Killing Custer (6 page)

The officer with the notepad gave her a long, narrow-eyed look. “What's his license plate?”

“Ten something,” she said. “I don't know. He drives a silver BMW.”

The officer nodded; the pen scratched the notepad.

“When did you say you last saw him?”

Angela pulled her lips between her teeth. She hadn't said. No one knew about her and Skip. It was their secret. She wiped a palm across the moisture blossoming on her face.

“He was at his desk when I left at 5 o'clock Friday,” she said, and the officer jotted in the notepad and didn't push her, didn't inquire if she and Skip had a relationship outside the office.

When he looked up, he asked if Skip had any family.

“He was married once,” Angela said. This caught both officers' attention. Eyebrows shot up in unison. “He told me they had been divorced for twenty years. She left him after he got back from Desert Storm. He said she married a college professor who would never join the military and moved to Alabama.”

Scribbling. Scribbling. The officer flipped over a page in the notepad and continued writing. “Any enemies?” he said without looking up. “All these fine people stopping in to shoot the breeze and drink coffee. Anybody not so friendly?”

Peters let out a short guffaw, as if the idea of Skip Burrows having an enemy was as unlikely as . . .

Angela closed her eyes against the rest of it: as unlikely as someone shooting Custer in the middle of Main Street.

“What is it?” the dark-haired officer said.

“I heard him arguing with a friend last week.” She had no idea what had pushed her to say it. She loved the man; such a thin line between trust and distrust. “The man stomped out. ‘Win some, lose some,' Skip said.”

“You have a name?”

Yes. She had a name. Colonel Edward Garrett. She had called him “General,” because Skip said the man liked that.

6

TH
E LONG VIEW
of Main Street, wide-laned and lined with hanging baskets of flowers, took Vicky Holden by surprise, it looked so peaceful. Except for the yellow police tape that fluttered in the street a half block away. Vicky had stopped in the doorway of the coffee shop, barely aware of the pressure of Adam Lone Eagle's hand on the small of her back, ushering her outside. Shadows and sunlight mingled in wide rectangles on the sidewalks, a robin's egg blue sky all around, not a cloud in sight. And yet, a man had been shot to death not twenty-four hours ago. A thin line of pickups and cars moved slowly toward the tape before turning onto a side street.

Adam guided her onto the sidewalk and pulled the glass door closed behind them. In the distance, sirens rose and fell like a memory. Adam's hand felt firmer, more protective, against her back. “Probably an accident,” he said.

They had grabbed coffee and scones and carried them to a small metal table against the brick wall. The shop was always crowded in the morning. People coming and going, the little bell on the door jingling nonstop, conversations buzzing. Snippets of conversation cut through the noise:
We were right there. Saw the whole thing. You saw him go down? Saw him laying there soon's the Indians rode ahead. One of them shot him, poor man. Just because he pretended to be Custer.

Vicky had squeezed her eyes shut for a moment against the earnest faces bending toward one another, theorizing, guessing. An image swept over her. She was a child begging Mama to take her to the movie theater in Lander. One of the fairy tales, maybe
Snow White
, and Mama saying,
Not in town. We're not welcome in town
.

She lived here now. In an apartment building filled with whites. She chatted with them on the elevator, waved in the parking lot. Once, when she had the flu, the widow next door had brought chicken soup. Her office was here. A small bungalow on a corner in a residential neighborhood. She and Annie, her secretary, the only Arapahos within blocks. But Arapahos drove to her office every day from the rez. No one bothered them or called them names. She remembered that, too: The rodeo grounds outside town, and white kids saying,
What're you doing here, Injun. Go back where you belong
.

“Don't let them bother you.” Adam had leaned across the table toward her. “Nobody knows what really happened yesterday. There will be a major investigation, you can bet on it.”

“An investigation into every Arapaho in the parade? Turning their lives upside down? Assuming one is guilty? The only question is, which one to pin it on?” She had felt a sharp prick of annoyance. Adam seemed distant, removed from what had happened, and yet it was his people who had defeated Custer and the 7th Cavalry, his people who were the heroes—Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Some Arapahos had ridden north to join Sitting Bull, the chief who refused to be ordered around by white people. Arapahos had wanted to be like him, free on the plains with the buffalo and the sky and the endless expanse of prairie like a grassy sea around them.

