Wall of Glass (26 page)

She barked at me.
Arf, arf, arf
, like Little Orphan Annie's Sandy. It took me a moment to realize that she was laughing. “I like that,” she said. “No denials, right? And no admissions neither. Slippery, but honest.” She nodded approval. “We'll get along, Croft. Just what is it you wanna know about eagle feathers?”

“First of all,” I said, “is possession of them illegal?”

“Depends,” she said. “Depends on who you are. If you're an Indian, a Native American with your name on the census polls, and you got a warehouse full of the things, the Fish and Wildlife people might stew about it some, but there isn't a whole lot they'd be able to do. See, you could find yourself maybe eighteen thousand reasons why you needed those things for religious reasons, and Fish and Wildlife, they know that the courts all say you got a right to practice your religion, even if it uses raptor feathers.”

“Raptor feathers?” I said.

“Raptors, birds of prey. Eagles, hawks, owls, vultures. They're all protected, see, by the federal government. Most of them since nineteen-eighteen, when the Migratory Wildlife Treaty Act went into law. The Indians are allowed to own the feathers, but they can't sell 'em, and even the Indians aren't allowed to kill the birds.”

“If they can't kill the birds, then how do they get the feathers?”

She grinned. “There's the rub, huh? Tell you a story. I was on a buying trip once, up to Chinle on the Navajo reservation, and this ol' boy, frenna mine for years, comes up to me with an eagle claw, right? ‘Bout so big, size of my hand, ugly as sin but it had some nice silver work on it, he's good with silver. I say to him, ‘Harold, you know damn well I put that in my gallery, the Federales'll be all over me like warts on a horny toad, and besides, where'd an ole fart like you get that sucker anyway?' He tells me, this is with a straight face now, he tells me he was just walkin' out along the hills and this big ol' eagle keels over out of the sky and plops down at his feet.” She barked. “Tells me it was probably sick.” She barked again.

I smiled. “So an Indian,” I said, “is allowed to own the feathers. What about someone who isn't an Indian?”

“Then,” she said, “Fish and Wildlife can bust your ass good. They think you're selling the things, you're lookin' at a five thousand dollar fine and five years in the pokey.”

“The eagle feathers,” I said. “They were once used in kachinas.”

“Right,” she nodded. “You still see some of the old ones hangin' around, eagle feathers all over. Worth a pretty penny. And legal, too, long as they're pre-nineteen-eighteen. But you gotta have
certification
, see, something that proves the kachina is old enough. Last year, frenna mine on the Plaza, nother dealer, he had one in his window, and I
know
the damn thing was a hunnerd years old if it was a day, and Fish and Wildlife came and carted it off anyway. Confiscated the thing, just like that.” She shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Guy didn't have any proof.”

“Would it be illegal for an Indian to sell a kachina made with eagle feathers, one that wasn't certified?”

“Sure would. Get the same penalty as a white guy.”

“You buy all your kachinas, the ones in your gallery, directly from the Indians?”

She nodded. “For thirty years now.”

“Have any of them ever offered you kachinas, new ones, that had eagle feathers?”

“When I started up, sure they did. And ever so often one of the ol' guys like Harold tries to sniff me out, but that's a game with 'em now, mostly. They all know I wouldn't touch the things.”

“Have you heard of any dealers here in town who might be selling eagle feather kachinas?”

Her eyes narrowed, nearly disappearing between folds of skin. “Everyone in town knows the score. Don't make any sense to sell something for a thousand bucks that'll cost you five thousand in fines and maybe some time in the pen.”

“But what about overseas sales? Wouldn't it be possible for a dealer to sell eagle feather kachinas somewhere overseas—to Germany, let's say—without much risk?”

“You know,” she said, her eyes still narrowed. “I'm startin' to get kind of a weird feeling about all this. Couple days ago Silvia Griego dies, and I know for a fact that Silvia's a heavy dealer to Germany, probably the heaviest in town. And suddenly you show up here asking questions about dealing kachinas to Germany.”

“Would it be possible?”

