The Darkness Rolling (16 page)

I looked around the room, my focus made bright, and I wondered how the person who did this had gotten in. The whole situation felt, and looked, impossible.

She snatched her hand away from me and got loud. “I said, DON’T TOUCH ME!”

At that moment Julius barged through the door, followed by Colin and Raphael. Julius clicked his eyes deliberately from one of us to the other, collecting details.

Now she ramped up to a scream, propping up in her bed and hurling words at the walls. Her voice went down to a growl that sent shivers down the back of my legs: “Get … away … from … me.”

Then I turned my focus to a different reality—I knew exactly how this looked to Julius.

Suddenly the barrel of his .38 revolver was in my face. Colin jerked both my arms high behind me.

“Goldman, hold still for the cuffs.”

Knowing the drill, I did it without one word.

Linda was still raving. Loud voice, blind eyes. My heart twisted like a wet rag being wrung hard.

I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her, how she felt, who had done this terrible thing. I wanted to hold her. To comfort her. To wrap her in blankets and kiss her. To kill the person responsible. All of those things.

I felt the clamp of Colin’s handcuffs and heard the
snick.
At that moment I hated him. He whispered to me, “Sorry, Yazzie.”

“Raphael,” snapped Julius, “go tell Mike Goulding to radio Kayenta for the cops. Then send Janey up here. Tell her we need everything she’s got.” Janey treated aches and pains for the cast and crew.

“Goldman, get out the door and away from Miss Darnell. Now.”

I did.

Julius and Colin marched me to the pine where I’d been dumb enough to close my eyes and doze. He cuffed me to a branch just above my head.

“I’m staying right here,” Julius said, “and I’d be glad to use this on you.” He held his .38 up. “Don’t try anything.”

The stogie was out of his mouth, and he was speaking distinctly.

“We’ve been idiots. I’m going to see that your ass is in jail for the assault, battery, and rape of Linda Darnell.”

Life turns on a dime, which is a very slim coin.

Ten

The tribal cops were sent, and they were Hugh Cly and Melvin Etcitty. Everything was desperate, turned upside down. Painful. But all was not entirely lost.

When they freed me from the tree and recuffed my hands, I turned and saw a small crowd around Linda’s cabin.

“Eyes front,” said Hugh, making himself sound tough. He marched me, with his baton poking my back, to the cop car. It was a pickup truck with paint so faded that the police insignia was almost invisible. We got into the front seat, me in the middle. The jail was in Kayenta, an hour’s dirt-road drive. We spoke in Navajo.

“Hugh, I don’t have a lot of time.”

“We know that, and we seen what they said you done.” He added, “And we’re not supposed to talk together. You know that.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“We called it in, and the Loot ordered us to arrest you.” Then Melvin added, “And we’re to keep you away from the crime scene.”

“Loot’s sending some guys who are smarter’n us to do the actual investigating,” Hugh said with a twist.

“Until the really smart guys get here,” Melvin said. “The Fibbies.”

Hugh got the cop car rolling.

I didn’t need any explanation. The FBI would be on the job as quick as they could get here. A crime by a Navajo against a white woman was federal jurisdiction, not Navajo. Would be anyway because the Gouldings’ little stretch of land wasn’t rez but what was called an “inholding”—they owned it, not the tribe. And a crime against a movie star, a celebrity, was the sort of case J. Edgar Hoover loved. The feds would be all over it.

“You know how it goes, Yazzie,” Hugh said. “We’ve got to move fast if we want to find anything out, because as soon as they all get in here—”

“You’re out, I said.”

“Yep. We’re not supposed to be smart enough to figure out crimes on our own. No more talking now.”

I had to watch out for my chance.

After about fifteen minutes I saw a decent place. Time to act.

“I need to relieve myself.” I’d picked a spot just before a sharp curve in the road.

Hugh braked to a stop. He knew what was up. He pointed with his lips, Navajo-style. “Over behind those rocks, maybe?”

I held out my cuffed hands. “To do this, uh, you know, I need…” Melvin shook his head, freed me, and kept the cuffs.

I clomped up a sandy gully, slipped behind the rocks, and waited. As soon as I was well hidden, Hugh and Melvin drove on.

