Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Willie slouched beside him and ordered a Whopper and fries, ignoring Janet standing in line beside him, pale and silent since the forensic autopsy. Manny caught the wonderful odor of hot grease wafting past his nose, grease that all things tasty would be cooked in. He was about to match Willie’s order of a Whopper when Clara popped into his mind, and he ordered the chef salad instead. Extra pounds sneaking upon him to match his diabetes diagnosis made him think twice about ordering the good stuff. That and Clara’s scowling face popping into his head.

  Pee Pee followed suit and grabbed a salad. “Out of solidarity for Johnny Stud.” He smiled as he drowned his salad with four packs of full-fat ranch dressing. “Going to eat yours?” He motioned to Manny’s cheese and crouton packs.

  “And invoke the wrath of the Health Nazi?”

  Pee Pee shrugged and grabbed the packets, doubling the cheese and croutons smothering his greens.

  Willie picked at his hamburger and looked at it, nibbling at the outside. Even though he still presented an imposing figure, his trousers were now a size too big and his shirt hung loose over shoulders that slumped more often now. The old Willie would have wolfed the burger down in two bites and ordered another. The new, depressed Willie just picked at it. Even visits to his aunt Lizzy in the state mental hospital couldn’t bring Willie out of it. And neither could Manny.

  Janet nibbled at her Chicken Tenders. “How long will DNA take to come back?”

  Pee Pee licked dressing that had leaked out of the small pack and settled on the web of his hand. “Depends. We’ll have it back from the FBI lab in a couple days if Manny can grease the wheels.”

  Grease again. “I’ll overnight the samples today. DNA takes a while to come back, but I’ve still got some pull with the lab.” Manny stabbed his salad with the flimsy plastic fork/spoon combination, the spork, jail being the only other place in the civilized world where you had to eat with one of these fast-food instruments of torture. Manny prayed the spork wouldn’t break like it usually did when he stabbed salad. Greens always reminded him of cows grazing. Wakan Tanka had made him a Lakota, a carnivore, and he couldn’t imagine his ancestors sitting around the campfire and diving into a Caesar salad. But the ancients didn’t have Clara’s line of questioning to contend with at the end of the day. “I intend to wrap this up quick.”

  “Why the rush?” Janet finally spoke. “The first body’s been in that car longer than I’ve been alive. And the other two longer than any of us.”

  “I just want to piss Lumpy off.” Manny smiled at her. “I mean, Uncle Leon. He’s got it in his mind that this will keep me tied up for some time. For the record, I’d just as soon be a pain in his behind.” Manny knew that whatever he said in front of Janet would get back to Lumpy. That in itself was worth having Janet around.

  Willie left the rest of his burger on the plate and stood for a soda refill. “That draft card we found in the first stiff’s wallet should get things rolling.”

  “I’d just like to know what caliber the poor bastard was shot with,” Pee Pee said as he heaped more cheese onto his salad, making it slightly less calorie-dense than Willie’s Whopper. “Doc Gruesome said gray matter hadn’t leaked out, which meant the guy lived for some time before he died. A small caliber projectile, most likely.”

  At the mention of gray matter leaking out of the victim’s skull, a young couple in the booth beside them squirmed in their seats. Looking like twins, with their cardigan sweaters and tweed gray golfer hats, they shot Pee Pee a worried look as if they shared a booth with Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer.

  “Do they usually mummify like that?” Janet was coming around, shaking off the effects of watching her first autopsy. Or first three. “You’d think the badgers or coyotes would snack on them.”

  The couple behind them left their remaining food on the table and hurried out, eyes darting to the booth they’d just escaped from. Manny eyed the burgers the couple left. Even used hamburgers appealed to him. “The dryness of the Badlands often causes bodies to mummify.” Janet leaned across the table listening to Manny and her hand brushed against Willie’s arm. “Probably the reason they weren’t snacked on was they all died in that car. Or at least all three ended up inside. Made it hard for predators to get to them. We’ll know when we look it over, but I suspect not every window shattered from the bombing nearby. By the time the elements ate enough of the car away where critters could get to them, the victims were too decomposed to be appealing to scavengers.”

