"Bobby and Chantel had a child right away. No surprise, she had a bump on their wedding day. Then he died and she really embraced the tribe, as they say."
I bet she did. Free room and board courtesy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the knowledge that she and her little boy would be enrolled as members of the Quepochas tribe. And possibly a very rich member if she sided with Daniel Smallwood.
"As a licensed attorney I went before the tribal council to make the Crawfords' case. We won and the tribe agreed not to add any new members without a rigorous approval process."
"DNA testing?" I asked.
"Not that rigorous."
Betty told me they'd tried that ten years earlier and the results sent shock waves through the small community. Some leaders had less blood than they claimed, some members found out their fathers weren't their fathers, and other even more awkward bits of news surfaced, so the testing was halted and never resumed.
"Were the Crawfords ever arrested for the incident with you?"
"Arrested, but not charged. I wouldn't press charges. Without that it was purely a tribal issue. Red on red offense on tribal lands . . . the council had jurisdiction. They held a pretrial intervention on behalf of the Crawfords. We made it go away. It wasn't in anyone's interests to pursue."
On top of that, she'd come over to their side. She learned a lot about her own heritage from them. Bobby, really. He was the smart one; the other two were not as bright. Or as passionate about their cause.
The original stunt had worked. Now I wondered if the surviving brothers were dumb enough to try something similar on a nonnative off tribal lands, where it wouldn't be a tribal issue swept under the rug but a federal offense.
"Is the reservation near here?"
I tried to sound casual, but Betty Smallwood knew what I was thinking.
"They wouldn't do that."
"Why not? They shamed and charmed you into seeing their side. Maybe they thought they could do the same with a TV journalist." Lucy would have been happy to be referred to that way, although she'd be the first to admit that she cranked out low-budget reality television shows.
I waited for Betty to answer, and she searched my face trying to guess how I'd use the information.
"It's adjacent to the Titans Hotel, on the north side."
"Thank you."
We heard huffing and puffing, and the stairs creaking as they had when I climbed them. I thought it was the elderly salesclerk, then the door swung open.
"You better have some water up here." It was Detective Stacy Winters. She leaned against the doorjamb, hands low on her bony hips, and Betty pointed to a cooler near a dirty casement window.
"Where are they?" she asked.
"Papercups?"
"C'mon, let's not waste each other's time. Billy and Claude. They were seen at the hotel and as of this morning I've got physical evidence linking them to Nick Vigoriti's murder."
So now the Crawfords were officially wanted for questioning in the murder of Nick Vigoriti. My temporary status as a "person of interest"—bestowed on me by the local press, who had to say something even if it was vague and ultimately untrue—was rescinded. And if Lucy's disappearance had briefly registered on Stacy Winters's Richter scale, it had gone poof with this new evidence against her favorite suspects.
"Physical evidence, right at the scene. So I'll ask you again. Where are they?" Winters said. It was a scene I had a feeling they'd played out before, with Betty leading in the head-to-head matchup.
"What is your problem with them? One of them not ask you to the prom or something? I don't know and I wouldn't tell you if I did. I wouldn't have to. Presumably you do know something about the law, since you're in law enforcement." Betty was in lawyer mode, but this smacked of something a tad more personal.
At a loss for words, Winters turned to me. "And what are you doing here?" She walked over to the watercooler, ran a finger across the top of the dusty glass jug, and decided against it. "I heard about your little escapade in Springfield last year. Some cop friend of yours called me. I hope you don't think you're going to start sticking your nose in police business up here."
Betty's crack about the prom and Winters's inability to deliver a quick comeback made me bold. "Lay back. I just came to send you the fax. It's not like there's a Kinko's in this burg." I was tempted to say, If your office had a working computer I wouldn't be here. I handed her the picture of Lucy that I'd just faxed to her office. She didn't even look at it—just folded it in four and stuffed it in her inside pocket.
"Okay. Mission accomplished. I got the fax."
She stood with her hands on her hips, dismissing me. Jeez, what a bitch. Part of me wanted to stick around for the cat fight, but I didn't need to be hit over the head—she wanted me gone and I was happy to oblige. I yanked out the power cord and shoved the cord and the computer in my bag. "What do I owe you for letting me use the computer, Ms. Smallwood?"
"Forget it."
I made my way down the stairs, nearly bumping into Georgie, who'd crept up to eavesdrop. "You might want to let them talk for a bit," I said, trying to spare him.
"Is it about Billy and Claude?" he whispered, walking back down the stairs. "She don't like them."
I nodded. "Does everyone know about them?" I asked.
"I know everybody. They all come in to buy the Powerball tickets. I can tell who's having fun and who's desperate." He fell just short of telling me what he meant by that. "You're not a cop, too, are you?"
"Me? I'm a gardener." That got me a smile but no more information from Georgie. I didn't want to be around when Winters and Betty finished up, so I kept walking, to the front of the store, where I handed Georgie a dollar for a bottle of water. Across the street I saw the Big Y shopping cart and the walking bundle of rags.
"You know that guy?" I asked, cracking open the bottle and taking a long pull.
