Authors: Anne Argula
“Is this a tour? Are we on vacation here?”
“It’s an interesting place, Quinn. They never had any real problem before so they couldn’t accept it might have been racial.”
“This is what you’ve been doing, all night long, instead of sleeping?”
“Now, you’d never know it, ‘cause Indian kids and white kids pair off all the time and nobody thinks anything of it, but back then it was different. The sixties came and old restrictions were being tested.”
“Odd, listen to me, you ain’t a detective. You’re a cop, and not even a cop from around here. We issue citations, we quell domestic disputes, we roust hookers and dope smokers, and we are sent on shit details like this that no one else wants.”
“I know that.”
I had to laugh. I packed the twins into my sports bra, put on my shirt and buttoned it up. I put on my pistol belt and shook it into the familiar fit on my hips, noticing lately how the rig seemed to be getting heavier.
I opened the door, took the last sip of coffee and handed him the empty cup.
“So it’s off to evaluate our prisoner?” I said.
“Right. At the chief’s house.”
“You got the directions?”
“Sure.” He looked at me, his lower lip jutting out ever so slightly, like an irresistible little boy.
“But it’s right on the way and would only take a minute and what’s the harm,” I said, pretending to be him.
“What’s that?”
“The scene of the crime.”
This time, I got a full-tilt smile out of him.
“I got a feeling, Quinn. A very strong feeling.”
“You could just sit quiet until it goes away,” I said.
“I tried that,” said he.
He drove. The road was lined with fireworks stands, put together with plywood and scrap lumber, with hinged wooden shut-downs over counters packed high with brightly wrapped pyrotechnics from China. Hand lettered signs identified each stand. They seemed to be family enterprises. We later learned that the teen-aged son of each family was obliged to sleep in the shuttered stand with a .357 magnum tucked under his pillow to protect the investment from vandals and thieves. According to law, the fireworks purchased on the reservation must be set off on the reservation, but of course mainlanders came over and filled up their trunks, turning their own quiet neighborhoods into war zones, terrifying the family pets and invariably blowing off some of the little digits of their own children. Don’t get me started on fireworks. More distractions for the dumb. Fireworks have killed and maimed more people than marijuana, which to date hovers around zero, but one is legal and encouraged, the other one can get you hard time. Don’t get me started.
Odd pulled to the side of the road. A narrow rutted dirt road went up a hill and disappeared into the woods. “We have to walk from here,” he said.
“You didn’t say anything about walking.”
Having come this far, I knew it would be a waste of breath to refuse, and I was going to need all the breath I had for the hike. We trudged up the hill.
“James Coyote had a Ford four-by pick-up with a canopy. They had no trouble getting up here, even though it was raining that night and the road was all muddy. Lots of kids used to run their four-by’s up here during the daylight, and at night it was a good place to bring a girl.”
“You came up here last night with the chief?”
“Yeah, I told you. He’s an interesting guy. That picture on the bulletin board, all these years, even though it’s a cold case? He was only twelve when it happened. But he knows there’s a killer going free, maybe still on this island, and still eats at him.”
“And at you, apparently.”
“It’s got to me. I admit it. When we walked up to this rise last night, the chief and me, I started getting all roiling inside.”
“I know what that’s like.”
The road rose into the woods and dropped into a clearing that over the years had been worn into a kind of four-by track, up and down hillocks, dangerous angles and curves, deep mud traps. Where it went up it offered a nice view of the water, Point Despair, one of the many cheerfully named points of land in the Northwest. Point Deception, Point No Point, Point Doom…
“This is where they parked,” he said, showing me a lane that ended just inside the edge of the woods. “Jimmy backed in so that they were facing the water, even though there wasn’t much to see that night because of the rain. They were alone, off in their own world, necking, touching each other, talking about their dreams.”
“Did they have the radio on?” I was making a lame joke, adding one more impossible to know detail to his imaginary scene.
“No,” he answered. “The radio was broken when Jimmy bought the truck and he never had the money to replace it.”
“How do you know that?”
“The chief told me.”
“Did he tell you they were talking about their dreams?”
“How could he know that?”
“How could you, buddy?”
“Isn’t that what any young couple would talk about?”
“You were up here all night?”
“Half the night. There wasn’t that much left to it.”
“With Chief Shining Pony?”
“He’s haunted. Comes here often. And he was only twelve when it happened. He kind of liked having the company and someone to talk to about it. You aren’t interested?”
“Murder is always a little interesting, Odd, ‘cause we’re the only animals that practice it and study it…and seem to enjoy it. That’s the mystery to me, not who did what to who.”
“Is it because we’re made in God’s image? Do we get it from Him?”
“Hmmm….Man’s disposition toward murder is genetic, passed down from his Heavenly Father…that’ll get you kicked out of any Lutheran church in the land, Odd.”
He was standing where the driver’s window might have been that night.
“They were shot from here,” he said, “twelve gauge shotgun. First Jimmy, one shot to the head.”
“The chief told you that? That the boy was shot first?”
“There were bruises on his right arm, where Jeannie had clutched him while they talked to the killer.”
