Death Etched in Stone

by C. M. Wendelboe

“Does he need an attorney?”

  Neville looked away. “Tony always needs an attorney for something.”

  Manny buttoned up his coat, and was nearly out the door when Neville called after him, “You have any leads on Johnny’s killer?”

  Manny turned around and faced him. “Who said he was murdered?”

  “The FBI doesn’t investigate accidental drownings.”

  Manny wrapped the pink scarf Clara knitted around his neck. “I’m still trying to piece together why Johnny would have driven here to Rapid City.”

  Neville shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “You may be the only person Johnny knew here.”

  “And your point?”

  “You see how it might look, Neville, you being the only person the victim knew. And living three doors down from the bar where Johnny may have stolen a car.” Manny started for the door again. “But if I see Tony, I’ll tell him you might need a good attorney as well.”

  Chapter 14

  Manny was about to climb into his car when he backed out and shut the door. He stepped over a smashed Budweiser carton and skirted a used condom as he walked around back of the building. He found the two drunks huddled inside a lean-to shed against the side of the building. He motioned them over and they slowly, cautiously came over, breathing heat into their gloveless hands.

  “You going to arrest us for trying to shake you down earlier?” White Hair said.

  “Yeah,” Red Keds added. “We was just hungry is all.”

  “No, I’m not going to arrest you. But over there,” Manny motioned across the street and down the block, “is a McDonald’s. I’ll walk you there and buy you a meal.”

  “No thanks,” the younger man said. “We’ll pass.”

  “Yeah,” White Hair added. “We got our pride.”

  “Are you two peckerwoods going to get any other food today? You need some calories to keep warm.”

  They looked at each other, and fell in step beside Manny. They walked past the plumbing supply shop that had gone out of business, past the moneylender that operated out of a tiny kiosk, and past the one-chair barber shop with the rotating red and white pole. When they went past the D&D, Manny checked the sign: still an hour before it opened. “You guys ever drink in there?”

  White Hair picked at his beard, and Manny didn’t want to know what he plucked out. “Not on your life. Bad things happen in there.”

  “Besides strippers?”

  Red Keds frowned. “That’s not the bad. People get beat up in there. Bad. If we went in there, we might come out in a body bag. That’d be real bad.”

  “As bad as it gets,” White Hair breathed, keeping an eye on the front door as they walked past. “Rumor has it that a lot of drugs come and go in there.”

  “What do you expect,” Red Keds elbowed his companion, “it’s a biker bar.”

  Manny walked them into McDonald’s, and they rubbed their hands together to restore circulation. He ordered each the Big Breakfast with Hot Cakes, plus large coffee and juice. He got only coffee for himself and motioned to a corner table. They both looked around nervously. Manny bent and whispered: “I won’t let anyone know I’m the law.”

  White Hair sighed deeply and straightened up. “Thanks. We got our pride.”

  Manny waited until they had wolfed down half their breakfast before asking, “What are you guys doing living in back of that law office?”

  “We gots to live somewhere,” Red Keds said. “As many displaced people as there are around—”

  White Hair leaned across the table and glared at his friend. “I told you to cut that ‘displaced people’ crap. We’re homeless. Most of us by choice. Including you.” He turned to Manny. “We’re just homeless. We don’t need some damned cultural anthropologist to stick us in a neat bin. We don’t need any pity.”

  “But you do need a warm place to crash.” Manny nodded outside to the snow that had started, a skiff filtering its way across the large window. “Another couple of weeks and you’ll freeze to death outside.”

  “We sneak inside Neville Charging Bear’s office building—”

  White Hair elbowed Red Keds, and he shut up.

  “Do you break in?” Manny let the coffee ease down his throat, warming him. “Because there’s some things I have to report to the police department.”

  White Hair threw up his hands. “We don’t break in. We just crash inside when Neville closes the office. He keeps the back door unlocked.”

  Red Keds ran his coat sleeve across his mouth, ignoring the napkin on his tray. “And his brother, that Tony dude, gives us a few bucks now and again to . . . eat on.”

