Death on the Greasy Grass (19 page)

C
HAPTER
24

Manny timed his drive to Rapid City to coincide with lunch break, and arrived at the FBI office while everyone, including Senior Agent in Charge Hard Ass Harris, was out of the office. Manny peeked inside before making his way to his office. He grabbed a stack of messages from his mailbox in passing and closed the door. The jeweler had called with price quotes on his and Clara's wedding rings. Clara had convinced them they should get married while they both had the courage to go through with it, while Manny was still in the “let's get an engagement ring first” mode.

He thumbed to the next message, where Queen City Motors in Spearfish had finished the front fender and quarter panel from where the tree had come out of nowhere in the city park to hit Clara's Cadillac. Manny hadn't thought at the time that he deserved Clara's wrath for wrecking her “baby,” even though he was driving.

The last message was from Stumper LaPierre this morning, and Manny cursed the secretary for not calling him. He snatched his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Stumper. “What we got?”

“First, how's Willie?”

“Not good. Sounds as if his fifty-fifty chance went south.”

Manny imagined Stumper picking his teeth with his pocketknife. “The medical examiner completed the autopsy.”

“Was he able to ID Sam?

Paper shuffling. “No. He hasn't received Sam's military record to compare X-rays and dental records yet, but he's got an expedited request in. Also, he sent DNA samples and toxicology to the FBI lab in Quantico with a ‘hurry-the-hell-up note' as per Senior Special Agent Tanno.”

“Oh that'll get quick action. Now give me the quick and dirty of what the ME did find.”

Stumper shuffling papers. “No soot in the airway. Means Sam was dead at the time of the fire.”

Someone else tried the outside office door and Manny paused until they gave up opening it and left.

“Sam had to be alive or else if he died of smoke inhalation, he would have sucked in soot,” Stumper added.

“Not necessarily.” Manny lowered his voice. “Soot isn't always present with burn victims. Anything else?”

“The ME left a note for you that Sam's hyoid bone was broken.”

“Broken?” Manny sat down, thinking of the strangulation cases he had investigated where the U-shaped bone at the larynx had been snapped off, the only times he had seen such injuries. “A man passed out in bed—whether he died naturally or by smoke inhalation—doesn't get his hyoid bone broken unless . . .”

“Unless someone strangled Sam before the fire was set.”

“Have to have been,” Manny agreed. “Whether it was Sam or not remains in the hands of the ME once he gets that information from the Marine Corps, and we get the tox report from Quantico. I think it's even more important that we talk with Itchy again.”

“I just haven't had time to look for him,” Stumper blurted out. “Between Della Night Tail bitching about Little Dave's still out catting around, to the two meth search warrants we served last night, I've been just a little tied up. But I put the word out on the moccasin telegraph to turn over every rock looking for him.”

“Thanks.”

“And one other thing, the son of that Beauchamp—Emile—called. Yesterday, which is like, last week in France with the time difference.”

“Not quite.” Manny jotted down Beauchamp's phone number and checked his watch: early evening in France. He had just enough time to call and make his escape before the office people returned.

He punched in the international code and Emile Beauchamp's number. After a long interval, a man spoke French with a voice so deep Manny barely caught it. Manny identified himself.

“Ah, Agent Tanno.” Gone was but the slightest accent, his English near perfect. “My father said you needed to speak with me about items he donated to the Crow Tribe for auction.”

“Your father said you knew the items well.”

An easy laugh crossed thousands of miles in a heartbeat. “I loved playing with the artifacts when I was a young boy. I would grab the knife—the one with the black stone imbedded in an antler horn—and stick it in my belt. You do not know how many forts I raided with that knife. Did you ever play Cowboys and Indians, Agent Tanno?”

“I guess I was always stuck playing the Indian.”

“So it was with me.” Beauchamp sounded as if he wanted to play the Indian once again. “I guess it was the spirit of Blaise Beauchamp calling to me, because I felt alive when I played Indian. Sometimes, I just felt ghosts calling me.”

You ought to come to Pine Ridge and play Indian. Give you a perspective other than a romanticized one of what it's like to be one. Wouldn't take you long and you'd be scrambling for a cowboy hat.
“I sometimes feel the spirits calling me as well,” he found himself telling this stranger, and he wished he had more time to talk with Beauchamp about his trapper relative who once lived among the Crow. “I understand your grandfather came by the artifacts unusually.”

“Quite.” Beauchamp paused, and Manny recognized a match being drawn across a striker, and could imagine Emile drawing on a cigarette, could almost see the gold cigarette holder. Manny instinctively patted his own pocket where he once stashed his smokes. “Blaise lived with a Crow woman in the Valley of the Giveaway, but left the area shortly before the Custer Massacre. Did you know a developer put forth plans to build a Little Big Horn theme park some years ago on the outskirts of Paris like the western theme park in Sweden? But it never got off the ground. What a shame.”

