by Shadow Prey
“Take it easy,” Yellow Hand said again, rubbing his face. “Come on over and sit down. Davenport won’t fuck with you.”
There was another moment of stress; then, as suddenly as he’d become angry, the tattooed man relaxed and smiled. His teeth were a startling white against his dark face. “Sure. Jeez, I’m sorry, but you come on sudden,” he said. He bobbed his head in apology.
Lucas backed up a few steps, wary of the sudden change, uneasy about the eyes. Witch eyes. The tattooed man moved over to Yellow Hand’s mattress and sat down on a corner. Lucas watched him for a second, then stepped closer to Yellow Hand, until he was looming over him. He spoke at the top of the teenager’s head.
“What do you hear, Yellow Hand? I need everything about Ray Cuervo getting his throat cut. Anything about this guy Benton. Anybody who was friends with Bluebird.”
“I don’t know about that shit,” Yellow Hand said. “I knew Bluebird from out on the res.”
“At Fort Thompson?”
“Yeah, man. His sister and my mom used to walk down below the dam and go fishing.”
“What do you hear about him lately?” Lucas reached down and grabbed Yellow Hand’s hair, just above his ear, and pulled his head back. “Gimme something, Yellow Hand. Talk to me.”
“I don’t know shit, man, I’m telling the truth,” Yellow Hand said sullenly, jerking his hair free. Lucas squatted so he could look Yellow Hand straight in the face. The tattooed man watched Lucas’ face over Yellow Hand’s shoulder.
“Look. When Benton got killed, you got picked up as a witness,” Lucas said, putting a friendly note in his voice. “That’s on the record. There are some cops putting together a list. Your name is on it. That means some hardasses from Robbery-Homicide will be checking you out. They aren’t going to be friendly, like me. They aren’t gonna be no fuckin’ pussycats. They aren’t going to take care of you, Yellow Hand. If you give me something, I can deal them off. But I got to have something. If I don’t get something, they’ll figure I didn’t squeeze hard enough.”
“I could go back to the res,” Yellow Hand said.
Lucas shook his head. “What are you going to smoke on the res? Sagebrush? What are you gonna do, sneak down to the tribal store and shoplift boomboxes? Gimme a break, Yellow Hand. You got all these nice K Marts you can work in the Cities. You got the candy man coming around every night. Shit, you got guys peddling crack at Fort Thompson?”
A tear trickled down Yellow Hand’s face and he sniffed. Lucas looked at him. “What have you got, man?” Lucas asked again.
“I heard one thing,” Yellow Hand admitted. He glanced at the tattooed man, then quickly looked away. “That’s all. It probably don’t mean shit.”
“Let me hear it. I’ll decide.”
“You know that hassle last summer? Like two, three months ago, between the bikers and the Indian people out in the Black Hills?”
“Yeah, I saw something about it in the papers.”
“What it was, was these bikers come in from all over. They have this big rally up in Sturgis and they have like a truce. There’s Angels and Outlaws and Banditos and Satan’s Slaves and every fuckin’ thing. A whole bunch of them stay in this campground out at a place called Bear Butte. They call it the Bare Butt campground, which already makes some Indian people angry.”
“What’s this got to do with Bluebird?”
“Let me finish, man,” Yellow Hand said angrily.
“Okay.”
“Some of these bikers, they get drunk at night and they like to run up the side of the butte on their bikes. The butte’s a holy place and there were some medicine people up there, with some guys looking for visions. They came down and they had guns. That’s what started the trouble.”
“And Bluebird was there?” asked Lucas.
“That’s what I heard. He was with this group, searching for visions. And they came down with guns. Yesterday, when this guy in New York gets killed, I was in Dork’s Pool Hall down on Lyndale?”
“Yeah?”
“Some guy had a picture cut out of the StarTribune from the biker thing. He was showing it around. There was a bunch of cops and a bunch of bikers and the Indian medicine people. One of the guys with a rifle was Bluebird.”