“They talked to the killer?”
“The window was rolled down. Why would the window be rolled down? It was pouring rain. Unless they rolled it down to talk to the killer? Which doesn’t necessarily mean they knew him. They were polite kids. Still, with a population of only a thousand, odds are they did know him. Anyway, it wasn’t a friendly coversation. She was gripping his arm. The killer shot Jimmy….then…Jeannie…then…he picked up the spent shells. Which is cold…methodical. Who could be so cold?”
Odd’s eyes were focused on the interior of that imaginary Ford four-by, but mine were all over him, watching him play this out. I had never attributed a great imagination to Odd, but why would I? He was like me. He did his job, he went home.
“Over in that direction lives—or used to live, he’s dead now—an old bachelor strawberry farmer. You can’t drive there from here, the only access is by another dirt road off the main road. His house is about half a mile hike from here. For a long time he was the prime suspect. He had complained about the kids and the noise they made over here and the way they tore up the land, even though it was county land….did I mention that? We’re on white land here. If they had been killed on tribal land the FBI would have had jurisdiction, and probably a much better chance of solving it. But the case went to the Sheriff’s Department, and they didn’t know murder from mahogany. They fixed on that strawberry farmer, who had lived alone for years and had turned eccentric. They didn’t look anywhere else. They all thought that either he was here when the kids arrived or wandered by them when they were parked, and his anger at kids in general overtook him and…”
“Wandered by? Carrying a shotgun? In the rain and the mud and the dark, half a mile from his warm and cozy home?”
“Welcome to the case, Quinn.”
“Fuck you, Odd. Let’s get breakfast.”
“I had no idea what you were like before breakfast.”
“Now you do.”
7.
I wanted nothing more than for Charles T. Houser to be in the pink and homesick for Spokane. Odd was beginning to pose a danger to my own fragile equilibrium, because under normal circumstances I was a boo away from collapsing into tears. I could not tolerate behavior that was obsessive, compulsive, impulsive, passionate or inappropriately light-hearted; none of that nor sad country songs. I could not stand for things to take an unexpected turn, and me without a plan.
A light rain started to fall, sun filtering through, so that you could almost count the drops. I daydreamed running naked through those cool delicious rain drops.
Odd turned off the main road and up a gravel driveway to the chief’s house. For a moment, it felt as if we were back in Spokane, called to quell a domestic distrubance, because on the porch was the chief himself, being yelled at and obscenely gestured to by an hysterical young girl, while a middle-aged woman sat defeated on the step, holding her head as though someone had hit her upside same. And as often happened, back in Spokane, the disturbance back-pedalled upon the appearance of two uniformed officers getting out of a car.
“Morning, Chief,” said Odd.
“Let me guess,” said I. “This has to be little Stacey and her mother…”
“Gwen,” the mother introduced herself.
Stacey took a moment to check our patches, then spit out, “You have no jurisdiction here. Fuck off!”
“She’s been informing me of her rights,” said the chief. “She seems to know a lot about that.”
“I have a right to see him, goddammit! I have to know he’s okay!”
“I told you, this is not a public place. This is my house and you’re not going inside.”
“Are you okay?” I asked the mother.
She rolled her eyes, as though wanting a definition of okay.
“Look, take your daughter home…you’re driving?”
“Yeah, that’s our car,” said Gwen, pointing to a half-primered Civic in the driveway.
“Take her home and have a long talk…about the birds and the bees. Long overdue, looks like.”
“Fuck you, you old cunt!”
“Stacey!” admonished her mother, to no effect, then explained to us, “She wasn’t raised to talk like that.”
“Listen, young lady,” I said, “this is Indian land, and this man is the law here. They don’t have to indulge you, they can just throw you in jail.”
“Go for it, you fat fucker!”
So much for idle threats.
I asked to see the prisoner and the chief invited us inside.
“If they can see him, I can see him too!” yelled Stacey, and she made the mistake of grabbing my arm as I was going inside the house. I hit her with the pepper spray, a good blast right in the face. She reeled back and screamed so loud I expected glass to break, which would have been some small satisfaction if it had been the pain of her taking her medicine, but it was more of her bottomless anger. She made choked and snotty threats to file the largest lawsuit we had ever seen. Fourteen years old.
Charles T. Houser was kept in the locked guest room, though at the moment the lock seemed unnecessary. He was ashen white, only half-awake, and if he was hearing the shrill voice of his own true love downstairs on the porch, as we certainly were, it seemed to have no restorative benefits.
He was on a high rough-hewn bed of cedar, covered against the morning chill with a handmade quilt of a bear design . He had been nursed by the chief’s wife, a pleasantly plump woman with braided hair who might have been a beauty in her youth. So might have we all.
His arms were above the quilt and the right wrist, where he had attempted to gnaw his way to redemption, was heavily bandaged. His eyes fluttered when he saw us come to his bedside, as though he needed any more proof of the seriousness of his situation. I looked at him for a moment, felt no need for introductions, but thought I’d better recite him his rights first off, which I did, while the others held their places respectfully, as though it were some kind of prayer. He was under arrest. Again.