Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  Except it didn’t feel clever and smart now. The pictures in her mind of papers and files strewn about the floor, cords yanked from computers and phones—the violence in the office—made the bread and water churn in her stomach until she thought she would be sick. She should take the flash drive to the office, leave it on the middle of her desk, and drive away. Across the border to the reservation where she belonged.

  She pulled out another slice of bread, hoping it would settle the bread she had already eaten. She could see more clearly now, as if she had been given a second sight. Across the border to what? There was nothing on the rez for her. Dad, whoever he was, gone before she was born. Mom and three—or was it four?—husbands. She had lost track in the midst of the boyfriends and stepdads wandering in and out and Mom being mostly drunk. Then Mom and the latest stepdad dead in a bar fight in South Dakota. She’d had grandparents once, and that had been a comfort, until, stooped and lined with disappointments and broken promises, they had faded away. One day, Grandpa didn’t get out of bed, and a few weeks later, Grandma stumbled on her way to the barn and never got up. And they were gone, and all she had of herself gone with them.

  There was her sister, Claire, no better than her mother, and that poor kid of hers that still had a few years before he would be old enough to escape. There had been only Colin to rely on, but Colin was stuck on the rez like a barbed wire fence. He would never leave.

  She fingered the cool, shiny flash drive, black metal with a red lightning streak down the side. Her ticket, like an airline ticket to a better place. When Skip came back, they would leave all this behind, just as he had promised. Angela, babe, you and me are going to Mexico, but first we’ll hit the road and take in the sights. San Francisco, New York, London, Paris. Where do you want to go? What suits your fancy?

  Skip always said weird things like “What suits your fancy?” He made her laugh and dream. He was her ticket out of here and so far away from the reservation the border would no longer loom like a giant snake, flicking its tongue, threatening to devour her.

  She had figured it out. Last night, tossing in bed, watching the starlight glow in the curtain, she had plotted out the scenario. When the man who took Skip called—he would call, she was certain—she would tell him how it had to go down. The meeting in a public place. People around, traffic driving by. An ordinary place, like Main Street. The thought of Main Street had stopped her for a moment. The Custer guy had been shot there in front of hundreds of people.

  Still, Main Street, first thing in the morning, with people going to work, bustling about, would be the meeting place. She would park at the curb and the man should park across the street. Skip had to be in the car. She had to see him, be certain he was alive. She would get out and stand on the curb to show good faith. Another term Skip liked to use. Show good faith, as if everything depended on the show. You didn’t actually have to have good faith, you just had to act as if you did.

  She would hold up the flash drive. As soon as Skip got out of the car, walked across the street, and got into the passenger seat of her car, she would set the flash drive on the curb, calmly walk around and slide in behind the wheel, and drive away. The man should wait until she had driven off. She would make that very explicit. If she showed good faith by standing on the curb, then he must show good faith by waiting in his car.

  Simple. How much she had learned from Skip. How much was in a smile, a handshake, a friendly, welcoming manner, as if you trusted the world and the world trusted you back. Good faith. It was like oil on the gears of an old truck.

  Angela spun the flash drive in a little circle. What was on her computer that the man wanted? Nothing but pages and pages of boring legal jargon with columns of numbers that she didn’t understand, and yet, somewhere in that jargon, there was something as big as Skip’s life, something she could use to ransom him. She went back into her bedroom, picked up the laptop Skip had given her, and carried it back to the counter. She flipped open the top. A couple of keystrokes and the screen bounced into life. She inserted the flash drive and tapped her nails against the edge of the counter until the icon of a disc came up. Then she opened it.

  She had never opened the flash drive. She’d had no intention of rereading the boring legal documents she spent her days with. The flash drive was her protection, that was all. A backup that could save her job if the computers crashed. She supposed she’d had some idea that if disaster struck and her computer went down, she would whip out the flash drive and prove to Skip how necessary she was, always looking ahead, paving a clear path for him.

  Well, disaster had struck, and now Skip was gone, along with his computer and backup as well as her computer. All that was left was the flash drive. Whatever was on the flash drive had also been on her computer. A duplicate, worth Skip’s life.

  She studied the list of files. Every day for the last six months, she had backed up the files. They had grown and spread like spilled paint. Letters, briefs, requests for court orders, documents she’d downloaded and filled in the blanks. All those reports with long columns of numbers. Routine and boring. A robot could have handled the documents.

  She searched for Deborah Boynton, and several letters came up. Thank-you letters for referrals. Angela scrolled quickly through them. Nothing to suggest that Skip and Boynton were anything but business friends. Lawyer and Realtor, referring clients to each other. She hadn’t wanted to know.

