Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery

by Coel, Margaret

  “What is the factual basis for this change in plea?” Now the judge had turned to Glasgow.

  “We were unable to locate the main witness. It seems he has left.”

  “Left Fremont County?”

  “That is correct, your honor. When we were unable to locate Mr. Tomlin, we spoke to Dennis Carey, his former employer at the Broken Buffalo Ranch. I’m sure you are aware that Mr. Carey was shot and killed last night on Blue Sky Highway. He told us Mr. Tomlin had driven off without leaving any forwarding address. He left about two weeks after the assault occurred. It’s possible he was reluctant to testify against Mr. Walksfast because of the defendant’s violent tendencies.”

  “Your honor.” Vicky could feel her fists clenching.

  The judge held up one hand, eyes still on Glasgow. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. The fact is the man Mr. Walksfast is charged with assaulting is not here to testify. He could be in Montana, or Utah, or Colorado by now. Six weeks ago, you said? He could be in the Yukon. I’ll go along with the plea.”

  Now the judge fastened his gaze on her client. “Well? I’m waiting. How do you plea?”

  “Guilty.” Vicky could sense the reluctance in the man beside her.

  “Substance abuse recommendations, counselor?”

  “Yes, your honor. Level three-point-five is recommended for my client. A residential program. As for a bed date, my client could check into the clinic in Riverton today.”

  The judge was staring down at the papers scattered before him. “Mr. Walksfast,” he said, looking up slowly, “I am going to sentence you to one year in the Fremont County Jail. On the recommendation of the prosecutor, I am going to allow you to serve your sentence on probation. But I am imposing a condition. You must successfully complete thirty days in alcohol and drug rehabilitation at the White Buffalo Calf clinic in Riverton. If you mess up, your probation will be revoked and you will serve the rest of your sentence in jail. This is an opportunity for you to straighten out your life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” The word sounded garbled, as if Arnie had suppressed a cough. “Your honor,” he added.

  “A deputy will take you directly to the clinic.” The judge banged his gavel, then peered over his eyeglasses at the clerk. “Call the next case,” he said.

  “I’m out of here,” Arnie said, starting to move past her.

  “Hold on.” Vicky set a hand on the man’s arm. She felt a sense of relief. Arnie was the kind of drunk who could sober up for months, then lose himself in days of raging drunkenness. His luck—their luck, she thought—had held again.

  “It’s all over. I’m in the clear. I told you I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  Vicky nodded to the deputy who had walked over and stood waiting. “I need a few minutes with my client,” she said. “We have to check in at the probation office.” Then she motioned Arnie ahead, past the prosecuting attorney, who pulled his eyes away, as if he were looking away from an accident. The handful of spectators, Arnie’s relatives, made their way into the aisle. Someone had opened the double doors to the corridor. She stayed close behind Arnie, willing him to keep moving toward the doors.

  An elderly woman with short, gray hair and a pinched, smiling face reached for Arnie’s arm as he passed and pulled herself in alongside him. Smiling! Betty Walksfast had heard what she had wanted to hear, Vicky thought. She had missed the rest of it: If Arnie messed up, he was going to jail.

  A young woman, all white and blond with startled blue eyes, held back a moment, then darted after them, her nervousness as palpable as a ticking clock. Lucy Murphy, Arnie’s current girlfriend. In the two years Vicky had represented Arnie Walksfast, he’d always had a girlfriend. Indian, Hispanic, white. Vicky moved to the side to make room in the aisle. She was aware of the scuff of footsteps falling in behind them.

  They reached the corridor, and Vicky steered Arnie past the door marked Probation. Fifteen minutes later, Arnie had been assigned a probation officer. She led him back into the corridor through the relatives milling about. They kept going past a heavy glass door. Across the entry, down the sidewalk, and out into the parking lot, the deputy walking beside them. The young woman was on the other side, close to Arnie, his mother and the other relatives, all drawing the same conclusion. Arnie had done it again! Never should have been charged. Someone always out to get him; always blaming him.

