Death Along the Spirit Road

by C. M. Wendelboe

  Manny once sat across from Unc at the base of a cottonwood, a blanket between them holding their afternoon snack. They hiked the steep cliffs of Buffalo Butte to gather elderberries that afternoon. “Tunska, if we don’t talk the talk,” Unc told him as he addressed him in the traditional word for nephew, “we’ll be like a man losing an arm or a leg. Our society will never recover our heritage without constant stumbling.”

  It was up to the youth of each generation, Unc told him, to carry on traditions that White people scoffed at, and Manny often regretted not keeping up with his Lakota language. He intended to get back into it when he was discharged from the army and working on the reservation as a tribal cop. He’d even attended a Sun Dance that first summer to get his mind right with the old ways. But when the FBI hired him, he’d figured his Lakota language skills would be useless in Virginia. He’d been wrong. As many times as he was assigned cases on reservations, being able to converse in Lakota would have been useful. At least being back on the Pine Ridge again was bringing back some of his dormant skills.

  “Why don’t you take Doreen somewhere for a nice meal and a movie?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Willie blushed. Manny laughed. The very large man in front of him had turned into a shrinking, intimidated little boy, and Manny empathized.

  He let Willie off the hook. “You said other tests were back.”

  “So I can quote you by saying Jason’s blood was found on the murder weapon? Along with unknown prints?” Sonja Myers stood beside their table and sipped delicately from a Coke cup. “May I?” She slid in the booth beside Manny and scooted close. Her legs touched his, but he was as close to the window as he could get.

  “How did you know where to find us?” Then he answered his own question. “I’ll bet that nice Lieutenant Looks Twice.”

  “Why, yes.” She looked sideways at Manny, her flowing hair cascading down her—what?—“bosom,” as Willie would say.

  “We really have nothing new . . .”

  “Well, this is new.” She reached for the lab report. Manny snatched it and jammed it into the manila envelope. “We have nothing more. I can call you when we do.”

  “Look, Agent Tanno. I got a job to do same as you. If I don’t give my editor something on this Red Cloud case, it’s back to the mail room for me. Can you see me exiled to the mail room?”

  Be a damned shame to stuff her somewhere people couldn’t see her. “I’ll call you when I have something I can release.”

  She feigned disappointment, then smiled. “That’s a promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Don’t force me to look you up.”

  “I won’t. But I’d bet the lieutenant will have new information. We haven’t checked in with him this morning yet.”

  “You might be right.” Sonja stood and smoothed her white blouse, and her eye contact lingered a moment longer than Manny thought the occasion warranted. “We’ll meet again soon.”

  “Of course,” he stammered.

  Now it was Manny’s turn to watch tight Levi’s walk away.

  “You could ask her out. A nice meal, maybe a movie.”

  “I got other things on my mind right now. Like the lab results?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Willie flipped through the papers until he found another page and handed it to Manny.

  “That stuff we thought was sweetgrass? It was. And that leaf you thought was cut-grass: It was.”

  The report showed that the material embedded in Jason’s trouser cuffs was concrete dust.

  “That’d fit your brother.” Willie seemed to be reading Manny’s mind.

  “Or it could have been picked up on Jason’s pants legs when he was inspecting the construction site. More people than Reuben work with concrete around here.” What the hell was he doing, defending Reuben? Manny dismissed it as being just the open mind of a trained investigator, not a kola protecting his brother. “Who else works around concrete?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Think.” If he could get Willie reasoning on his own, one day he would be a top investigator. And spare Manny another trip to places like Pine Ridge. “Who else could have deposited this at the crime scene?”

  “The Heritage Kids,” Willie said. “There’s six of them by last count. How do we narrow it down among them?”

  “Not so fast.” Manny reached deep into his pocket and came away with a piece of Nicorette gum to take the edge off his craving. Unless the gum could be rolled and smoked.

  “But they work concrete all day.”

  “Construction is pretty common here. New foundations, footings for houses, curb and gutter work. That doesn’t mean one of them killed Jason.”

