Death Where the Bad Rocks Live

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Pee Pee took his teeth out and started picking at them with a screwdriver he’d found under a mound of junk on the coffee table. He spoke to Willie, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if instructing a class of new recruits. “I had the brake drums pulled. Back then, people had to put new brake pads on every two thousand miles. By the looks of the rotors on that baby, they’d been turned once. Twice at most.”

  “That only means the owner couldn’t afford brakes.”

  “I thought of that.” Pee Pee scratched his testicles, rubbing his magic lamp. Manny hoped Pee Pee’s genie wouldn’t come out with him and Willie there. “That’s what took me so long. I also tore into the motor. Know how much dirt and rust accumulates in seventy years?”

  “What did you find?”

  Pee Pee opened his mouth, and Elvis spit out an orange PEZ. “The rings of that engine had just started to seat in the cylinders. Even though it would have been three or four years old at the time of the bombing, that was a pretty new car.”

  “That makes no sense.” Willie stood and paced the room. “No one leaves a new car someplace like that when they know there’s bombing practice going on.”

  “It does if those two drove there never expecting aircraft from Rapid City Air Base.” Manny reached for the Elvis PEZ, then thought better. Pee Pee’s scratching hand played with the plastic flip door, and Manny knew where that hand had been the last few minutes. “What we got to do now is figure out how this ties in with Gunnar’s body being found on top of the other two inside that car.”

  “Why do they have to be connected at all?” Pee Pee gummed his PEZ. One tooth was stained orange. “And we sure don’t know they were murdered. Looked like they were just in the bombing range at the wrong time.”

  Manny leaned closer to Pee Pee. “Didn’t they teach you anything about investigations in the police academy? I don’t believe in coincidences, and those three being interred in that car in that place all together would be stretching the laws of the Coincidence God. No, they’re connected somehow.”

  Pee Pee reached over and played with the remote volume. The television powered on and he adjusted the volume as he scooted his chair closer to the TV. “I’d wager you two got a big job—finding out who wanted those other two dead as well as Gunnar Janssen.”

  As Drew Carey’s assistant called for another contestant, Manny thought how right Pee Pee was. And Pee Pee was a wagering man.

  Willie pulled into the Cohen Home and parked between a pickup missing the bed and a Volkswagen missing one fender, sitting up on blocks. “Sure you want to go in alone? The way I hear it, he’s a bear in the morning.”

  “Chief Horn’s a bear anytime”—Manny grinned—“but at least he tolerates me. If I bring you along, you might have to arrest him.”

  “Arrest a retired cop?”

  “Retired and continues being a crotchety old fart. I’ll be all right.” Manny tried to sound as confident as he entered the retirement home and stopped at the receptionist’s desk. The twenty-something girl looked up from her Harlequin romance and frowned as she recognized Manny.

  “You going to get Chief Horn stirred up again.”

  “How so?”

  “After you visited him two months ago, he went into a cleaning frenzy.”

  “Thought that’s what you people wanted—for him to take better care of his apartment.”

  She shook her head. “It is, but he took it upon himself to be the cleaning police for the home. Insists on daily inspections. Raises hell with the other residents if their rooms aren’t cleaned like he thinks they ought to be.”

  “I’ll visit with him about it.”

  “Wipe your feet.”

  Manny walked the hallway toward the last apartment, past two-occupant rooms on either side to the room occupied by one person: Chief Horn. The first time Manny had visited his old police chief was while he was working on the Jason Red Cloud murder. Chief Horn’s room had been a poster child for every ghetto flophouse that Manny had ever been in: messy and dirty and unkempt enough that no one would ever want to return for a visit. When Manny came away from his visit with the chief, he wished he’d packed a can of Black Flag and hand sanitizer.

  But the chief’s granddaughter, Shannon, had convinced him that he’d get more visitors if his room were clean. The last visit Manny paid, Chief Horn’s apartment had been cleaned so that, with a good imagination, Manny could just about make out furniture uncluttered by trash. But he wasn’t prepared for this.