“Is that what you believe?” She had challenged him. “An Indian killed Custer again?”

Adam had sipped at his mug of coffee, eyeing her over the brim. Finally he'd said, “You're not making sense. Somebody shot a man named Edward Garrett. An actor. He could have been playing Shakespeare.”

“But he wasn't. He came here as Custer. Custer, in Indian country!” Vicky had taken a bite of scone and washed it down with a drink of coffee. “You know what this means to White-Indian relations here.”

“It doesn't have to mean anything.” God, he was so sure of himself, so handsome and confident, with strands of gray shining through the thick black hair that he wore short, neatly trimmed around his ears. And his hands: the long brown fingers and manicured nails. A Lakota who walked into the high-rise offices of oil and gas and coal companies around the country and faced down lawyers from the biggest and richest firms. Never doubting that they would both continue to come and go in town without worry. To live as they had lived. That no one would toss a brick through the window of the house he'd bought last winter. That he would practice natural resources law from the study that overlooked the quiet, tree-lined street where kids played kickball and neighbors pushed strollers along the sidewalk. Her stomach churned. The killing could change everything.

In the distance, the sound of sirens. She tried to concentrate on what Adam was saying. Something about letting things go, the investigation taking its course. She finished her coffee, wrapped the scone in a napkin, and got to her feet. She dropped both the empty cup and the scone into the trash receptacle and headed for the door, aware of the scrape of Adam's chair behind her, the tap tap of his boots on the hard floor. Now she found it hard to take her eyes away from the street flowing into the horizon. The sirens were coming closer.

“Accident on the highway,” Adam said, his hand still on her back. “I'll drive you to the office.”

She turned toward him, thoughts jamming together like snarled traffic. “I'll walk.” She tried to ignore the puzzled look in his black eyes.

“You're worried about a change in White-Indian relationships, yet you insist upon walking?”

She watched him swallow back the rest of the thought that worked through his expression: I'll never understand you.

She lifted herself on her toes, brushed his lips, and started down the sidewalk toward the yellow tape. Two police cars whipped past, racing toward some point farther down Main Street, sirens blasting.

In a couple of minutes, she was in front of the gift shop where she and Adam had been watching the parade when the commotion began. Up ahead, shouts, screaming, running. The parade had marched past: the blare of brass from the high school bands, the tissue-and-flower-covered floats, the beautiful teenage girls tossing flowers and kisses. But something had changed. It was hard to see the end of the parade past the crowds swirling along the curb. She had glanced at the program she'd cut out of the
Gazette
. The 7th Cavalry followed by Arapaho warriors. She had waited for the 7th Cavalry to march into view, listened for the buglers blowing “Garry Owen.” The troopers hadn't appeared.

She had started weaving through the crowds, making her way up the block. Adam beside her, shouldering past a couple of cowboys with hats pushed back, squinting toward the congealing bodies in the middle of the street. A voice, one of the cowboys, had slurred the words around the chunk of tobacco that protruded like a tumor in his cheek:
By God, Custer's down.

They had pushed past, she and Adam, but she had heard the reluctance in his footsteps, as if whatever had happened to an actor playing Custer was no concern of theirs. It was finished, settled in the Old Time. She had wedged herself beside a family and peered up the street. A riot had erupted, with police officers waving at the crowd, shouting, “Stay back. Stay back.” A blur of blue uniforms and horses bucking and plunging, the sounds of men shouting. The crowd pressed forward, and she caught a glimpse of a figure in buckskins and black boots sprawled on the pavement. Sirens swelled in the air. And nervous rumors rippled through the crowd: Custer's been shot.

Vicky crossed Main alongside the yellow police tape that wrapped around a large, wet place where blood had been hosed from the pavement. A couple of cops in jeans, white shirts, and vests patrolled inside the tape, heads bent, eyes scouring the pavement. Looking for what? she wondered. A lost button? An eagle feather? Prints of horse hooves? Some obscure object that the forensic team had overlooked yesterday that would point to the Indian who had shot Custer?