  “I see your point. Just one more thing to add when we put all this together.”

  “Now you’re learning.”

  Willie smiled and sat a little straighter in the booth. Manny knew the praise of a senior officer. His first pat on the back by Chief Horn had raised his rookie head inches one day. It was the end of a long night, when Manny had tracked a runaway boy from the Red Cloud School to the edge of the Stronghold region. The kid had been a runner, but Manny had humped these hills with Unc, and still ran when he got the chance between work and college classes. When he caught up with the runaway, the kid was as surprised as the rest of the officers were when Manny returned to town with him.

  “Oh, and we got some info on the war club.” Willie smiled and spread papers on the table. This time Manny allowed Willie to explain the report at his own speed.

  “The war club—which, to the lieutenant’s chagrin, was an original—was stolen. Along with other artifacts from the Prairie Edge store in Rapid City three weeks ago. Forty grand worth.”

  “When the other antiquities surface, we might know more.”

  “They have.” Willie handed Manny a list of stolen Lakota artifacts dating back to pre-1890: a bone whistle, a medicine pouch in the shape of a turtle, a pair of beaded moccasins, a stunning pink and rose colored star quilt. “All original. And all returned.”

  “Returned?”

  Willie paused as if speaking to an anxious crowd. “The morning of Jason’s murder, someone left them on the front doorstep of the Prairie Edge. They were all stuffed into a Sioux Nation grocery bag, undamaged.”

  Returned undamaged. Manny rolled that around in his mind. Someone stole forty thousand dollars’ worth of artifacts, then just returned them. “Have they been seized?”

  “They have.” Willie slid a pinch of Copenhagen under his lip, dragging his explanation out like a skilled attorney. “Rapid City PD seized them. Detective Harold Soske told me they developed some good prints from the bone whistle, and some partials on the grocery bag. He’ll call if they get a suspect.”

  Manny stood abruptly. He grabbed their paper plates and tossed them into the garbage. He patted his pocket for his notebook, and checked his watch for the first time since entering Big Bat’s. “You going to be on Indian time all day?” he called over his shoulder. “I need to get some work out of you today.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Manny walked to the patrol car with his hand on his throbbing head to ease the itch in his stitches, grateful that he had the case to take his mind off the pain.

  CHAPTER 7

  Willie slowed to allow a cow and her calf to cross the road. “If I had a brother, I wouldn’t want to have to arrest him either. Even if he is an ex-con.”

  Dispatcher Shannon Horn located Reuben’s jobsite from construction permits he had filed on behalf of his Heritage Kids.

  “I keep telling myself it really doesn’t matter if Reuben is the killer or not. Just as long as I do my job. See justice done. All that ideological bullshit. It would easier if it was someone else, though. But right now he’s our best suspect.”

  Willie pulled over and stopped the car. He reached into his briefcase and came away with a handgun in a brown shoulder holster.

  “I don’t need a gun.”

  “You need one here.”

  “I h
aven’t needed one in years, except for qualifications.”

  “Last night should have taught you that you need a gun on the rez. You need to be armed. As many homicides as you’ve investigated should have taught you that an armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Hell, you’re safer walking around Watts or Harlem unarmed in the middle of the night than you are Pine Ridge.”

  “You’re right. It is foolish of me, but I’m kind of rusty with guns.”

  “Don’t worry.” Willie slid the Glock 9 mm from the holster. After dropping the magazine and clearing the round from the chamber, he handed it to Manny. “It’s like a revolver. Just point and shoot. There’s no safety to worry about, and there’s seventeen rounds in that thing, plus this spare mag.”

  “Don’t let Lumpy see you saving my butt.”

  “He won’t know a thing. This is my own gun.”

