Death on the Greasy Grass (3 page)

C
HAPTER
4

Stumper stopped in front of a door marked I
NTERVIEW
. “Don't mind if I sit in on this, do you? It might be entertaining.”

“Entertaining?”

Stumper smiled. “Wait till you see this guy. He's a candidate for the rubber room.”

Stumper held the door for Willie and Manny. The cavalry sergeant Manny saw earlier, whose shot started the reenactment, sat in a captain's chair holding his head as his elbows rested on a long, oval Formica table sporting numerous cigarette burns along the outside edges. The sergeant's own cigarette had burned down, threatening to scorch the side of his head, and it was only a matter of time before the smoldering butt would add another insult to the embattled table.

Manny eyed the cigarette and patted his empty pocket. Even after he'd quit last year, he still craved a smoke. “Put your cigarette out, please.”

The sergeant dropped it into an empty Orange Crush can. It hissed and a small tendril of smoke rose from the can.

Manny nodded to the other door opening into the squad room area. “Make sure that's locked,” he told Stumper.

The sergeant jumped as if he expected rubber hoses and bright lights to come out. “We just need to make sure no one interrupts us.”

The sergeant said nothing and nodded.
Or did he shake?

Manny introduced himself and Willie, and the sergeant had started to rise when Manny put his hand onto the man's shoulder that shook as much as his nicotine-stained hands. One of the sergeant's suspenders had fallen off his shoulder, and he'd missed two buttons on his fly. Stumper was right: The man was a basket case, and the last thing Manny needed on vacation was to pick a basket case up from the floor. “Just sit back and relax, mister.”

The man considered Manny's shirt and shorts. “Don't you FBI agents usually wear a suit and tie?”

“I'm in disguise,” Manny answered.

“Ian Tess.” He seemed to accept Manny's explanation as he offered his hand, which lacked the firmness of Stumper's and the strength of Deer Slayer's, instead feeling lifeless like the body of the man he'd just killed. Manny wiped his sweaty hand onto his shorts. “This never happens at Gettysburg.”

“What's that?”

“Gettysburg,” Tess repeated. “I participate in the reenactment there every year, and nothing like this ever happens.”

“You mean you never killed anyone at one of these before?”

Tess looked through reddened eyes from Stumper, smiling as he leaned against one wall, to Manny. Manny rolled the only other chair in the room close to the card table and sat, careful not to gouge himself on the broken chair arm. Manny had long ago learned that the best attribute of an investigator was silence, knowing when to wait until the person decided to get their burden off their chest.

“Back there they check our loads before the shooting starts,” Tess said at last. “We never have anything on our uniform belts except powder. Never a ball to ram on top of the charge. And they check it many times before the battle begins.”

“And this is the first you've killed anyone?”

Tess sat back in the chair and his face flushed. He leaned across the table, and Manny smelled the whiskey on his breath. “Of course I never killed anyone,” he said, annoyance entering his voice, and Manny was glad Tess was starting to come around to the land of the living. He reached for his cigarettes, but Manny placed his hand on his arm.

“You didn't know someone had switched a live round with the dummy. Tell me what you did this afternoon leading up to the battle.”

Tess slumped back in his chair, his eyes softening, grateful that someone had confirmed he was no murderer. “After I loaded the Springfield, the prop man checked my rifle and stuck the yellow ribbon in the action.”

“And the rifle was in your possession the whole time?”

“Whole time?”

“Even when you went to the port-a-potty?”

Tess straightened up and a smile crossed his face. “No, it wasn't. I left it there when I got the two-minute warning and ran to the blue house.”

“I saw you run for the port-a-potty,” Manny said. “There were people around your tent.”

Tess nodded. “People come to these events 'cause they love history. They love it when I fold a little history into the events. Some background on cavalry equipment. Weaponry. Stuff like that. Anyway, I finished in the crapper just in time for the reenactment to begin. Everyone had cleared out—probably sitting in the bleachers. Even the safety man was gone.”

“Safety man?” Willie asked. “As in the man that checked your rifle?”

Tess nodded. “The second safety check of the day.”

Manny scooted his chair closer to Tess. “Like Gettysburg, multiple safety checks?”

“Just like Gettysburg.” Tess shook his head. “Making sure no accident happens. But it did somehow.”