  Vicky stepped ahead and motioned Arnie toward her, away from the crowd. The deputy stayed a few feet back and held out his arm like a roadblock to keep the others away. “Give them a moment,” he shouted.

  “I have to know, Arnie,” she said, keeping her voice low, her eyes on the brown, skittering eyes of her client. “Did you have anything to do with Tomlin’s disappearance?”

  “What? You’re supposed to be my lawyer. You’re supposed to trust me.”

  “If he isn’t in court, he can’t testify against you.”

  “How do I know where he went? I seen him one time at the O.K. Bar. Drinking a beer, minding my own business, and that sonofabitch started calling me names, pushing me around. ‘Go back to the rez, redskin,’” Arnie was tossing his head about like a pony fighting a halter. “I don’t have to take that crap.”

  “Look at me.” Vicky moved in closer. The tobacco and coffee-infused stench of the man’s breath floated around her. “If you are lying to me, I will withdraw from your case. Do you understand?”

  Arnie stared at her for a long moment, eyes narrowed, mouth hanging open, as if he were trying to grasp the implications. A front tooth was broken, sliced off at an angle, which made him look younger, a kid settling into his grown-up face. “I’m telling the truth.”

  Betty dodged past the deputy, walked over, and grabbed her son’s arm. “The judge cut you some slack,” she said. “Only thing that prosecutor wanted was to put you in prison.”

  “We had our own witnesses. No way was I going to be found guilty.”

  “We have two witnesses.” Vicky glanced at Lucy Murphy, inching her way like a shadow next to Arnie. “The prosecutor wouldn’t have had any trouble proving one of them, your buddy Ernest Whitebull, was too drunk to be credible. You have to go to rehab immediately.” This for Betty, whose face was now frozen in comprehension.

  Arnie shuffled from one foot to the other. “I need time to get my things together. Why do I have to go right away? Tell the deputy he can pick me up later.”

  “Now, Arnie. The deputy doesn’t take orders from me. I’d like to report to your probation officer how seriously you are taking this, how eager you are to recover, how sorry you are for the fight at the O.K. Bar.”

  Arnie seemed to be turning this over in his head. Vicky could almost see the gears slip into action. But it was his mother, Betty, who said, “Vicky’s right. We got to listen to your lawyer.”

  Still hovering close to Arnie, the young blond woman had a sad, defeated look about her, as if she hadn’t yet been abandoned but understood it was about to happen. “I can bring your things to you,” she offered in a small, tentative voice.

  “Jesus.” Arnie exhaled a breath. “I don’t see the rush.”

  “Come on.” His mother took his arm and tried to steer him toward the deputy, who had walked over. “The sooner you get rehab over with, the better.”

  “Jesus,” Arnie said again.

  * * *

  A FEW CARS, pickups, and campers lumbered along the streets of Lander. Clumps of sagebrush, dried and brown in the August sun, sprouted from the dried yards. Vicky kept the windows rolled down partway. The wind whistled around and fanned at her hair. She drove with one elbow propped on the top of the door, her hand holding her hair out of her eyes.

  You’re my lawyer. You have to trust me. Vicky laughed at the thought of trusting Arnie Walksfast. Maybe when he was sober, but you could never trust him to stay sober. It was Betty who had called after Arnie was arrested. “They’re out to get h
im, Vicky.” Vicky hadn’t asked who they were. They could be anybody. Police, feds in the big and sometimes frightening—yes, frightening—white world with its laws and regulations.

  She had agreed to take Arnie’s case. To quiet the panic in Betty’s voice at the thought of losing her son to the prison system. Her own son, Lucas, a few years older than Arnie, was moving up the corporate ladder in a high-tech firm in Denver, living like a white man in a condo by the South Platte River within walking distance of Confluence Park where an Arapaho village had once stood. The thought of someone taunting Lucas, insulting him, assaulting him, left a hard knot in her stomach. She had visited Arnie at the Fremont County jail, gotten him out on bond, prepared a defense. Whether or not Arnie was innocent, he deserved a defense.

