Death Where the Bad Rocks Live (21 page)

“Thanks.” Ham nursed his beer. “I have what the
New York Times
calls a plethora of detractors. Enemies that want me to fall on my face in those hearings. Many my own people.”

“I recall you’ve caught flak for your repeated opposition to
tribal sovereignty. Last thing you ruled on was denying giving the entire Badlands back to the tribe.”

“That was over a year ago.”

“Right before your mining rulings.”

Ham stood and leaned against one of the huge timbers holding up the porch. “I just didn’t feel it necessary to mine parts of the Palmer Creek and Stronghold Unit that that Canadian company wanted.” He smiled at Manny. “And I see you do some checking of your own.”

“Nature of my job.”

Ham nodded and sipped his beer. “If we let the tribes handle their own affairs completely, they’d allow mining there. The environmental disasters would do irreparable harm to the park, and the tribe.”

Manny swished ice cubes around in his empty glass. “Mining would give the tribe the shot in the arm it needs to get on its feet.”

“All the tribe needs to get back on its feet is a shot in the butt. Besides, there’s never been proof there’s anything’s worth mining in the Badlands.”

“The School of Mines would disagree.”

Ham waved the air as if dismissing the comment. “I know. They filed an amicus brief that last time it came before my bench. Some professors were upset they didn’t influence me.”

“And the letters supporting mining the Badlands? My agent in Sioux Falls said there were a thousand sent to your Sioux Falls office.”

Ham turned to Manny and a frown hung on his chiseled face like storm clouds filtering the sun. “Do you know how many of those letters call me an Uncle Tomahawk? Or how many threatened my life because I stood up for what I believed was best for our people? Come inside.”

Ham led Manny into the cabin. They walked under an elk head larger than any Manny had seen hanging over the door, past cedar log tables guarding either side of a sofa with deer antlers as armrests and a buffalo robe draped over the back. Ham stopped at a rolltop desk situated in a small alcove and opened it. A Glock—like the one Manny was supposed to carry at all times—held down a shoe box, and Ham caught him eying the gun.

“Like I said—I have enemies. Joe insisted I keep it handy.” He took the lid off the shoe box and shoved it toward Manny. “That’s how many vile letters I’ve received just since it was announced I’d been nominated for the Supreme Court. I keep them close in case someone carries out their threat. And for every one of those that’s arrived at my office, I’ve received a hundred angry e-mails.”

“You want me to take these and start a threat investigation? The last thing we need now is a federal judge assassinated.”

Ham shook his head. “At least I’ve risen enough in importance that I might be assassinated and not just murdered. But I wouldn’t want to give the bastards that much credit, knowing I whined to the FBI. The investigation I’m concerned about is Gunnar’s murder—having it completed before the Senate hearings. His and Moses Ten Bears’s.”

“You know about that?”

Ham nodded. “Moses and some other guy were found in the same car as Gunnar. Poor souls just happened to be on the bombing range at the wrong time. How they all happened there is beyond me.”

“We didn’t release anything to the press. Who told you about Ten Bears?”

“I have my sources with the moccasin telegraph, too. Or maybe it’s because I have such a strong connection with Moses. I told you he and Grandpa Charles had a special friendship,
didn’t I?” Ham chin-pointed to a painting hanging on the wall opposite the elk, a painting that hung guarded by shadows that parried light getting to the canvas. Manny stepped closer and craned his neck upward. And gasped. “An original?” The second original Ten Bears work Manny had seen this week. He felt honored.

Ham nodded. “That was one of Moses’s early works. Right now you’re thinking I’m on the take for owning an original Ten Bears painting.”

“It is priceless.”

“Hardly. Everything has its price.” He took Manny’s glass and refilled it with tea from a gallon jar on the granite counter, drawing out his explanation, once again the attorney. He handed the glass back to Manny and continued sipping on the same Corona. “My father, Samuel, resented Grandfather Charles. Bitterly. He’d abandoned Dad and Grandmother Hannah to pursue his political career, and his false promises of marriage and a family broke her heart, though Grandmother never let on, from what mother said. Only once did Grandmother Hannah mention that Grandfather Charles’s political career meant more than his family, and it appears as if she handled it well, despite her poverty.

“No so my father—his hate drove him into a fresh bottle every day of his life, and he remained a bitter drunk until the day he died.”

“So your mother told me.”

“You’ve spoken with her?”

“I had to verify your whereabouts on the reservation the week Gunnar went missing.”

Ham shook his head. “Mother. She would have told me you stopped if she had a phone, but it wasn’t until last year that I talked her into getting power run into her place.”

“I saw she could use a home makeover.”

“Don’t judge me by the looks of her place.”

Manny nodded. “I apologize. People tell me I get down on folks now and again.”

Ham waved the comment away. “She won’t allow me to help her. Except for her dentures—that’s the one thing she wanted when I became successful.”

“I noticed that, too.”

Ham laughed. “How could you not? They’re white enough to be a lighthouse beacon. And they don’t fit well. I told her I’d take her to the finest dentist I could, but she threw a fit. Said it was too pricy, and she found a dental school that I won’t name to pull her teeth and give her choppers. Looks like they got the teeth from some donor horse, but she’s happy with them, and I’m stuck wearing sunglasses whenever I visit her.”

Ham set his empty bottle on the coffee table. “But you wonder about the painting.”

Manny nodded.

