Apache Country

by Frederick H. Christian

  “This guy Ironheel say anything when you checked him in?” he asked her. She shook her head.

  “Funny, though,” she said. “When I first see him, I’m like, what is this guy on? He’s got these big dark eyes, and they’re like, gone, empty, y’know what I’m sayin’? I mean, like his body is here, but the rest of him is, y’know ... out of it. Eerie, man.”

  “He test clean for drugs?”

  “As a whistle.”

  “They still in the interview room?”

  “Ahuh.”

  The interview room was in the angle of the L-shaped corridor. Jack Irving answered the buzzer and Easton went in. The room was only slightly less bare than the cells all around it. A solid square wooden table fixed to the floor by steel brackets, four wooden chairs likewise, a single overhead light protected by a shatterproof plastic dome, and a shelf for the timing clock, everything screwed down so nobody could use them as an offensive weapon. Up in one ceiling angle, the unblinking eye of a CCTV camera recorded everything that was said and done. These days law enforcement worked on the belt-and-suspenders principle. Easton nodded hello to Tom Cochrane as the door clanged shut behind him. “Eight forty-two,” Cochrane intoned for the taped record. “Chief Deputy David Easton entered.”

  Ironheel sat facing the two detectives, his head down. He had on the mandatory orange jump suit and felt moccasins issued to all prisoners; his hands were free but his ankles were chained. As Easton came in he looked up. The overhead dome light put shadows beneath his eyes and cheekbones that made his face look like it was chiseled from stone. He was about the same height as Easton, but heavy-set, with sloping, powerful shoulders and straight black hair that fell forward over his face. He had strong, well-defined features, a wide mouth, good teeth, and dark eyes in which Easton could detect no trace of apprehension. He regarded Easton expressionlessly.

  “Your arraignment is scheduled for Monday morning,” Easton said. “You understand what that is?”

  Ironheel turned his gaze away and said nothing. It was like he wasn’t interested. Easton looked a question at Cochrane.

  “Just the basics,” Cochrane said wearily.

  “Nothing else?”

  “The prisoner is exercising his rights,” Jack Irving said. “He refuses to answer any questions.”

  “Well, well,” Easton said.

  He tapped Irving on the shoulder. The detective relinquished his chair and stood leaning against the wall. Easton sat down facing Ironheel.

  “As you heard, my name is David Easton,” he told him. “Chief Deputy, Sheriff’s Office. Couple of things I’d like to ask you.”

  Ironheel remained silent.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Easton said imperturbably. “Where you from, Mr. Ironheel? Where on the reservation?”

  “Already told them all this.” A jerk of the head at ‘them.’

  “Humor me.”

  He shrugged. “Whitetail Canyon. Southeast of Rio Alto.”

  “You live alone?”

  “Stay on my sister’s place.”

  “She know you’re in here?”

  He shook his head and looked away. Interesting. Some conflict there, Easton thought, making a mental note.

  “Something’s been puzzling me, Mr. Ironheel. Like you to clear it up for me,” he said.

  Ironheel shook his head stolidly. “N’zhoo. Already told these other guys. No more questions.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a cop, right?”

  “Don’t like cops, huh?” Easton said.

  “Who does?”

  The contempt was open and defiant. Like a challenge. Easton felt his hackles rising, and it put an edge on his voice.

  “You want hostile, I can do that.”

  Ironheel looked at the wall.

  “You were picked up walking on Highway 286. Don’t you own a car?”

  “You’re a detective, work it out,” he said without turning his head.

  “I’ll take that as a negative,” Easton said, cooling it down, determined not to let the prisoner’s attitude get to him. “How did you get down here from the reservation?”

  Ironheel made a fist, raised a thumb. “Some trucker.”

  “Some trucker gave you a ride?”

  No answer. Take it or leave it.

  “You remember his name? Or the name of the trucking firm?”

  Silence.

  “Okay, you got a ride to Riverside. Then what?”