"Sure. He'll be in later. I let him use the facilities—they don't let him hang around the gas station no more; owner says he scares people away," Georgie said. "I think it's the owner scares them away."
"Give him this, okay?" I handed Georgie a twenty and walked out to my car.
I had the sinking feeling that Lucy was mixed up in all of this—it had two handsome guys and a good story. I drove back to Titans trying to figure out what to do next. Just before the turnoff into the Titans lot was a hidden driveway I hadn't noticed before and a small handwritten sign: PROPERTY OF QUEPOCHAS, STAY THE HELL OUT.
I didn't.
Twenty-nine
In the early seventeenth century, well before it was a state, the Connecticut colony gave the Quepochas 17,000 acres of prime farmland. Who knows why? Guilt over killing so many of them with guns or disease? Fear that they would encroach on lands inhabited by European settlers? Whatever the reason, there was an acknowledgment of their existence even before the Revolutionary War. And an attempt was made to live amicably with them. Over the years, members moved off or assimilated. Large tracts of tribal lands were sold by tribal leaders until the reservation reached its present size of approximately 300 acres—small for a reservation but huge for a property in Connecticut.
For some lucky tribes, the reservation is a tax-free gated community where few people work, but that's by choice. Why work when the money from gaming just keeps falling on your head? Other tribes suffer from as much as eighty-five percent unemployment—and that's not because the members are staying in their mansions, eating bonbons.
The Quepochas reservation was neither. From what I could see, most of the reservation's inhabitants seemed to be dead, as evidenced by the lack of homes and the dozens of listing, wafer-thin tombstones I passed driving the dirt road that ran through the property.
Betty Smallwood had told me that enrolled members of the tribe were not required to live on the reservation. Hell, most of them got away as soon as they could, and as far away as possible. Like Betty herself had done.
Unofficially, a handful did live there, scattered across the
reservation, scratching out an existence in shacks and cabins and quietly dying out. Officially, it was just Chantel and Sean in a two-room cinder-block house close to the road.
The farther I drove the more the road narrowed and the potholes deepened. It reminded me of the road to Oksana's place; she was on a reservation, too, in a way. The switchbacks took me higher and although I hadn't noticed it on the way up, on one side of the mountain I could now see the top of Titans. There were fewer tombstones and still no houses, just the occasional dilapidated shack built into the side of the mountain. I pulled over to a carved-out spot on the road to enjoy the view.
Peak time was probably in the fall when the mountain would be awash in color, but it looked pretty good to me; I fished out my phone to take a picture.
Just then it rang.
"Where the hell have you been?" the woman asked.
It was Lucy.
She'd been trying to reach me for the past three days. When she called the hotel, I had checked out. When she tried me at home, I'd already left to come back to Titans. And the cell didn't work until I drove up the mountain and got a signal.
"Where the hell are you?" I asked.
"Well, I'm not one hundred percent sure."
"Can you talk? Are you safe?"
"Yes. I'm alone now. I don't know when they'll be back. Come get me."
Thirty
Before Lucy and I were to meet at Titans, she'd had an appointment. With Billy and Claude Crawford. They were her sources for an exposé on casino gambling that involved some of the most prominent names in this part of the state and some pretty unsavory characters as well. The three of them had met in the parking lot outside of Titans. I watched the sun go down as she told me what happened.
"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to get into a car with two strange men?" I asked.
"I don't remember the stuff my mother told me. Besides, I didn't get in a car with two men; Billy had to meet someone in the hotel; he joined us later." Lucy and Claude drove to the Crawfords' attorney to discuss what they knew and how best to reveal it.
"You went to Betty Smallwood's?" I asked, incredulous.
"You know her?" Now it was Lucy's turn to be surprised.
"I just came from her office. I showed her a picture of you and she didn't bat an eyelash. She didn't utter a word about having met you." That was one cool customer.
"After I left the message for you I called this other guy I was supposed to meet," she said.
"Nick Vigoriti?"
"How do you know this?" she asked, exasperated that I was cutting into her story.
"I met him instead." Now I understood some of Nick's cryptic remarks. He had thought I was Lucy, in the hotel to interview him for the casino story. And so, obviously, did some other people who had showed an inordinate amount of interest in a woman who was there to write about the corpse flower. I told her Nick was dead but she already knew.
"Betty called Claude and told him. That's why the guys haven't wanted to drive back. Some local cop has a real hard-on for them and probably thinks they did it. The boys stashed their car in the woods and we walked the rest of the way here."
"And where is here?"
She was somewhere on the reservation in a log cabin off a dirt road. "It's kind of nice, like one of those places pictured in the Sunday Times real estate section with a view that you can never afford. High on the mountain, lake, there's even a small waterfall in the distance."
Waterfront property notwithstanding, she was brought to a secret place, car stashed, and incommunicado for three days. Any minute she'd start speaking Swedish. I forced myself to stay calm and not scream at her.
"Okay, why are you still there?" There was a silence and after being Lucy's friend for many years and through many relationships I knew exactly what it meant.
"Jeez, Lucy, both of them?"
"No, just Claude. You have to see him, he's gorgeous. He's got this amazing hair and skin. Our kids would be phenomenal."