  Then, in one of the letters, she spotted the name Edward Garrett. Skip, thanking the Realtor for looking after his old army buddy Edward Garrett and helping him find suitable property. Could he take her to dinner sometime to show his appreciation?

  Angela swallowed back the taste of acid and bread in her throat. She hadn’t thought there was anything between Skip and Deborah Boynton. Skip took lots of people to dinner. His way of showing appreciation. He was known everywhere in Lander and Riverton and Jackson—the whole area—for treating people to breakfast, lunch, dinner, endless rounds of coffee. He practiced law in restaurants.

  She closed the letter file, then did another search for Edward Garrett. The letter she had just closed came up, along with two quarterly reports, pages filled with numbers. Once she had asked Skip to explain the numbers, eager to show her good faith, how she wanted to learn so she could be more help to him. He had waved off the question, told her it was complicated, not to worry about it. Fill in the boring columns with the numbers he forwarded to her.

  For a moment she thought she would start weeping, and she didn’t know how she would stop. She jammed her fists against her eyelids, willing the hard knots of moisture to dissolve. Pictures of the office flashed in her mind, so neat and tidy, a welcoming place where she had felt at home. Gone. Files, papers, trash thrown around the floor, blinds knocked sideways, spots of blood on the carpet and windowsill. The smashed bush below, the sense of irretrievable loss, and the vast emptiness that had opened around her.

  There were other files she forced herself to look through. Documents she had printed out and delivered to the courthouse herself, knowing they were due and Skip was out having coffee with somebody. Research documents Skip had asked her to pull off the internet. She had forwarded them to his computer. Records of incoming calls and appointments, although Skip never turned down anyone who appeared at his door without an appointment. The only thing she and Skip had disagreed about—because she had wanted to show him she was a good organizer—was how smoothly she could plan his days. He didn’t want his days to run smoothly.

  She closed the last documents. Routine, all of them. A record of spent days and weeks and months. She had been grateful for a way off the rez, grateful to be with Skip. The good humor man, she thought of him during the day. At night, sometimes he allowed her to see another side of him, and she was glad of that. She felt privileged that he had shown his anger and impatience, had flown off the handle once or twice and slapped her, but nothing serious. Just that other side of him that no
one else ever saw, which meant she knew him better than anyone. It had made her proud and confident.

  She was aware of a muffled ringing noise. How long had her mobile been ringing? She stumbled against the edge of the counter as she ran toward the sofa bed. Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up! She was shouting and laughing and crying at the same time. Today, Skip would be back. He would hold her again. They would be together.

  She dragged the mobile out of her bag. Shaking so hard she had to hold it in both hands, she clasped it to her ear. “Hello? Hello?” she was still shouting.

  “Angela Running Bear?”

  A faint familiarity to the voice that she dismissed. This had to be the call. Her heart was jumping in her chest. She felt cold and clammy, legs weak and wobbly. “Yes,” she managed. “This is Angela.”

  “Detective Madden.” The voice seemed to come from another time and place that had nothing to do with the present. She forced her legs to fold her onto the bed. She was shaking. Her mouth had gone dry as crust.

  “I want to interview you again. In my office, say, in an hour?”

  It took a moment for the words to arrange themselves into some kind of sense. “Interview?” she said. “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

  “I have a few more questions.”

  Angela had the feeling she was floating overhead, looking down on the girl with mussed, black hair and puffy eyes, the short nightgown, faded yellow, with the little rip in the side seam that exposed the top of her thigh. “I can’t,” she said, and the sound of her own voice brought her back to herself.

  “This isn’t a request. I can send a car . . .”

  “No.” The image of the landlady’s face pressed against the window, eyes as big as a horse’s, watching a police car driving her down the driveway rose like a billboard over the road. “I’ll be there.”

  17

  “ANGELA’S ON THE line.” Annie held up the phone and shook her head as if she had delivered bad news.

  Vicky shut the front door behind her. “Ask her to wait a moment,” she said, hurrying across the office and past the beveled doors to her private office. She had been expecting the call.

  She slid onto her chair, dropped her bag at her feet, and picked up the phone. “Angela? What’s going on?” Vicky could hear the tenseness in her own voice. She couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow Garrett’s murder and Skip’s abduction were connected. Look for the truth running through the coincidences, Grandmother had said. But she had no proof. She pulled a notepad out of the desk drawer. The breeze blowing though the opened window ruffled the top page. The office was warm, but she preferred the warm summer air and the breeze to the cold blast of air-conditioning.

  A gulping sob burst down the line, followed by a garble of words and shouts.

  “Try to calm down.” Vicky pressed the phone against her ear. “Take a deep breath and tell me what happened.”

  Another stifled noise. The pain in the girl’s voice was so intense that Vicky closed her eyes a moment. “I want to help you,” she said.