“Moses gave that to Grandfather Charles after a terrible vision he had of Grandfather, terrible enough that Grandfather didn’t want it around after he saw his fate.”

“What happened to those other paintings that people didn’t want?”

Ham shrugged. “There was the rumor that an art critic from New York found and stole them after Moses disappeared. Who knows. But Grandfather Charles said this was Moses’s vision for him—frightening though it was—and said he’d beat the vision. That sounded like Grandfather Charles—reckless and unafraid of the devil himself.”

Manny set his tea on the table and donned his reading glasses as he stepped close to the painting hanging above eye level. Subdued browns, burnt umbers, and grays dominated the work, the edges ragged, undefined, cruel. The harsh Badlands under a dirty burnt brown sky. An orange sun blazed too-large for the picture, heating cows with matted, motley,
mangy hair, skinny range cows looking as if they’d lived their last season. “Frightening.”

Ham had soundlessly come to stand beside Manny. “And this was also Moses’s vision for himself, or so Grandfather always thought. Moses was a poor rancher, starting with the few cows the government gave him when he became fee patented. He tried to make a go of it—some ranchers in the Badlands became successful, but not Moses. Those cattle represent his sick herd, or so Dad said.”

“Still doesn’t explain how you came by it.”

Ham looked sideways at Manny. “I’m even a suspect in the theft of a painting.”

“I didn’t mean…”

Ham held up his hand. “Just being facetious. Grandfather Charles left the painting in Moses’s cabin because he spent time there every year hunting and knocking around the Stronghold. I think Grandfather always intended bringing it home, but he died three years after Moses did. Eldon—Moses’s son—gave it to my father one summer, who tossed it into the garbage in a drunken stupor one night when I was a little kid. I waited until dad passed out and rescued it. I kept it at Holy Rosary Mission until I graduated.”

Manny gestured around the cabin. “I don’t see a security system. Aren’t you afraid someone might steal it, since you’re away so much?”

Ham smiled. “I have my own kind of security system. Joe stops often when I’m away.”

Manny recalled the heavy-handedness with which Joe Dozi parried the people at the Alex Johnson lobby. “Where could I find him?”

Ham took a tarnished railroad watch from his front trouser pocket. It chimed when he opened it. “My Waltham here says Joe should be at his bike shop. Sturgis Rally Week is the first week in August and he’s prepping two bikes to show.”

“Then I’ll visit him there. I’ll keep you posted on those things that don’t conflict with the investigation.”

“In case your prime suspect pans out?”

Manny shook his head. “I’m hoping my prime suspect ends up being no suspect at all.”

Manny veered to avoid hitting an oncoming car that had drifted into his lane. Or was it Manny that drifted into the other lane as he punched a number into his cell phone? He recognized Helga’s grating voice right away, sharp and short and sounding as if she’d stepped out of a
Hogan’s Heroes
episode. Manny asked if Gunnar and Ham’s arrest report was ready to be picked up. “I thought all you guys worked together,” she cackled into the receiver.

“What guys?”

Her long pause annoyed him, even more than the look she’d given him over her long nose the previous day when he asked to view the archival reports. “You federal guys. The Secret Service is federal, last I knew.”

“What
are
you talking about?” Another car dodged his government Malibu and laid on the horn, missing him by a foot. Manny pulled to the side of the road and stopped. “I’m not working with the Secret Service.”

“Well, one breezed in here yesterday. Asked—no, demanded—I
give him the arrest report, the same one I copied for you. At least you asked.”

No small compliment from someone that didn’t even shave her underarms. “Can you make another copy?”

The cackle again. “He took the microfiche roll the report was stored on, along with the arrest report I’d copied for you and that good lookin’ fella with you. I told him you’d be picking up the report today, but he said he’d save you the trip.”

“What makes you think he was Secret Service?”

“I thought he was some scary bastard off the street at first. You know the kind whose portrait is painted by a courtroom artist.”

“What made you finger him as Secret Service?”

She paused dramatically. “His photo on his Secret Service credentials.”

“What was his name?”

Helga exaggerated her sigh over the phone as if to punctuate her annoyance. “How should I remember? When the Secret Service demands I hand over all the files, I do.”

Manny did his own deep breathing. For being connected to a law enforcement agency, Helga was unusually naive. Didn’t she ever jump on the Web? Didn’t she know how easily fake bonafides could be bought for any agency with a stroke of the
SEND
button? Including the Secret Service. “Do you at least recall what he looked like.”

“Of course,” Helga snapped. “He was stocky and short. Wore those funky heavy shades you government types wear. Not your average guy. Kind of scary.”

“How so?”

“You know—charming as a carbuncle. Women’s intuition and all. Like if I hadn’t given him the report he would have broke a kneecap or an elbow. That kind of charming.”

Manny forced a thank you and started disconnecting from the phone when Helga shouted, “Maybe you can tell that
bald-headed son of a bitch to stay away from this agency if he’s going to act like that.”

Manny pulled in front of that bald-headed son of a bitch’s Sturgis motorcycle shop, ironically situated between the Jolly Funeral Home and Gunnar’s Lounge. As he stepped out of his car, hair on Manny’s arms stood at attention beside large goose bumps. Helga wasn’t the only one with intuition. Manny had felt anxious the other day when he spotted Joe Dozi in the lobby of the Alex Johnson, anxious and wanting to be anywhere besides close to him. Those same feelings came over him now and he took deep breaths before starting for the shop.