Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery (19 page)

VICKY CLOSED THE
door and leaned against it. The office glowed in the light from the streetlamps: Annie's desk and chair, the computer, side chairs against the wall. She could hear the click of Adam's footsteps receding on the sidewalk, the sharp ratchet of the engine turning over. Then the fading noise of the BMW moving down the street. Sadness washed over her. Shouldn't there have been shouting and tears, some force of emotion, to mark the end of a relationship? Something more fitting than silence? They had started with so much hope, she and Adam. Such a promising direction, as if on some day in the future she would love him and he would love her and they would go on, but that day had never arrived. They had loved each other as much as they could, she thought. As much as was possible, but it hadn't been enough, all that wanting love. They had needed more.

She flipped on the switch and watched the light from the ceiling shimmer in the beveled-glass doors. She walked over, flung open the doors, and went to her computer. Nothing in her e-mail that needed attention, nothing about Arnie. She clicked on the Web site for the
Gazette
. A bold, black headline ran like a banner across the page:
LOCAL BUSINESSMAN MURDERED THIS EVENING
. She scanned down the lines of text.

Steve Mantle, owner of Ranchlands Employment, was shot to death this evening in his office on Main Street in Riverton. Police believe Mantle was killed in the course of a burglary. The office had been ransacked, and numerous items were taken. Mantle had run the employment company, which placed ranch workers in the area, since 2002. Active in the community, he was a member of the Presbyterian church and had coached the Riverton Rangers for three years. He is survived by his wife, Julia, and two children, Richard and Mary Ann. Riverton police ask that anyone who may have noticed anything unusual around the office of Ranchlands Employment between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. contact them.

Practically broad daylight. Someone in the strip mall must have seen a burglar and killer going into Ranchlands Employment. And yet, people tended to their own business, picking up dry cleaning or pizza, locking up the front door for the day—normal, normal—not expecting anything unusual.

She dragged her cell out of her bag, called the number for the rehab clinic, and asked to speak to the nurse in charge. Several moments passed before a woman's voice, deep and confident, came on the line. “This is Ruth Avery.”

“Vicky Holden. I represent Arnie Walksfast.”

“Yes. I called your office as soon as we realized Arnie had left the hospital.”

“Is there anything you can tell me about why he left? Something he might have said? Any note?”

“I'm afraid not. He seemed to be doing well in treatment. Very accommodating.”

A red flag, Vicky was thinking. Arnie had been belligerent and angry when she had seen him. He blamed everybody for his predicament. Everybody except himself. If he had turned accommodating, it meant he had decided to leave. “Have you reported his absence to the probation department?” God. Arnie's probation could be revoked. He could spend a year in jail.

“I'll have to report him missing tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, of course.” Which left some time to find Arnie and talk him into returning voluntarily, unless . . . She thanked the nurse and ended the call, a chill moving through her. Arnie had walked away from the hospital around five o'clock, and sometime between six and eight, the man Arnie and his friends blamed for putting outsiders into jobs on local ranches was shot to death. My God, what had Arnie gotten himself involved in? Shooting at cowboys, trying to scare them away? And now, at least three cowboys missing—there could be more—and a businessman murdered?

Vicky started to call Betty Walksfast, then ended the call. If Arnie was at his mother's, a telephone call would send him fleeing somewhere else. She swung away from the desk and hurried back through the office and into the still, warm night filled with stars. In ten minutes she had left Lander behind and was following the sheen of headlights onto the reservation. More traffic than she had ever seen on Rendezvous Road, cars and trucks barreling in both directions, headlights strobing the asphalt. All around, the plains were dark and quiet, limitless. From time to time houses rose at the edge of the headlights. Sometimes the windows were dark, sometimes faint lights glowed behind the curtains.

She followed a truck from Oklahoma and kept going until she saw the lights of Arapahoe on the west. Still more traffic, and she wondered where all the visitors would bed down for the night. Not until she turned into Arapahoe did the traffic fall behind. She tried to remember which of the white, look-alike houses belonged to Betty Walksfast. Which house had Arnie grown up in? Become angry in?

She drew up in front of the house on the corner with a little peaked roof over the stoop. A single light shone in the front window. Parked next to the house was a dark truck with a license plate that hung off a single screw. She waited, half expecting Arnie to fling himself past the door and run to the truck. He would back up and leave before she had the chance to turn the ignition.

