Montana (29 page)

Lola leaned in, savoring the physical sensation of the moment, the withheld knowledge humming within her like a strikeout pitch, gathering force with the windup: “I mean your father. Vince Senior. Big Fanny.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Sweet, sure release, the ball hanging high and lovely before dropping into the inevitable curve below the slicing bat.

It was 12:30.

“Oh, come on, Little Fanny. How long did you think you’d get away with playing Indian?”

T
HE BACKGROUND
noises rushed back in, loud enough to drown out the sound of the opening front door. If it had opened. Which it apparently had not, no collective turning of heads to see who could be enticed to sit down, share a cup of coffee, jaw about the wildfires and wheat prices and the inexplicable bumper crop of bodies.

“I have to admit,” Lola continued, talking fast now, needing to keep Johnny there until the sheriff showed up, “it’s impressive. The hair—dyed
and
conked. The spray tan. I found all the boxes in the bathroom trash can at your—Johnny’s—grandmother’s place. That’s a lot of work. Time-consuming.” She looked at the top of his head, the white slash of the part, the hair drawn tight into the braids on either side. “How often do you have to touch up those roots?”

He reached across the table, picked up her coffee cup. Put his nose to it. “Funny,” he said. “I don’t smell anything. What’d you spike this with, vodka?”

Lola squeezed her next question past the anger fighting to escape. “What I can’t figure out is the nose. How’d you do it?”

He hung onto her cup, took another ostentatious whiff. “With your permission,” he said, and drank from it. He shook his head. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s clean. Did you start your morning with a snort? Because what you’re saying, that’s crazy talk.”

Lola let herself look toward the door. No one there. The only thing to do at this point was keep firing questions, one fastball after another, watching as he deflected them into foul territory, knowing sooner rather than later would come the big swing and the miss. “Did you get somebody to hit you? Or did you do it yourself?” She shivered, pantomiming agony. “Must have hurt like hell.”

“Funny,” he said. “You talking about the Fantonellis. It was Little Fanny who hit me, back in law school. He’d boxed some, but wanted to get better, so we got into it one day, just fooling around, and he landed one right on my nose.” He shook his head, his face going soft and fond.

“What about Frank’s pony?”

“What about it?”

She’d hoped to do this part with Charlie sitting beside her, but she was too deep into the game. He’d just have to bat cleanup. “Johnny broke his nose riding Frank’s pony. Back when they were little kids. Guess he never told you that, did he, Little Fanny?”

“Quit calling me that.”

“You quit. It’s over. I ran your prints.”

The skin around his eyes tightened. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “You’re bluffing,” he said, and she knew for sure.

“It’s all there,” she said. “The prints. Your record. How long after you’d arrived on the rez before you started running drugs again? Couldn’t help yourself, could you? It’s what you know. The campaign, though. I’ve got to give you credit for using it to launder your money. The tribe was suspicious, you know. Or at least some people were. Showing up the way you did, saying you’d forgotten all their traditions because you’d lived so long with white people.” She was beyond bluff now, spreading it out for him, thinking as she spoke how she’d finally found her way to him, the hints from Mary Alice’s stories and the sheriff and Wilson and Gallagher scattered like crumbs along a Hansel and Gretel trail. And she’d been the one to scoop them up. “Know what else gave you away?”

“Do tell.” Voice like sandpaper.

“Going into tipis. Lodges, I guess they’re called. See, I didn’t know that before I came out here. You didn’t either. And I’d probably turn right, too, if I ever went into one.”

He shrugged. “So?”

“Wilson told me people always turn left.”

“I’d been away a long time.”

“Even little kids know that. Everybody does it, so it’s more like instinct. I figured you can change everything else—you can undo that hard-squeeze whiteman handshake, you can stop looking people right in the eye in a way that would be rude, you can lower the decibel level when you talk—but that thing about turning left, that’s so little and insignificant no white person would ever notice it, so there’s no need to change it. Except that you never changed it because you’d never learned it in the first place. Mary Alice figured it out. She was just about to bust you. Wasn’t she, Little Fanny? That’s why you had her killed. Who’d you get to do it? Frank? Or did he just happen to come upon her after the fact?”

