Risky Undertaking

by Mark de Castrique

  Robbie looked at me with a combination of suspicion and fear.

  “Let’s walk behind the housing exhibit,” Romero said. “No sense standing out here and ruining the time period.”

  “Who’s he?” The kid’s eyes never left me.

  “Deputy Clayton from Laurel County,” Romero answered. “He’s helping find who murdered Jimmy. You want to help him, don’t you?”

  Robbie swallowed and looked down at the ground. The nod was barely perceptible.

  “I thought so.” Romero nudged Robbie along with a hand to his shoulder like a big mother bear steering her cub.

  I followed as we arced around various demonstrations till we stopped behind a clay-walled structure with a thatched roof. There were no rear windows so we were unseen by the tour groups.

  “Now it’s important that you tell us the truth,” Romero said. “If you do that, you won’t get in trouble.”

  Again, the faintest of nods.

  “When did you see Swifty last?” Romero asked.

  “Yesterday. Lunch at school.”

  “Did he seem upset?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he heard about Jimmy?”

  The kid looked up at us, his eyes wide. “That really set him off.”

  I didn’t wait for Romero to ask the question begged by the boy’s answer. I stepped closer. “So, he was upset before then?”

  Robbie flushed. He knew he’d revealed more than he intended.

  “Come on, son,” Romero prompted. “You’re not doing Swifty any good by holding back.”

  “Don’t tell Mr. Swift,” the boy pleaded. “I only told him Swifty left school at lunch and I didn’t know where he was going. That was the truth.”

  “Only part of the truth,” Romero admonished. “What’s the whole story?”

  Robbie looked over his shoulder as if someone might be sneaking up to eavesdrop. Then his high, whiny voice fell to a whisper. “Jimmy caught Swifty looking in the back of his truck.”

  “When was this?”

  “Sunday. At ball-play. Swifty told me the bed of the pickup was covered with a tarp. Usually it was open. He peeked under it.”

  “What did he see?” Romero asked.

  “Old Indian stuff.”

  Romero shot me a piercing glance. We both sensed the investigation was about to take a significant turn. I nodded for him to continue.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Boxes and boxes filled with arrowheads, flint tools, some broken pottery. You know, stuff like they have in the museum.”

  “Jimmy’s collection?”

  “That’s what Swifty said. He’d seen it before. He was surprised that Jimmy got mad at him.”

  “For finding it in the truck?”

  The boy licked his lips. He was obviously afraid we didn’t believe him. “I guess. Swifty said Jimmy told him not to tell anyone. That he was thinking about donating it to the national Indian museum in Washington. He didn’t want anyone in the tribe to know.”

  “That doesn’t seem like something he’d need to keep a secret,” Romero said. “The collection was his.”

  “Swifty thought the same thing. He didn’t believe Jimmy and he told Jimmy so. Jimmy said sometimes you have to do something bad in order for something else that’s good to happen.”

  “Did Jimmy tell him what those things were?”

  Robbie’s dark eyes locked on Romero. “No. But that’s why Swifty was upset. And because of what Jimmy gave him for keeping quiet.”

  “The ball-play stick,” Romero said. “It was in the truck and he gave it to Swifty.”

  Robbie’s mouth fell open. “You found it? You found Swifty?”

  “No. But we found the stick under his bed. He hasn’t been home for it.” Romero leaned against the wall of the dwelling and relaxed. “You’re doing good, Robbie. We’re almost done.”

  The kid swayed from side to side. “I need to get back to work.”

  “In a minute. First tell me when you heard this story from Swifty.”

  “Yesterday morning before school. Then when we learned what happened to Jimmy, Swifty said the bad thing must have caused it. And now the good thing that meant so much to Jimmy wasn’t going to happen. Swifty said he would find out what that was. And he left school. He made me promise not to say anything.”

  “And you haven’t heard from him since?”

  Tears flowed down the round face. “No. Do you think Swifty’s dead too?”

  “No.” Romero laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “And we’ll find him. But not a word of this to anyone. Promise?”

  Robbie wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then run on. And if you think of anything else, you call me.”

  The boy scooted around the corner of the house. When the footsteps faded, Romero asked, “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s telling the truth as far as what Swifty told him. But what it means could be completely different from the way the boys interpreted it.”

  “Maybe Jimmy told Swifty more than Swifty told Robbie,” Romero said.

  “Like what the bad thing was that would make something good happen?”

  “Yeah.” Romero started walking back to the car. “We can assume Jimmy’s collection wasn’t stolen. At least not from his home.”

  “And it explains how the arrowhead came to be under his belt.”

  “That could have happened carrying them to or from his truck,” Romero said.

  Or if his killers dragged him across the arrowheads, I thought. “How much would the items be worth?”

  “Not enough for a man’s life.”

  “And yet Jimmy gave the kid the ball-play stick, his most prized possession, for his silence,” I said. “That doesn’t add up.”

  “And Swifty ran away without taking it. Where did he go and why?”

