Sure enough, Looks Far’s place was part of the parcel. The plans indicated that a “Native American teepee village” would be plopped right on top of the wickiup. My heart sank. White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman knew how to suck me in, all right.
“Looks like it will have a great view,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. I’ve been told I have a great poker face; I hoped it was in working order right then.
“Yeah, Leo says you can see for miles from that cliff top.” He rolled up the plans again and dropped them atop the pile.
“So it’s totally undeveloped? That’s surprising, so close to Boulder.”
Brock shook his head. “There’s some old Indian guy living there now. He sells vision quests and sweat lodge ‘experiences’ and all that kind of crazy stuff.”
“And he won’t budge.”
“Right. Says it’s sacred land. Says it’s not really his, anyhow. You know how Indians say nobody can really own land and all that junk?”
I nodded to keep him talking. “Is it, though? Sacred land, I mean?”
Brock snorted. “I wish I had a dollar for every time some Indian complained about development on a sacred site,” he said, putting air quotes around “sacred site.” “I’d be a millionaire by now. Anyway, sweetie, I’ve got a ton of work to do.”
“I’ll be here for a while,” I said, slipping my arms around his neck. “Any chance you could get away for lunch?”
He wrapped his arms around my waist and drew me to him. “I wish,” he said, kissing the corner of my mouth, and working his way down my neck. “But Perry has ordered lunch in for us.”
“Too bad,” I said, a little breathless.
“Too bad,” he agreed, sliding his hands up my back, under my shirt. They paused at my bra. Then he sighed. “Really too bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Really.” Then I pulled away. “Well, if you want to take a break, you know where to find me.”
A sly grin overspread his face. “I do indeed.”
I threw a come-hither look over my shoulder at him as I sashayed out, closing his door behind me.
As I walked to my office, a thought I’d been ignoring forced its way to the front of my brain: What if I had forced Brock to propose to me with my newfound powers of persuasion?
My steps faltered as I reviewed in my head the scene at the restaurant. It was certainly possible that I’d pushed him, I conceded, but I didn’t think it likely. He had seemed too sure that night. And I had yet to see him express any regrets.
Well, other than the f-bombs.
But, I reasoned, those might not be about me. They might be about work. He might be cutting some corners on the Durant matter.
I wasn’t sure whether that would be good news or bad news for Looks Far.
Behind my own closed door, I continued to ruminate while waiting for my laptop to boot up. Clearly Looks Far had known about the challenge to his land when we were there the day before. Why didn’t he say anything about it? Granted, we had other things to talk about – maybe more important things – but still. He knew I was a lawyer. Why didn’t he say something?
And what would Durant’s plans mean for Looks Far and his business? What would they mean for Joseph and George?
Never mind the fact that the cliff top really was sacred land. I had seen it with my own eyes. Brock’s cavalier dismissal of the possibility appalled me.
Speaking of Brock, it certainly looked like he was working today. But I had trouble believing it would take him two days to draft a memo on a real estate sale. Granted, I didn’t know the issues, but it just didn’t strike me as that complex of an assignment. Maybe a brand-new associate would require a couple of days, but Brock wasn’t a brand-new associate.
I should have asked him who else was on the team.
Then I stopped and thought about who, or what, I was turning into: the jealous fiancée, checking up on her man, with or without cause. It wasn’t a pretty picture. I’ve never looked good in green.
I sighed and went to work.
A couple of hours later, I’d made a good-sized dent in my paperwork. I stood and stretched, and thought about whether to get some coffee and power through the rest of the stack to avoid having to come in again the next day. Then I glanced at the clock on the computer and decided that lunch would be a healthier idea than coffee. I locked the computer screen, grabbed my coat, and headed down to the 16th Street Mall to see what was still open for lunch at 3:00 p.m. on a Saturday.
The day had warmed up considerably while I was slaving away over a hot keyboard; the snow was nearly all gone. I shrugged out of my coat, wishing now that I’d left it in my office, and dangled it by a finger over one shoulder. My stomach began to rumble as I walked past the chain burrito place; I decided that was a sign, and reached for the door.
A brown hand reached in front of me and got to the door handle first. I half-turned to thank whoever was (I trusted) about to hold the door open for me, and stared.
“You’re buying, right?” Joseph Curtis said with a grin. “I’m starving.”
“Were you following me?” was all I could manage.
“Not exactly.”
I preceded him in, folding my coat over my arm. “What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “I saw you walking down the street and came over to say hi. I thought I might join you for lunch.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “Don’t worry. I can pay for my own burrito.”
I waved one hand in dismissal. “No, it’s fine, I’ll get it. It’s the least I can do for you, after yesterday.”
We ordered, exchanging small talk about the menu, and picked up our meals. I paid with my corporate credit card. Well, it was a business lunch, kind of. We were colleagues of a sort.
“How’s your grandfather?” I asked as we sat near the window.
“Fine,” Joseph answered.
“And the offer for his land?”
He stopped in mid-bite, the burrito suspended in midair. Then he put it down, folded his hands, and leaned forward. “It’s not.”