  Vicky swung around the wide curve, stopped for a red light, then turned into a parking lot and drove toward the redbrick building of the local FBI offices. She spotted Adam standing on the sidewalk, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, eyes trained on the highway on one side of the lot. Not until she had parked next to his BMW did he seem to realize she had arrived. He walked over and opened her door. She could still feel the coolness that had settled between them last night when she had insisted upon staying with the body of Dennis Carey. A white man she had never met. Adam, nervous beside her, glancing around as if he expected the killer to rise up out of the borrow ditch and point a gun at them. She had thought of Grandmother Nitti and Grandfather Joseph, her parents and aunties and uncles, the lady who’d served lunch in the cafeteria at St. Francis School when she was a kid, the grandmother who’d made fry bread at the rodeos, all the dead she had known. Someone had always stayed with the body until one of the holy old men could bless it, paint it with the sacred red paint that would identify the spirit to the ancestors.

  She lifted herself out of the Ford, conscious of the protective and—was it her imagination?—apologetic pressure of Adam’s hand on her arm as he guided her across the sidewalk and through the front door of the redbrick building.

  7

  FEDERAL AGENT TED Gianelli, twenty years ago a linebacker for the Patriots, stood in the corridor, the pebbled glass door open behind him. “Saw you drive up. Come on in.” He had a booming voice that rolled around the walls and the vinyl flooring.

  Vicky felt the pressure of Adam’s hand on the middle of her back as they followed the fed into a warren of offices with fluorescent lights humming overhead. Right, down a short hallway past a cubicle with a dark-haired woman behind the desk, head bent into the phone at her ear. Left, down another hallway and into a small, tidy office with a bank of windows that overlooked the parking lot. Opera music played softly from the iPod jammed among the massive gray legal books that lined the side wall. A flood of memories washed over her. In John O’Malley’s old pickup, opera floating out of the CD player between them on the front seat; in his office at St. Francis, opera wafting from the CD player on the bookshelf. Opera was something they had in common, John O’Malley and the fed. She had grown accustomed to the music, even recognized a few arias. “Celeste Aida” was playing now.

  Gianelli motioned them to the pair of chairs. Vicky sank down and Adam dropped beside her. The fed settled himself behind the desk and leaned back, tapping a ballpoint against the palm of his hand in rhythm with the aria. “I’ve read the Wind River police reports.” He nodded toward the computer on the table in front of the bookcase. “Sometimes it takes a while for the details to emerge. Let’s start at the beginning. What time did you come upon the victim?”

  Adam cleared his throat, as if he were the only lawyer in the courtroom and the judge were addressing him. “Must have been close to eleven. The meeting at the tribal college in Ethete adjourned at ten, and Vicky . . .” She was aware of the nod in her direction; she kept her eyes on the fed, ready to read his reactions. What was he looking for? Something new, something they had neglected to tell Banner? A detail they hadn’t realized could be crucial? “After she spoke, Vicky stayed to talk to students. We drove out of the parking lot about ten thirty and headed south.”

  Is that what they had told Banner? Left at ten thirty, reached the victim’s pickup about eleven? It was possible. Vicky felt a shiver run through her. Parts of last night were a blur, a mixture of anger and frustration, fear and shock, with a white man collapsed over a steering wheel, a black hole in his forehead and trickles of blood on his cheeks.

  “I spoke to the monthly meeting of women students about careers in law,” Vicky heard herself explaining. She wondered what on earth difference it made. She and Adam could have been munching on hamburgers at the convenience store in Ethete. Except that one clear, inane memory might trigger another, and that might make the difference. “It was a small group, about twenty students.”

  “Traffic was light.” Adam looked relaxed, leaning back, hands on the armrests. “Folks are staying home at night with that crazy shooter loose. No one knows when he might show up and send a bullet into your windshield.”

  “It has been a few weeks since we’ve heard from him.” Gianelli shook his head.

  “What about last night?”

  “Maybe, but we don’t think so. Still early in the investigation, but no bullet holes in the truck. So traffic was light. How many vehicles on the highway near the shooting scene would you say?”