  Ironheel shrugged. “The guy was delivering at K-Mart. There was a McDonalds. Got a cheeseburger, started walking.”

  At least they had him talking again, Easton thought. If his odd, chopped-off responses could be called talking. Was there some reason he avoided using the first person? Was that an Apache thing?

  “What time was this?” he said. “When he dropped you off?”

  “Noon, maybe.”

  Easton glanced at Jack Irving, who nodded imperceptibly. That meant they already had a trace out on the trucker who had given Ironheel his ride. K-Mart would have a record of all the deliveries that had been made that day and who had made them.

  “And when you left town?”

  “Say two-thirty.”

  “We already checked with McDonalds,” Irving interposed. “He was there when he says he was.”

  “I understand you were going to Vaughn,” Easton said.

  Ironheel nodded.

  “You can’t go on just nodding or shaking your head, Mr. Ironheel,” Easton told him. “You need to answer yes or no. For the tape.”

  “Yeah?” he said. The hell I do.

  “Let’s talk about the billfold,” Easton said.

  Ironheel turned his head to stare at the wall. His face was about as responsive as a block of granite.

  “He claims he found it in the brush,” Cochrane said, putting scorn into his voice. “Beside the road.”

  Easton picked up on his lead. “What color is it?”

  “Black,” Cochrane said, picking up the tempo. Both of them knew where they were going. They had worked together a long time.

  “Be difficult to see,” Easton observed. “Sun low down. A black billfold lying in shadow.”

  Ironheel pointed to his right eye with his right forefinger. “Apache got eye like eagle, white man,” he said, hamming contemptuously. “Track bird flying, fish swimming. Ugh!”

  “Cut the comedy, Ironheel,” Cochrane rasped. “This isn’t funny.”

  He shrugged and looked away. Sue me.

  “Where did you find it? Were you near a sign? A mile marker?”

  No comment.

  “Casey’s wife says he had over two hundred dollars in that billfold,” Easton said.

  Again he thought he saw a flicker in Ironheel’s eyes, as though he had been about to contradict him then thought better of it, but it was gone before he could be sure.

  “What did you do with the money, Chief?” Jack Irving said.

  Ironheel shook his head again. “No comment.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Easton said. “Our criminalists found gypsum dust and prickly pear thorns on your jeans. No way you could have picked those up on the road.”

  Ironheel looked into Easton’s eyes for a long moment. Like he was trying to tell him something without speaking, Easton thought. But what? And why?

  “Tell us about the blood,” Cochrane said. “How did you get blood on your clothes? Under your fingernails?”

  “No comment.”

  “What about your shoes?” Jack Irving chimed in. “Come on, Chief, are you telling us you trod on the billfold as well?”

  “No comment,” he said doggedly. “I got the right to remain silent.”

  “That’s true,” Easton said, keeping his voice mild, his manner almost helpful. He was the nice guy. The other two were the heavies. It was an old, old scenario but more often than not it was effective. “But if you do, it’s going to make us think you’ve got something to hide.”

  “That it, Chief?” Tom said. “So
mething you know about all this you’d rather we don’t find out?”

  Ironheel turned his head away again but not before Easton saw that same strange look in his eyes. He sighed and started over.

  “Okay, let’s take it from the top,” he said. “Where did you find the billfold?”

  “Aal bengonyáá!” Ironheel rasped in Apache. “It’s over.”

  “You wish,” Cochrane said.

  They did the whole thing again. An hour dragged past, two hours. Again and again the same questions. Over and over Ironheel stubbornly refusing to say anything more than the same two words. No comment, no comment. Easton’s throat was beginning to feel as if someone had taken a metal rasp to it and his clothes felt sweaty and itchy. Time to end this, he thought.

  “Okay, enough,” he said. “Listen up, Ironheel. I’m going to make you an offer and it’s the only one you’re going to get. You cooperate with us, tell us what we want to know, we’ll do what we can for you in the prosecution process. Stick to this ‘no comment’ routine and I’ll personally see to it that every charge is processed separately. You understand? That’s two murders, armed robbery, resisting arrest, vehicular larceny and anything else I can think of.”