  “Come in kid,” Chief Horn bellowed and stepped aside. It took Manny a moment for the shock of the chief’s white shirt and bow tie to wear off before he took in the apartment. The cases of beer—both empty and waiting to be emptied—that did double duty as end tables and places to set trash were now gone. Manny studied the room trying to locate the beer, but found it nowhere on the varnished wooden floor. And he could actually see the kitchen table with a bouquet of wild flowers in a Budweiser bottle doubling as a vase. “Let me take your coat.”

  Like a polished butler, Chief Horn helped Manny with his coat and hung it on a bentwood coatrack beside the door.

  “Iced tea? How about a soda?”

  “No beer?”

  Horn smiled. “Got no time for that now. I’ve been too busy enforcing the house regulations on keeping things cleaned.”

  “So I’ve heard. Tea would be nice.”

  Horn grabbed a glass from the cupboard, held it to the light, and polished it with a dishcloth before filling it with ice cubes and tea. “So why the visit?”

  “I just wanted to check out rumors.” Manny smiled, waving his hand around the apartment.

  Horn tilted his head back and laughed. “Bullshit, kid. I know you. You need some info. ’Bout the only time you come to visit your old chief.”

  Manny nodded. “I’ll correct that in the future. I’m working on a couple deaths that happened in the bombing range.”

  “Three bodies to be exact.”

  “Moccasin telegraph clued you in?”

  Horn nodded. “Quicker than cell phones—at least there’s no dead zones with the telegraph. You want to know if I recall anything about missing people during that time?”

  Manny nodded. “Two homicides—at least I’m treating them as homicides for now—happened at the bombing range in the Stronghold we figure happened in 1944. One was Moses Ten Bears.”

  Horn sat on a chair and rested his enormous arms on his knees. “I heard they found him, and I’ve been studying on that this last week since I heard. When I hired on with the tribe as a snot-nosed nineteen-year-old wanting to arrest bad guys, one of the standing procedures was to give the rookie the Ten Bears file and a week in the Badlands to find him. I didn’t find him, of course, but I looked, using maps other officers had used unsuccessfully to find Moses. I might have walked right past that car he was in. There were so many old bombing targets left there. Never thought one would be a dumping ground.”

  “There was also a geologist—Ellis Lawler—from the School of Mines in the car beside Moses.”

  Horn sipped his tea delicately, his glass disappearing in his hand. “Years after he went missing, Lawler’s wife hired a private investigator out of Chicago to find out what happened to her husband. Guess she wanted him proved dead or something. Anyway, I hiked into the Stronghold with the PI and we had as little luck as everyone else. Last I heard, after a couple years the widow got the money Lawler had salted away.”

  “Why would a geologist have been interested in the Stronghold? That’s miles away from the annual Pig Dig the School of Mines sponsors—geologists accompanied archeologists even back then.”

  Horn shook his head. “The PI either didn’t know—or wouldn’t say—but I always thought it odd. There’s little there to interest a geologist. Now some other parts of the Badlands…”

  “What do you know about where the bad rocks live?”

  Horn frowned. “Now where the hell did you come up with that?”

  Manny set his empty glass on
a tooled leather coaster on the kitchen table. “Uncle Marion told me about a place in the Stronghold where the bad rocks live, whatever that meant. Warned me not to go there. That bad wakan lived among the rocks.”

  “Legend.”

  “More than legend. Unc was convinced there was something to the stories.”

  “Marion often had an overactive imagination. When we were kids…”

  “When you two were kids, you got into a lot of trouble, or so he said.”

  Horn laughed. “See, his imagination was even overactive about that. But don’t put too much store in those legends Marion spouted. He’d tell them to me and I’d just laugh. There was nothing to it.”

  Manny recalled asking Unc things, all sorts of things, every question that a young boy had for the man raising him as his own. And every time Manny’s question was answered, Unc always explained it by saying, “I just know things.”

  Horn checked his watch. “Sorry kid. I’m overdue for morning inspection.” He stood and grabbed a small notebook.

  “For violations?”

