Vicky took her eyes away. She waited a couple of seconds before she looked at the woman again. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” she said. “Liz is dead. She was murdered, and her…” She hesitated. “…body was discovered last month in a gulley east of the reservation. The man who killed her is still on the reservation. I want to see him charged with her murder. I want to see him convicted.”
Inez was staring past Vicky now, seeing something beyond the living room and the interior of a tidy house on a tree-lined street. “I knew it was true, but I never wanted to believe it. I told Luna her Mommy had to go away for a while. I told her she’d be coming back just as soon as she could, because she loved her. ’Til she got back, I told her, I’d be her Mommy and I’d take good care of her. So that’s what happened. I became her mother.”
Vicky leaned forward. “Help me, Inez. Please. Tell me what happened after Liz came to your house.”
“The house,” Inez said, still staring at the point in space. “It was supposed to be a safe house. Nobody was supposed to know where it was. Well, that was funny. Turned out lots of people knew where my house was. Wasn’t supposed to be that way. Nobody’d think a Cheyenne like me, twenty-three is all I was, working nights in a diner trying to pay the mortgage and keep some food in the fridge, was gonna run a house where AIM people running from the Feds could hide. That’s what they told me, a couple of the leaders that used to come into the diner. ‘You got the perfect place,’ they said. They’d pay me a hundred bucks a month. It was a lot of money, and Fred was in Vietnam. I never told him what I was doing, ’cause I knew he wouldn’t want me mixed up with AIM.”
She took a moment, working through the memories. “Tell you the truth,” she said finally, “I guess I was what they call a sympathizer. I saw how they were going to bat for Indians that got beat up by the police, thrown into jail just for being Indian, fired from their jobs. I almost got fired myself, ’cause the boss wanted to hire his girlfriend, so the AIM guys paid him a visit, asked him how he’d like a bunch of Indians protesting every day in front of the diner. Well, he backed down and kept me on. Then, when Fred got killed, they took up a collection for me. So I owed ’em, you know. I said, they could use my house. It could be the safe house.”
THE STREETS WERE dark except for the light splashed under the streetlamps here and there. Liz gripped the steering wheel and drove around one block, then another. The safe house had to be here somewhere, but she wasn’t sure. It could be miles away. She didn’t know Denver. She’d been here only once before, and her mother was driving—driving and driving, looking for the guy she’d met at the bar in Riverton, some salesman that had been coming through. He was gonna save them. They’d gone around block after block then, too. They never found the guy.
She’d had to pull off I-25 when she got to Denver. The stream of headlights coming at her, blinding her, and Luna crying in the backseat and the needle flicking on empty. She’d found a 24-hour convenience store and used the rest of Ardyth’s money for a couple of cans of baby formula and six gallons of gas. She’d asked the clerk—a white woman, and she seemed nice, the way she smiled and cooed at Luna—how to get to the address that Robert had given her. The woman had started explaining, then had pulled a map out of the rack by the cash register, opened it on the counter and traced the route with a pencil. Highway south to Alameda. West on Alameda toward Sheridan. Couple of blocks before Sheridan, turn here. She’d tapped the pencil on two blue lines that intersected. Can’t miss it, she’d said, then she’d handed Liz the map.
She’d fed Luna a bottle in front of the store, thinking about what Robert had said when he’d finally answered the phone, after she’d been calling most the night. “Best you go to Denver,” he’d said.
Denver? She’d been surprised. “You can fix it, Robert. Tell Jake to back off. I’m not the snitch. Somebody else told the cops.” He’d ignored what she’d said, and that surprised her again, but he’d insisted on the safe house in Denver. She should stay there until he straightened everything out.
She got back on the highway and followed the directions. Now she was in a maze of houses that all looked the same, white frame houses with flat fronts and dark windows, pickups in the dirt driveways, other pickups parked on the streets. She squinted at the numbers on the black mailboxes at the curbs.