I hoofed it up the gully in the opposite direction. Over one rise, then down the next canyon, up and across a mesa high above. A long walk ahead of me.

Since none of the big law-enforcement agencies paid much attention to Melvin, Hugh, or any of the other Navajo cops, it didn’t matter much what they decided or ordered. Melvin and Hugh were my clansmen, and I was going to walk free. Same story with a jury or a judge—clan came first.

Maybe it’s not a perfect system. For sure it isn’t. But in some ways it creates balance.

It was going to be a cold night, but I’d make it home before dawn.

*   *   *

I scraped the heavy front door open an hour before first light. Mom was up waiting for me. She gave me a wrapping-up hug.

“I’m out of a job,” I said. “And Linda has been hurt so bad … I can’t even talk about it. Not all the way.”

“Mike radioed us. She said that you’re also wanted by the police.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek, leaned back holding my shoulders, and burst into tears. She’d been a-jangle emotionally, unusual for her, ever since I got home. Each night I came in late for a reheated supper and took off for work right after sunup. But arrested? In the company of an important woman who had been beaten? That was the last straw.

She said, “Gone for six years, and now?”

I felt as if I’d become a plague on her life. She loved me, but the effect was the same.

I heard Grandpa’s wheelchair. He was a light sleeper in his old age. He was going, “Ow, ow, ow…”

“Out of a job,” I repeated for his benefit, “and the cops are after me. Worst of all is Linda. What happened to her, and the shape she is in? It rips me up inside.”

Mom pulled me over to the couch, and I sat down. “I have coffee made,” she said. “Let me get you a mug.”

I sat, numb, willing to be led anywhere.

“Now,” she said, “tell us what happened.”

I told the story. “The most terrible part is that I didn’t hurt her, I don’t know who did, the person is still out there.

“Yes,” said Iris. “And if there’s a jealous boyfriend…”

“… Or husband,” I added.

“She is still in lots of trouble.”

“And we may be, too.”

Mom shot a look at me. She didn’t know about the husband part, but it was very minor right now.

From just behind me, I heard Grandpa, a sea of turmoil rising and falling in his nonsense words. Iris said, “I think he wants the details.”

I gave them to him. He nodded in his lopsided fashion.

Iris said, “And what are the charges, exactly? Hugh came by, but he didn’t tell us much. He didn’t want to be seen around our house.”

I couldn’t look her in the eye, so I looked at Cockeyed’s screwy one. “The assault, battery, and rape of the movie star Linda Darnell.”

“That’s what I figured. What idiots. She’s your girlfriend, or paramour, or consensual fling. Something like that. How can a man rape his own girlfriend?”

“Iris,” I said, “it’s a rough world, and it happens all the time.”

“But not by you.”

“Absolutely not.”

Grandpa pulled out his chalkboard.

Iris said, her words falling like flaking paint, “This is too damn real, isn’t it? Paradise, dreams … they’ve been shattered. I can’t imagine what Linda is going through. She believes in those things.”

She turned quick to my mother and said, “Loan me the truck. I have to get to the hospital to see her. She doesn’t have any other friends around here.”

“I’m not sure she has many real friends in the world,” Mom said.

Grandpa scrawled crazily, shaking his head:
IRIS
+
LINDA
—NO!

“Grandpa, she needs someone.”

He waved his chalkboard.

“Iris,” I said, “I agree with Grandpa. You stay close to home. Whoever did this, Linda is his target, and you shouldn’t get too close.”

“But—”

“Iris, I agree with Yazzie and Grandpa on this, too” said Mom. “You have a big heart, but this is a world we know nothing about. Best to stay clear.”

I had turned it over on my walk home, all night, trying to find the truth of the matter. “I can’t figure out how the guy got in. I stayed right there, guarding the only way in or out, and the other guard—your Colin, Iris—and the makeup fellow were right with me. When the makeup man went in to take her down to her dressing room, he found her battered.”

I played it through my head again. “Since no one went in or out of that cabin but me, I have to be the bad guy. That’s how it would look to me. Someone figured just how to set me up. I was the perfect fall guy.”

“Yazzie,” said Mom, “we are all attached to Linda. She is a good woman who has lost her way, and somehow you got in the way of a road she started down long before you came into her life. Sometimes we have to be careful who we draw close to us.”