“Not an offer? Not going to happen? What?” I asked, taking a forkful of my burrito bowl.
“All of the above.”
“Oh, it’s an offer, all right. My fiancé’s working on a memo about it as we speak.” I willed it to be so.
He bit into his burrito and chewed for a minute. I was pretty sure he had an internal debate going on, so I said, “Look, I don’t intend to be a jerk about this. I can’t represent you and Looks Far – it would be a conflict of interest for my firm, since we’ve already been engaged by the other side – but I will certainly help you find a good lawyer. Which you will need. I don’t know a lot about Durant Development, but I do know they have a reputation for playing hardball.”
“We’ve got it under control,” he said.
I sat back. “You are infuriating, you know that? I am offering to help you out of a pretty serious situation, and you just shut me down. Your grandfather could lose his home, you know.”
He smiled again, and took another bite of burrito.
“Where do I know you from?” I asked. That weird sense of familiarity had washed over me again.
His smile widened. “I wondered if you remembered me,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
“All I saw of you was your eyes,” he said, “peeking through the mail slot in your front door.” Then he winked at me.
The words “mail slot” and the wink together unlocked the memory. I nearly dropped my fork. “It was you and your grandfather on our front porch!” I said, and he bounced his head in agreement.
The farmer who owned the buffalo calf, looking (Mom said) to make a quick buck, called the local newspaper right after our class left his farm that day. The reporter assigned to the story called our house before Mom got home from work. Naive as I was, I answered some of his questions. The next day, there on the front page of the paper was a picture of the farmer with the calf. My quotes were featured promi
nently in the story.
My mother just about had a cow. I’d told her about the calf’s weird behavior but hadn’t thought to mention that the newspaper had called.
That was bad enough, but then a wire service picked up the story. Suddenly we were getting phone calls at all hours, from as far away as New York and Australia. Australia! And they all wanted to talk to me.
Mom shut them all down. Even the “Today” show, which was her favorite morning show. I could tell it just about killed her to say no to her little girl being interviewed by Jane Pauley.
In the midst of all that hoopla, one evening, our doorbell rang. Mom flipped on the porch light and answered the door with the chain on, then stepped outside without a coat. I remember it was cold that night, and when I’d finished my supper and Mom was still outside on the porch, I got curious. I couldn’t see Mom through the front window – the angle was wrong – so I knelt behind the front door and looked out through the mail slot.
The conversation seemed to be wrapping up, mainly because Mom kept saying stuff like “no” and “get off my porch.” The older man kept saying it was a miracle foretold, that he had risked a lot to come, could he and his grandson at least meet me – and Mom just kept stonewalling him. I couldn’t see much – Mom was standing in front of the doorknob, just in case they made a grab for it, I guess – but I could see around her to the boy standing on the bottom step. He was a few years older than me, maybe sixteen, tanned (or so I thought), with dark hair cut short, and beautiful blue eyes. He was looking around while the grownups argued and caught sight of me spying on the conversation, and winked and grinned at me.
Then Mom said, “I don’t care how far you’ve driven, I won’t have any of your Indian nonsense near my daughter. You and your boy can just get back in that rust bucket of yours and get off my property, before I call the police.”
The man told her she was making a big mistake, but he took the boy and left. I scrambled out of the way of the door just in time – Mom slammed it open so hard that she knocked a picture off the wall.
“Were they real Indians?” I asked her later.
And she replied, “Don’t you have homework to do?”
How had I forgotten all that? Daydreaming about that boy and his amazing blue eyes was what got me through the rest of that awful school year.
And now here he was, right in front of me, finishing off the burrito I’d bought him.
“So tell me,” I said, “what ‘Indian nonsense’ was it that my mother didn’t want me near?”
He laughed. “Grandfather had a fit about that. He talked about it all the way to Iowa.”
“You’d driven to our house all the way from Boulder?”
He shook his head. “Denver. We were new to Colorado then.
“My parents had died about five, maybe six years before. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but that accident really tore him up. He loved my mother fiercely, and hated my father for getting her started drinking. Mom could quit, and did, sometimes, but Dad never could.” He sat back. “Eat. Your food is getting cold.”
Obediently, I put a forkful of lettuce and sour cream into my mouth.
“Anyway, he went out on a vision quest to try to salve his grief and guilt. And while he was out there, White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman contacted him.” He grimaced. “You know we’re not Sioux. We’ve never been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for why She picked Grandfather to be Her messenger. But he came back from that vision quest convinced She had.
“She played into his desire for a perfect world – a world where daughters don’t get drunk and die in car accidents with their good-for-nothing husbands. A world where white men act like Indians – giving the Indian Nation and the animal nations equal respect. A world where Manifest Destiny is seen as a lie.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I’ve gotten pretty adamant about it over the years, partly from listening to Grandfather.