  Janet shook her head. “But I still can’t figure out the oldest two—how was it they were lying under the guy with the tennis shoes?”

  “What’s puzzling?” Pee Pee finished his salad and patted his stomach. “Great to be eating healthy.” He got up and returned within moments carrying a triple-decker hot fudge sundae. Manny eyed the sundae, envious of Pee Pee, not for his single tooth, but because he could eat anything and stay rail thin.

  Pee Pee sat beside Manny, the ice cream inches from Manny’s salivating mouth. “The last two—or should I say the first two that died in that car—were long dead before passenger number three came along. By the looks of that whiskey bottle busted on the floorboard, I’d say those first two drove out there to pass the jug. Wouldn’t be the first time one of our people whiled away an afternoon sucking the sauce.”

  “But why way out there?” Janet asked.

  “It was as illegal to have booze back on the reservation then as it is today,” Willie said. “They didn’t want to get caught then any more than young folks do nowadays.”

  Manny eyed Pee Pee’s sundae, with chocolate and caramel dripping over the sides of vanilla ice cream. If only Pee Pee would leave for a moment, go to the bathroom or something, even for just a second. “But that doesn’t explain the White guy with the Indian. Whites didn’t need to sneak drinks back then—they could drink any time they wished.”

  “Maybe Doc Gruesome was wrong about the one being Caucasian,” Janet said. “Maybe both those bodies were Indians.”

  Pee Pee stopped the spoonful of sundae midmouth. “Doc wasn’t wrong. Pelvis and facial bones clearly show one was wasicu.”

  Willie said, backing away from Janet’s touch, “Maybe he wanted to show some solidarity with the Indian.”

  “Sure.” Pee Pee licked his chocolate-covered lips as if to emphasize Willie’s point. “Just like I just did with Manny when I ordered a healthy salad.”

  Manny jotted on his pocket notebook and thanked the person on the other end of the phone. “That partial draft card came back to Gunnar Janssen. DOD will fax a copy of the original when they locate it in the archives.”

  Willie slowed to allow two skateboarders to cross the road, jeans sliding over their pale butts, exposing their tighty-whities. “You were living on the rez in the seventies. Gunnar Janssen ring a bell with you?”

  Manny shook his head, more to clear it from the memory of the death that lingered over the autopsy table than anything else. Intellectually, he knew the bones Doc Gruesome examined were too old to smell anymore. He’d just never gotten used to the imaginary odor hovering over old bodies. “Never heard of him, but his Social Security card has a 504 number—South Dakota. Homegrown—and buried—boy. We might track the name through DMV.”

  “Can I help with something?” Janet gazed into a small pocket mirror as she reapplied lip gloss, the last having been abraded when she lost her breakfast at the autopsy.

  “We do need help.” Willie batted his eyes at Janet.

  She smiled. “Anything.”

  Willie motioned to Pee Pee sitting in the backseat beside her. He held his dentures and picked food out of them with a pocketknife. “You mind dropping Janet off at the Rapid City Journal office?”

  Janet snapped her compact shut. “What am I supposed to do there?”

  “Research.”

  “Research what?”

  Willie stopped beside Pee Pee’s truck in the morgue parking lot. “I need you to find all the missing persons reports from the yea
rs 1964 through 1972, the years the draft was in effect. And”—he winked at Manny—“missing persons from the early forties, when the bombing range was most active.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Investigating.”

  Janet glared after Willie as he pulled out of the parking lot even before Pee Pee fished his keys from his pocket.

  “What’s the chance of Janet finding something?” Manny asked as he looked out the back window at Janet fuming, hands on her hips, staring at them as she stood beside Pee Pee’s truck.

  “Slim. But it’ll keep her busy. Do you know what Doreen will do if she even suspects I’m messing around with Janet?”

  “That Big Eagle girl from Ft. Thompson?”

  Willie nodded. “Your typical mad Lakota woman. Things haven’t been going so good lately even before Janet was assigned to me.”

  “You still got the nightmares?”