“Okay, that’s something,” Lucas said, patting Yellow Hand on the knee.
“Jesus,” said the tattooed man, looking at Yellow Hand.
“What about you?” Lucas asked him. “Where were you during this shit?”
“I got back from Los Angeles yesterday. I still got the bus ticket over by my bed. And I ain’t heard nothing, except bullshit.”
“What bullshit?”
“You know, that Bluebird went crazy and decided to kill a few of the white people sitting on his back. And how that’s a good thing. Everybody says it’s a good thing.”
“What do you know about Bluebird?”
The tattooed man shrugged. “Never met him. I know the family name, but I’m from Standing Rock. I never went over to Fort Thompson except once, for a powwow. The place is out of the way of everything.”
Lucas looked at him and nodded. “What were you doing in Los Angeles?”
“Just went there to look around, you know. Look at movie stars.” He shrugged.
“All right,” Lucas said after a moment. He looked down at Yellow Hand. There wouldn’t be much more. “You two just sit here for a minute, okay?”
Lucas stepped over to the tattooed man’s bed. On the floor on the far side, out of sight from the door, was a willow stick with a small red rag tied around the tip in a bundle, what looked like a crumpled bus ticket, and a money clip. Inside the clip were a South Dakota driver’s license and a photograph pressed between two pieces of plastic. Lucas bent over and scooped it up.
“What you doin’ with my stuff, man?” the tattooed man said. He was on his feet again, vibrating.
“Nothing. Just looking,” Lucas said. “Is this what I think it is?”
“It’s a prayer stick, from an old ceremony down on the river. I carry it for luck.”
“Okay.” Lucas had seen one once before. He carefully laid it on the mattress. The bus ticket was out of Los Angeles, dated three days earlier. It might have been an arranged alibi, but didn’t feel that way. The SoDak license carried a fuzzy photo of the tattooed man in a white T-shirt. The white eyes glistened like ball bearings, like the eyes of Jesse James in nineteenth-century photographs. Lucas checked the name. “Shadow Love?” he said. “That’s a beautiful name.”
“Thank you,” said the tattooed man. His smile clicked on like a flashlight beam.
Lucas looked at the fading color snapshot. A middle-aged woman in a shapeless dress stood by a rope clothesline. The line was strung between a tree and the corner of a white clapboard house. There was a board fence in the background, and in the distance, a factory chimney. A city, maybe Minneapolis. The woman was laughing, holding up a pair of jeans that had frozen board-stiff. The trees in the background were bare, but the woman was standing on green grass. Early spring or late fall, Lucas thought.
“This your mom?” he asked.
“Yeah. So what?”
“So nothing,” Lucas said. “A guy who carries a picture of his mom, he can’t be all bad.”
• • •
After the Point, Lucas gave up and headed back toward City Hall, stopping once at a public telephone outside the StarTribune.
“Library,” she said. She was small and wistful, falling into her forties. Nobody at the paper paid her any attention.
“You alone?” he asked.
“Yes.” He could feel her catch her breath.
“Could you call something up for me?”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Last week of July, first week of August. There was a confrontation between bikers and Indians out in South Dakota.”
“Do you have a key word?” she asked.
“Try ‘Bear Butte.’ ” Lucas spelled it for her. There was a moment’s silence.
“Three hits,” she said.
“Did you use any art?” There was another moment of silence.
“Yes,” she said. “August first. Three columns, page three.”
“Yours or AP?”
“Ours.” She named the photographer.
“What are the chances of getting a print?”
“I’d have to lift it from the files,” she said, in a hushed voice.
“Could you?”
Another few seconds passed. “Where are you?”
“Right down at the corner, in my car.”
“It’ll be a minute.”
Sloan was leaving City Hall when Lucas arrived.
“Winter coming,” he said as they stopped on the sidewalk.
“Still warm,” said Lucas.
“Yeah, but it’s already getting dark,” Sloan said, looking up the street. Cars were creeping out toward the interstate, their lights on.
