“There’s always quiet,” she said. “The soft and gentle hum of the open road.”
“Party pooper.”
As they motored down highway 380, Charli turned and looked out the window “We are now in Lincoln County,” Roger said. “This is where the fighting that made Billy the Kid famous took place.”
Charli pointed to billboards advertising the Billy the Kid Casino and Ruidoso Downs Racetrack. “Apparently they don’t want us to forget Billy, but also find it important to let us know they have more than 300 slot machines plus horse races, and all the betting you can stand.”
“It’s healthy competition for the Inn of the Mountain Gods Casino that your people run,” Roger said, clearly delighted at almost everything he saw. When he had to swerve to miss hitting a roadrunner, Charli had thought the man would absolutely burst with joy. “Did you see that thing?” he’d demanded. “Roadrunners are actually part of the cuckoo family and are also called chaparral birds.”
“Who could've known?” she laughed.
Clearly, Roger was totally enthralled by this trip. He even was pleased with their mission, and most especially with the idea of being there when Charli met ‘her people.’
“My people,” she said out loud. The phrase sounded comforting, good, but it also had an unreal quality to it; at times, it sounded false. It had a hollow; the truth was that she knew nothing about the Apache they were on their way to meet.
Despite being born a blend of Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache, with a dash of New England generic caucasian tossed in for good measure, for most of her life, Charli had lived a purely white-bread existence. Indian culture had been no part of her existence. The only way that heritage had touched her had been in her dreams. In those dreams, strange apparitions and creatures came unbidden from other times and places to mix with current events. And the main recurring character in those dreams was an old Indian woman claiming to be her grandmother.
Recently, she’d had to confront the fact that the dreams and the images were real. It was a different reality than most people experienced, but still a part of her. She felt driven to understand it and so, when her friend Elle Kramer offered her a job that meant going to New Mexico, where Charli was born, she'd taken it. There, the dreams came on in force. Everyday life had gotten even more entangled with those dreams. Although the relationship between her dream world and the reality she found herself was powerful, its meanings were uncertain. Most of what she did know had come from Navajo she met who had known her late father and her mother; they had shared their stories, but that was only a taste.
Now, with Roger happily playing the role of her sidekick, she’d embarked on an adventure to learn more about her people, their wisdom and foibles, and about herself. Raymond Talks-with-Wolves, the Chief of the Ramah Navajo had made some calls for her, pulled in a few chips so that she had a clue where to start.
“Your grandfather passed over years ago,” he told her. “I understand that your grandmother is living in a rural edge of the reservation. I don't think she has a phone.”
“I suppose we can drop in on her unannounced,” Charli thought out loud.
“You'll have to. And she will be delighted to see you,” Raymond said.
“How can you be sure?” Charli had her doubts.
“She has been calling to you, asking you to come to her for years,” Raymond laughed.
“She has?”
“Isn’t she always in your dreams? Didn’t Reyes Iron Eyes, our Shaman tell you the woman made it clear that she wanted to teach you?”
“Yes,” he did. Iron Eyes was certainly convinced.
Raymond smiled and shook his head. “Then go and learn.” He had touched her cheek tenderly, like a father. Don’t be afraid to be an Indian, Bonita.”
“I’m not...” she started to say, then realized being Indian was, in a way, exactly what she was afraid of. Or afraid of not of being one, of not knowing how to be an Indian.
“What if I screw it up?” she asked now. “What am I then?”
Roger found the question delightful. “How could you screw up being an Indian?” he asked her. “Indians are what Indians do, right? You are one so whatever you do is what Indians do. Voila!”
Although he was pleased with his logic, it didn’t calm Charli’s mind. She still felt like a fraud and she was certain her grandmother would see right through her. Whatever that meant. “But I'm Charli. How can I be this Bonita Bonito that the Navajo tell me my father called me.”
“It's what every Indian we’ve met calls you,” he said.
“But I don’t know me as her.”
Roger smiled. “It’s pretty wild all right, but I really don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can get wrong. You aren’t pretending to be someone you aren’t. It’s bigger and better than that. You’ve got some fascinating people telling you that you are much more than you thought.”
She knew he believed every word of that. “It’s hard to get my head around.”
“Well, at one point you probably thought driving a car was complicated and difficult. You just need to learn how it all works.”
“I suppose.”
“You know, that Shaman pal of yours is a real piece of work,” Roger said. She heard the admiration in his voice. The two of them had hit it off big time.
“Pal? I wouldn’t call him my pal.”
“Then you aren’t paying close attention,” Roger said. “Or maybe I see it because I have an outside perspective.” He scratched his nose. “And if pal isn’t the right word for it, then I’d accept the use of the term ‘colleague.’”
“How is a cultural anthropologist a colleague of a Navajo Shaman?”
Suddenly he was pointing, excitedly. “Hey look, a fox.” She saw something furry flicker on the hillside and then disappear. As she stared after it, Roger picked up the thread of the conversation. “Even if an anthropologist isn't exactly a colleague of a Shaman, I think a dreamer is. And you don’t stop being a dreamer when you are playing anthropologist.”
