“Just an old flame wanting to rekindle, not for any good purpose I can figure out. What you got on the accident?”
“You’re one tough bastard, I got to say that for you.” Willie flipped through a stack of Polaroids and showed one to Manny. The Taurus had been shortened several feet as a result of the rear-ending: it was at least half as tall because of the rollover, and there wasn’t an intact window left. “Most men would have been dead. Maybe it’s because you had this.” Willie held back a corner of the bedsheet to expose Manny’s beaded turtle. His medicine bundle, still hanging from the leather thong around his neck, watched over him. “Officers said you clutched your wopiye like you planned to walk the Spirit Road with it. Maybe you’re not dead because of it.”
“I ain’t dead?” Manny wanted to tell Willie about his experience waiting for the truck driver to finish him off. But such a highly personal vision would have to wait before he shared it with anyone. “What do you know about the wreck?”
“We know we damned near got another agent sent out on this Red Cloud investigation,” Lumpy called from the doorway. He waddled across the room and stood beside Willie, who, sitting down, was about even with Lumpy’s shoulders. “I passed Desirée in the hall. She said you were doing just fine. I told her I’m sure she had brightened your day.”
“Thanks a hell of a lot.” Manny tried sitting and got a couple inches higher up on the pillow this time. “Will someone tell me what the hell happened?” He propped himself on one elbow. Pain, intense and biting, radiated from his chest to his navel, and he eyed Lumpy through his one unbandaged but bloodshot eye.
Lumpy smiled. “Well, Hotshot, seems like someone stole an F-350 and ran you off the road.”
“You found the truck then?”
“A dozen yards from where you rolled, but no one was around. Whoever did the deed left you for dead. Probably caught a ride from someone else, probably also involved. Means more than one suspect, I’m thinking.”
Manny peeked around the bandage at Willie. “Anything in that truck that could ID the driver?”
Willie began speaking, but Lumpy interrupted. “The truck was stolen from Reuben’s jobsite. It belongs to a contractor installing the electrical. The owner leaves the truck there when he knocks off work and grabs a ride from another electrician back to Hot Springs. The guy didn’t even know it was stolen until the Fall River County SO talked with him. We’re bringing in Reuben with all his little urchins for interviews as we speak.”
“Any prints?”
Lumpy nodded. “We lifted a ton of clear prints, like the killer wanted to get caught. We already faxed them to Pierre for identification, and Hot Springs took a set of elimination prints from the truck owner for us.”
“Anything else?” A rib rubbed a lung and pain shot down through Manny’s entire body. He dropped back down onto the pillow and sucked in shallow breaths.
“Shoe prints,” Willie said. Lumpy glared at him.
Manny smiled. The kid was growing cojones after all.
“Big shoes,” Willie went on. “Someone stood next to your window, probably checking if you were dead.”
Manny vaguely remembered the bright light that had filtered through his bleeding eyelids. “How big were the shoes?”
“Like we found at Jason’s murder, but not the same tread. This one is distinct. I’ll dig up the shoe book later and see if I can get a match.” He reached for his can of chew, then quickly put it back into his pocket when a nurse poked her head into the room.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“Just fine,” Manny answered, and waited until she left before pressing Willie.
“So, size ten or thereabouts?”
“Lots of people got big feet,” Lumpy blurted out.
Manny glanced down at Lumpy’s feet.
“Thank God, or we’d all be suspects,” Elizabeth added from the doorway. She walked to the bed and glared at Lumpy. He excused himself and left without wishing Manny a speedy recovery.
“Is that hot coffee I smell?” she asked Willie. “Maybe you could get your old aunt a cup.”
“Sure enough, Aunt Lizzy.” Willie turned the chair around for her and disappeared through the doorway. When Willie left, Elizabeth sat on the chair beside Manny’s bed. “I’m sure you’ve told it a dozen times, but what happened?”