Sometimes the fight just went out of them. Maybe it didn’t even matter that Charlie wasn’t there to snap the cuffs onto his wrists and haul his sorry ass off to jail. Lola could probably offer Johnny a ride over to the sheriff’s office and he’d come along, glad it was finally over. He had to be weary of this witness protection program of his own design.

“I don’t know what Mary Alice was going to do,” he said, and his tone was all wrong, no defeat in it. “But I know this. It’s nothing but one big load of horseshit. There’s no story. Wasn’t then and isn’t now.”

“Oh, there will be,” she said. “I can promise you that. But that’s the least of your worries. If your father finds out you’re here—and he will when the story runs—then it won’t matter what color contacts you’re wearing. Federal prison won’t stop Big Fanny from putting out that hit again, and this time, he’ll make sure it’s done right.”

He shifted in his seat and Lola knew she didn’t have much time.

“Did you kill him yourself? Johnny, I mean. Track him down at a homeless shelter, give him some good clothes, lure him into an alley, something like that? Must’ve hurt, to waste one of your pretty suits that way.”

She knew she was talking too loud, and still her voice rose.

“How’d Mary Alice find out? And why’d you have to kill her? Why didn’t you just take off again, like you did from Calgary? You’d be gone and she’d still be alive.”

Joshua had come over to their table and stood rooted with his coffeepot.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Johnny said. “She was a nosy bitch, but I didn’t kill her. I wasn’t there. Remember?” He came upright in his chair, legs knocking hard against the floor. His hand shot out and clamped her arm. Lola twisted in his grip. He thumbed her cuff away from her wrist and deftly extracted the tape recorder. It went into her coffee cup with a splash.

“Oops,” he said.

Lola grabbed for the cup. He held it away from her and sloshed the coffee around. The recorder clacked against the sides of the cup. “The light just went off. That can’t be good. You seem to know so much about the mob. Funny how it didn’t occur to you that spotting a wire is part of Mob 101.” He extracted a sheaf of green from a billfold and fanned a few bucks onto the table.

Lola didn’t even bother looking toward the door. He wasn’t coming.

“You have fun writing that story of yours. Here.” He pulled a fifty from the wallet, slapped it on the table. “This says it never runs.”

She ran to the cafe door just in time to watch the Suburban pull away, heading north, the windows down, Johnny waving a grand goodbye.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“W
here the hell were you?”

Lola swept her arm across Charlie’s desk. The cribbage board skated to the floor, pegs and cards patterning around it. Before the sheriff could navigate to the desk’s far side, manuals followed. Pages fluttered, seeking their place.

“Are you going to tear up my entire office? Because if you are, we’re going to have to find another place for you to tell me whatever it was that you found so urgent.” His hands banded her wrists. Lola aimed a kick at his shins but he sidestepped it, not letting go. She tried again; again, he moved easily with her, his ponderous body suddenly light, Lola the clumsy one in their dance of anger and avoidance. “I was right here,” he said. A slight hesitation between his words the only betrayal of the effort required to hold her in place. “Look, I’m sorry. But I had to take a call. I was just on my way over when you came busting in.” Shadows swept past the frosted glass window of his door and returned, lingering. “Could you lower your voice, Lola? Half the county employees are in the hallway, taking in the show.”

The effort made Lola’s chest hurt. “Get back on that phone. Do that all-points-bulletin thing you did with me. Because he’s getting away.”

The shadows swam closer to the window, a school of fish coalescing into a single focused mass. “Everybody back to work,” Charlie called. The mass broke apart and the room grew lighter. “You,” he said to Lola. “Sit down.”

She shook her head.