“Just like you obviously don’t stop being a ranger when you are being my sidekick. I barely saw a fur ball and you noticed it was a fox.”
Roger considered that and then smiled. “Exactly.”
And then he lapsed into a concentrated silence. Charli let her own mind drift, trying to keep from anticipating too much, assuming too much, expecting too much from the meeting with her grandmother. Or from her grandmother herself.
If she was even there. None of this had any guarantees. She'd learned that much.
Chapter Three
A New Investigation
Over the years, Elle Kramer had learned that the path to success in a large corporation was to never, ever ask questions. Not simple ones, not hard ones. No questions at all. Early in her career, she’d asked a few. That was the way to learn, right? But she quickly learned that corporations didn’t deal well with questions. They resented questions. Questions made the hierarchy feel challenged and besides, its structure was such that it wasn’t very good at coming up with answers. Besides, the answers she did get weren’t very useful and were often wrong, and that left the people who gave them resenting her for asking.
So she stopped asking and her career took off.
This amenable attitude got her several promotions so she never looked back. If she did feel the urge to ask questions, she saved them to ask her best friend Charli, preferably over a bottle or two of wine. But Charli was gone, so when she received a message telling her to go to Las Cruces, New Mexico and investigate a suspicious death, she didn’t ask anyone any questions. Experience told her that eventually her bosses would email her the details they wanted her to have. Whether or not those details would give her enough information to do the job was more... questionable.
But you did what you could, so after she acknowledged the message, she carried out her standard six-step plan for new assignments, which was:
1. Check an online map and find out where in the world this Las Cruces place
was.
2. Tell her husband Lester that she had to make a business trip to a remote part of the planet and therefore might never be seen again. Of course, as he always did, he assured her that he’d see her soon enough, which wasn’t all that reassuring.
3. Cancel the dinner party scheduled for Friday night with the Houstons who also wanted to know where Las Cruces was, which showed more curiosity than Lester had.
4. Go online and buy a coach seat on a plane headed for El Paso (having learned there was no airport in Las Cruces, New Mexico).
5. Arrange for a rental car at the El Paso airport.
6. Arrange for an Uber to take her to the airport.
It had all gone reasonably well, and now here she was in El Paso. After twenty minutes of standing in the incredible heat, albeit dry heat, of the Texas sun, an air-conditioned shuttle took her to her rental car. She entered the address for the Las Cruces office and drove north, her knuckles turning white as she threaded the chaos that is the freeway that crosses the Texas/New Mexico corridor.
When she pulled up at the address she’d been given, she did a double take. Used to the headquarters building in St. Louis, the branch offices in Chicago and New York, she was sure the GPS, or the home office, someone, at any rate, had made a mistake. She was parked in front of a rather tatty mobile home. It was whatever the opposite of ostentatious was, she decided, and something of a shock. But a sign by the front door said: “Nevermore Insurance,” so this was it. Head office for the Southwestern region.
The mobile home sat alone in front of a small, pot-holed parking lot that was next to a construction site. “Future home of Amazing Shopping,” the sign on the chain link fence said. “Must be a contrarian operation,” she muttered to herself, wondering why anyone invested in brick and mortar stores. Everything was happening online. Why would you build a mall? But, she reminded herself, the same argument justified the mobile home office. If retail was mostly online, insurance was more so. All the paperwork, the form filing, the applications were scanned and processed in a manner the IT people gleefully described as “in the box.” As far as she could tell, that term was the Millennial equivalent of “untouched by human hands.”
Once the various documents for policies and reports disappeared into computers in a flurry of ones and zeroes, they were never seen again. The only things to ever emerge again, short of an audit, were abstracts of trends, projections, and actuarial tables, although the now-mythical documents all had very legal reference numbers that made them seem real.
Elle found it all a bit spooky and she was glad that these days her job consisted of verifying claims and not management or anything so arcane, even mystic that she actually had to keep up with the ins and outs, the changing regulations and rules of the insurance business. Investigating was relatively simple—look at the claim and find out if it reflected what she saw. At least most of the time that was the case. And when it wasn’t, it was usually interesting.
The downside of being a claims investigator was that all she saw were the bad things that happened in the world—and the worst of the bad things at that. The company would never send her from her home in Tennessee to Las Cruces to investigate something routine. The travel expenses, her per diem, it all added up and her bosses were, not to put too fine a point on it, cheapskates.
The local and regional offices were equipped to handle death by natural causes or simple property damage all by themselves. A routine death required them to do little more than confirm the identity of the deceased, and then to submit proof of the identity, along with a digitized copy of the death certificate, and any relevant police reports. Then, at some point, the computer would issue a check. Actually, she corrected herself, that was old school. These days it deposited money in someone’s account.