“Did you get anything today? After I left you?”
“Naw.” Then the other man brightened. “I did get a look at that woman cop from New York.”
Lucas grinned. “She’s worth looking at?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s got a lip, you know? She’s got this little overbite and she’s got this kind of soft look about her like, I don’t know, like she’d moan or something . . . .”
“Jesus, Sloan . . .”
“Wait’ll you take a look at her,” Sloan said.
“Is she still here?”
“Yeah. Inside. She went out with Shearson this morning,” Sloan laughed. “The lover boy. The good suits.”
“He made a move on her?” Lucas asked.
“I’d bet on it,” Sloan said. “When he came back, he spent two hours studying his files awful hard. She was sitting around looking cool.”
“Hmph.” But Lucas grinned. “How’d she get with Shearson? I thought she was going out with you.”
“Naw. Shearson gave Lester a blow job and got her assigned to him. Squire her around.”
“He’s so suave,” Lucas said. He said “swave.”
“Good title. You ought to write a song,” Sloan said, and went on his way.
Lucas saw her in the hallway outside the Robbery—Homicide office. The madonna from the cemetery. She was walking toward him on high heels and he noticed her legs first, then her dark eyes, like pools. He thought about the tattooed man, the shiny pale eyes like flint, eyes you bounced off. With the woman, you fell in. She was wearing a tweed jacket and skirt with a ruffled-front blouse and black tie. She had a paper coffee cup in her hand and Lucas held the door for her.
“Thanks.” She smiled and went through, headed for Anderson’s cubbyhole. Her voice was low and buttery.
“Um,” said Lucas, tagging behind. Her hair was done up in a slightly lopsided bun and a few loose strands fell across her neck.
“I’m leaving,” she told Anderson, leaning into his cubbyhole. “If anything comes overnight, you’ve got the number.”
Anderson was sitting behind an IBM terminal, chewing on the end of a chopstick. The remains of a Chinese dinner were congealing in a white foam carton on his desk and the office stank of overcooked water chestnuts and rum-soaked cigars. “Okay. We’ll see if we can find something better for you tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Harmon.”
She turned and almost bumped into Lucas. He caught a faint scent that was neither water chestnut nor cigar, something expensive from Paris. Anderson said to her, “Do you know Lucas? Davenport?”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, stepping back and offering her hand. Lucas took it and shook once, smiling politely. She was larger than he’d thought at first. Deep-breasted, a little pudgy. “You’re the guy who blew up the Maddog.”
“He’s the one,” Anderson said from behind her. “You get anything, Lucas?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said, still looking at the woman. “Harmon didn’t mention your name.”
“Lily Rothenburg,” she said. “Lieutenant, NYPD.”
“Homicide?”
“No. I work out of the . . . out of a precinct in Greenwich Village.”
Anderson’s head was swiveling between them like a spectator at a tennis match.
“How come you’re on this one?” Lucas asked. Inside his head, he was doing an inventory. He was wearing a $400 Brooks Brothers tweed sport coat with a pale rose stripe, a dark-blue shirt, tan slacks and loafers. He should look pretty good, he thought.
“Long story,” she said. She nodded at the manila envelope in his hand. “What did you get? If you don’t mind my asking?”
“A photograph of Bluebird taken on the first of August,” he said. He took the photo out of the envelope and handed it to her. “He’s the guy with the rifle over his shoulder.”
“Who are these people?” A small frown line appeared on her forehead, connecting her bushy dark eyebrows.
“A group of Sioux vision-seekers and a couple of medicine men. I don’t know who’s who, but they had guns and Bluebird was with them a month ago.”
She looked at him over the top of the photograph and their eyes clicked together like two pennies in a pocket. “This could be something,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“Friend,” Lucas said.
She broke her eyes away and turned the photo over. The remnants of routing slips were pasted on the back. “A newspaper,” she said. “Can we get the other shots on the roll?”