  I swept my eyes across the panorama of the Oconaluftee Village and its replication of the culture driven nearly to extinction. “Preservation, not termination.” Jimmy Panther’s words rang in my head. If he were still speaking to me, what was he saying to a thirteen-year-old kid who idolized him? And how did a collection of artifacts in the bed of a pickup tie into an execution in a cemetery?

  I grabbed Romero by the arm, halting the big man’s stride. “Would the discovery of artifacts have the same effect as discovering an Indian burial site?”

  “You mean was Jimmy going back to salt a wider area of your cemetery?”

  “Yes. Both Skye and Eddie Wolfe said he was growing more confrontational. Could he effectively have shut the cemetery down?”

  Romero’s lips tucked into a fine line as he thought about my question. “Your cemetery’s not public property, is it?”

  “No. It’s privately held.”

  “Then it would clearly need to be categorized as a burial site and not simply an archaeological find. The Archaeological Resources and Protection Act is federal law enacted to protect irreplaceable archaeological resources on federal, public, and Indian lands. That’s what we most commonly enforce when we come across artifact hunters on the Qualla Boundary. But off reservation, human remains would trigger the more extensive actions regardless of who owned the property.”

  “Would Jimmy go so far as to exhume bones from a known site to perpetrate a hoax?”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Romero said. “He’d be desecrating one site for the sake of another. A site we’re not even sure is more than a single grave.”

  “Doing something bad so that something else good would happen,” I said, quoting what Panther supposedly told Swifty. “It describes that scenario perfectly.”

  “Yes. But it runs counter to everything I knew about Jimmy. You’re talking about disturbing the dead. He wouldn’t have taken that action lightly. And his grandmother s
aid he was happy. That doesn’t square with grave robbing. He should have been troubled.”

  “When we pressed her, his grandmother said contented, not happy,” I corrected. “I’ve helped enough terminally ill people make their funeral plans to witness an unexplainable peace come over them once everything is set.”

  Romero stared at me. “You’re saying Jimmy knew he was going to be killed?”

  “No. I’m saying he was content to let his plan play out. Whatever that plan was, he was ready to activate it.” Skye’s word came to me. Not contented. Smugness. “Jimmy must have been confident of its success.”

  “And instead he wound up dead on a fresh grave.”

  “With evidence he was killed elsewhere, and a missing collection of artifacts and possible human remains that could have salted the scene of his most recent protest.”

  “Can you have it both ways?” Romero asked. “That his target was the cemetery and yet he was killed someplace else?”

  The detective sergeant had put his finger on the dilemma. The cemetery made Luther my main suspect. The possible abduction introduced other motives from within the reservation. Motives that might have caused a thirteen-year-old boy to go into hiding, or worse, try to find answers on his own.

  And there was Kevin Malone and his Boston hit man. I had no idea how they figured into things, only that Kevin’s tactics depended upon Archie Donovan, and that made me very nervous.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Romero dropped me off at the casino around four thirty. I went straight to the hotel room and swiped my keycard through the electronic lock. The steady sound of streaming water came from the shower and I knew Susan had started getting ready for our big night at the gaming tables. I cracked the bathroom door enough to let steam pour out.

  “Got room in there for a good-looking guy to soap up with you?”

  “Yes,” she shouted. “But my husband will be back soon.”

  “Very funny.” I closed the door and sat on the leather love seat by the window. I needed to call Darren Cransford, but I figured I should check in with Tommy Lee first. He was still at the department.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I spoke with Eddie Wolfe. He claims not to know anything, but he did say Panther was supportive of the Catawba casino efforts. Eddie wouldn’t put it past him to stage some kind of public demonstration, maybe at the legislature in Raleigh.”

  “Was something planned?”

  “Not that Eddie knew of.”

  “I thought Panther and Eddie were tight,” Tommy Lee said.

  “Yeah, but according to Skye and Eddie, Panther was taking their cause in a more confrontational direction. He might not have confided in them. And there’s a new development. Hector Romero asked me to accompany him on an interview regarding a runaway thirteen-year-old boy.” I recapped the conversation with Dot Swift and the Oconaluftee Village interview with Robbie Ledford.

  When I finished, there was silence on the other end of the phone. I didn’t press Tommy Lee for a response. I knew he was thinking.

  The water cut off in the shower. Susan opened the bathroom door. She was barely covered by a plush towel with a second one wrapped around her wet hair. “You need to get in here?”

  I pointed to the phone at my ear and mouthed, “Tommy Lee.”

  “Too bad.” She spun around, whipping off the body towel a split-second before disappearing behind the bathroom door.

  “Bad,” Tommy Lee echoed. “And then good.”

  “What?” I thought Tommy Lee had heard Susan’s tease.

  “That phrase the kid said. Something bad had to happen for something good to happen. That doesn’t sound like a picket line in Raleigh.”

  “No. But it could be salting the cemetery with his Cherokee artifacts.”

  “Barry, it’s nice to feel our town’s important, but that cemetery isn’t a cause worth sacrificing what everyone says was so valuable to Jimmy Panther. And if Kevin’s right, although I’m hard pressed to see how he could be, Francis Tyrell didn’t come down to Cherokee to take out a guy who embarrassed Archie, Luther, and Mayor Whitlock. Believe me, it didn’t happen.”