Oh, brother. The only reservation in Lucy's future was at Balthazar, downtown, table by the window, but she was playing out some fantasy. One of us had to be the grown-up.
"It's not as if I just met him," she rationalized. "We've been e-mailing for weeks—I felt as if I knew him." I tried not to be judgmental with friends, but my silence smacked of disapproval.
"Lucy, I just heard the cops say they had evidence that implicated the Crawfords in Nick's death. What do you know about that?"
"I know they've been persecuted by some psycho local cop with an ax to grind . . ."
"And hotel security at Titans has instructions not to admit the Crawfords," I said. "There's a restraining order against them entering the hotel, so Billy's got to be lying about meeting someone there. Luce, physical evidence. Ted Bundy was cute, too. Not my type, but someone thought he was cute."
I checked my watch; it would be dark in about thirty minutes, and it was getting chilly. As it was, I didn't know if I could make it back down the mountain in the dark with all of those switchbacks—and the very real possibility of going over the side like poor Mrs. Mishkin made it an unattractive prospect. I had to find her, and soon.
The light was fading but I had a picture of the spot on my phone and Lucy had given me a description of what she could see from the cabin; I tried to match it up with what I saw from my perch on the side of the dirt road. She told me the lake was on her right.
"That's west," I said.
"Is it? Oh yeah, setting sun." Clearly she hadn't been a Girl Scout. Neither had I for that matter—west was the Henry Hudson Parkway and east was the FDR, what else did you need to know in Manhattan?
"I've got it!" she said. When Lucy rented the car, YoDrive had provided her with a TomTom, a portable global positioning system. Since no New Yorker leaves anything of any value in her car, she had automatically taken it with her. She rummaged through her bag to get the Tom.
"Great! What does it say?"
She waited for a satellite signal. Finally the screen lit up. "It says I'm screwed. I'm at the corner of nowhere and battery low," she said, frustrated. "I'm a speck. What's the point of this thing? You have to know where you are to know where you are."
I told her to minimize the screen to see as much of the surrounding area as possible. She was somewhere west of 95, which was not much help since so was most of the United States.
"Plug in Titans as a destination," I said. If she'd used it on the drive up it would have been her last address on the TomTom. She groaned.
"I didn't use it. The clerk at YoDrive said all I had to do was take 95, so that's what I did."
"It's near Academy Road. Start with that."
Titans's exact address was on my Jeep's system and I ran to get it before the power drained on Lucy's Tom. We waited until her handheld unit processed the information. She was eleven miles from Titans, but the TomTom was having a rough time choosing a route selection since there weren't any established roads through the reservation.
"Keep at it," I said, "and call me back if something comes up. Wait a minute, give me your longitude and latitude. Maybe I can figure out how to use that to find you."
"How do I do that?"
I told her to hit browse map but it was too late. The TomTom ran out of power.
"Lucy, is there electricity in that cabin?"
"No."
"Well, light some candles and make a fire. And save your cell power. Turn it back on in one hour. I'll call you to let you know where I am." Assuming I knew.
Before I risked losing my cell signal, I made one more call.
"Paradise Diner."
Babe and company were gearing up for the dinner crowd, not as busy as breakfast or lunch, but busy enough so that Babe didn't answer the phone herself.
"She's with some customers. Want me to get her?" Alba, the budding rock singer/waitress, took a message. I could hear her making change at the register, and she read the message back to me with no reaction at all to its contents: Lucy missing, searching
Quepochas reservation, just in case you never see me again. Paula.
"Okay, so, like, is that it?"
"That's it."
Thirty-one
A former colleague once dragged me to a foreign film called The Wages of Fear, starring Yves Montand, a French hottie from the fifties. The movie was about a couple of guys who were so broke they agreed to drive a truck filled with nitroglycerin across the proverbial hundred miles of bad road. Most of the film showed a nervous, white-knuckled driver and a wild-eyed passenger stopping and starting the car while they navigated the treacherous road.
All I needed was the passenger.
Farther on from the spot where I'd spoken to Lucy, the road had fewer switchbacks, but other than that, it was really only good for mountain goats or Dall sheep. The kind you see in National Geographic magazines and wonder how the hell it is they don't fall off the side of a craggy bluff. Luckily the Jeep is the automotive equivalent of a mountain goat. All of those car commercials that are so obviously Photoshopped to show cars at the tops of arches and hoodoos in Colorado or Utah actually have some basis in reality.
As long as I kept to a snail's pace, I made progress. The road had to have been at a forty-five-degree angle in some spots and even more in others with only intermittent stretches where I could kick butt and drive a whopping eight or ten miles an hour.
Even with my brights on I could only see about twenty feet ahead of the car. Without another vehicle in front of me as a frame of reference, the road seemed to get narrower, at times seeming just inches wider than the Jeep. Branches scraped both sides of the car. I pulled left to avoid them on the right and a stubby shrub reached in and left a long scratch on my cheek, scaring the hell out of me. Then I overcompensated and hugged the mountain so closely on the next turn that I smacked in the passenger-side window. The sound startled me and I stopped to survey the damage. To the car and to my face.
The Big Dirt Nap db-2 Page 13