His arms were straight as steel. He lowered them and Lola found herself in a chair. “I could arrest you. Seriously. You have got to knock this shit off. Now”—he made the mistake of loosening his grip—“what’s going on?”

Lola threw his hands off and shot up from the chair. “Johnny Running Wolf killed Mary Alice—at least, he set it up. And now, thanks to you and your asinine phone call, he’s gone. Go after him.”

He slid his hand along his nylon duty belt, touching the black anodized pistol, the orange-handled Taser, the cylinder of pepper spray. The brick-sized radio, the deceptively weighty flashlight, the hard circle of cuffs. He made a movement toward the door. Checked it.

“How do you know this?” Suspicion warred with weariness in his voice. “All you told me when you called last night is that you think Johnny Running Wolf is running with the mob and isn’t even an Indian. At least, I think that’s what you said. I was only half-awake.”

“I don’t think. I know. His real name is Vince Fantonelli Junior. A.K.A. Little Fanny, to distinguish him from his father, Big Fanny.” Lola paced as she spoke, seeking words that would persuade him. “Little Fanny got crosswise with his father during a drug war up in Calgary a few years back, and Big Fanny put out a hit on him. So he offed his old friend Johnny Running Wolf and showed up on the reservation pretending to be him. It might have worked, but a guy like Little Fanny was never going to be content sitting in an old lady’s house out on the prairie. He went back to his old line of work. He probably made some connections in Helena when the tribe sent him there to lobby. And you were onto it. You and Frank. But Frank wasn’t running booze for him. He was running drugs.” She stopped for air.

Charlie leaned against the desk and crossed his arms. “I don’t know that he was running them for Johnny. But I do know he was running drugs.”

Lola paused in mid-stride. “You do?”

“That was the phone call I took. They finally got the tox screens back from Frank and Judith and Billy Worden, too. You called it. Those kids OD’d on heroin.”

Lola indulged in a flash of triumph. Knew he could see it in her face. “What about Frank?”

“They found traces of it in his backpack. The kids probably thought they’d hit the jackpot when they jumped him. They were tweaking when they did it—that’s something else the tox screens showed—and that’s probably why things got so out of hand. And then they found the heroin and decided to give it a try. Heroin on top of meth. It’s a wonder more of them didn’t end up dead. So, yes, you were right about that. But how do you figure Johnny is really this Italian guy?”

Pride puffed through her urgency. “I found all of his stuff. He had dye, hair straightener, that fake suntan goop in his bathroom. I’ve got photos on my cell phone if you want to see them.”

Charlie retrieved the things she’d knocked from his desk. He squared the deck of cards and replaced the cribbage pegs in the holes. He crouched and felt around on the floor and straightened. “Huh,” he said. “One must have rolled under the desk. About the Indian thing.”

“What about it?”

“You know, a lot of us are conflicted when we don’t look Indian enough. There’s all kinds of mixed-blood combinations, starting with French like me and getting more complicated from there. It doesn’t even have to be white blood to make things confusing. I’ve got cousins that are damn near pure Indian but not enough of any one tribe to enroll for membership. Given that he’s running for governor as the first Indian candidate, maybe he thought he needed to look a little more authentic. Doesn’t mean he’s a mobster. Besides, when you’re talking heroin, you’re talking real money. You’ve got to launder that stuff somehow. Johnny has a lot of spendy stuff, but not nearly enough to account for the kind of money heroin brings. Where would he stash it all?”

“His campaign,” Lola said. “It was a front.” She reached for his phone.

“If we were in California, I’d say maybe. But campaigns in Montana are still cheap. You’re throwing around a lot of accusations. I like you, Lola. I like you a lot. But we’re getting into some pretty strange territory here.”

She gaped at him. “Like? As in . . .”

He pulled the phone away from her. “First you mess up my crime scenes, now you trash my office. I don’t even want to get into how you’ve messed with my head. Leave my phone alone.”