“Tell me about this second safety man.” Manny took a notebook from Stumper, not to actually take notes, but to appear to be taking notes. It's what people expected an interviewer to do.

Tess looked at the ceiling before dropping his head and nodding to Willie. “Tall guy, like him. But not nearly as heavy. And sloppy, too.”

“How so?”

“Wore an old T-shirt that looked like he served last night's dinner on it.”

“Indian?”

Tess nodded. “But don't ask me what kind. They all look alike.” Tess looked to all three men in the room and slid his chair back from the table. But there would be no escaping his stupidity. “Sorry, but you guys know what I mean?”

Manny waved it away. “What did the second safety man do?”

“Well he checked my rifle, of course.”

“Did you watch him?”

Tess laughed nervously. “What's to check. He opens the rifle's action and checks that there's a dummy chambered. Then sticks the yellow ribbon back in the gun.”

“Did you watch him?” Willie asked. He leaned over the table, and Tess backed up as he craned his neck up.

“I went in my tent for a moment while he did that.”

“To take a nip?” Manny asked.

Tess's hand automatically went to his back pocket. “You know they don't allow booze at the reenactment.”

Manny shook his head. “I don't care about that. Could you give a description to a police sketch artist?”

Tess rubbed his eyes. “Wouldn't do any good. All I know is he was an Indian.”

Manny had stood and started for the door when Tess stopped him. “What happens to me now?”

Manny looked to Stumper and Willie. “Somebody that looks Indian will come get you soon. Just sit tight.”

Tess leaned on the table and once again cradled his head in his hands as he rocked back and forth. “Nothing like this ever happens at Gettysburg.”

C
HAPTER
5

Manny squirmed in the seat as he tried to stretch out his legs. “I offered to sit back there,” Willie said. “I don't feel sorry for you.”

Manny leaned over and rested his arms on the seat back. “If I can't fit back here, just think what it'd be like for you.” He tapped Stumper on the shoulder. “How far is it to Lodge Grass?”

“Twenty minutes,” he said as he turned onto I90. Stumper retrieved his can of Copenhagen from his back pocket and stuffed his lip. He had started putting it back when Willie reached over and snatched the can. He started filling his own lower lip, and Manny scowled at him. But just for a moment. Willie was fighting his other addiction, alcohol, and Manny could overlook his tobacco habit for the moment.

They started around a '60s International pickup missing the hood, the seventy-year-old-going-on-ninety driver pedaling as fast as she could. She glared at the tribal Tahoe as it went by and thrust her middle finger high out the door as they passed. Stumper chuckled.

“That funny?” Manny asked.

Stumper shook his head. “Not that, it's us. It's ironic that you and this big ugly Lakota sitting beside me are working a criminal case with me, a Crow. Wasn't but a century ago and we'd be fighting for each other's scalps.”

Willie reached over and flipped Stumper's braid. “Who's to say we won't come away with a scalp today?”

Stumper flipped his hair back and slapped Willie's hand away.

Manny was quick to intervene. “Hate to have pulled you away from anything important.”

Stumper shook his head. “The only thing you pulled me away from is another methamphetamine case. I get tired of working those.”

“Same as us.” Willie worked the snuff into his lower lip. “Not a week goes by that we don't have some new meth case dumped in our laps.” He rolled his window down to spit. “It's ruining our kids.”

“But it comes onto the rez at odd times. Keeps us second-guessing where it's coming from, who's bringing the shit onto Crow Agency.” Stumper rolled his window down and spit. Manny scrambled to the other side of the seat just as droplets of tobacco juice splattered where he'd sat. “And if that were my only problem, it would be bad enough. But we got Della Night Tail.”

“Meth head?”

“Pain in the ass. She's our chronic bitcher.”

Willie laughed. “I'll put our Crazy George He Crow or Henry Lone Wolf against any complainer you got.”

Stumper started passing a stock truck hauling yearling heifers, and he quickly rolled up his window against the odor. “There's no bitcher like Della. She's a professional. She reports her old man, Little Dave Night Tail, missing about once a month. Like she did this morning.”

“Little Dave use meth?”

Stumper shook his head. “Little Dave just doesn't come home about every other payday. He lays carpet for an outfit out of Hardin, and claims he needs to tie one on now and again. Claims the carpet kicker trashes his knees, and he drinks to kill the pain.”

“But you don't believe him?”

