He waited as someone slipped by us and went into the bathroom. “Are you sure you are okay?”
I told him about the dream, which had featured Mari Baroja.
He listened quietly and nodded periodically. At the end, he smiled. “It would appear that you now have an advocate in the Camp of the Dead.”
My knowledge of the intricacies of Indian religion was spotty, but I knew about the camp, a place where the Cheyenne tribal ancestors gathered in the afterlife. The elders in the Camp of the Dead sought the society of interesting people in this one. There were items that carried their touch, like the old Sharps buffalo rifle that Lonnie had given me a month ago that stood in the corner of my bedroom. I could see that rifle as we stood there, the long, heavy barrel glowing with a ghostly sheen, cold to the touch like a dead body. I could see the beaded dead-man’s pattern on the fore grip, the ten distinct notches at the top of the stock, and the way the gray feathers ruffled even when there was no discernible breeze, messages from the dead on the wings of owls.
We waited as the person from the bathroom passed us with a smile. “Any more advice?”
“You should be able to figure the rest out for yourself.” He was silent for a moment. “If you cannot, then we are going to need more time than this conversation will allow.”
* * *
On the way back, I stopped off at the massive refrigerator, took out a beer, and paused to look at a few of the photographs lying on that end of the center island. The top one was of three boys, one standing and the other two seated. They wore what looked like military uniforms, and the relaxed quality of their posture was only belied by the tension in their eyes. I knew why; their hair had been cut by the teachers at the Indian boarding school from which, if they were lucky, they got to go home for a visit every two years. I slid it over and looked at the next.
Willy Fighting Bear and Zack Yellow Fox were standing between a couple of ornery-looking Appaloosas and were wearing two of the most enormous cowboy hats I had ever seen, the kind from an earlier period that must have been meant to protect the wearer from meteor showers. Willy and Zack looked comfortable, even though they had probably been in the saddle a good fourteen hours. My dad knew them and had said they were two of the finest horseman he had ever seen. I slid this one over and looked at the next.
I knew Frank White Shield. He was in full Cheyenne chief ’s regalia and was standing between his two sons, Jesse and Frank Jr.; they were in their army dress uniforms, circa 1943. Frank Jr. died in Okinawa, while Jesse went to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands with the Seventh Infantry Division as a sniper. He became famous for tying himself high in the trees so that if he were shot the Japanese would never know if they had scored a hit. They finally did, but never knew.
I looked at the next few photographs. There was one of a group of men and women standing around with the church in the background, and there was one of a young man with beaded leggings standing on a makeshift baseball field. I looked at the broad smiling face and the delicate way the nimble, dark hands held the ball. I could hear the snap when it hit the pocket and the catch phrase of a man without legs, “Um-hmm, yes, it is so.”
The words had escaped my smiling lips before I was aware. I looked at Lonnie Little Bird who was involved in a whimsical conversation at the other end of the kitchen. I tried to imagine him playing professional baseball before losing his legs to diabetes. Lonnie with legs. I took a deep breath along with a swig of beer and made my way to the other side of the kitchen where my romantic fate awaited.
She was leaning on the counter with one elbow, the palm of her hand supporting her chin. “ I thought only women went to the bathroom together.”
She shifted to the other palm and was suddenly a lot closer. “He’s a good friend.” I squeezed in and popped an elbow on the table and rested my chin in my own palm only a little ways away from her face. “I’m beginning to think that you are, too.” I smiled and looked down at the table. The flame of the candles shifted like the owl feathers on the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead. There was something bothering me about something I’d just seen, an inkling of sorts, but nothing I could pin down. Was it something in the photographs or something Henry had said? I looked back up to Maggie just as Henry came back in, and I’m sure I looked like I had just broken a vase. Maggie, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair, reset a pixie chin on the palm of her hand, and batted the blue like a signal. “How’s dinner coming?”
He smiled and joined Brandon at the stove. I sat there for a moment and stared into her eyes, but it became too much, so I glanced out the window. I watched the flakes fly at the pane and momentarily pause before slipping away. It was as if they were trying to drift through the glass and remind me of something that skipped like a stone on smooth water.