  “Eat on?”

  They eyed Manny and exchanged a look between them.

  “I know,” Manny said, letting them off the hook. “You only use the money for food.”

  Manny checked his watch, figuring the D&D should be open by now. He stood and tossed his empty cup in the garbage before returning to the table. He palmed a ten spot and slid it under their tray. “Not that you’ll use it for anything but antifreeze, but—”

  “I know, Agent,” White Hair said. “In case we get hungry.”

  Manny nodded. “Sure. In case you get hungry.” Manny had no illusions about the pair getting off the sauce. But perhaps giving them drinking money would keep them from doing something stupid to get it. At least for one more night.

  He jotted his cell number on a business card and handed it to White Hair. “Let me know if Tony comes back to Neville’s office.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “I just want to visit with him about his Uncle Johnny.”

  By the time he’d walked to the D&D, the doors were unlocked for the day’s business. As Manny stepped inside, he understood why it was called the Death & Destruction. Dark stains spotted the concrete entrance to the bar. Remnants of blood, dark and smeared, that hadn’t been cleaned off the door yet reminded him what biker bars could be. He stepped over last night’s broken chair, the crunching of peanut shells littering the floor announcing a customer to the woman behind the bar. She arranged glasses in a pyramid, the dull sound telling Manny the bar didn’t take chances with real glass. The barmaid continued stacking plastic glasses as she called over her shoulder, “What’ll it be, Honey?”

  Manny sat on a ripped bar stool, a hard piece of plastic jabbing his butt. “I’m not here for a drink.”

  “Well the girls don’t get here for another hour. I’ll make change, and you can sit at the stage and get ready to drool.”

  “I’m not here to drool, either.”

  “Then what the hell you doing here?” The woman glared at Manny in the back-bar mirror, a towel draped over her arm like an experienced maître d’. One cheek was puffy, and she had to turn to look at Manny through the eye that wasn’t swollen closed. In another life, in years past, she might have been attractive. “What the hell do you want?”

  “What’s the yelling all about, Monica?”

  “We got us another dead beat here,” she answered and stepped away from the bar.

  A man nearly as tall as Willie, but put together like a weight lifter, emerged from a room in back of the bar. Jailhouse tats covered his massive arms and spread up into a thick neck where a snake’s head hissed at the man’s ear. If he actually had a neck, his head seeming to attach itself directly to his shoulders. “This ain’t no place to come in and warm your scrawny ass,” he came around the bar and towered over Manny, bad intentions written all over his face.

  Manny started to thank him for referring to his ass as scrawny: Wait until Clara hears someone thinks my butt is small. Instead, Manny flipped open his FBI identification. “I’m looking for Julie Groves.”

  The biker stiffened. Manny stepped back.

  “Bobo don’t like no one calling him by his Christian name,” Monica said.

 
Bobo glared at Monica. She cringed and busied herself at the other end of the bar. “My wife don’t know when to keep her fat mouth shut.”

  “By the looks of her face, she forgot that sometime recently.”

  Bobo scowled at her wiping down the bar. “She got into a fight last night. Some biker chick. Now is this about my ride? Did you find the son of a bitch who stole it?”

  “We haven’t. Do you have any ideas?”

  Monica laughed. “Bobo thinks it had to be someone pretty dumb to steal his car.”

  “Apparently, someone wasn’t afraid of ol’ Bobo.” Manny walked to the far end of the bar and asked for Diet Coke. Monica looked at her husband. Bobo nodded, and she slid a watered-down soda in a plastic glass across the bar. “Don’t get much call for soda without something in it.”

  Manny grabbed a straw from a holder on the bar and stuffed it in his glass. “There. I put something in it.” He turned back to Bobo. “So, let me get this right: Somehow, someone grabbed your car and hot-wired it—”

  “Didn’t have to. Ignition lock is broke. Anyone with a little knowledge of mechanics could have done it.”