Manny turned his head so he could look at Elizabeth. He knew people could often remember things from their childhood, but couldn’t recall what happened a few moments before an accident or traumatic incident. It surprised him that he remembered the details of last night with such clarity.
“So you saw the driver?”
Manny shook his head. “I never opened my eyes. I played possum as best I could. It must have worked, because I’m still kicking, though not as high or as easy as yesterday.”
“Then you got no idea who?”
“None.”
Willie lumbered into the room with coffee for Elizabeth and Manny. “Just don’t tell the nurses here or they’ll scalp me for sure.”
Manny forced a wink. Sympathetic movement of his injured eye shot pain back across his forehead. “I won’t breathe a word. Hell—I won’t hardly breathe.”
Elizabeth bent and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her lips brushed his bruised skin. It was soothing, the fragrance of her perfume. The fragrance of—what, another forgotten memory?—whatever perfume she used was pleasant compared to the sanitary smell of the hospital room.
They sipped their coffee, and Willie showed Elizabeth the photos. She shook her head. “It’s amazing you’re not dead, by the looks of this car.”
Willie smiled. “Like I told him, he’s tough.”
Elizabeth finished her cup and tossed it in the trash as she stood. “Have to get back to the grind. I’ll come see you when you get out.” She bent and kissed his cheek once again before she left.
Clara Downing briefly shared the doorway with Elizabeth. “Hello, Clara.”
“Well, hello, Elizabeth.” Manny swore the temperature in the room dropped several degrees. “You don’t have to leave.”
“The tribe doesn’t pay me for socializing.”
She brushed past Clara, who watched her go, before she turned to Manny.
Clara held a large bouquet of roses in front of her like it was a magic wand that would mystically heal him. The flowers, and especially Clara, perked him up enough that he felt on the road to Wellville already. She searched for a vase, and found one in a cupboard beneath the sink. She filled it with water and set the flowers on the tray table next to Manny’s bed. She looked at Willie.
“This is Officer William With Horn,” Manny introduced him. “And he was just going to say good-bye to his aunt Elizabeth.”
Willie looked like a big kid caught dipping into the cookie jar when he finally caught Manny’s meaning. “Yeah, better catch up with Aunt Lizzy.”
“Did you just happen to pop in?” Clara scooted the chair closer to the bed after Willie left. Her perfume was different from Elizabeth’s, not as sweet, more subtle. It took him back to their first meeting at the Red Cloud offices. “Just happen to be in the neighborhood?”
Clara laughed. “No. I came home to the Rosebud for a day visit and called the OST police dispatch for you. I had some things I wanted to run by you concerning Jason, when they told me you almost died in an accident.”
Manny’s laugh shot pain through his chest. “It’s not quite that bad, and it wasn’t an accident. Someone deliberately ran me off the road, but I was lucky. I just got some superficial cuts, and my eye will be swollen shut for a few days by the feel of it, and floating ribs on my one side took a beating. Other than that, I’ll be up and around soon.”
Clara smiled. His face flushed. “You said you had information for me?”
She nodded. “The corporation—that is, I—ordered a full audit on Jason’s books. Dunn, Dunn, and Winthrop out of Billings worked on it, and they found some odd irregularities.”
“Such as?”
He struggled to sit up, and Clara propped a pillow behind his back. Her hand rested on his shoulder for only a second. He felt stirrings that confirmed he was very much alive after all, stirrings he could get used to. “What irregularities?”
“Jason sent Harvard Business School gobs of money every year, from 1989 to 1995.”
The answer came to him easily. “Erica.”
“Your niece?”
Manny nodded. “She attended Harvard those years.” He sat up straighter, and reached for his coffee on the sliding tray beside his bed. Without thinking, he confided in Clara. He told her about Erica’s full-ride Harvard scholarship, with a healthy stipend each month. “Erica was the first Oglala to be awarded such a scholarship. And even though she was an outstanding high school athlete and her GPA was through the roof, folks were left scratching their heads as to how she landed it.”