The photographs, it was something in the photographs.
I stood quickly, made my way around the room, and threaded through the crowd until I was standing over the assorted snapshots. They were as I’d left them. I studied the one of Lonnie with the beaded leggings that encased the now missing legs and could see him sweeping through the infield like a red-tailed hawk, the top grain leather sailing toward first like a war lance; but it was the car that was parked to the side along the foul line, a large convertible, fancy for the period in two-tone paint that had pricked my thoughts.
I slid the photo aside and looked at the next. A small group of Indians were gathered around the same car. The automobile was closer in this shot, and I could make out the buffalo hood ornament and the letters running down the chrome.
Maggie had followed me and placed her hand on my arm. “Is there something wrong?”
“There is.” I let my heart slow back to normal and looked at the photo again. “Let me ask you.” I placed a finger on the picture for clarification. “Does that look like a 1950 Kaiser?”
She leaned in and inspected the car in question. “I’m not so sure about the year, but the front emblem says Kaiser.”
There was only one white man in the photograph, and I was pretty sure who he was. Henry had come over to my other side, and I shifted my finger. “Does the name Charlie Nurburn ring a bell?”
His eyes narrowed as he studied the image. “Yes, I have heard that name.” He breathed for a moment. “From the southern part of the county, sold bad liquor for a year or so. He blinded and killed some of my people.”
I shook my head and studied the tall, thin man in the photo. “That sounds like Charlie, all right.”
His head shifted. “This involves a case you are working on?”
“Yep.” I thought about it. “No. I mean there really isn’t a case, and he’s really not a part of it since he’s alive and living in Vista Verde, New Mexico.” I stopped talking for a moment to allow myself to think.
I turned to look at Henry, but as I did, the lines on his face disappeared, his cheekbones were more pronounced, and water trailed from the crow-wing black hair. His shoulders were narrow, before the high-octane testosterone of adolescence had made an all-state middle linebacker out of him and, when he smiled, the canine baby tooth that had stayed with him through junior high suddenly reappeared.
* * *
“You are chicken!”
I looked down at him and the swirling water of the Little Powder near the confluence of Bitter and Dry creeks. A bridge was to our right, with a black framework that loomed against the brilliant blue of a July day. My spine felt as though it was falling through my rib cage, and a cold chill scraped along my arms and shoulders. “I am not!” I yelled back.
“Then jump!”
I looked down and instead of the man-sized boots, I saw a pair of scrawny, sunburned legs that shot from a pair of cut-off jeans to bare feet. I shifted, and the sheet metal I was standing on popped back against my weight.
He cocked his head and laughed, the skinny fists resting on the narrow hips. “You are chicken!”
I stared at the faded yellow paint on the metal, the chrome strip with the letters indented, Powder River sediment lying in the lower edges. I looked at the buffalo standing on the hillock of the hood’s crest and the large K insignia . . . and jumped.
* * *
I refocused my eyes in the kitchen and met his. “I know where it is.” I turned to look at Maggie. “Stuck in the bank of the Little Powder, about a mile from here.” I tapped the picture for emphasis. “This very car.” I looked again. “Along with seven or eight other cars that are used to hold the bank where it curves under the bridge.”
His voice doubted me. “How long has it been there?”
I smiled. “As long as I can remember. It was there when we were kids.”
He smiled for a moment, and I watched as he made the journey. “You cracked your head open there.” He didn’t move for a moment. “This is important?”
“Maybe.” I continued to look at the photograph. “This is the car.”
He shrugged. “There were not that many two-tone Kaiser convertibles on the Rez.”
The blue eyes shifted back to the photograph, and her lips thinned in concentration. “Why would somebody bury a practically new car in the river bank of the reservation?”