“Anyway, he took the message of White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman to the tribal council, and they weren’t exactly receptive. They wanted to know what business the Ute Nation had with Her. She’s not one of our gods. And the white buffalo isn’t as big a deal to us as it is to the Sioux. Why should they get dragged into this?” He stared at the table, lost in thought. Then he shrugged and went on. “Of course, Grandfather didn’t have any answers, or none that would satisfy them, anyway. What they really wanted was for him to shut up about his vision. But he told them he wouldn’t be silenced. Finally, things came to a head, and he decided we’d be better off leaving the rez. So I dropped out of high school – I got my GED later on – and we moved to Denver. We were both doing anything we could to make money – day labor, construction work, stuff like that.
“Then we saw the story about you and that white buffalo calf in the Rocky Mountain News. Grandfather insisted we get in his truck immediately and drive however many hundreds of miles it would take to see you.”
“And my mother froze you out.”
He nodded, sighing.
“I want you to know,” I said, “it was nothing personal. She froze out everybody. Even Jane Pauley.”
A small grin. “I’ll tell him that.”
“And I’m serious about helping you guys. It’s the least I can do.” Then I realized there was something I could do for Joseph and his grandfather, and it might help me, too. “Let me talk to Brock. He might be able to talk the client into mediation. If that works, I could at least try to get a fair deal for your grandfather.”
“That would be great,” Joseph said. He seemed a little bit relieved.
“He still needs a good lawyer, though,” I warned. “I can’t represent him. Please make sure he understands that.”
“I’ll tell him,” Joseph said again. “Thank you, Naomi.” His expression turned mischievous. “And thanks for lunch.”
I grinned back. “Don’t thank me. The firm’s going to pick up the tab.”
“If I’d known that,” he said, “I’d have gotten another burrito.”
Chapter 5
I walked back to the office, feeling a little better for having both a full stomach and a plan of sorts.
I walked past Brock’s office on the way to mine. He was, indeed, hard at work at his computer. I began to wonder whether I should ever have doubted him – although I wasn’t ready to give him a free pass yet. Not until I figured out where those f-bombs were coming from.
“Hey,” I said, stopping in his doorway. “How was the pizza party?”
Reluctantly, he looked away from his screen. “Hey,” he responded. “Pizza was okay. Would have been better if you’d been there.”
“I had a brainstorm about that over my burrito bowl,” I said, and outlined my idea to him.
Brock shrugged. “I can float the idea to Perry. Not sure the client would be willing to pay for another attorney to staff this matter – not that you’d be part of the team, of course. I know Durant and the Indian would have to split your fee, or however you usually handle that. But if we pitch the idea to Durant as a net savings if the mediation works, he might go for it.”
“Tightwad, huh?”
“Pretty tight, yeah.”
I nodded. “Let me know what Perry says. I’ll be here for a little while yet. Gonna power through some more reports so that I don’t have to come in tomorrow.” Then I blew him a kiss, which got me a grin in return, and headed off to do battle with the paper monster in my office.
Half an hour later, Perry Dorfman himself knocked on my door. The head of the firm’s litigation practice, he was rarely seen walking the halls; usually he had his secretary call subordinate attorneys to his office so he could sit behind his desk and intimidate them. You can do that when your name’s on the front door.
He had a bulbous nose, a bulbous stomach (encased today in a long-sleeved sports shirt with a bolo tie), and a fringe of graying hair that he wore like a tonsure. But for all that he was a caricature, he was a brilliant lawyer.
“It’s an honor, sir,” I told him, letti
ng just a tinge of sarcasm creep into my voice.
“Cut the crap, Witherspoon,” he said, dumping a pile of back issues of American Lawyer from my guest chair onto the floor. (One of these days, I was going to page through them and then send them back to the firm library.) He eased himself into the chair as if afraid it would break under him. Then he leaned across my desk as if it were his office, careless of my haphazard piles of paper and legal pads. “Brock told me your idea. It’s not bad. Durant is a bastard, but he’s a cheap bastard. He might go for mediation if he thinks it’ll save him money in the long run.”
I nodded. “That’s what Brock said.”
He sat back. “We’re going up there tomorrow for a site inspection – Brock, Durant, and me. I’d like for you to tag along.”
“I’d love to.”
“Good. Be here at noon tomorrow or we’ll leave without you.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be here.” Then I went on, “Full disclosure, sir: I’ve met the property owner. He and my friend Shannon had a little business to tend to yesterday, and I went along with her.”
“So you’ve been up to the site?”
I nodded again.
“Good,” he said. “You can be our navigator. Durant told me he’s never laid eyes on the place.”
That’s interesting. Then how come he told Brock it had a killer view? Aloud, I said, with the beginning of a grin, “I hope somebody’s got four-wheel drive. The entrance is at about a seven percent grade.”
He harrumphed on his way out the door.
As soon as I was sure Perry was out of earshot, I called Joseph to give him a progress report. His cell phone went to voicemail, though, so I left him a message and got back to work. Now I had no choice – I had to finish these reports today. There wasn’t going to be time tomorrow.
Following another weird-dream-free night, I hit the front door of our firm at 11:55 a.m. Sunday. Brock, Perry, and the client were making small talk in the lobby, drinking brand-name coffee in paper cups. Brock handed me a latte from a cardboard cupholder on the receptionists’ desk while Perry introduced me.
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