was reminded of his arrogance when she’d interviewed him the day before. Twenty-four hours hadn’t changed him, but then why would it? People rarely changed much over the course of a lifetime, much less with the passing of a single day.
“Why did you say you guess I would be?” she asked.
“What?”
“When I told you I was looking for Red Hawk, you said you guess I would be.”
Levi flipped his hand in the air, as if shooing a fly. “Just a hunch.”
“Based on what?”
Levi shrugged. “Based on the fact that you’re investigating Olivia Burns’s death, and that he was the last person seen with her.”
“That’s all?”
“All I can think of.”
“What about the fact that Red Hawk showed up here the very next day with the actress he wanted to replace Olivia Burns? What about that?”
The producer nodded slowly, as if considering the connection for the first time. “That is a little suspicious, now that you bring it up.”
“You’re an interesting guy,” Claire said. “You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be but not nearly as smart as you think you are.”
She saw that she’d actually wounded him. His lips tightened, and he ran the fingers of his right hand through his mane, looking past her toward the village. He held the thousand-yard stare, his nostrils flaring, as if he was punishing her with his silence.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Claire said, unable to stop. “There probably aren’t too many people out there as smart as you think you are.”
Now he looked at her. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Detective? I don’t have to listen to this. I told you where he went.” He turned toward the steps of the trailer, as if to go back inside.
“You’d better curb that tongue,” Claire advised. “And there’s one more thing. Did you tell me that you sat in the bar at the Hampton Inn with Sam Sawchuk until around ten thirty the night Olivia Burns died?”
He stopped. “That’s right.”
“She and her hubby claim they were in their room from eight o’clock on. What do you make of that?” Claire paused. “Better yet, what should I make of that?”
Levi shook his head and kept shaking it while he formed a reply. “I don’t know, I guess they were mistaken. People don’t usually write down exactly when they’re doing what.” He was suddenly inspired.
“What time is it right now?”
“Pardon?”
“Don’t look at your watch,” he said. “Tell me what time it is.”
Claire smiled but she didn’t play along.
“You see?” he asked. “If somebody asked you two days from now what time we talked today, you wouldn’t know for sure, would you?”
“I might.”
“I doubt it,” he said. Smiling, he raised his left hand and with his forefinger tapped his temple twice. “See? Maybe I’m not quite as dumb as you think.” While his hand was in the air, Claire had a clear look at the Rolex on his wrist.
“You just keep thinking that,” Claire said. She glanced up at the sun. “By the way, I’d say it was a few minutes past two right now. You know—if some curious person were to ask me a couple days from now what time we talked.”
She saw that he didn’t want to look at his watch, but he couldn’t help himself. His face fell when he saw the time.
“I’d also tell that curious person that you haven’t explained the discrepancies in the timelines you and your friends gave to the police,” Claire continued. “You want to give it another shot?”
“No,” the producer said, sullen again. “I told you the truth. You’ll have to talk to them. They could have been confused by the question.” But then another notion came to him. The man was an assembly line of half-baked inspirations. “You know—everybody was in shock after hearing the news about Olivia. You might want to take that into consideration. We’re human beings.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Claire said, “when I talk to your confused friends.”
“Are we finished here?”
“God, I hope so.”
• • •
The Running Dog Casino was as familiar to Claire as the pioneer village was not. She’d been there socially a couple times, before deciding that casino gambling really wasn’t her thing; she preferred live-action, particularly the thoroughbreds when they ran at Saratoga every summer. But she’d been to Running Dog in a professional capacity a number of times. A thriving casino was like a boomtown and as such it attracted all kinds of grifters, dopers, scam artists, prostitutes, and lowlifes in general. Every month there were innumerable calls for the state police, the charges ranging from car theft to soliciting to the odd stabbing or shooting in a parking lot or underground garage. And while many Native reservations had their own police force, the Sumac reservation did not. In the past, the place had been too poor to support one, and now everybody was too rich to bother. The casino had its own security, which was pretty corrupt in and of itself, but with more serious matters it allowed the state police to take care of things. On the state’s dime, of course.