I looked closely at the man I assumed to be Charlie Nurburn. He was thin, tall, with the thumbs of his bony hands hitched into the front pockets of his work pants. You could just see two pearl-handled automatics sticking out from the waistband, and there were two more in a crossed, two-rig shoulder holster. Charlie Nurburn was well armed. His jeans looked like shedded snakeskin that rolled at the cuffs to reveal a scuffed pair of lace-up logging boots. An old CPO jacket was draped on his narrow shoulders, and a flannel plaid shirt buttoned up to the turkey throat. He wore one of those old hunting caps, the ones with the earflaps that tie on top, perched at a rakish angle to the left. I looked at the face and could make out what appeared to be a gold tooth, front and right. I tried to see a woman-beater and a murderer behind the lowered eyebrows that hid his eyes, but he looked like everybody else. It’s that kind of thing that worries me.
If Charlie had left Absaroka County forever back in 1951, why wouldn’t he have taken his almost brand new Kaiser with him? I looked at the two of them. “This is the man who was married to the woman in the nursing home, the Basque woman who just died.”
Maggie Watson took a seat on the nearest stool and folded her hands over her lap. “What woman in what nursing home?”
“Mari Baroja, the one that was married to Lucian.”
It took a good three seconds for the Bear to respond. “What?”
“Mari Baroja is the woman that died in the nursing home. She and Lucian Connally were married for a couple of hours back in the mid forties before her family annulled it. He said that he didn’t see her again till about a year ago when she got planted in the Durant Home for Assisted Living. For some reason, Lucian has suspicions that the cause of her death might be more than natural, so I locked up her room and called in an ME from Billings for a general. He says she probably died of heart failure, but there are millions of dollars being pumped out of the ancestral manse down at Four Brothers.”
“And that is the Baroja place?” He raised an eyebrow as I nodded. He looked like he was getting ready to ambush a stagecoach. “Motive, yes, but is there a case here?”
“During the autopsy it was discovered that Mari Baroja was beaten and, during consequent conversations with Lana Baroja, Isaac Bloomfield, and Vern Selby, I discover that Charlie Nurburn was possibly the slimiest thing to ooze across the surface of the earth until his disappearance under ever increasingly mysterious circumstances.”
He still looked puzzled, and I was aware that most of the conversation in the room had stopped. “Lana Baroja is?”
I took Henry by the arm and steered him to the far side of the kitchen. I apologized to Maggie as we receded. I pressed Henry into a corner. “Lana Baroja is the granddaughter of the deceased and clearly of the opinion that Lucian Connally had something to do with the death of her grandfather.”
“I thought you said that he is alive.”
“It’s complicated. Also, it appears to be common knowledge that Mari Baroja and Lucian were involved in a Thursday afternoon tryst that lasted for years, but Lucian doesn’t admit to the affair.” I thought for a moment. “That and a ’50 Kaiser imbedded in the bank of the Little Powder for as long as we can remember.”
“So, we are talking about two potential murders separated by more than fifty years.”
I stood there for a while looking at him. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“Do you think Lucian did it?”
For the first time that evening, the Cheyenne Nation was silent.
6
“I like your friend Henry.”
I had taken route 87 back from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation because, in a fit of optimism, I thought it might have been plowed. Mari Baroja had probably traveled this way in the opposite direction a few hours earlier; I wondered how she had felt about it. She rested uneasily on my mind, so I thought about sharing part of the burden with Maggie as we rode along on the inch or two of compacted snow. I looked over at her; if women knew how good they looked in the dash light of oversized pickup trucks, they’d never get out of them. “Really?”
“Uh, huh.”
The snow had slackened a little, but the fat wide flakes still swooped out of the darkness into the headlights and disappeared around the windshield in uncountable little games of chicken. I was munching on ruggelach and was trying to concentrate on the road and not let the thrill of a new association put us in a ditch.
“How long have you known each other?”
“Since grade school.” I felt a slight twitch as the rear wheels of the truck slipped a little. “I used to go to his auntie’s house, and we would watch the Lone Ranger. We’d play in the yard, and I always got to be Tonto.” She laughed, but I thought about the case. I wondered if Saizarbitoria had spoken to Charlie Nurburn. I’d given Sancho the job in hopes that I’d never have to speak to the man.