No one came to the door. After two or three minutes, Vicky got out, walked up onto the stoop, and knocked. “Betty,” she called. “It's Vicky Holden.”

The door opened. A small, stooped figure in a pink robe cinched at her waist stood outlined in the rectangle of light. Greasy smells of something fried, like chicken, seeped from inside the house. “I seen you drive up. Wasn't expecting visitors.”

“I'm sorry. It's about Arnie. Is he here?”

“Here? He's in rehab. Doing okay, too. I talked to him today.” For a moment Vicky thought Betty would close the door, then she seemed to hesitate. “Why'd you come here?”

“He left the clinic this afternoon.” The woman hadn't invited her inside, and Vicky wondered whom she had been frying the chicken for. “I have to talk to him. I want to help him.”

“He's not here.” Now the door was closing, and Vicky wrapped her hand around the edge.

“Listen to me. The clinic won't notify probation until morning. If Arnie returns, everything might be okay. I have to get him back tonight.”

The woman was shaking her head. “I'd tell you if he was here. Arnie don't need any more trouble. I told him I'd take him back, but he said he had something to take care of.”

So Arnie had come home. Vicky didn't press the point. “Where did he go?”

For a moment, Vicky thought the woman might fold inward and crumple to the floor. She looked shaky and uncertain, as if the world had started turning about her. “Are you okay?”

Betty blinked into the outdoors, as if she could blink herself back, and leaned against the door frame. “I did my best for that boy. I raised him right here in this house. He went to school over there.” She nodded in the direction of the dark expanse of the Arapahoe school yard. “I had help. All my aunties and grandmothers, my nephew was like a big brother. Didn't make any difference. Arnie went on his own way, found his own friends. No good, any of them. See what they brought him? All the relatives threw up their hands and said no more. We're not bailing him out of jail, paying lawyers, vouching for him to some judge. No more promising to look after him. He was on his own. Except for me. I know the goodness in my boy. He's got to throw away all the bad stuff and come back to the Arapaho Way like he was raised.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don't know, and that's the truth. He called somebody. Pickup drove up with three or four drunks, and Arnie ran out, jumped into the back. They took off.”

“What time did he leave?” The woman was shaking her head, as if the time couldn't matter. “It's important,” Vicky said.

“He didn't stay long. I started making him dinner, but he said he didn't have time.”

“An hour ago? Two hours ago?”

“He come here straight from the hospital. One of his no-good friends dropped him off. Then he called somebody else, and next thing I knew, he was gone. Three hours ago, I'd say.”

“If he comes back, tell him to call me. I don't care what time it is. Have him call.”

Vicky sat in the Ford a couple of minutes, watching the light go out in the window, listening to the sounds of night, the shush of the wind, the crackle of an animal's footsteps. The car was stuffy, the warm breeze blowing through the opened windows like the air out of a vent. Still she felt cold and clammy and a little sick to her stomach. Arnie had left the hospital with every intention of killing Steve Mantle, finishing unfinished business. The man would not be placing any more outsiders on local ranches. Anybody who took his place would get the message.

God, what had she done? Confronted Arnie about shooting at the cowboys, trying to scare them off? Reigniting all the festering resentments, the anger and hopelessness of Arnie and his buddies? Spurred him on to taking care of the man responsible for parceling out the jobs? And all the time she had been hoping that Arnie's crime was hanging around with bad guys—shooters—that the most Arnie could be charged with would be conspiracy. It would have been tough enough, but conspiracy she could have handled. She could have built a defense that he hadn't known what the others were up to. At the least, he hadn't approved, hadn't gone along. But this . . .

This was murder, planned, carried out. If Arnie had left the clinic to murder a man, that meant Arnie was the leader. The others might be conspirators, but Arnie . . . God, leaving court-ordered rehab was the least of Arnie's problems now. She fought the impulse to jump out of the car, run off into the darkness, and throw up.

Finally she turned on the engine. Fingers shaky, slipping off the key. She made herself take a deep breath, then another. She wondered if John O'Malley had heard the news about Steve Mantle. This afternoon—it seemed like a month ago—John had gone to Steve's office, gotten the news about the cowboys Steve had sent to Broken Buffalo Ranch. Two by two, like dancers in a powwow, hiring on, leaving.