  “Noted,” Manny sipped. “So someone, who surely didn’t know you, just up and stole your Cowboy Cadillac. Now why would they do that?”

  Bobo’s face flushed. “Because they needed a ride, I guess.”

  “Bobo,” Manny sat on a stool, just out of arm’s reach, “why would anyone steal that piece of crap you affectionately call a car? Someone could have stolen any number of vehicles that I’m sure were left running while their owners warmed their loins inside.”

  Bobo looked to Monica. She shrugged, and he turned back to Manny. “Like I said, someone must have known I was too busy in here to come out and catch them. If I had, the police would be burying a car thief.”

  Manny started fishing his notebook from his pocket, then put it back. The written word would have been lost on Bobo anyway. Manny nodded to a security camera looking down on the stage from one corner of the bar. “Does it work?”

  “Of course it works. After the last time the cops accused me of roughing up a drunk, I had it installed.”

  “Let’s pull the tape from two nights ago.”

  “What good would that do?” Bobo asked.

  “It might show which regulars were here. Could be we might eliminate others.”

  “Monica!”

  “Yes, Honey?”

  “Grab the tape from three nights ago. And hurry the hell up.” He frowned at Manny. “Bad for business if anyone knew the law hung around here.”

  Bobo’s wife disappeared behind a door marked Office and returned with a portable monitor and tape player. She popped the security tape into the machine and waited until Bobo nodded before she started the recording.

  The quality of the recording and the equipment that produced it was in line with a first-generation Betamax machine. It began on a fuzzy screen showing patrons entering the bar. Bobo tapped the monitor. “There’s the first sucker coming in an hour after we opened. Larry something-or-other. He comes in here every Thursday night.” Bobo laughed. “Amateur night. Old fart thinks he’ll get lucky.”

  Manny grabbed the remote from the bar, and fast forwarded it until more people started coming in. “Regulars?”

  Bobo nodded and yelled at Monica. “Draft!”

  She shuffled back around the bar and drew Bobo a beer.

  Manny continued stopping the recorder each time someone new appeared on the screen, and each time Bobo identified the customers as regular clientele. “No one stands out?”

  “Him.” Bobo tapped the screen. “That damned Able Ought. He came in here looking for Tony.”

  “Tony?”

  “Charging Bear.”

  “Is Tony a regular?”

  Bobo and Monica both laughed. “He crashes in the back room when he’s in town on a bender.” Bobo downed his beer and slid the empty glass to Monica. She filled it and slid it back. Bobo tapped the screen again. “Tony’s getting a snoot full right there.” Tony Charging Bear sat with his back to the camera, his arms resting on the bar. Better leverage for downing brewskies.

  Manny fast forwarded the recording, and suddenly slowed it down. The man Bobo identified as Able Ought walked up behind Tony, and slapped him on the back of the head. Tony started to turn around, when Able grabbed a handful of Tony’s long hair. Able wrapped it around his hand and began hitting him with his fist.

  “That’s me,” Bobo grinned as he came into the picture, tire billy swinging over his shoulder. It landed on Able’s head and he crumpled. Bobo nudged Manny. “You ain’t gonna arrest me for protecting my clients?”

  Manny sipped his soda, pondering if he should lie. “No. I’m just trying to figure out who might have taken your car. Who’s this Able Ought?”

  “Some mechanic who works at the co-op feed store. Tony kicked him off when he moved to the Charging Bear family ranch after his old man died.”

  Manny resumed the tape showing Bobo dragging the unconscious Able outside. “I thought the cold night air would do him good. He was gone by the time I locked up.”

  “Does he have a history of car theft?”

  Bobo waved the suggestion away. “Able’s an asshole, but he ain’t a thief. Besides, he knows me well enough to realize he’d be sipping Christmas dinner through a straw if he took my car.”

  Manny ran the machine again, and Bobo identified each patron who came into view. At the periphery of the camera, girls danced, panties flew, and Bobo hustled to keep customers from climbing on the stage. The last frame showed a young girl, her short dark hair punctuated by a light streak down the middle of her head, climb up on stage seconds before the tape went blank.