That rubbed me the wrong way. I thought,
Your mating choice wasn’t so great … whoever he was.
And then I brushed that aside. I hated to think so, but part of my mother’s words were right because they came from experience.

Six eyes on me, plus Cockeyed’s straight one, waiting to see if I had more to say. Grandpa wore a face that was terrible even for him. And I was bone tired and buzzed up at the same time.

“They assigned Hugh Cly and Melvin Etcitty to take me to jail,” I said, “So, you know—”

Mom explained to Iris how I got away.

“That was a piece of luck, anyway,” Iris said.

Mom stepped in front of Iris, took me by the upper arm, and led me toward my bedroom. “You sleep,” she said. “Some
biligaana
lawyer will get here plenty soon.”

I wanted to shut my eyes, to turn off my mind. I couldn’t stand looking across the landscape of my future. It was a badlands. Finally sleep, that great healer, found me.

*   *   *

About noon Mom rousted me out to meet the tribal lawyer.

“Martin Green,” he said, offering his hand. The tribal lawyers’ being
biligaanas
made things sticky. I wasn’t sure how they could help people they didn’t understand. Our home may as well be in a different country.

Green was a timid-looking fellow with round, gold-rimmed spectacles, and his thin hair parted right in the middle. He was disheveled, and the knees of his pants were sandy. Turned out he’d gotten his tribal car stuck in the sand twice between Kayenta and Oljato.

Grandpa came wheeling out, and I smiled sideways at him. He didn’t send back his lopsided smile—he was feeling pissy. He held his board behind the lawyer to show what he’d already written:
SHUT MOUTH
. I nodded.

Iris came in from the back door, and she and Mom sat thigh-to-thigh with me on the eight-foot sofa. Female guardians. Mom gave me a pat of confidence on the knee.

“I’m here on official business,” said Green. “I need to talk to Mr. Goldman in private.”

“We’re a family,” Mom said.

“I—”

“Don’t take any risks,” Iris said, “with your welcome in this house.”

He should have known his position from the fact that Mom offered him nothing to eat or drink. With Navajos, no hospitality means not welcome.

Green sighed and sat down without invitation. “I have to ask Mr. Goldman a few questions.”

“Which he may or may not answer,” said Iris.

Grandpa shook his fist, like
Way to go.

“I’m a cop,” I said to everyone. “I know what not to say.”

Iris got on me. “People who think they can’t incriminate themselves—”

I put a hand on her arm. She stopped. I finished gently. “Right. I haven’t done anything wrong, so that protects me. Dumb. Anything can be twisted to work against you.”

“Could we back up here? “I’m
your
lawyer,” Green reminded us. “Whatever you say to me is privileged. I can’t repeat it to the authorities.”

“Let’s get going,” I prodded.

He nodded, uncertain. “You know something about the law governing arrests and criminal charges.”

“Damn straight,” I said.

“The FBI is on the way. The jurisdiction—”

I held up a hand to stop him. “I know. Anglo and Indian, felony. It’s the feds.”

“Right.”

“So some feds are coming by train from Albuquerque and driving the dirt road up here.”

“Actually, one of them stayed in Flagstaff to get a statement from Miss Darnell, and the other two are on the long drive. But the evidence looks strong. You’re guilty.”

He waited.

“By now Miss Darnell has told them it wasn’t me.”

“We’re in contact by shortwave. The agent asked her who did it, but she just babbled and cried. Now she’s under heavy sedation again. He’s hoping she can give a statement tonight or tomorrow.”

“I didn’t do it. Take my word for it.”

“To them your word is a fart in the wind.”

“At least you have some juice in you,” Iris said.

Green blinked several times. “All right. You, the other guard, and the makeup man were stationed in front of her cabin with an excellent view of the only entrances and exits, right?”

“No questions yet. Tell me what they think. Then I may correct something.”

“Okay, here’s the picture. You took your usual lunch break with Miss Darnell, maybe an hour.”

He waited, but I said nothing.

“You came out. Miss Darnell customarily takes a nap at that point. Colin Murphy, the other guard, and the makeup man, Raphael Garibaldi, were sitting under a tree. Garibaldi meditated while he waited for the chance to take her down to her dressing room.”

Green looked at me, paused, and without hearing anything from me, he went on.