  Willie nodded. “I can’t seem to shake the image of Aunt Lizzy cooped up in the loony bin.”

  Manny had encouraged Willie to talk about his aunt Lizzy. He had been as close to his aunt as a son is to a mother, and he struggled daily with her spending her time these days doing macramé and tatting doilies in the South Dakota State Mental Hospital.

  “It was best for her and it was best for the tribe. You did your job.”

  Willie snorted and set his hat on the seat divider. “Sure. I did my job, and now where the hell do I go? What the hell do I do—Aunt Lizzy’s still locked up. Now this fight with Doreen. She’ll have my jewels on a skewer if she thinks I’m messing around with Janet.”

  “Don’t let that happen. Clara’s got mine and look what a mess I am.”

  Manny dialed the Department of Motor Vehicles. After explaining he needed Gunnar Janssen’s information, he had his answers within minutes. “The address he used when he had a valid DL was the men’s dorm at Black Hills State in Spearfish. Let’s take a drive up there.”

  “Anything to put distance between me and Janet,” Willie said and turned onto I90 for the thirty-mile drive.

  “Maybe the police department can help us.”

  “Maybe.” Manny climbed into the Durango parked in a visitor’s slot at Black Hills State. Students crossing the lawn on their way to summer classes stared at the Oglala Sioux Tribe markings on the door. “Their records didn’t help much.”

  Manny shrugged. “Might when we find out why Gunnar left school midsemester in ’69.”

  Willie drove through the campus and onto Jackson Boulevard. “It makes no sense that an honor student would slip academically so far that he was failing most of his classes.”

  “Obviously something else had been going on in his life. Maybe something that he needed help with.”

  “Such as?”

  Manny shrugged. “Can’t say. But might have been something a good counselor could have helped him with.”

  “Don’t start that shit again!”

  “Maybe if you just talked with someone. I know the man that does post-traumatic counseling for officers at the Rapid City PD. I know he’d…”

  “I’ll talk with someone in my own time.”

  Willie had resisted Manny’s attempts to line him up with a good depression therapist. Perhaps Willie was right. Perhaps in his own time he would break down and talk with someone. Manny was just grateful Willie had spoken of it in passing this morning. Perhaps Willie was thinking along the lines of a therapist.

  Willie pulled into a parking spot at the Spearfish PD. A patrolman gawked as he got in his cruiser and motored away.

  Willie looked after the cruiser and shook his head.”You’d think no one ever saw us Skins before. Or an Oglala tribal vehicle.”

  “Probably not one without whiskey dents.”

  “That’s ’cause I haven’t let you drive.”

  They entered the Spearfish Police Department and Manny badged the receptionist. She buzzed them through the security door and directed them to the records section. Down the hall a blond woman wearing headphones around her graying temples pec-pec-pecked at a computer terminal. When she noticed them leaning on the half door leading into her office, she hit a foot pedal and stood. She smoothed the skirt covering her thick thighs that ran all the way down to lace-up clodhoppers with dried cow dung on the soles. She smelled like she’d tramped around a recent rodeo and forgotten to change shoes before work. Manny was certain she’d not forgotten to change, and just as certain she was comfortable coming off the farm to work in the office. Her name tag proclaimed her Helga, and Manny imagined her straddling a three-legged stool, wringing the last milk from some hapless Holstein’s teats.

  He fought to suppress the odor of cow crap and explained why they were there. “Gunnar would have lived here in the late sixties when he attended Black Hills State.”

  “Long time ago,” Helga said as if, in voicing it, the request would fly out the window, like the odor that flew past Manny’s nose.

  He turned away. “Long time, indeed.”

  She turned her attention to Willie and smiled. Willie blushed. When it became evident to her that they were going to actually wait until she found the records, she turned on her heels and returned to her computer. She sat behind her terminal, and Manny thought she’d returned to transcribing her report. “How do you spell Janssen?”

  Manny spelled Gunnar’s name and she continued typing. After several minutes, she stood and walked to a rotary file cabinet and reached high. A sizable clump of hair sprang from her armpit, and Manny knew he’d just met his first granola head. He had heard Spearfish was full of them. She handed him a microfiche roll. “This can’t leave the office.”