  “Damn straight. Now if I can just talk the management into authorizing actual citations for rule violations, I could issue those at the same time. I’m getting to hate residents letting their rooms get so messy.”

  Chief Horn shut the apartment door, but Manny stopped him before he could wander down the hall. “There was another body placed in that old car—years after Moses and Ellis went missing—in 1969. He was shot in the head.”

  Horn stopped and scratched his chin whiskers. “Don’t recall anyone missing during that time.”

  “He was the roommate of Judge High Elk when they went to college.”

  Horn nodded. “Sure. I recall Spearfish police wanting us to keep an eye out for some college kid. Said he might be here, though they also thought he fled to Canada to escape the draft. We looked all over hell for him, but no luck. Sorry I can’t be more help, but I got inspections to conduct now.”

  Manny hurried ahead of Chief Horn down the hallway, making his exit before the chief issued the first stern warning of the morning.

  CHAPTER 12

  After his phone lost contact, Manny redialed Willie’s number, dropped the phone, and veered toward Spearfish Creek. As he bent to grab it under his heel, he jerked the wheel back just as a car passing in the opposite direction laid on its horn. The driver gave him the single finger wave in passing.

  Manny dialed Willie’s number again. “You figure out what the judge wants to talk with you about?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” Manny answered. “All he said was it was important.”

  “Did you get to the judge’s turnoff yet?”

  “Just coming up to Savoy now. You sound exhausted.”

  “Worse,” Willie breathed into the phone. “She’s driving me nuts.”

  “Doreen?”

  “Janet. Chief Looks Twice—she even has me saying it now—ordered that I take her along, take her under my wing. Whenever she winks at me like she does, I get the feeling she wants to be under something besides my wing.”

  “That’s love.”

  “That’s a pain in my behind. She asked me—no, told me—to put on a clean shirt this morning. A clean shirt when I’ll get sweaty and dirty today anyhow.”

  Willie had been wearing more dirty shirts than clean ones lately. Manny recalled the neat, young tribal officer he’d first met, his uniform pressed, his shoes shined, his gun belt polished as if he intended to use it. That was before he helped put his aunt in the loony bin. “You must have ditched Janet for a little while at least.”

  Willie’s voice broke up as if he were looking over his shoulder as he spoke into the phone. “We’re at the White River Visitor’s Center. She’s in the ladies’ room. Her hair was mussed up, and she wanted to touch up her makeup.”

  “You could always drive off. She’d hate you forever for that, but it’d solve your dilemma.”

  “And risk being animal control officer for the duration of my career?”

  “I told you before the bureau would love to have you.”

  There was a long pause before Willie answered. “Thanks for the offer. Again. But I’ll stay on the rez. I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but I’ve been a tad messed up. I’ll just have to suffer through Janet’s company.”

  “You’ll pull through, whatever’s bothering you.” Manny tried convincing himself as much as Willie. “Does Marshal Ten Bears know you’re coming?”

  Willie’s voice faded, then came back clear. Reception in the Badlands was sketchy, at best. “We couldn’t find a phone number for him, not even a cell, though one wouldn’t work where his cabin is located anyway.”

  “How do his customers contact him if they need wood?”

  “They tack up a note on the bulletin board at Sioux Nation Grocery. Oh crap, here comes Miss Lakota Nation all fixed up. Gotta run.”

  “Go get ’em tiger.”

  Manny closed his phone and laughed at the thought of Willie and Janet alone in a remote part of the Badlands, alone away from anyone, alone with Janet sporting fresh makeup, and alone with Willie sporting a declining will to resist her. And sporting morning wood. He laughed again until he realized Janet did Willie no good. He had enough going on in his life without having to referee Janet and Doreen.

  Manny came to the turn leading to Ham’s cabin, passing the Latchstring Inn on one side of 14A, and the Spearfish Canyon Inn on the other. He took the gravel road heading west up into the hills. Four hikers waved as Manny passed them on their way to Roughlock Falls. The falls had developed into one of the true scenic spots in the Black Hills. Marriages took place against the backdrop of the waterfall, and families went there to renew relations.