  “Tape screwed up after the skunk came in.”

  “Skunk?”

  Monica chuckled. “That’s what we called that girl. The Skunk, ’cause of that white streak down her hair.”

  Bobo glared at Monica. She slunk back to the bar and resumed stacking glasses. “This girl came in with her boyfriend looking to make some spare change. Amateur night. She wasn’t worth a shit on stage, and she was booed out of the joint.”

  “So they’re not regulars?”

  “Never laid eyes on her or her boyfriend before.”

  “Maybe they stole your car.” Manny picked up the tape. “Is this the only tape you have?”

  “The only one.”

  “Mind if I take it and make a copy?”

  “Sure. And better take the player, too. Don’t rush back with it.” Bobo grinned. “Give me a chance to get more . . . personal with rowdy customers without the cops claiming I don’t have surveillance.”

  Manny put the tape in his briefcase and tucked the player under his arm. “So those two were the only ones who weren’t regulars?”

  “I had others that weren’t my normal clientele. I always get guys dropping in here I’ve never seen before.”

  Manny took the photo of Johnny from his pocket and showed it to Bobo. “Ever see this man in here?”

  Bobo held the picture up to a Coors Beer neon light and handed it back. “Can’t say. We usually get some old dudes in here every night. If they don’t start trouble, I got no reason to remember them.”

  “What about Tony Charging Bear?”

  “What about him?”

  Manny pocketed Johnny’s photo. “With a record like he’s got, he could be good for stealing your car.” And he does live only a mile from Oglala Lake.

  “It wasn’t him. He had left a couple hours before my car was jacked. And I haven’t seen him since.”

  “I’ll look him up. All I have is old mug shots to go by, and I couldn’t tell from the tape. What’s he look like now?” Manny asked.

  Bobo described Tony when four men with bachelor party written all over their young faces walked through the door. Bobo turned
his back on Manny and yelled at Monica. “Better get the girls out. Money’s to be had.” He faced Manny and downed his beer. “Monica’s not the most dependable help.” He nodded to the stage. “Met her working the pole some years ago. As you can see, her looks have gone a little south since then.”

  Bobo watched as two girls emerged from the back room. They sported G-strings and pasties, which Manny was certain wouldn’t stay on for long once the money started flowing. “Not them!” he yelled at Monica. “Get Martha’s ass on stage before her hip goes out again.”

  Bobo turned back to Manny and shook his head. “Like I said, Monica’s not the brightest bulb on the tree. But you find the bastard that took my car, you let me know. I’ll save you the cost of prosecuting them.”

  “I hear you’ve already been doing a little investigating yourself?”

  “How’s that?”

  Manny pointed to Bobo’s tats, to his Mr. Clean head. “A couple boys in Pine Ridge got beat up pretty bad yesterday.”

  “They say who did it?”

  “Just some bald guy with wall-to-wall tats,” Manny answered.

  “Lot of guys got tattoos like me.”

  “But not too many who are San Quentin alumni.”

  “So I messed up in the past.” Bobo cracked peanut hulls and tossed them on the floor. “Now I’m what they call ‘rehabilitated’ back into society.” Bobo headed for the back room.

  “Are you rehabilitated from your drug dealing?” Manny called after him.

  Bobo froze and turned slowly. “What the hell you accusing me of now?”

  “A K-9 alerted to drugs that were in your car. That when it was stolen?”

  “A lot of guys use my car. You got something concrete on me, talk with my attorney. And if I hear you accusing me of tuning up your homeys on the reservation, I’ll see about filing a harassment suit. Now I got work to do.”

  Manny finished his glass of soda just as Bobo came out from the back. He led a woman older than Manny who walked with a pronounced limp. He headed for the door when Monica stopped him. “You come back next Thursday, Hon. Amateur night is for guys who want to make a fast buck, too.” She winked. “You might make some pocket change. Especially,” she flipped his scarf, “with a pink scarf like that.”