“Think it’d be worth the trouble?”
“Yes,” she said. She put her index finger on the head of one of the figures in the photo. “See this guy?”
Lucas looked at the photo again. The tip of her finger was touching the head of a stocky Indian man, but only the outer rim of his face and one eye were visible. The rest was eclipsed behind the head of another figure in the foreground.
“What about him?” He took the photograph and looked more closely at it.
“That could be our man,” she said. “The guy who lit up Andretti. It looks a lot like him, but I need a better shot to be sure.”
“Whoa.” Anderson eased out of his chair to take a look. The lumpy mound of Bear Butte was in the background, gray and brooding, a lonely northern outpost of the Black Hills. In the foreground, a group of Indians, wearing calico shirts and jeans, were gathered behind one of the elderly medicine men. Most of the men were looking to the left of the camera, toward a group of sheriff’s deputies. Bluebird was there with his gun, one of the few who were looking more or less at the camera.
“So how do we get back to your friend and see what else is on the negatives?” Lily asked.
“I’ll talk to the chief tonight,” Lucas said. “We’ll have to meet with some of the people at the paper tomorrow morning. First thing.”
“Tomorrow?” she snapped, incredulous. “Christ, the guy’s on his way here right now. We’ve got to get going tonight.”
“That would be . . . difficult,” Lucas said hesitantly.
“What’s difficult? We get the negs, print them and find somebody who knows my guy’s name.”
“Look, I know the papers here. They’ll need three meetings and eight consultations before they’ll make the pictures,” Lucas said. “That won’t get done tonight. There’s no way that we’ll see the negatives.”
“If we put on enough heat . . .”
“We’re talking bureaucracy here, okay? We can’t move it faster than it’s willing to move. And if we go tonight, there’s a good chance I’ll burn my friend. The first thing they’ll do is look at their files, and they’ll find their record photo’s gone. I don’t want to do that. I want to get it back in the file.”
“Jesus Christ, you fuckin’ . . .” She snapped her mouth shut.
“Shitkickers?”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” she lied.
“Bullshit. I’ll tell you what. I’ll get as much done tonight as can get done. All the newspaper people will get called, it’ll all be explained, they can have all their meetings, and we’ll be over there at eight t
omorrow morning, looking at prints.”
Her eyes searched his face for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said finally.
“Look,” said Lucas, trying to win her over. “Your killer is driving a junker. If he pushed it as hard as he could, he wouldn’t get here until tomorrow night anyway. Not unless he’s got a relief driver and they really hammered it out the whole way.”
“He was alone in the motel . . . .”
“So we don’t lose anything,” Lucas said. “And I save my friend’s ass, which is a pretty high priority.”
“Okay,” Lily said. She nodded, her eyes on his face, then stepped past him toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Harmon.”
“Yeah.” Anderson looked after her as she went through the door. When she was gone, he turned to Lucas, a small smile playing on his face.
“You got the look,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Like a bunch of people look after they talk to her. Like you been hit on the forehead with a ball-peen hammer,” Anderson said.
• • •
Daniel was eating dinner.
“What happened?” he asked when Lucas identified himself.
“We came up with a photo from the StarTribune,” Lucas said. He explained the rest of it.
“And Lillian thinks he might be the killer?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah.”
“Damn, that’s good. We can get some mileage out of this. I’ll talk to the people at the Trib,” Daniel said. “What do you think about the approach?”
“Tell them we need the rest of the negatives on that roll and any other rolls they have. Argue that the photos were taken at a public news event, that there is no secret film involved—nothing involving sources, nothing confidential. Tell them if they help catch Andretti’s killer, we’ll give them the story. And they’ll already have the exclusive pictures that solved the assassination.”
“You don’t think they’ll pull the confidentiality shit?” Daniel asked.
“I don’t see why they should,” Lucas said. “The pictures weren’t confidential. And we’re talking about serial assassination of major political figures, not some kind of horseshit inciting-to-riot thing.”