“So it wasn’t a scholarship, after all,” Clara said. “Jason footed the bill for her education. Why would he do such a thing?”
“Perhaps she’s really Jason’s daughter.” The answer rolled quickly off Manny’s lips before he could suck it back. But it was possible that Jason could have been her father. He told Clara about his dinner date with Erica, when she’d pointed out that Jason was old enough to be her father. “During the whole time she never once mentioned Reuben, never once asked about him. I thought that maybe she’d decided to forget her father, to disallow him in her life.”
“And maybe,” Clara reasoned, “it was because she finally found out that Jason, and not your brother, is her natural father. Maybe she doesn’t want any contact with Reuben because of that.”
“You’re turning into a first-rate FBI agent.”
“Not me.” Clara frowned. “All this is a little scary as it is. But you said yourself she looks like Reuben.”
“I said she has Reuben’s cheekbones, his skin tone. But Jason had those same features.”
Clara nodded and poured ice water into a cup from a plastic pitcher on the bedside tray. She sipped from a straw as she continued. “There is one other thing, though. Remember I mentioned Jason made a trip to Minneapolis a couple weeks before he was killed? Well, I found the boarding stubs from a charter airline in Rapid. Jason flew out of Rapid City Regional to Minneapolis. And the auditors found he was sending money to a Clifford Coyote monthly, by way of a post office box in Pine Ridge.”
“Who is Clifford Coyote?”
“Not a clue,” Clara answered. “But just as strange is Jason flying to Minneapolis. He never flew anywhere. He had a phobia of flying, and if he had gone to Minneapolis on business, he would have driven.”
He understood Jason’s fear. Manny had developed an acute fear of flying in the army while in Germany, where he had to fly often. The bureau required him to fly, but he always opted for driving when he could, even though his driving was more dangerous. Years of working to overcome his flying phobia had helped him enough that he could control it, but had Jason been able to do the same thing? Suddenly, he swung his legs over the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Investigating.” Manny hobbled over to the closet to check for his clothes. “And the one person who might have some answers just walked out the door.”
Clara drove while Manny held his bandaged ribs. They pulled into Big Bat’s just as Elizabeth disappeared inside. He opened the car door, but Clara put her hand on his arm. “My guess is she’ll take her lunch to her office. Better to confront her there, I think.”
“See, agent material in the making.”
They waited until Elizabeth emerged. Manny got out of the car and started after her. He couldn’t walk fast enough to catch her and called out her name. She stopped. When she saw him, panic brushed her face a split second before a frown furrowed her forehead.
“Manny, what are you doing out of the hospital? The nurses told me you were going to be there at least a couple days.”
“We’ve got to talk. It’s important.” His words came out in great gasps as he clutched his ribs.
“We can talk in my office.” She led the way across the street. He flashed five fingers twice to Clara behind his back. Ten minutes. He followed Elizabeth into the finance office. He had to stop and catch his breath, and found breathing less painful if he bent over. Elizabeth was at his side. She put her arm around his shoulders and helped him into her office. She eased him into a chair beside her desk. He started speaking, stopped and held up his hand, and finally spoke when he caught his breath.
“What did you forget to ask me at the hospital?”
Manny knew there was no easy way to ask the question. “Is Jason Erica’s father?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“One that I need to know.”
“What prompted all this?”
When Manny taught interviewing and interrogation, he always explained the many ways people avoided answering questions. One way was stalling until they could think of an answer that sounded convincing. Elizabeth was stalling now, and Manny pressed home his question before she could regroup.
“Jason funded Erica’s college the entire six years she was in Harvard. He somehow made it appear as if she’d received a scholarship. He wouldn’t have paid her way unless he had a good reason—like he was her father.”
“How dare you ask me that.”
“I dare because it’s my job. The question is simple, even if the reasons may not be.”
Elizabeth put her sandwich on her desk and sat in the chair opposite Manny. She rested her arms on the desk and leaned close. “Reuben is Erica’s father.”