She pulled out her cell, found John O'Malley's number, and hit send. It took a moment before the buzzing noise started. The engine hummed around her, the breeze whipped a piece of hair into her eyes. She pushed the hair back and tried to tuck it behind her ear. “Sorry to miss your call.” John O'Malley might have been sitting in the passenger seat. “Leave a message and I will call you back.” She waited for the beeping noise, then said, “It's Vicky. Please call me.”

She drove back through the dusty streets of Arapahoe, left onto Rendezvous Road, right onto Seventeen-Mile Road, trying to push her thoughts into some kind of order that made sense. She could be wrong about Arnie, and she whispered a prayer to the Creator: “Let me be wrong.” She had to find him. The instant she saw him, she would know.

She laughed at the thought. She hadn't known anything about Arnie Walksfast. She had thought he had been involved in an assault in a bar. She hadn't seen the turbulence and hatred beneath the surface. The idea of trying to talk him into returning to rehab seemed faintly silly now. A murderer showing good faith by returning to rehab? She would be laughed out of court.

The surface, she thought. Stay on the surface. All she knew was that, at five o'clock, Arnie Walksfast had walked away from rehab. Her job was to talk him into going back. The rest was conjecture, the what-might-have-happened. The Riverton police would have to sort it out.

Traffic had thinned out, but lines of cars and pickups moved along Seventeen-Mile Road. Looming in the headlights was the billboard with the shining white words:
ST. FRANCIS MISSION
. She slowed for the right turn, ignoring the horn that erupted behind her, and plunged into the tunnel of cottonwoods, which cast long shadows over the road. She pulled onto Circle Drive and drove slowly around the center of the mission. Dim lights shone in the windows of the administration building, the church, and the museum; night lights that were always left on, she knew. The residence was dark, closed up for the night. No sign of John O'Malley's red Toyota pickup. No vehicles anywhere.

He was a priest. He could have been called out. To the hospital, to a house where someone needed to talk to a priest. So many people who needed him more than she did.

She completed the circle and drove back through the cottonwoods. Trying to think, trying to remember. What was the name of the restaurant where Lucy worked? A bar and grill in Riverton, she remembered that much, but there were several in Riverton. She worked nights, late, which probably meant the place served liquor.

She was back on Seventeen-Mile Road, heading to Riverton, when her cell phone rang. It took a moment to find it in her bag. She stopped at the intersection with highway 789. “Call from John O'Malley” appeared on the screen. She slid her fingertip over the answer bar. “Have you heard the news?” she said.

“Are you talking about Steve Mantle?”

“Yes. There's more.” Then she told him about Arnie leaving rehab. She could hear herself going on and on about her fear that Arnie and his buddies had killed Mantle until a pickup behind her honked. At the next break in traffic, she turned left onto the highway, still babbling, all the worry and tension of the evening leaking out.

“Where are you now?”

“I'm on my way to talk to Arnie's girlfriend. She works at the”—she had it then, as if the name had dropped into her head—“Diamond Bar and Grill.”

“I'll see you there.”

STEAKS CHOPS BBQ
blinked yellow and red on the neon sign close to the curb in front of the redbrick restaurant. Rows of cars and pickups crowded the parking lot next door. Vicky waited for an SUV to back out of a parking space, then pulled into the slot. A trio of people were weaving their way among the parked vehicles, and she followed them toward the front. The big door with glass inserts sighed on pneumatic hinges when one of the men yanked it open. He held it back, a doorman bowing and smiling, as she joined the others pushing into the crowded entry. People everywhere, standing against the walls, hovering around the hostess desk, sitting on small benches. Vicky thanked the man. “Happy to oblige, ma'am,” he said, shutting the door behind him. A Texan, she guessed.

She slid past the crowd toward the desk. The hostess was about twenty, tall and white-skinned with black hair piled on top of her head and a harried look that gave her an exhausted, older-woman look. She kept her head down, eyes glued to a seating chart with assorted red checks on the square, black outlines of tables. “Excuse me,” Vicky said.

“Sorry, you have to wait your turn.” The young woman never lifted her eyes. “We're super busy. I can't help everybody at the same time.”

“Is Lucy Murphy on tonight?”

The hostess looked up. Eyebrows raised, shiny red lips revealing a row of tiny, white teeth. “No personal stuff while the waitstaff is serving. Manager will throw a conniption fit. You'll have to call her tomorrow. She's supposed to come in at five, but she was plenty late tonight. You want a table? Half-hour wait.”