Luna had started crying again by the time she spotted the numbers she was looking for. She parked between two pickups, lifted Luna out of the cardboard box, and, struggling to hold on to the baby and fit the strap of the diaper bag over her shoulder, made her way up a sidewalk ragged with cracks. The night was warm, but she was shivering. She felt her legs shaking beneath her and she had to lean against the door frame to steady herself as she knocked. A cat was meowing in the bushes next to the house.
There was no sound from inside. She waited a moment, then knocked again. Luna whimpered in her arms and she tried to shush her. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay.” But nothing was okay. She wondered if she was at the right house, on the right street. Had she copied down the right numbers?
Then, the sound of footsteps padding toward the door and a woman’s voice: “Who’s there?”
“It’s Liz,” she managed. She was afraid she might burst into tears.
The door opened. The woman wasn’t a lot older than she was, only a few years maybe. She had long black hair and she was Indian. Cheyenne, she guessed. She had on a blue robe that she held closed with one hand. The other was waving her inside. “Been expecting you,” she said. Then, “Robert didn’t tell me you had a baby.”
Liz stopped, one foot on the doorstep. “Her name’s Luna.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine. I’m Inez. Come on in.”
And then she was showing her through the little house. Kitchen here, make yourself at home. Food’s meant to eat. Liz followed her into a bedroom in back, then into what looked like a sleeping porch with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a kitchen chair with chrome frame and a green plastic seat. “It’s nice and cool here. You can open the windows,” Inez said, glancing around the room. “Now, where’ll we put the baby?”
“I have a cardboard box in the backseat,” Liz said.
“Good. That’ll work.” Inez swept out of the porch and came back carrying a matching chair. She arranged the chairs facing each other. “You can put the box here.” Then she turned, and Liz felt herself being scrutinized, examined the way she used to look at insects in the mud down by the creek when she was little. “What did you do,” Inez said, “that you got the Feds after you?”
No, it wasn’t like that. She tried to explain. It was a misunderstanding with some of the AIM people on the rez—but Robert would straighten it out. It might take a couple of weeks to convince…
“Well, never mind.” Inez waved away the explanation. “You’ll be safe here.”
“I RAN THE house about two years,” Inez said. “There was a lot of trouble. AIM was in the newspapers all the time. Protests in D.C. You know, they took over the BIA building! Imagine that! Then they took over Wounded Knee. A lot of them were wanted by the FBI. Mostly it was Lakotas that came to the house, but there were Cheyennes and Crows, a couple of Blackfeet. Liz was the last one that came. After that, I told them I couldn’t do it anymore. Liz and the baby only stayed for four days, and we got on like sisters. She was like the sister I always wanted. She used to walk around the house singing her songs, singing to her baby all the time. ‘Baby, baby, you’re the sun rising in the sky, the moon riding high. Beautiful baby of mine.’ Songs like that.”
Inez dipped her head. She lifted one hand and ran her forefinger and thumb over her forehead, then squeezed the small of her nose for a moment. When she looked up again, Vicky saw the moisture shining in her eyes. “They broke down the door,” she said. “They didn’t even knock, just came bursting in here like they were some kind of SWAT team and we’d been holding hostages or some damn thing. Liz and I, we were sitting in the living room watching TV. I remember we were watching Get Sm
art. Funny what you remember. Liz jumped up and she clamped her hand over her mouth, ’cause she didn’t want to scream, I could tell. She didn’t want to wake Luna. The baby was sleeping on the porch. I think she knew they were going to drag her away and she didn’t want them to take the baby. They must’ve forgotten about Luna, or most likely they would’ve taken her, too.
“I remember shouting: ‘Get out of here!’ I ran to the kitchen for the phone, and one of them came after me. Grabbed me from behind and hit me in the face. That’s all I remember, his fist coming at me. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor and I heard a baby crying somewhere. There was blood everywhere, ’cause he broke my nose. I could taste the blood in my mouth. I had to hold on to the wall to get up, you know, sort of crawling up the wall, and I saw they were gone. Liz, too. I went into the kitchen, ducked my head under the faucet and tried to clean up some of the blood. My whole face felt like it was on fire with the pain. I went and picked up Luna and I knew, even then, that I was gonna have to take care of her. She was going to be my little baby.”