Elle and her colleagues were reserved to work on cases where things proved to be less clear. Even “less clear” was a relative, rather subjective term. Partly this was because of their inherent cheapskate nature, but it was also because the denizens of the home office were suspicious by nature. When homes got trashed by freak tornadoes, for instance, they wanted someone on their payroll, loyal to the bottom line (aka, eligible for a bonus) to confirm that all the damage was caused by the storm and not an enthusiastic homeowner wanting to increase the payout.
And, when someone died under mysterious circumstances... well, the paperwork mandarins absolutely despised anything and everything mysterious. To them, mysterious was a synonym for suspicious and suspicious was... well, suspicious. The idea that someone might put something over on them was abhorrent to them. In a way, Elle understood, although even after five years on the job, the concept eluded her. Why (or even how) a dead person might arrange their own death to fool the insurance company was beyond her.
Due to her ‘no questions’ policy, she did as they asked. She went into the field, confirmed that the dead person was indeed an insured dead person—the very insured person named in the policy—and that the circumstances didn’t somehow alter that rather dead state or give the company (Nevermore) an opportunity to decline payment.
Early in her career, someone told her that it was a matter of doing due diligence, but she couldn’t see how, if you excluded the existence of zombies. Dead was dead. Although zombies raised an interesting question: Was Nevermore Insurance liable for payouts in the case of the murder of someone who became undead? Was the living dead legally alive or dead? She had added that to the list of questions not to ask and, except at times like this, tended to forget about it entirely. And now her real question was what the home office thought was questionable about the death of this insured. So far, they hadn’t given her a clue.
She got out of the car, immediately regretting leaving the air conditioning and heading into the mobile home where she was supposed to learn more.
Inside, a rather overweight man in a white, short-sleeved shirt sat behind a desk. The desk was totally in keeping with its environment, being one of those cheap sheet-metal desks that must be legally mandated to be a sickly gray. “Can I help you?” he asked, summoning up the kind of sincere enthusiasm most commonly observed among used car salespeople.
“I’m Elle Kramer. I believe you are expecting me?”
“I am?” He seemed delightfully confused. So far that was the high point of her day. “Do we have an appointment?” He grabbed an old-fashion appointment book.
“The home office sent me. About Jake Ravenwing.”
He shook his head. “We don’t have an agent here by that name. Human Resources should be more on the ball.”
“He is, or was, a client. An insured.”
His smile faded. “Oh. Yes. Ruidoso Downs. I remember now. The dead Indian.”
“Is he?”
“What?”
“Dead. And an Indian.”
“Yes, and yes. Is there a problem?”
She shook her head. “For us? No. For Mr. Ravenwing, apparently there is. Being dead and all.”
“I don’t know why you are here.”
“Because the situation is apparently not clear cut.”
“It isn’t?”
“The home office considers it a suspicious death. They want to make certain the beneficiary wasn't involved in his death.”
The man stared blankly. “I didn't get much from the police...” he turned to his computer and scrolled through some files, then opened one. “Says he was shot dead. Nasty business, but is that suspicious?"
"I won't know until I investigate."
"I know there is lots of suspicious stuff around here, especially up at Roswell, but this poor guy sounds more dead than suspicious. Probably a robbery gone bad.”
Elle gave him a gracious smile. “Good. If it's that simple then I won’t be in town long.”
The man pointed to a map on the wall behind him. A very old and faded map of the State. “If you intend to investigate, you won't be in town long at all. He didn’t die here. This is Las Cruces.”
“I know.”
“He was killed in Ruidoso Downs.”
“And?”
He pointed again. "That’s way out here where the casino and racetrack are. Right near Ruidoso.” He turned back to her. “There isn’t anything to investigate in Las Cruces. We just scan in the forms.” He rummaged in his desk and came up with a red and white hard candy, opened it and popped it in his mouth. “We don't have any forms to scan in yet. Just the initial report.”
“Can I get a copy of that and of the policy?”
“I can send them to you.”
She pointed to the printer sitting on the table behind him. “Why don't you print them out for me now?”
He scowled. “We ran out of toner about three months ago. I put in a request for more but it got turned down.”
“Turned down?”
“Toner is a nonessential item, I’m told.”
That sounded too much like corporate policy to be a stalling tactic. “Then send them to me. I’ll print them out at the hotel.”
“I wouldn’t put that as a printing charge on your expense report if I were you.”
“Nonessential. Got it. I'll call it dinner with a vendor. Do you have an actual police report that you can... send me?”
“No. You’ll need to go to Ruidoso Downs and talk to the police there. The investigating officer hasn’t filed the crime report yet.”
“Why not?”
“Apparently, she’s waiting on the Medical Examiner’s report.”
“And that is taking a long time because...”
“Because the ME is in Ruidoso and local work takes priority.”
“They are both Ruidoso, right?”
“No. The killing, murder, whatever, was in Ruidoso Downs. Different jurisdiction.”
Turf wars gave Elle a headache. “So we are in paperwork limbo.”
He nodded. “Which is normal, and always followed on by a paperwork hell that begins when we start filling out the paperwork to explain why there is no paperwork yet.”
“Tell them it’s because you don’t have any toner in your printer.”
A Foreboding Felony Page 2