  Cochrane and Irving knew what he was doing. There is a point in interrogations where you have to break the circle. This was it.

  “This goes down, you’re looking at two consecutive life sentences, Ironheel,” Easton said, leaning forward until their faces were only inches apart. “You’ll be an old man by the time you get out.”

  “You hear him, Chief?” Jack Irving said harshly, going into full Hostile Cop mode. “Time to piss or get off it. Quit jerking us around.”

  “Come on, Ironheel,” Easton said, still Mr. Reasonable. “Help us, then maybe we can help you.”

  Ironheel remained silent.

  “What did you do with the gun, Chief?” Jack rasped.

  “What did you do with the knife?” Cochrane followed up. Ironheel shook his head like a taunted bull.

  “Talk to us, Ironheel. Give us some answers,” Easton said.

  “Dah,” Ironheel said, staring sullenly at the floor. “Negative. No comment.”

  “We’ve got you, Chief,” Jack said, Hostile Cop pressing hard now. “And you know it. We’ve got you at the scene, we’ve got you with the billfold, we’ve got you with the blood. Do yourself a favor, tell us the truth.”

  Ironheel looked at Easton again. There was anger in the dark eyes now and, Easton thought, a kind of desperation.

  “Doo nt’é da!” he said, his voice rising, his face sullen and hostile. “Nothing more!”

  This was going nowhere, Easton thought. He gave it a final shot.

  “Last call, Ironheel,” he said. “Talk, or take your chances with the judge.”

  “Wouldn’t make any difference if I did!” Ironheel burst out, his voice bitter. “You already got your minds made up.”

  “Tell me something I want to hear,” Easton said, softly. “And I promise I’ll listen.”

  Ironheel’s head came up very slowly and again Easton thought he saw something in the dark eyes– could it have been entreaty? – but again the Apache turned away before Easton could be sure he’d seen it. Again he softened his voice.

  “Anything?”

  Ironheel looked at Irving and Cochrane and then looked away.

  “That’s it then,” Easton said, and stood up. “You got till tomorrow to change your mind.”

  Jack Irving recorded the time and switched off the recording machine. They buzzed Patti to let them out and then walked Ironheel back to his cell where Patti locked him in. As the cage clanged shut he looked at Easton again and this time the message in the dark eyes came through loud and clear: help me.

  The three men went back to the receiving office and sat down in the waiting room. It was dark outside now. Tom Cochrane took his cigarettes out of his pocket and looked at the pack thoughtfully for a moment before speaking.

  “We’re getting no place with this guy,” he said.

  Jack Irving nodded agreement. “No fucking comment,” he muttered.

  Easton said nothing, the implications of Ironheel’s silent signal still spinning around in his mind. He couldn’t have read it wrong. But what did it mean?

  “That reminds me,” he told them, shaking off his preoccupation. “Charlie Goodwin’s office is sending an attorney over to represent him.”

  Goodwin was the senior partner in the law firm that contracted much of the County’s public defender work. When Easton told him Ironheel had waived his right to an attorney, his reaction was immediate. McKittrick knew better than to allow a suspect in a murder case to waive, it was a direct infringement of Ironheel’s Constitutional rights, he’d get someone over as soon as he could, and so on. Of course, Easton thought sourly, the fact that representing a suspect in a high profile murder case with national media attention could be very good for business had nothing whatever to do with it.

  “So when does this hotshot arrive?” Tom Cochrane asked.

  “Sometime tomorrow morning would be my guess.”

  “Tell you what,” Cochrane said, mock-brightly. “Let’s go back in there with a riot baton and appeal to his better nature.”

  Easton smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “I know how you feel, Tom,” he said. “You gave it your best shot.”

  Cochrane shrugged philosophically. “There’s still time,” he said. “That guy is hiding something. I could see it in his eyes.”

  “Yeah,” Irving said. “But what?”