  “Of course.” Manny wanted to reassure her he was privy to any number of documents affecting national security, that a roll of microfilm was safe in his hands. “You have a reader?”

  “Follow me.” She sighed and led them to a cramped office with archive boxes piled inches from the ceiling. She cleared boxes off a railroad chair missing one arm, and blew dust off the ancient microfiche screen. She hiked her skirt up and polished the screen. She only managed to move the dust from one side of the reader to the other. “Just slip the roll in here.”

  “I’ve used these before”—Manny smiled—“back when I was a rookie at the Pine Ridge PD.”

  “Did I detect some condescension in her voice?” Willie said when Helga’s footsteps faded down the hallway. “Almost sounded like you.”

  “I think she was angry because I wouldn’t leave you two alone in the office. I think she might be sweet on you.”

  “Whatever.”

  Manny adjusted the focus and started his search in 1966, working forward. “Shit.”

  “Shit what?” Willie stood from the chair and leaned over Manny’s shoulder.

  “Got it. Gunnar went missing in the fall of 1969. Look who filed the missing person report.” Manny canted the screen so Willie could read it.

  “Alex High Elk.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe you should watch something on the tube besides sports once in a while.”

  “So some High Elk reported Gunnar missing. So what?”

  “Alexander Hamilton High Elk. Federal appellate judge out of Sioux Falls. And recently nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. Went by Alex during his college days.”

  “Shit!”

  “That’s what I said.” Manny read aloud the missing person report. Alex High Elk had reported his college roommate missing in the fall of 1969. High Elk told the investigating officer that Gunnar’s parents lived in Iowa, but that he knew little more about his friend. The report concluded that another roommate, Joe Dozi, was the only other person who might have useful information.

  “Maybe Judge High Elk will remember something more about Gunnar. Do you think the tribe will fly me to Washington to interview him? I understand Senate confirmation hearings on him are about to convene in two weeks.”

  “See, you do watch something beside sports now and again. But even the bureau wouldn’t fly me t
o Washington to interview someone on a forty-year-old homicide. I’ll ask someone from our D.C. office to talk with him.”

  “An all expenses paid trip to Washington down the drain. What else is in the report?”

  Manny scrolled the microfiche reader and read an attached arrest report. Gunnar had been arrested just a week before he disappeared, along with his roommate Alex High Elk. “Too coincidental.”

  “What is?”

  Manny took off his reading glasses. “It’s too handy that Gunnar disappears a week after he was arrested fighting with the very guy that reported him missing.”

  Manny walked into the hallway and found Helga typing at her desk, oblivious to anything except what came through her headphones. She noticed him standing by her door and shut the dictation machine off. She stood and tossed the headphones on her desk.

  “Now what is it?”

  “The arresting officer on Gunnar’s arrest—Frank Willis—still around here?”

  “You missed him by ten years.”

  “Quit?”

  “Quit life. You can find him in the Veterans Cemetery outside Sturgis.”

  “How about the officer who took the missing report, Micah Crowder?”

  Helga stepped closer. The office was heating up and Manny could tell she wore no deodorant. Or was that her boots? “Micah Crowder left the department right after that incident to run for sheriff. Lost big, from what the old-timers said.”

  “He still around?”

  “As in alive?”

  “Alive and around.”

  She shrugged. “He raises hell over at the retirement home, Parkside Manor. You’ll find him ruining shuffleboard games, or organizing protests against the food, or looking up some old gal’s skirt. Old-timers said he turned into a horse’s patoot after he lost the election.”

  “Can I get a copy of this report?”

  Helga smiled and Manny noticed a large gap between her front teeth. “For a price.”

  “Don’t tell me—something like dinner?”

  She frowned. “Not with you. Him.” She jerked her thumb at Willie standing in the hall looking absently at courthouse construction photos hanging on the wall. “It’ll take a lot of work to copy a report on microfiche. But I’ll have it ready for you Wednesday, say around suppertime?”