  “But something was worth it,” I said.

  “I agree. And you’ve opened up an interesting possibility. Especially since Luther’s alibi seems more probable.”

  I stood from the sofa. Tommy Lee had new information. “What did you learn?”

  “Luther told us he had a couple of Miller Lites up at the Blue Ridge Parkway overlook Sunday night. Wakefield found the bottles.”

  “Could Luther have planted them later?”

  “Maybe. He would have had to do it before I talked to him because I sent Wakefield up there as soon as Luther told me. Luther wouldn’t have had time to stage the scene afterwards. Given the way you said he reacted to the news of Panther’s death and the site supposedly being the spot for his first picnic with Eurleen, I find his actions credible. When you lose someone close, you take comfort in shared familiar places.”

  I thought of Emma Byrd taking Romero and me to Panther’s lodgings because she wanted to feel close to her grandson. Then I thought of a grieving thirteen-year-old. “My God, Tommy Lee. I think you’ve hit on something. Danny Swift might be doing the same thing.”

  “Can you check it out?”

  “Not now. I’ve got to meet Kevin at six. But I’ll phone Romero.”

  Tommy Lee grunted. “I wish we hadn’t agreed to this stupid poker thing. If you’re right, I’d rather you talk to the boy with Romero.”

  “Do you want me to hold off?”

  “No. If the boy’s there, he needs to be found. We don’t want the parents worrying a second night.”

  “I mean do you want me to hold off on the poker game? I can’t believe anything’s going down at the table.”

  “Nothing’s going down. But I don’t think that’s the intent.”

  Tommy Lee wasn’t making sense. “You think Kevin’s just hassling the guy?” I asked.

  “Archie’s got his eyes on Tyrell, you’ll have your eyes on Archie and Tyrell, and no one will be watching Kevin.”

  “Watching him do what?”

  “Anything he has to, Barry. Don’t forget it.” Tommy Lee hung up.

  I tried to reach Detective Sergeant Romero at the Cherokee police station but was told he’d left for the day. I followed up with his cell, but that went straight to voicemail. I left him the suggestion that Swifty could be at Panther’s and asked him to call me. Then I retrieved Darren Cransford’s number from the phone log, took out my notepad, and moved to the small desk opposite the bed. I remembered Tommy Lee’s goal to drive a wedge between the stories of father and son. But with Luther a less likely suspect, Darren Cransford now merited a different approach.

  “Hello?” He sounded tentative, like he’d never answered a phone before.

  “Darren, it’s Barry Clayton.”

  “Yes, Mr. Clayton. Is anything wrong?”

  Darren and I were about the same age and he’d called me Barry up till now. The new formality put distance between us, and I didn’t know whether it was a defensive move or continued anger at the debacle in the cemetery. I decided to forge ahead aggressively.

  “Yes, Darren. Something’s very wrong, especially for Jimmy Panther. He was found dead yesterday morning in the cemetery.”

  “I know. My sister told me. Do you suspect my father?”

  “What has he told you?”

  “I haven’t spoken with him.”

  That response surprised me. “You’re kidding? A man is murdered on your mother’s grave and you don’t talk to your father?”

  “I knew any discussion would only upset him.”

  “Did your sister agree with your decision?” I asked.

  “She did. She spoke with him and he assured her he had nothing to do with it. I
thought it was better to leave it at that.”

  I jotted down that Darren claimed no contact with Luther after the murder. “And I guess things were crazy at your office.”

  “You know it. I had to catch up on a lot of work after mother’s funeral.”

  “Now which office would that be? You’re no longer employed by Wilder and Hamilton.”

  Silence.

  “Where did you go Sunday night when you told your father you had to get back to DC?”

  “Did you tell him?” Darren whispered the question.

  “No. If he knows, it’s because he called them or your sister told him.”

  “Sandra wouldn’t say anything.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “She wouldn’t want to create a rift between my father and Mack Collins.”

  “What’s Mack Collins got to do with any of this?”

  “He’s the one who got me fired. Called my boss and complained I was lobbying for the Catawbas.”

  Darren’s disjointed answers suddenly made sense. Sandra told me her brother had taken on the Catawba tribe as a client using his family connection to State Senator Collins. But Mack Collins wasn’t in favor of the Catawba casino proposal. His loyalty was to western North Carolina and to preventing the negative economic impact a rival casino would create. Darren had to be the dullest knife in the drawer if he hadn’t seen that conflict.

  “Had Mack asked you directly not to represent the Catawbas?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I thought that was just for show. I knew he had aspirations for statewide office, maybe even governor, and bringing jobs and growth to another part of the state would play in his favor.”

  “So, he called your firm and told them you were moonlighting. When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago. Since then I’ve been working full time for the Catawba tribe and a group of businessmen in Kings Mountain.”

  “Where did you go Sunday? And don’t lie because we can backtrack your phone.”

  “I went to Kings Mountain. We had a meeting that night.”

  “Can anyone verify it?”

  “Verify it?” His voice rose to an indignant shout. “Barry, you think I’m lying to you?”