“Did you call the police?”
Inez gave a snort of laughter and shook her head. “Oh, yes. I called. Took them two hours to get here. Indian neighborhood, another Indian fight, was how they looked at it. Let ’em go back to the reservation and settle their own troubles. Couple of officers wrote in their notepads, shoved the notepads back into their pockets, said they’d file a report. That was the last I heard. I wanted to call AIM, the guys I knew. But I didn’t, ’cause they were AIM, you know.”
She went quiet for a moment, kneading her fingers together. “Maybe you’d better tell me what they did with her.”
“They shot her,” Vicky said. “They beat her first…”
A sharp cry erupted behind them, and Vicky turned around. Luna was standing in the doorway to the bedrooms. In her arms was a baby girl, with brown, baby-fat arms and legs and black hair. A pink ribbon was tied around a snatch of hair that stood straight up from her head. She rubbed a chubby hand at sleepy eyes, then leaned back and stared at her mother, who was crying.
Vicky jumped to her feet. “I’m so sorry.”
“No.” Luna pressed a fist against her mouth a moment, then she said, “I want to know everything that happened to my mother.”
Inez pushed herself out of the sofa and went over to Luna. She wrapped her arms around both the young woman and the baby and held them close. After a moment, she said, “Her body was found this summer near the reservation. We can see that she has a proper burial now, in the Arapaho Way.” She led Luna and the baby back to the sofa and sat down beside them. The baby leaned against her mother and patted at her arm.
“Did you recognize the men?” Vicky said. “Can you identify them?”
A couple of seconds passed before Inez said, “One of them stayed at the house. Right after Wounded Knee, came and stayed a couple of weeks. Then he said he was going to Wind River with other AIM people. Lakota, went by the name of Jake Tallfeathers, but he told me once his real name was Walker.”
And he’s dead, Vicky was thinking. Struck by a truck probably driven by the other man—who was still alive. “Who was with him?” she said. Her voice was quiet; she realized she was holding her breath.
“I never saw him before,” Inez said. She waited another moment. “All I know is, he had a funny name. I never forgot it. He was the one that hit me, and just before he grabbed me, I heard Jake yelling: ‘Get her, Mister!’”
Vicky could hear the sound of her own breathing; it was like a bellows in the quiet house. “Do you remember what he looked like?” she managed. “Do you think you could still identify him?”
“I’ll never forget their faces,” Inez said. “I can close my eyes and see their faces.”
30
“I KNOW WHO the killer is!” Vicky shouted into the cell over the whir of the Jeep’s engine. She’d tapped in the telephone number, hurrying down the sidewalk, then opened the door and crawled inside, the phone ringing in her ear. “Get me Coughlin,” she’d told the high-pitched disembodied voice that had finally answered: “Fremont County Sheriff’s Office.” She’d turned on the ignition while she’d waited for the message to wind its way from the receptionist’s desk down the corridors to Coughlin’s office. Finally, the detective was on the line.
“Start over,” he said.
“His name is Lyle Bennet. He goes by the name of Mister.”
“We’re talking about Ruth Yellow Bull’s homicide?”
“And Liz Plenty Horses’s.” Vicky pressed herself against the seat and fought to keep her voice steady. My God, she and Adam had agreed to help the man. They were going to do everything they could to help him obtain his rights.
“Tell me what you’ve found.”
Vicky told him what Inez Horn had said: that Liz Plenty Horses and her baby had stayed at her house—an AIM safe house—in Denver for four days, that Jake Tallfeathers and Mister had broken into the house and forced Liz to accompany them, that she had never heard of Liz after that night, that she had raised Liz’s daughter, Luna. “He’s still on the reservation,” Vicky said. “He’s one of my clients, for godssake, and he wants to kill me. He killed Ruth, and he’ll kill anyone who can connect him to Liz Plenty Horses’s murder.”
“It’s a good lead, I give you that, and I’ll definitely investigate…”
“A lead? You have to pick Mister up right away before he kills anybody else. I have his address.” God, what was it? She fumbled in her bag, dragged out her Day-Timer and scrolled down to M. She had it then. Lyle Bennet/Mister, on Middle Fork Road. “He’s desperate. He might come after Inez and Luna.”