Vicky waved away the offer. The woman had told her what she wanted. Lucy was here now. Through the low murmur of conversations, the impatient tones, Vicky heard the door behind her sighing again on its hinges. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a tan cowboy hat bobbing above the heads of the people packed into the entry. She tried to make her way toward him, slipping past arms, wedging herself between backs. Excuse me. Excuse me.

“Lucy's here somewhere,” she said when she reached John O'Malley. There was a worried sadness about him, the lines at the corners of his eyes deeper, permanent looking. “We can go into the dining room and look for her.”

He nodded, and she turned around and threaded her way back through the crowd, aware of John O'Malley behind her and the way people parted for them. The dining room was packed, people seated at tables and in the booths, waitstaff in white shirts and black slacks or skirts, scurrying about with trays of food perched shoulder high on their palms. She spotted Lucy in the far corner, bent over a table, delivering plates of food. The girl stood up straight, lifted the tray off a serving table, and swung toward them. She stood still, as if an electric current had coursed through her. Then she pivoted about and pushed through a swinging door. A flare of noise burst over the dining room: clanging metal, running water, someone shouting. For an instant, Vicky glimpsed the rows of metal tables, white-coated cooks bustling about. Then the door swung shut.

“She's scared. She's going to run.” Vicky could see the look of understanding that flashed in John O'Malley's face. He ushered her ahead, back to the entry, through the crowd, and out the door that another man in a ten-gallon hat, probably also from Texas, was holding open. They hurried around the building, half walking, half running.

An alley ran along the back, cars and pickups parked at random, trash barrels overflowing against a wooden fence, a collection of small metal containers lining the back wall. A solid black door in the center of the building burst open. Lucy came running out, clutching a red bag and a stash of black-and-white clothing, fingers working the buttons on a pink blouse. The door made a hollow whacking noise behind her.

Vicky closed the space between them. “Lucy! Don't be frightened.” The girl's eyes were lit with fear. “This is Father John from the mission.”

“Go away. Leave me alone.” Lucy was trembling, backing toward the alley, knocking over a metal container that clanked and rolled along the pavement. “I don't know anything, I swear. Arnie'll kill me.”

“He threatened you?”

“Told me to stay out of his business. Go away. I can't talk to you.”

“Where can we find him?” John said. “We won't have to talk to you. We'll talk to him.”

“You don't get it.” The girl started shaking her head, swallowing tears. “I'll be arrested. I'll be charged with aiding him. That's what he told me. I gotta keep my mouth shut or I'll be in a lot of trouble.”

“You picked him up at the clinic?”

“He said it was okay. He said the judge changed his mind, so he could leave. Soon's he got in the car, he told me to keep my mouth shut if I knew what was good for me. That's when I knew he wasn't supposed to leave rehab, and I was his accomplice or something.” She looked back at the door. “I'm gonna lose my job, walking off like I just did.”

“You can go back,” Father John said. “Tell us where Arnie is and go back to work.”

This seemed like a new and fantastic revelation. Lucy looked at them with wide, dark eyes. “You won't tell him I told you?”

“We're trying to help him,” Vicky said. “I'm hoping he'll let us take him back to rehab before the probation officer knows he left.”

Lucy gulped down a couple of breaths, looking between them and the solid, black door. “I need this job, but Arnie can't know I talked to you. He said he had business to clean up.”

“Business? Where?” Vicky could feel the knot tightening in her stomach. Clean up by murdering the man responsible for putting outsiders in jobs?

The girl shrugged. “All I know is, Arnie did business with drinking buddies, a bunch of lowlifes.”

“Do they hang out at a bar?” John said.

“He said he was going to the rez.”

“A drinking house?”

The girl nodded. “Ansel Night Hawk's place. His girlfriend doesn't care. She drinks with 'em.”

*   *   *

THEY DROVE SOUTH
on 789, past the warehouses and liquor stores and camper rentals, past the trailer park, and turned onto Seventeen-Mile Road, heading deeper into the reservation. Traffic was lighter, but still steady. An occasional truck passed; lights from oncoming vehicles flashed across the pavement. A field of stars danced in the sky. They had taken John's old pickup, parked in the rear of the parking lot near the back door of the restaurant. The girl had stood there, looking small and helpless as they backed out of the lot. Vicky had wanted to jump out of the pickup, run to Lucy, and tell her again to go home. She could feel the exhaustion moving through her like a cold draft.