“Elizabeth, I already have an agent running down the info from the college end,” he lied.
Elizabeth dropped her eyes. Those interviewing classes again: Manny had won.
“We were all in AIM, we lived AIM together,” she began. “A year before Reuben killed Billy Two Moons, Jason graduated from college and moved to Rapid City to work in the family business. When Reuben went to prison, Jason came around here a lot. He and Reuben were best friends before the Two Moons incident, and Jason was like Erica’s godfather. He took her to concerts in Rapid when he could, took her on day trips other times. He took her to the powwow on Standing Rock once. Jason always treated Erica as if she was his own daughter.”
“That still doesn’t answer why he would pay for her college and grad school.”
Elizabeth sat back in her chair. “Erica landed a scholarship to Harvard out of high school. Thank God and affirmative action, they scooped her up. But the tuition was only a small part of what she had to pay for. There were books, lab fees, dorm fees, and just day-to-day expenses that she had no money for. So Jason came up with the idea to supplement the scholarship.
“But we didn’t want anyone thinking just like you do now. We didn’t want anyone whispering that Jason was really Erica’s father, so we concocted a ruse. Jason sent money to Harvard every month, and they told Erica it was part of her scholarship.”
Elizabeth made sense, at least on the surface, but digging below the surface was something Manny did well. “I had to ask.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Your job, right?”
“Sure, my job.” He used the edge of the desk to stand. He limped toward the door and paused. “Do you remember Alex Jumping Bull?”
Blood drained from her face. “I remember him vaguely. He moved away from here years ago.”
“Moved, or disappeared?”
She shrugged. “Why?”
Manny shrugged. “His name came up, is all. Thanks, Elizabeth. And I am truly sorry for the questions.”
“I believe you are,” she said. This time she didn’t move to help him.
Manny used the wall for support. He had to cock his head to look through his good eye. People he passed in the hallway witnessed a Halloween caricature of the mummy come trickor-treating a few months early, but that was all right. With the information he had gathered the last few hours, here and at the hospital, he might not have to be around the rese
rvation much longer for people to stare at.
CHAPTER 14
Clara stopped the car beside the curb outside Manny’s apartment.
“Pull up a little farther.”
“Why?”
“There,” Manny pointed. “I don’t want her to see me.” Desirée stood framed by the window. She hadn’t seen them yet, and Manny hoped she would continue looking the other way until he drove off.
“An admirer?”
“More like an old nightmare.”
Clara pulled the car a hundred feet ahead and stopped. She turned in the seat and faced him. “I’m not so sure about this.”
“It’ll be fine. I still got one good eye I can drive with.” He winked it, bringing sympathetic pain to the bandaged one. “I can still drive good enough,” he insisted.
“But my car. My baby. Willie said you’re not the best of drivers with both eyes working, and cracked ribs that double you over in pain every time you hit a bump won’t help any.”
“Is that all you’re worried about? Your car?”
“I’m worried about you, too.” Clara looked at Manny and leaned over the seat. Her lips brushed his cheek.
Manny felt the blood rush to his face and blurted, “What can I hit just driving the few miles to Reuben’s?”
She sighed and ran her hand over the Cadillac’s leather seats. “I guess it isn’t that far. Besides, you need someone here to sign for your new rental car when Hertz delivers it.”
Clara had put the key in the lock before Desirée realized someone was next door, and Manny drove away before she saw him.
He turned onto the highway and digested the happenings of the last few days. He needed to do some road work, to run, to get into that zone where he sorted things out. But with his injuries, all he would be able to manage was a pained shuffle, and he’d have to think without the runner’s high. He had uncovered some facts about Jason’s murder, which caused someone to run him off the road and bury a hammer in his head. Then someone, presumably the same person who failed with the hammer, struck him with the stolen truck and left him for dead. And even though there would be many people on the reservation who wanted him out of the way, all roads led to Reuben.
Death Along the Spirit Road Page 17