“Sure it would. Even if the things are checked at customs here in the States, no one's gonna know the difference. A feather's a feather, right? And once they're in Germany, Fish and Wildlife can't do a whole hell of a lot about 'em.”

“The eagle feathers make the kachinas more valuable over there?”

“'Course they do. More authentic, right? You think the kachinas the Indians use on reservation land, the Hopis and the Pueblos, you think those suckers are put together with dyed goose feathers? Or turkey feathers? And the Krauts, see, they're ape-shit about Indian stuff. Only it's gotta be
authentic
, know what I mean?”

“What do you think of John Lucero's work?”

Eyes narrowed again, she said, “You wanna tell me what this is all about?”

“Would it surprise you if I told you that I think Silvia Griego was dealing eagle feather kachinas to Germany?”

She looked at me for a moment. At last she said. “Surprise me? No. I gotta admit it wouldn't surprise me much. Depress me some, maybe. I liked Silvia.” She frowned. “Well, no, that's puttin' it too strong. You gotta respect somebody, I guess, before you can like her. I felt sorry for her, is what it was, probably. She was a widow, see. Husband died ten years ago. She bought the gallery with the insurance money and she's been runnin' hard ever since, tryin' to prove something. And the way she proved it, see, was with sex and money. Now you gotta figure sex and money, they're at the bottom of most'a what folks do, right? And Lord knows I don't mind makin' a buck or two myself, or slippin' into the sack for a quickie now and then—” grinning, she winked at me “—we could talk about that a little later, if you got the time—but with Silvia, both of 'em had become almost like obsessions. New men and more money. New kicks, new tricks. And more money.”

“Would John Lucero make kachinas using eagle feathers?”

“The thing you gotta remember here, about Johnny Lucero, is that he's good. I mean he's real good.
Too
good.”

“How so?”

“Well now, most of the artists who do kachinas they're gonna sell, they leave stuff out. Little details, you know? Maybe some paint here and there, or some beadwork. Nothing major, nothing an Anglo buyer might spot. But always
something
, you get me? And makes sense, too, you think about it. I mean, these things are
religious
, they represent the important spirits, and they're
connected
, see, to the spirits they represent. And the more accurate the image is, the stronger the connection is. So no Indian's gonna want a real accurate image of one of the spirits sitting on some Anglo's coffee table, right next to the empty beer bottles. It's like blasphemy, right?”

“And you're saying that Lucero's kachinas are too authentic.”

She nodded briskly. “Too authentic, right. Lot of the other artists hereabouts, they don't care much for Johnny. What it is, they think he's selling out their religion. Some people, seems to me, are born with some important parts missing, and Johnny's one of 'em.”

“So Lucero is capable of making the kachinas with eagle feathers.”

She frowned at me. “Didn't I just get through sayin' that?”

“What would an eagle feather kachina be worth in Germany?”

“Depends on the quality. A good piece, one of Johnny's, could bring in maybe five thousand.”

I frowned at her.

“'Smatter?” she said. “Sound like too much? You gotta remember, like I said, those Krauts go bonkers over this stuff.”

“No,” I said. “It sounds like too little. How long do you think it takes Lucero to make one of these things?”

She shrugged. “Start to finish, carving the wood, painting it, decorating it, embroidering the cloth, maybe a month.”

“So in four years, if he made only the illegal kachinas, he could put out forty-eight of them. At five thousand a piece, that comes to—” I looked away, calculating.

“Two hunnerd and forty thousand,” she said immediately.

I nodded. “Right. So let's suppose that Silvia Griego had some money tucked away in a Swiss account. And let's suppose that it was over four hundred thousand dollars.”

She eyed me. “We're talkin' hypothetical here, huh?”

“Right. Now if she had it hidden away, then the money probably came from illicit sales—why hide it otherwise? But let's say she's been putting it into the account for a period of five years. Even if Lucero worked faster than you say he does, he couldn't have put out enough kachinas to bring in that much cash. And besides, in order to show where his income was coming from, he had to make legitimate sales, too. Legitimate kachinas. And I know he was, because I've seen them. So where did the extra money come from?”