“Ansel and Arnie used to play for the Eagles,” John O'Malley said, and Vicky realized he was lost in his own memories. “Good kids, both of them.”

Vicky told him then about her fear that Arnie and his drinking buddies could be responsible for the cowboys missing from the Broken Buffalo.

“You think they might have killed them?”

She was quiet a moment, sorting her thoughts into compartments: Anything Arnie had told her was privileged. But she had her own theories. Theories based on nothing except her own growing uneasiness and diminishing trust in her client.

“I spoke with Jaime Madigan's fiancée,” John said. “She reported him missing last fall, and she has been in touch with Gianelli and the BIA police every few weeks. There's no sign of Jaime.”

“So they've stopped looking.”

“Unless something turns up, they don't have anything to go on.”

“How can cowboys disappear and nobody cares?”

“Nuala cares. Josh Barker's friend has come here looking for him. The prosecutor must have tried to find Rick Tomlin so he could testify against your client.”

“They've run into blank walls. Reg Hartly thinks he might stumble onto something at the ranch, but as soon as he hits the blank wall, he'll leave.”

“You believe the cowboys are dead?” Father John turned north onto Blue Sky Highway, leaving most of the traffic behind. An occasional pickup rose in the oncoming lane. The houses set back from the road were dark.

“I can't shake the feeling, John. I hate it; I don't want to believe it. What business did Arnie have that was so important he had to leave rehab?” Vicky leaned her head back against the seat and stared at the headlights floating into the darkness. “He's my client, but who is he? A guy who beat up a cowboy in a bar? A murderer? How can I help him if I don't know?”

John O'Malley didn't say anything. He understood, and it was enough.

She could see the glow of lights off the road ahead, the dark shadows of parked vehicles. She thought she heard the faint trace of hip-hop on the breeze, but she wasn't sure. There were no other houses around, no other traffic, just the glow of a drinking house where kids and young people went to drink. Sometimes for days, until someone dragged the kids away.

The pickup was slowing down. Tires scraped the pavement, the engine rattled. They veered right, crossed the borrow ditch, and slid onto the hard dirt washboard of a yard. The headlights flicked over a group of men standing around and lounging on the stoop, shadowy and dark, hunched over beer cans, music thumping in the nighttime silence. The door to the house was open. John pulled in next to a dark sedan with a silvery-primed passenger door. He started to tell Vicky to wait, then changed his mind. She would do what she wanted. He got out, leaving the engine running, the headlights on. Three of the beer drinkers started toward the pickup.

Vicky threw open her door and jumped out. She hurried around the hood and stopped next to John O'Malley, a phalanx of two, she thought, against big, strutting drunkards. “We're here to see Arnie Walksfast,” John said.

“Don't know any Arnie Walksfast,” one of the men said. He was in his twenties, shirtless, with long black hair pulled back from his face and trailing over his naked shoulders. He wore blue jeans that rode low on his hips and flip-flops that made a swishing noise on the dirt. “Anybody know an Indian named Arnie Walksfast?” he called over a brown shoulder. “Nope. Nobody. So turn around and drive that old wreck out of here.”

“Hey, maybe they want a drink first?” Another Indian had staggered off the stoop and planted his boots a couple of feet apart, shifting his weight from one to the other. “Get them a drink! What kind of Raps are we? Forgetting our manners.”

“I'm Arnie's lawyer.” Vicky could hear the tenseness in her voice. “Tell him I'm here. I can help him.”

“Help him?” A fourth man had walked over, and now they stood together, smirking, headlights strobing over their faces. “He don't need no help. We don't need no lawyers around here.”

“Is he inside?”

“What?” The Indian blinked and looked around, as if he'd given away the game. “I never said he was here.”

“You heard that?” the first Indian said. “Nobody said he was here, so get out before . . . we have to do some damage. Break a couple legs. Never like beating up ladies, but ladies don't come calling where they're not wanted.”

Another Indian appeared in the doorway. He had big shoulders and a big head that rolled on his thick neck. “Knock it off, you bums,” he shouted. “This here's Father John.” He picked his way across the stoop, gripping the shoulder of an Indian sitting on the concrete edge. “Show some respect. Hey, Father,” he said, tottering forward, in and out of the headlights. He let out a loud belch.

“How are you doing, Ansel?”

“Doing just great. Having a little fun, that's all. You want to see Arnie? You're not going to bring the police here, are you?”

“We're not going to bring the police.”