Stumper looked at Manny in the rearview mirror. “If I were married to that witch Della, I'd manage to stay away every chance I could, too. What I think is that Little Dave got himself some stray tail in Hardin, which makes it hard for us. Every time he doesn't come home, Della gripes to the tribal council, and we all know what direction shit rolls.”

Willie drew his legs under him and tried to turn in the seat. He just didn't fit. “If he's anything like our drunks, he's on the backside of a twelve-pack of Budweiser, and he'll stagger home when the beer runs out. I know.”

Willie caught Manny's eyes in the rearview mirror and he quickly looked away. Willie struggled daily with the booze, and talk of Little Dave Night Tail only reminded him of the comfort a bottle of whiskey or a cold six-pack could bring.

They took the off-ramp to Old Highway 87 onto Main Street. If a town of five hundred souls had a Main Street. “Where'd you get a nickname like Stumper?” Manny asked.

“Yeah.” Willie slapped his arm. “Where'd you get that goofy name?”

Stumper leaned his head out the Tahoe and spit. The wind caught it and blew brown tobacco juice back onto his arm. “Some dude from Billings robbed the Little Big Horn Casino my first year on the job. I got there in time to shoot the guy as he ran out the door.”

“Doesn't explain your name.”

“My aim was a little off.” Stumper turned onto Hester Street. “I was shooting a .357 Magnum then, and the ER docs in Billings couldn't save the guy's arm. He's working in a prison laundry folding clothes one-armed.” Stumper laughed. “Or should I say one-stumped. So the name stuck.”

Stumper drove past a rusting street sign proclaiming they had turned off Hill Street when they reached Taft. They turned down a gravel street and Manny caught sight of yellow crime scene tape encircling a large pole building. Harlan's gray-sided auction barn sat at the end of a dead-end street. In Manny's last home in Arlington, Virginia, such faults of street planning would be referred to as cul-de-sacs. Here at Crow Agency, it was just one more street that ran out of money before it was connected to another.

Stumper pulled up in front of police warning signs that had been posted at Harlan White Bird's auction house. The sign proclaimed the business had been seized as evidence. “Odd for a business to be located on a dead end.” Manny unfolded his legs from the backseat and stretched his hamstrings. He needed to get some road miles in his running shoes, even on vacation. “Wouldn't think that'd be good for business.”

“Didn't matter.” Stumper stuffed his can of Copenhagen in his back pocket before Willie could grab it. “Harlan did enough business that people came from all over the country. He could have held his auction in an outhouse and still drawn a crowd. Besides, Harlan was paranoid as hell. Insisted it was easier to watch anyone coming up if the place set on a dead end.”

Willie walked to the corner of the windowless building and back. He tapped the security keypad hanging on one side of the door. “Did Harlan have a reason to be paranoid?”

“The quality of the artifacts he gathered for auction would be reason enough for someone to break in.”

Stumper walked to the door and stood on his tiptoes as he felt for the key above the jamb. Willie reached up and grabbed it, smiling as he handed it to Stumper. “Don't say a word, big man.”

Willie backed up, feigning hurt feelings, his hands held out in front of him. “All I was going to say is that's a hell of a place to hide a key. For someone so paranoid.”

“Who else knew Harlan stashed his key there?” Manny asked.

Stumper paused. “Probably everyone on Crow Agency. Certainly everyone in Lodge Grass.”

Stumper had inserted the key when Manny stopped him. “Aren't you going to disable the alarm?”

Stumper turned the lock and opened the door. “Security system's been shot for the better part of a year. Harlan never got around to having it fixed. And yes, most everyone knew about that, too.”

They followed Stumper into the building as he felt his way around the wall for the light switch. The fluorescents flickered for a moment before catching, a steady humming filling the huge room.

Stumper caught Manny's slack-jawed stare. “Winter was Harlan's slow season, and he'd clear the tables so the local kids had a place to play ball.”

Manny nodded to basketball hoops on portable stands on one end of the building. “It's certainly big enough to play ball in here.”

Stumper led them to where Harlan had arranged wall-to-wall display tables clustered together according to the type of relic. They'd been set so close together that there was just enough room for prospective bidders to walk between them as they inspected the artifacts. Manny walked awed among the tables, the largest collection of authentic Indian artifacts outside a museum he'd ever seen.

“Did I lie about Harlan's annual auction being impressive?”