  Willie drove while Manny wrestled with the adjustment straps. He hadn’t worn a shoulder holster since he first started with the bureau. It had been cool back then, in a Don Johnson-Miami Vice kind of way. But experienced agents were right: Real cops didn’t wear shoulder rigs. He fidgeted until he got it comfortably positioned under his armpit, eased back in the seat, and thought of what he’d say to Reuben. He’d told Willie the truth: It didn’t matter if Reuben was Jason’s killer, Manny would arrest him. But it did matter. He wanted Reuben to be innocent of Jason’s murder like he’d wanted Reuben to be innocent of Billy Two Moons’s murder. And if he’d read Reuben right yesterday, they might have an outside chance of patching things up.

  He envied Willie’s relationship with his aunt Elizabeth and their extended family back at Crow Creek, envied how they looked after one another. Tiospaye had always been the cornerstone of Lakota society, where family ties took precedence over everything else. Tiospaye determined how people conducted their lives.

  Manny and Reuben were the last of their tiospaye. Manny admitted that he wanted some relationship with Reuben, even if only limited. He’d lie awake many nights, fighting to drive his brother from his thoughts, to forget old promises from Reuben that he would always be there if Manny needed him. If only he hadn’t talked with Reuben yesterday, this would just be another assignment to complete before he returned to the academy. He damned his brother now as he damned him untold times after he went to prison.

  Willie hit a rut, and the shoulder strap bound into Manny’s armpit. He wrestled with it until it was loose, then settled back in the seat and listened to Willie. After his folks had drowned at Big Bend Dam near Fort Thompson on the Missouri River in South Dakota, Elizabeth had brought him to Pine Ridge to live with her and Erica. He told Manny how he had no other living relatives except for his aunt Lizzy and his cousin Erica.

  In many ways Willie and Manny shared similar backgrounds. Like Manny, Willie was left orphaned. And like Manny, a loving relative took Willie in as her own. Elizabeth had welcomed Willie into her family and treated him as an equal with Erica. Again the importance of the tiospaye reminded Manny of the Lakota way, going back when warriors failed to return from a hunt or a war party: the surviving family members raised the orphaned children as their own.

  “Aunt Lizzy said your uncle raised you since you were five.”

  Manny smiled. He always smiled when he thought of his uncle Marion. “My aunt Sadie died of complications from diabetes the year I was born, and Unc’s only son died at Chosin in Korea. When my folks died in a car wreck, he took me in even though he couldn’t afford another mouth. We were so poor, the only pet we could afford was a tumbleweed.”

  Willie laughed. “We didn’t have much either, but we didn’t want for anything.”

  The reservation was peppered with the Willies, people who possessed none of the things that White people worked so hard for. Yet the Willies were happy with their lot. Deep inside, Manny wished he could reconnect with that life he once had. If only Quantico wasn’t on another planet than Pine Ridge.

  The droning car motor helped Manny drift in and out of sleep. The aching in his head was now just a dull thud, and he was grateful for the chance to close his eyes. The thump-thump-thump of the tires on highway expansion strips acted like the sound machine he used back home to drown out traffic noise. He dozed in and out, the exhaustion of the last three days evident in his aching muscles and sore joints. In just a few days, the reservation had beaten him to a draw on the homicide case, and had aged him.

  When the car had left pavement for a washboard dirt road, Manny awoke massaging his stitches. Damned thing’s more a two-track than a road. He tried to place where they were. Cows, whose ribs and spines threatened to burst from their skin, stood grazing on sparse scrub bushes on one side of the gravel road. In the ditch on the other side of the road, a Chevy van sat abandoned, every multicolored fender shot full of holes. A six-pack of empty beer bottles littered the grass around the van. “Modern Indian artifacts,” Unc used to say. Willie swerved to miss the glass.

  “Where are we?”

  Willie smiled and turned the radio down. “Just turned onto Route 100 from 18. Your snoring drowned out the radio for the last half hour.” He turned KILI off. “They give you something strong for the pain there at the ER?”

  As if in response to Willie’s question, the squad car hit a rut, and pain shot sharp and deep into Manny’s stitches. A reflex reaction jerked his hand up to his head, and he hit his forehead. Now the throbbing stitches in his hand took his mind off the pain in his head.