She hurried down the sidewalks through the residential area. Rows of brick bungalows sheltered behind bushy pine trees and cottonwoods dusted with whispery clumps of cotton. Her office was on the corner ahead, a redbrick bungalow with a porch that stretched between the two front windows and a small sign in front that said, Vicky Holden, Attorney at Law. Annie's black Pontiac stood at the curb behind the pickup driven by Roger Hurst, the lawyer she and Adam had hired to handle what Adam called the little cases. When she and Adam had been partners. Vicky crossed the street and slowed her pace, giving her heart a chance to stop hammering. The sirens had cut off. An accident, Adam had said. Still, the sound had unnerved her, an echo of the chaos of yesterday. By the time she let herself into the bungalow, her heart was slowing to a steady, almost normal pace.

Annie was on the phone, the perfect image of a no-nonsense librarian—shoulder-length black hair, quick, dark eyes, silver beads at her neck—except that she was a no-nonsense secretary, personal assistant, and, Vicky had to admit, close friend. Annie reminded her of herself. Making her own way in the world, a woman alone, with an ex-husband in the state prison at Rawlins and two almost-teenage kids. One day she had appeared in Vicky's office. “I hear you're looking for a secretary,” she'd said, “and I'm a good one.”

At the time, Vicky hadn't been sure she was looking for a secretary. Business was slow. How would she handle the extra expense? She had been about to tell this young woman, who had driven in from the rez in an old pickup that laid down so much exhaust Vicky had smelled it in the office, that she wasn't hiring. Then Annie said she had kids to feed, and that had gotten Vicky's attention. Vicky had been on her own and still alive after ten years with Ben Holden and his fists and accusations. Trying to support two kids, Susan and Lucas, while she went to college and law school in Denver, looking toward the future, when she wouldn't have to beg for a job. She had never found the way to do it all. The waitressing jobs that hardly covered the rent and left her exhausted and sleeping in class; the night shift at a brewery that paid for the babysitter but not much else. In the end, she'd brought the kids back to her own parents on the rez. When the future finally arrived, the kids were grown and on their own. She had hired Annie on the spot.

Vicky closed the beveled glass doors on the sound of Annie's voice and dropped into the chair at her desk. The computer made tiny gyrating noises when she turned it on. She watched the icons dance into place, then clicked on her calendar. Two appointments this morning, canceled. Will and Mary Whiteman, hoping to finalize the adoption of their granddaughter, and Bonner LeBois, needing a new will, now that he had married Beverly. All from Ethete, which meant a long drive south on 287, across the reservation border into Lander. She checked the afternoon schedule. More cancellations. Only Donna Red Cloud still on the schedule, but she lived in town with her white husband.

Someone was watching. Vicky felt the eyes boring into her like laser beams. She swung her chair toward the door where Annie, blanched and wide-eyed, stood in the opening. She gripped the door handle and leaned against the edge, as if she were leaning into the wind out on the plains.

“What is it?”

“Skip Burrows.”

“What about him?”

“He's gone.”

Vicky was quiet for a moment before she repeated the word: “Gone?”

“I just got off the phone with my cousin, Andrew. He was having breakfast at the café across the street from Skip's office when police cars pulled into the parking lot.”

“I heard the sirens,” Vicky said. So it hadn't been an accident on the highway.

“Lot of people showing up, and Andrew went to see what was going on. Somebody trashed Skip Burrows's office, and he's missing. The police are forming a search party. Roger is taking the morning off to help.”

Vicky leaned back against her chair. Law office trashed, lawyer missing? And Skip Burrows: likeable, friendly, always time to stop and chat. Remembered everyone's name and the names of their kids. He had opened the office about two years ago, and last year, he had hired Angela Running Bear as his secretary, which made the office a friendly place for Arapahos. For a while, Vicky's own practice had slowed down, her own people finding their way to the office in the white-brick building at the far end of Main Street. Skip had taken to stopping in unannounced, assuring her he had no intention of taking her clients, suggesting that they might work together. He and Roger had become friendly, walking into town for coffee some mornings. Gradually things had returned to normal, as if the novelty of another Arapaho in a law office had worn off.

“Angela called 911 when she got to work this morning.”

Vicky took a moment, letting the news settle, find a place in reality. She was about to turn back to the computer when Annie gave a little cough, as if to clear the way for more news. “I checked the phone messages for the weekend,” she said. “You had a call on Friday at 6:03 in the evening. No message, but the ID said the call came from Skip Burrows.”