Manny turned away from Stumper and started walking the displays. “You didn't lie.”

“Look at this.” Willie stood hunched over a table two rows down and Manny joined him. Willie pointed to a cradleboard, Crow by the beaded diamond pattern at the top and bottom of the board, tapering slightly at the bottom. Red and yellow beads set on light blue formed the background. Three deerskin ties to hold a baby at the center of the board lay stiff and twisted from years of hard weather. A yellow plastic tent with the item number on it sat in front of the cradleboard for prospective bidders to match up to bid sheets.

Manny brushed past Willie, stopping at a table displaying metal trade axes, some still secured in ash handles with buffalo sinew, others pegged in place with square nails, each with its own plastic tent and number assigned. Ornately decorated axes, more ceremonial than practical, were laid out side by side. Their beaded and quilled handles of various colors vied with blades in various stages of brown and black and bluish patinas.

On the opposite end of the table, Harlan had arranged knives of different lengths and different functions. Skinning knives were displayed next to hunting knives, next to knives used in ceremonies.

Manny had started walking past when his eyes clouded, his focus drawn to one knife apart from the others: a warrior's knife. A killing knife. Manny bent over, one hand resting on the table for stability, his other hand reaching out. He touched a dark stain on the blade near the hilt that he knew was ancient blood. He tried pulling his hand away, but it remained on the blade as he fought the physical connection to what he witnessed somewhere deep in his clouded mind.

And then the stench of blood. The stench of pain. The stench of death. He swayed in the heat, the intense heat, of that June day overlooking the Greasy Grass when Colonel Custer fought Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. The heat, always the heat, caused Manny's vision to shimmer. A warrior squatted and peered through thick reeds at his friend in the open field just out of the protection of the tall buffalo grass. Two Lakota rode up a hill, their war cries loud, their horses' flanks whipped with quirts, tongues lapping the air as they bore down on the luckless warrior caught in the open.

Manny felt the need to scream a warning to the warrior caught alone. But this was a Crow, sworn enemy of the Lakota, and Manny hesitated. Shots erupted in Manny's head, the ringing in his ears followed by resounding disbelief. The first Lakota had jumped from his pony, run to the fallen Crow warrior, and dropped to his knees. One hand had grabbed his enemy's hair and the other had held a knife poised to slice. Even before he had been able to make the first scalp cut, he had been shot in the back by his own comrade's rifle. Manny tried shouting.

And his throat closed shut watching the other Lakota coolly murder his friend. He looked down only to make sure before he dropped to his knees and slid the knife around the base of his friend's scalp, lifting the bloody souvenir. The warrior slid the knife into the sheath on his belt, along with the Crow scalp and that of his fellow Lakota. The man mounted and rode slowly away from the killing field. The knife—the scalping knife—fell to the ground unnoticed.

Lights overhead flickered and caught, the humming bringing Manny back to the present. He shook his head to clear his mind, the strength returning to knees that had nearly buckled. The last thing he felt like putting up with now was some fleeting vision he couldn't possibly need—or want—to interfere with his investigation.

Manny staggered and turned his back on the table with the knife display, concentrating in front of him on the table hosting bow and arrow displays. In the center of the table lay a Crow bow made of mountain sheep horn and covered with rattlesnake skin. It lacked a bowstring, yet Manny knew enough about them from archery in his youth to tell that a very powerful man must have strung the instrument.

Various deer – and elk-skin quivers surrounded the bow, some ornately beaded, others painted on the tanned hides with geometric patterns of forgotten clans. Harlan had arranged single arrows around the quivers, the different fletching with various types of feathers as sure to identify the makers as if they'd left palm prints behind. Manny picked up one arrow and ran the dried, century-old feather fletching carefully over his hand. A warrior was nocking the arrow, a spike buck deer was feeding on an elderberry bush. Once again, Manny shook his head to clear the images flooding his thoughts. “Harlan must have been quite organized,” he said, gesturing to the tables categorized by type of artifacts to maximize the bidders' inspection.

Stumper laughed and waved his hand over the room of wall-to-wall tables. “Only in this was Harlan ever organized, and only because he knew the smoother his auctions went, the more money he made. And Harlan was all about money.” Stumper turned to a table holding rifles and handguns. Ammunition was still in original boxes, some pristine, others torn and weathered, spilling out graying bullets sticking out of rust-colored casings.