Winnifred Gail picked up a ball-point pen, stared down at it, clicked it a few times. “Over four hundred thousand, huh?”

“Four hundred and twenty. Hypothetically.”

Frowning, still looking down at the pen, she shook her head sadly. “Poor Silvia.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked up at me, took a deep breath, and said, “Well, I shouldn't be sayin' this, probably, no proof of anything, but if Silvia was selling contraband kachinas, she coulda been selling other kinds of contraband, too.”

“Like what?”

“Artifacts. Ceremonials.”

“How would they be contraband? All the dealers sold those, I thought.”

“They'd be contraband if they were robbed from graves on federal land, and the Indian reservations are all on federal land. And in the past ten, fifteen years, people been robbing graves on the reservations like crazy. See, what happened is, back in nineteen seventy-one the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, they held the first big auction of American Indian art ever, and they got prices on some of the stuff, big money, that knocked the socks off a lotta people. Now once you got a market that's ready for goods, you're gonna find people who'll supply the goods, and a lot of them aren't gonna care where they get 'em.”

“Looters.”

“Looters, yeah. Things got so bad in the seventies, the guv'mint passed the Archeological Resource Protection Act in seventy-nine. Didn't stop 'em, though. Prices keep going up—especially in Germany, like I say. Problem is, you got three agencies involved—National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Forest Service—but all three of them put together don't have enough people to keep these scumbags away from ceremonial gravesites. Too much area for them to cover. Too much money for the scumbags to make.”

“What kind of money?”

“Guy I know at B.L.M. figures twenty-five million a year in black-market sales.”

I must've looked surprised, because she smiled sadly and said. “Yeah. Lotta people can't believe it. You talk about gravesites and they figure you're talkin' arrowheads, maybe a feather or two. Well listen, last year in Munich, a single Hopi ceremonial basket went for a hunnerd and fifty thousand. One single solitary basket. And the scumbags don't stick to baskets and bowls, neither. The Anasazi—that's the Navajo name for the Old Ones, the Indians who lived here before the Navajo and the Hopi showed up—they used to mummify their dead. Men, women, children. What the scumbags are doin' is diggin' up the mummies of the dead children, and then castin' 'em in acrylic blocks. Just the right size, see, for a mantelpiece. Look real good next to that lamp shade from Buchenwald. Real conversation piece. Germans are paying five to ten grand for one. I tell you, on a scale of ethics or morals, these guys, these looters, are a couple steps below maggot puke.”

“What'd be the most valuable kind of contraband that Griego might've had access to?”

“Be your Hopi and Anasazi stuff. Krauts like 'em both.”

“What would she need to get it?”

“All she'd need,” she said, “would be someone who knew where the stuff was, which'd be one of the Hopis, naturally, and then a couple of strong backs to dig it up.”

A couple of strong backs. Killebrew and Biddle?

“John Lucero,” I said. “He's Hopi.”

She nodded. “Sure is.”

A
FTER
I
LEFT
Winnifred Gail's gallery on West San Francisco street, I drove over to the house of Carla Chavez, Biddle's girlfriend. She was home, and by now she'd gotten used to answering my questions. Yes, she said, when Frank had gone on hunting trips, Stacey Killebrew had gone along. Just the two of them? Yes. Had they ever actually bagged any deer? No. And where, exactly, had they gone hunting? Arizona. Where in Arizona? She wasn't sure, she said, but she knew that it was somewhere on the Navajo Reservation.

The Hopi Reservation is on the Navajo Reservation.

When was the last time Biddle had gone hunting? Last year, in the spring. Did Killebrew go with him? Yes.

I gave her another twenty before I left.

Since it seemed to be a day for tying up loose ends, when I got back to my office I called Peter Ricard at his. The secretary put me through.

Peter sounded tired, and I told him so.

“Yeah,” he said. “A tough night. Some married lady I barely know showed up on my doorstep at two in the morning and told me she wanted to have an affair.”

“Your reputation precedes you, Peter.”

“I sat her down and explained to her, very rationally, that I don't do married ladies. There are too many problems, moral, legal, and logistical. So she took off her blouse.”