“Okay, take it easy.”
“Inez can identify him, Coughlin. She’s never forgotten what he looked like. She’ll testify that Mister and Jake Tallfeathers dragged Liz out of her house. They were the last ones to be seen with her.”
“It doesn’t prove they killed her.”
It came like a slap in the face. Vicky flinched at the truth of it. The heat of the sun bore through the windshield and burned into her forearm. They’d taken Liz from the house; yes, that was true. She could almost hear the rough, gravelly voice of Mister trying to explain his version of what had happened that night. They’d stopped for gas, and Liz said she had to use the john, and she never come back. That’s the truth, so help him God. He’d swear it was true. He was no murderer, why would he murder her? Just bringing her back…
Bringing her back. The idea stalled in her head like a roadblock Vicky couldn’t get past. Suppose it were true. Suppose Jake and Mister were the errand boys, dispatched to bring Liz Plenty Horses back to the reservation to answer for something she hadn’t done. Suppose someone else—a man intent on remaining in charge, a man who had eliminated anyone he thought was competition: Jimmie Iron in Washington, D.C., Daryl Redman in Ethete—had given the order to bring Liz Plenty Horses back to the reservation. Then he had killed her to keep her quiet.
She could see Inez Horn looking out the window, the sadness outlined in the hunch of her shoulders. More than thirty-five years, and Liz’s killer was still free. And now—where was the evidence that Jake Tallfeathers and Mister were the men who had beaten her and shot her to death? Where was the gun, the blood spatters in a truck that had been crunched into a scrap heap years ago, the bloody clothes and fingerprints and strands of hair, the DNA that might have been swabbed from under fingernails? There was nothing but a skeleton.
“He knows what happened to her,” Vicky said, and she knew that was true. Mister knew who had killed Liz Plenty Horses. “You have to pick him up.”
“We will, we will, Vicky. I want to talk to this Inez Horn.”
“Hold on.” Vicky checked the cell and gave him the number Luna had used this morning. Then she read off Luna’s address.
“I’ll see about sending a man…”
“There isn’t time,” Vicky said. “Pick him up now. Please,” she added, and realized that was ridiculous. He would handle matters his own w
ay. “Mister knows who the murderer is.” And here was a new thought. She blurted it out, “He could be in danger.”
This seemed to get his attention because the line went quiet for a long moment. “We’ll pick him up, talk to him,” he said. “Where are you now?”
She told him she was about to start for the reservation, and glanced at her watch. Two o’clock. She would have to retrieve her bag from Lucas’s house, leave a note on the table: Sorry, honey. Something came up. Had to return to the rez. We’ll have a long visit soon—I promise. I promise. So many broken promises. The house was near I-25 and she should be on the highway in thirty minutes. “I’ll be on the rez by nine thirty.”
“Look, Vicky. Until we find this guy and sort through things, maybe you shouldn’t go to your apartment.”
She told him she’d be at the mission.
HE THOUGHT HE’D heard a car pulling into the mission a moment ago, and Father John had pushed back from his desk in the study and gone to the window. The last of the daylight had begun to fade. Darkness was crawling over the grounds, wrapping around the yellowish light of the streetlamps. No sign of any vehicle outside. The old house creaked around him, settling into evening, and from overhead came the faint clicking noise of Father Ian’s laptop. Familiar sounds, and yet, he couldn’t shake the sense of something different, some disturbance.
He’d been expecting Vicky at any moment; she’d called around three. Just leaving Cheyenne, I-80 flinging itself ahead through the sagebrush and wild grasses and blown dirt in a great expanse of nothingness. They’d talked a good ten minutes, Vicky’s voice lost at times in the roar of semis barreling past her Jeep. Mister and Jake Tallfeathers had taken Liz from the safe house, she’d told him. They may have been involved in her death—the brutal beating, the gun fired into her skull. At the very least, Mister knew who the murderer was.
The Girl with Braided Hair (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 28