“A shame indeed. People would have loved to see men dying and scalps being lifted all over the battlefield.”

“Exactly!”

Manny breathed to gather his composure. “Blaise brought the artifacts with him when he left Crow country?”

“Some of the items,” Emile explained. “When he left to return east, Blaise carried many of the Indian items. He formed a freighting company and went west many times, though never back to Crow country. Whenever he came back east, he had other relics with him. Sioux. Arapaho. Shoshone.”

“And he never connected with his Crow woman again—Pretty Paw?”

“Most lived on reservations by the time he started his freight company.”

Interned
is how Wilson aptly termed it.

“He made a fortune in freight and moved back here to France. Does this answer your questions?”

“It helps,” Manny said. “But I'm most interested in a journal your father included in the things Harlan White Bird was to auction off.”

“The journal. Of course.” Beauchamp pulled the receiver away and hacked a lingering smoker's cough, just like Manny was developing before he quit last year. When Emile stopped, there was another long pause. Another drag. “Blaise's Crow woman—Pretty Paw—would eventually marry a Crow man.”

“Levi Star Dancer.”

“Yes. She outlived Star Dancer by many years. Shortly before her death, she asked the Indian agent at Crow Agency to send Blaise some of her personal things from the time he lived in her father's lodge. Simple things her family was not interested in. Star Dancer's journal was among them.”

“What was Blaise's reaction to receiving the relics?”

More coughing. “Blaise was dead by then, but she had no way of knowing. Grandfather tossed the things in a trunk with the other Indian relics Blaise had collected, and it was forgotten by most of my family.”

“Except by you?”

Emile laughed. “I was a ten-year-old boy sitting beside a musty old trunk in his father's attic, reading a hundred-year-old journal. I imagined I was a Crow warrior, playing Cowboys and Indians. No, Agent Tanno, I did not forget about the relics.”

“Tell me about the journal.”

“The journal.” Emile Beauchamp paused so long Manny feared the line had disconnected. When he began speaking again, Emile measured every word so Manny could understand. “Levi Star Dancer witnessed his friend—White Crow—killed by two Sioux warriors overlooking the Custer battlefield. He was indisposed at the time of the attack on his friend. Running sickness he called it.”

“Running sickness?”

“What you would call diarrhea. Star Dancer had suffered from colonic problems ever since the Sioux warrior—the same one he witnessed killing White Crow—gutshot him in a fight years earlier. It is what killed Star Dancer so young.”

“He wrote about this sickness in the journal?”

“He felt guilt that the sickness caused him to be off in the grass the moment his friend was attacked and killed. He was guilt ridden the rest of his life because he could not help his friend.”

“I can imagine.”

“And there was more,” Emile continued. “The Sioux that killed White Crow next murdered his own friend.”

“The other Sioux warrior?”

“Yes. That is what Star Dancer wrote in the journal.”

Manny thought back to Wilson's display case, to the scalp locks that seemed to talk to Manny. Somehow, he knew the answer before asking it. “Did the journal name White Crow's killer, the one that killed the other Sioux?”

“He wrote the man's name many times: Eagle Bull. Seems like Star Dancer developed an obsession with him. He set out to avenge his friend many times, but Pretty Paw always stopped him.”

Manny closed his eyes, letting Emile's revelation soak in. Eagle Bull would have rode back into camp, victorious that he had killed a Crow warrior. He would have hoisted the scalp high for all the lodges to see. He would have showed his own friend's scalp around, his war deeds claiming White Crow had killed Eagle Bull's friend, and he avenged his death. He would have been an instant hero. His war deeds would be told for many generations; young boys would look up to him, try to emulate Eagle Bull's deeds.

“One thing I'm still curious about—why did Pretty Paw send her things to Blaise, when Star Dancer's own children may have wanted them?”

“Hollow Horn Star Dancer was Blaine's natural child,” Emile said. “You'll read that in the journal as well.”

“So Hollow Horn knew Blaise was his natural father?”

Static over the lines. “He did. But Blaise did not know she had been pregnant when he left Crow country, or he would have stayed and honored her, I believe. But Hollow Horn never wanted anything to do with his natural father. And kept Blaise a secret all his life. Only when I read the journal did I realize Blaise had a Crow son—long after Blaise died. This bothered my grandfather, and is why my father decided to donate the artifacts to the Crow Tribe.”