  Adam was shaking his head. “The highway was empty. That’s why I was surprised to see two vehicles pulled over on the side of the road, headlights on. We were still a good hundred yards away when the first vehicle pulled out and made a U-turn. Had to be going seventy when it passed us.”

  “Did you get the make? Any part of the license?”

  “License?” Adam snorted. “It was pitch-black out there except for the headlights. Big, dark-colored truck, like a Chevy.”

  “I was watching,” Vicky said, the memory spurting in her mind. She was in the passenger seat, watching the headlights coming toward them. The dark hulk rushing past. “The driver wore a cowboy hat.” The memory was getting clearer, like a pebble in a creek starting to reflect the sunlight. “I’m sure it was a man.”

  Gianelli scribbled in the notepad he had produced from a desk drawer. “What made you stop?”

  Adam drew in a ragged breath. She waited for what he would say: she could almost hear the words moving through his head. I didn’t want to stop. “I expected the second vehicle to pull out. A pickup with its headlights on. I figured the engine was running. I was concentrating on driving past, in case the driver was drunk and decided to pull in front of me.”

  “I caught a glimpse of the driver slumped over the steering wheel,” Vicky said. Another memory as clear as glass. “He looked sick or passed out. I asked Adam to stop. He slowed down and pulled in ahead of the pickup. When we walked over, we saw the man had been shot.”

  No one said anything for a moment. A matter of respect. Aida played softly. “We called 911 and waited for the BIA cops.” Adam’s voice was crisp and businesslike. As if that were all of it, the facts. “They showed up twenty minutes later.”

  “Did you recognize the victim?”

  Adam shook his head. “Not until one of the officers ID’d him. Dennis Carey, white rancher on the rez. We’ve seen him cooking buffalo burgers at powwows. He came to the farmers’ market this summer to sell buffalo meat.”

  “Anything else?”

  “We stayed with the body out of respect,” Vicky said.

  Gianelli made some more notes, then looked up at her and nodded. He had worked among Arapahos and Shoshones on the rez long enough to glimpse their ways. “If you think of anything else, give me a call.”

  Vicky got to her feet and started past the desk toward the hallway, conscious of Adam close behind, the large presence of him. Then she turned back and, looking past Adam, said, “What about his wife? How is she doing?”

  Gianelli drew in a long breath. The answer was obvious, Vicky knew. How did she expect the wo
man would be doing after her husband had been murdered? Still she had asked, a matter of politeness. She had to find the time to stop at the ranch, tell Dennis Carey’s wife that she and Adam had stayed with her husband. He hadn’t been alone.

  “Well as can be expected,” Gianelli said. “Eager for us to find the killer. She’s been very cooperative.”

  * * *

  THE HEAT REFLECTED off the asphalt, the sun blinked on the hood of the Ford. Adam opened her door, and Vicky slid behind a steering wheel that was like a hot iron burning her fingers. Gusts of dry air banked and swirled around the interior. “We have to talk about this, you know.” He was leaning around the door.

  This. The word looped through her mind. Last night, all of it. She had told him she wanted to go to her own apartment. Alone. He hadn’t protested, even though they had both expected her to spend the night at his house. Spaghetti dinner at the little restaurant on Main Street in Lander, the meeting at the tribal college in Ethete, the drive home under a field of stars. They had both assumed . . .

  Adam had walked her into the glass entry of her apartment building and pressed the elevator button. They had stood silently next to each other, the elevator gears and chains rattling. She had stepped into the elevator alone. Through the narrowing space of the closing doors, she watched Adam spin about and dive past the glass door into the darkness. Woman Alone, she had thought, as she made her way down the corridor and into her own apartment. The name the grandmothers had given her after she returned to the rez, divorced from Ben Holden, opening a one-woman law practice, clinging to the belief that she could make a difference, that she could help her people. A woman who had stepped ahead of the warriors and made herself a chief, as if such a thing were possible. Destined to be alone. In the glow of the kitchen light inside her apartment, she had made herself a cup of tea, then carried the cup over to the window bench. She had sipped at the tea and watched the streetlights flickering, the lone car crawling down the street, glad to be alone.