  Unc had taken him to the falls once as a boy, at a time when tourists hadn’t yet discovered it; at a time when picnic areas hadn’t yet been built; at a time when the access to the falls was by a narrow hiking trail. They had entered the sacred Black Hills, the spirits of their ancestors yet moaning among the trees, or so Manny had thought at the time and he’d huddled closer to Unc. They remained four days, praying and offering sweetgrass and sage to those wanagi that lingered awaiting the Black Hills to be returned to the Lakota. Even then, Manny felt a connection to the Old Ones, especially here in the sacred He Sapa.

  The road cut between ponderosa pine and Black Hills spruce narrowed, and Manny drove past Ham’s driveway. He backed up. A tiny mailbox proclaiming HIGH ELK was set apart from aspen and birch trees. A flowering lilac bush hid half the mailbox. The driveway was even narrower than the road and he slowed. He didn’t need a tree to jump out and hit him right now.

  Manny stopped to allow a whitetail doe and her fawn to cross. They watched him intently until they reached the sanctuary of trees across the driveway before they bent their heads and continued their foraging. They’ll be even more skittish when hunting season opens in a couple months.

  Ham’s cabin loomed out of the tree line, and Manny stopped in front of Ham’s red Indian Chief parked on the other side of his black Suburban, complete with twin silver feathers painted on front fenders and dark tinted windows. It reminded him of every cheesy movie where black government ’Burbs were armored and every world leader riding inside got shot at. Except Ham wasn’t getting shot at. He was seated in a sun-faded Adirondack chair protected by a covered porch, smiling under a large dream catcher, the colored feathers keeping time with the wind chime that kept time with the easy breeze that blew from the west. Ham closed his book and stood.

  “Glad you could come, Agent Tanno.”

  “What choice did I have when a federal judge requests my presence? But I wanted to come anyway, just to see your shack, as you called it.”

  Ham smiled and waved his hand around like those game show hosts Pee Pee Pourier was so obsessed with. “Took the builders two years to figure out how to squeeze two thousand square feet of log into this space so I’d have a view of Roughlock Falls from my porch. Please sit and enjoy the view while I get refres
hments. Beer? Wine cooler?”

  “Tea?”

  “Sugar?”

  Manny yearned for calorie-dense, nutrient-bankrupt sugar, but he wanted to survive Clara’s inquisition when he came home. And survive his next diabetes screening. “Sweet’N Low?”

  Manny nodded, and Ham disappeared inside.

  Manny positioned another weather-beaten Adirondack chair so he could watch the falls. This had been a wet year for the Black Hills, and the water gently rumbled as it dropped over the top and collected in a frothy pool below on its way along Spearfish Canyon.

  Ham emerged with a beaker of iced tea and set it on the cedar table in front of Manny, then sat in his chair next to him and cradled a Corona Light. The sun jostling through the trees played off the slice of lime stuck into the top of the beer bottle, which Ham squeezed while he gestured to the waterfall. “Did you know Roughlock Falls got its name from pioneers?”

  “Like Ralph Roughlock or something?”

  Ham laughed and sipped his beer. “In the winter, early freighters used to rough lock their wagon wheels—roped logs around them to keep them from turning, then hitched their horses to the rear of the wagons and slid down the slope. That’s how they got back down this hill in deep snow.”

  Manny stirred the sweetener into his tea and wrapped his hand around the glass. The water sweating the sides felt cool in the intense heat, and he brushed his forehead with his wet hand. “You didn’t call me up here for a history lesson.”

  Ham smiled and set his beer on the table. “You don’t beat around, Agent Tanno. I like that. No, I’m curious how your investigation into Gunnar’s death is progressing.”

  “It’s advancing.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Some.”

  “Am I still in your suspect column?”

  Just like an attorney, beat around the juniper bush until coming to the real question. “Don’t have a choice but to put you there—you’re the last one that saw Gunnar. But I find it awkward that someone from the suspect list wants to talk with someone from the investigator list.”