Manny thanked Emile and disconnected, sitting quietly at his desk digesting what he'd just learned. The journal could harm Wilson Eagle Bull. His renowned reputation for decency, handed down through generations, would be tarnished. The sins of the father revisited the sons, or in Wilson's case, the sins of the great-grandfather. But would that be enough to want to kill someone over? Or have someone do the killing for him, like Carson Degas? As a Vietnam Marine, Wilson had surely seen—and done—his share of killing. Perhaps one more would make little difference. Perhaps this was the real Eagle Bull curse: treachery.

And the journal revealed the half-French child Hollow Horn. Levi Star Dancer and Pretty Paw had kept the family secret. Such a child from a Crow woman and French trapper would prove Chenoa hadn't the Crow purity she claimed. Had Chenoa found out who had the journal and arranged to have someone steal it back? Or was the information contained so damning that she arranged for Sergeant Tess's ammunition to be switched to prevent Harlan from telling the world what it contained? Or was Harlan putting the bite on her, receiving periodic blackmail money?

Sampson Star Dancer had been an unexpected iron bar jammed in the cog of whoever wanted the journal's secrets to remain so. Sam had read it. Sam could tell the world what it contained. And someone had strangled a man presumed to be Sam in his ramshackle house before setting fire to it.

A door slammed outside Manny's office and he peeked out. Hard Ass Harris walked to the coffee station and grabbed the pot in passing as he headed for the watercooler. Manny eased his door closed as he flattened himself against the wall and silently made his way to the front door, escape just feet away. His cell phone beeped a message. The SAC spun around, eyes wide, a slight grin widening across his face.

“Just the man I want so see.”

Manny dropped his head and started for the ass chewing, and checked his message from Clara just before he closed Hard Ass's door: “Get to the hospital ASAP.”

C
HAPTER
25

1887

CROW AGENCY, MONTANA TERRITORY

Pretty Paw dabbed sweat from her husband's forehead with her apron. Levi forced a smile.
“Aho.”
Thanks.

With one hand Hollow Horn squeezed his father's hand, the other wiping tears from his eyes with his shirtsleeve. The boy had just turned ten, yet he was much older, having seen death many times before. Hollow Horn turned away, and Levi knew his son didn't want his father's last image of his son to be crying. Levi painfully sat a little higher on the pillow. He brought Hollow Horn's hand to his parched and cracked lips and kissed the back of the boy's hand. Even that slight movement brought pain shooting through his gut and he slid lower, flatter on the bed.

“Lay there,” Pretty Paw scolded him. “The sacred man is coming . . .”

Levi laughed, and he was rewarded with an intense pain that shot clear through his gut. “Can't you leave me and my
baachilape
in peace, woman.” Levi knew that inner person that always dwelled within him, his constant companion, perched on the end of the bed. His
baachilape
would be with him when he traveled to the
Ammilliwaxpe,
west where the sun sets, west where the dead have gone. West where First Maker waited for him.

Pretty Paw's sobs brought him around, and he patted her hand. “Even on the other side there are homes. I will be all right.”

“Lay there quiet.”

“And linger another hour?” Pain shot through Levi anew, pinning him to the feather-ticking mattress soaked with sweat from hours of agony.

His breathing came in gasps now, and sweat stung his eyes as he forced them to remain open, wanting to see his family to the end, wanting to tell the Old Ones what a blessing they had been his entire life.

Pretty Paw laid a wet rag across his head, but he brushed it away. “The journal,” he said to Hollow Horn. “Get it for me.”

Hollow Horn grabbed Levi's possible bag from where it hung from antelope horns beside the fireplace mantel and withdrew the journal. He held it away in front of him as if, by bringing it close, some terrible affliction would consume him. Levi tried untying the thong holding the journal closed, but dropped it. He moaned in pain, and Pretty Paw untied it and took out the journal. Levi flipped to the middle pages and grabbed a stack of folded-up papers and handed it to Hollow Horn. “These are land deeds, and one day they will make a difference to our clan.”

Hollow Horn clutched them close and backed away as if the deeds were deeds to a gold mine. “I will keep them safe until your return.”

Levi nodded his approval and turned to Pretty Paw. “A pencil. Please.”

She reached behind his ear and grabbed a stub with just enough lead left for one entry. “What will you write, my husband?” Her sobs drowned out Levi's grated breathing. “If you stay with us, I'll let you teach me the White man's words.”

Levi smiled.

“I promise I will learn.”

“I do not have time.” He patted her hand again. “The One Who Is Not Here awaits me on the other side.”

Pretty Paw stroked Levi's head. “Do you not think the Old Ones will forgive you if you speak White Crow's name just this once?”

He shook his head; he dared not speak, his strength was fading so quickly. He had just enough strength to wet the pencil with his tongue and make a final entry before leaving to meet White Crow, his final entry cursing
Eagle Bull
.