  Help me, Easton thought. He couldn’t have been mistaken. What Ironheel had silently said was help me.

  Chapter Five

  When Easton got home, Grita was in the den watching TV. She gave him one of her you-did-it-again looks and lumbered off into the kitchen with her nose in the air. He followed her in.

  “I made burritos,” she said. He could feel the weight of her reproach.

  “Things ran late,” he said. “Honest, I’m sorry.”

  “Is okay,” she said, her tone making it clear that okay it most definitely was not. In Grita’s world, people ate their meals at the appropriate time: eleven o’clock at night was not one of them.

  “You work too hard,” she said. That was as close as Grita would allow herself to come to saying ‘I forgive you.’

  “Now you mention it, I could eat something,” Easton told her. “I’ll just go up and look in on Jessye first.”

  She looked at him the way she always did when he came in late and said that, like she might go stand in the doorway and stop him. “Don’t you go waking her up, now,” she warned. “She got school tomorrow.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  No question, Grita was Easton’s rock and foundation. For more than five years now his life had revolved around her, his earth orbiting her sun. When his wife Susan had died so suddenly, so unexpectedly, he had gone completely off the rails. And stayed that way for a long, blank, empty time during which everything slid away, like a curling stone on ice. Steeped in self-pity, drinking too much, he forgot to shower or shave, hanging around in dirty old sweats, staring out the window. There wasn’t anywhere he wanted to go, nobody he wanted to see. People stopped calling, invitations dried up. He didn’t care. Jack Daniels was the only friend he needed.

  He was pretty nearly all the way down to the bottom of the bottle when Ellen Casey just marched in to his house and took over. Didn’t ask, didn’t apologize. Just sat him down and read him the riot act. She wasn’t angry. It would have been easier if she had been.

  “You’re a drunk, David,” she told him “Worse still, you’re a slob. You keep carryin’ on like this and they’ll kick you out of the Sheriff’s Office, and you can be damned sure if that happens, someone from Child Protection is going to take your daughter away from you – for good. Is that what you want?”

  “Aw, Ellen, it’s not that bad …”

  “Yes it is!” she snapped. “And whether you like it or not, yo
u are going to shape up. Starting now.”

  She attacked the unkept house as if it were an enemy. He watched shamefacedly as she poured all the liquor down the sink, threw out all the spoiled food, stacked greasy plates in the dishwasher, crammed dirty shirts and soiled underwear into the washing machine, then scrubbed and vacuumed the place till it practically begged for mercy. There was a contained fury about the way she worked, as if maybe she was exorcising a few demons of her own.

  “Now you, you big ape,” she said, arms akimbo. “Climb into that damned shower and don’t come out until you’re squeaky clean.”

  Early every day, right on the button, she would come by and check him over before shunting him off to work. She cleaned the house, took care of the laundry, drove Jessye to kindergarten, picked her up in the afternoon, cooked evening meals for them, sometimes even stayed and watched TV.

  After a month or two when things more or less got back on the rails she hired him a housekeeper. It was a Friday, he remembered. Margarita Gutierrez was a large woman who weighed maybe two hundred pounds. She had a nut brown, unlined face, and big brown eyes that met his unafraid. She told him she was forty eight years old and that she had definite opinions about certain things, and if any of them bothered him, he better tell her right now. She would not work for anyone who drank heavy or brought women home. Or for anyone who smacked their children or for anyone kicked their dog. He said that wasn’t a problem and she said very well. The following Friday she moved in.

  Jessye had been just a baby then, and couldn’t get her mouth around the name ‘Margarita’, so they settled on calling her what she could say, ‘Grita.’ That had been nearly five years ago, five years in which Grita had become his counselor and confidante, support team and cheering section, guardian angel and goad. As for Ellen Casey, even if he had known how, he had never been able to find a way of thanking her, nor did she ever present him with an opportunity to do so. She would never even discuss the matter. “Everybody hits white water some time or other,” was all she would say, and again, he instinctively knew as she said it she was talking more about herself than him. “You just have to get past it.”