  “I kick myself in the ass now that I didn’t take the painkillers they offered.”

  They drove the remaining eleven miles on Route 100 in silence, until Willie slowed for the dirt road leading to the construction site. Fine dust built up on the windshield. They turned and caught a crosswind, and dirt and mortar dust blew off a large concrete-block foundation. Willie stopped the cruiser in front of a dirty Dodge pickup with a magnetic sign on the side announcing that a Lakota Country Times reporter was on-site. “Damned Yellow Horse,” he muttered.

  Manny couldn’t see Yellow Horse, but tops of people’s heads bobbed just above the basement rim as they walked back and forth. “He’s got to be down there.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Making my life miserable.”

  Willie and Manny walked around the brick pile and peered over the edge. Five feet down, Reuben straddled a chalk line. He held a trowel in one hand while four boys, stripped to the waist and glistening in the hot morning sun, handed bricks to another boy. The fifth boy, larger and older than the rest, broke block for a corner piece. He tossed the brick to another boy, also stripped to the waist. “Lenny.”

  “You met him?”

  “First day when I rolled into town.” Lenny tossed the brick to one boy and accepted a clean one from another boy. “What’s the skinny on him?”

  “That’s Lenny Little Boy. And that kid that’s sixteen-goingon-twenty is his brother, Jack. They’re a couple bad ones. They’ve been in more shit than ten plumbers.”

  Jack slung the hammer effortlessly. “Wielded the hammer like it was a part of him,” the witness had told Officer Slow Elk. Each time the boy struck the brick, the sound carried to Manny’s head and he winced while he fought to leave his stitches alone.

  Nathan Yellow Horse, holding a reporter’s notebook, stood in front of Reuben. Yellow Horse wrote while Reuben worked the concrete on the trowel while he talked. Reuben had just grabbed the corner brick from Jack Little Boy when he spotted Willie and Manny. After dropping it, Reuben put his hands on the small of his back and arched. Sweat ran down from his face and chest and soaked his jeans.

  “Kola,” he called out. Yellow Horse looked up at Manny and pocketed his notebook. Reuben grabbed a bandana from his back pocket and dried his neck. He ran the bandana over a wide scar that ran diagonally over one pectoral muscle. Reuben had picked up that wartime souvenir when an incoming RPG hit the Con Thien mess hall one morning in 1967.

/>   Another scar, the result of a fight with some Minneapolis policemen three years later, started at his neck and ended at his upper shoulder. The eagle tattooed across his chest flew a little lower these days, its wings drooping across tired muscles. Still, Reuben was well preserved for his age, and Manny patted his own potbelly without thinking.

  “Kola. Come down here, and help me and Nathan. Real work will do wonders for you.”

  “I can see Yellow Horse is working up a sweat.” Manny stepped to the edge of the hole. The boys stopped working. They glared at Willie’s black Oglala Sioux Tribal Police uniform, then at Manny, who they now knew was an FBI agent. One boy stood clenching his fists, his bare pecs flexing, while another spit his chew into the dirt and glared at them with taut neck muscles. Another boy slipped a knife from a belt sheath and picked his nails, holding it so that the sun glinted off the blade and reflected in Manny’s eyes.

  Jack Little Boy elbowed his way in front of the others and clenched the hammer while he tapped it against his thigh. He cinched up on the handle as if he had intentions to use it.

  “Come down and we’ll visit,” Reuben repeated.

  “Let’s talk up here,” Manny said.

  “Suit yourself.” Reuben dropped his trowel and started the climb up from the hole in the ground. He grabbed the block pile and hoisted himself out of the basement. He winced in pain and massaged his leg. “Don’t ever grow old, little brother.”

  He offered Yellow Horse his hand and pulled the thin man up.

  “What you doing here?”

  “Follow-up,” Yellow Horse answered. “Getting the native perspective on Red Cloud’s murder. Anything you want to say?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then you won’t mind me interviewing your prime suspect?”

  “Who said he was my prime suspect?”

  “Two interviews with Reuben in two days is more than coincidence.”