  The silence went on until Vicky thought they had been disconnected. Finally the words came, shaking and blurred: “They’re going to arrest me for what happened to Skip.”

  “What makes you believe that?”

  “Detective Madden . . .” Another sob cut through the words. “He wants me to come to the police station. If I don’t come, he’ll send a police officer to pick me up.”

  She was weeping hard, and Vicky raised her own voice against the sounds. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s the way investigations go. I want you to calm down and get yourself together. I’ll pick you up and go with you.”

  The quiet on the line was almost as ominous as the crying. “Twenty minutes.” Vicky waited until the girl had gulped an okay before she said, “Remember, Angela. You don’t have to answer his questions or say anything.”

  “Why do I have to go?”

  She stopped herself from saying, Madden might come up with a reason to arrest you. “Look, there may be something you don’t realize you know that could help him find Skip.”

  * * *

  THE GIRL SAT slumped in the passenger seat, a black veil of hair falling down the side of her face. She had been outside on the stoop of the little house behind the white, paint-peeled Victorian when Vicky drove up, and she had sauntered over like a balky pony being led out of the barn. “You’ll be fine,” Vicky had said when the girl crawled into the Ford. She hoped that was true.

  On the drive to pick up Angela, Vicky had gone over what the girl had told her. How she had found the office on Monday morning, trashed, blood spots on the carpet, Skip Burrows missing. How she had seen the light in the window that evening and had gone inside, thinking it was Skip. How someone in a black ski mask had attacked her. Someone looking for something. And that, Vicky realized, was what Madden wanted from the girl. What had the intruder been looking for?

  “Have you told me everything?” Vicky said, turning into the asphalt parking lot. The redbrick police building looked solid and substantial, an air of white authority and power in the way it claimed its space, the kind of authority that could crush a young Arapaho girl. It struck Vicky that this was why she had become a lawyer. In the Old Time, her people had had no protection from white people in substantial buildings.

  She pulled into a vacant spot. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the girl giving a slow, methodical nod, as if it were obvious she had told everything. The forced, deliberate motion gave Vicky an uncomfortable feeling.

  Inside the narrow lobby was a stretch of vinyl flooring with plastic chairs along one wall. Vicky leaned close to the communicator in the window at the far end and gave her name to the thin-haired, blond officer. He looked familiar, in his twenties, smudges of sunburn on his nose and cheeks. He had probably been at the desk on other occasions when she had come in with a client, although he gave her a blank look. All Indians look alike. The old phrase popped into her head and made her want to smile at the idea that she and the young woman beside her resembled each other. There were times when she thought white people looked alike.

  She said she was here with her client Angela Running Bear to see Detective Madden. The officer pushed a button on what looked like a radio. “Running Bear here,” he said, the words muffled by the thick glass. “With her lawyer.”

  They waited a good ten minutes, Angela circling about, head down, letting out little intermittent sobs, squeezing a wadded tissue against her eyes. At one point she stopped and stared wide-eyed at Vicky. “Why aren’t they looking for Skip? Why are they doing this to me?”

  “Maybe Madden thinks you can help him find Skip.” Vicky hoped that was what the interview would be about. She had started to remind the girl that she would stop any line of inappropriate questioning when the inner door swung open. Standing before them was the bulky figure and pockmarked face of Detective Madden.

  “This way.” He nodded them through the doorway and down a corridor flanked by closed doors with bubble-glass windows. A ringing phone cut through the buzz of muffled voices. Stale odors of coffee and closed-in spaces permeated the air. Vicky was aware of the heavy thud of Madden’s footsteps behind them.

  “Next door on the right,” he said.

  Vicky took hold of Angela’s elbow and steadied her while Madden brushed past, pushed open the door, and stepped inside. The room was the size of a closet. Table in the center, empty except for a notepad, chairs on either side, and a large one-way glass taking up almost half of a wall. On the other side, Vicky knew, would be invisible detectives watching and listening. She guided Angela to a chair and sat down beside her. Madden settled himself across from them. He pulled the notepad toward him and, clicking a ballpoint pen he had extracted from his shirt pocket, looked into space. As if he were talking to himself, and not a microphone embedded somewhere, he said, “June twelfth, 3:53 p.m. Angela Running Bear and
attorney Vicky Holden. Detective Madden conducting interview.”

  He looked at Angela. “You understand this interview will be videotaped.” He nodded toward the small camera next to the ceiling.

  “Videotaped?” A note of panic ran through the question. Angela shifted toward Vicky. “You didn’t say anything about being videotaped.”

  “Standard procedure,” Madden said. “Shall we get started?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “It’s okay.” Vicky patted the girl’s hand. It felt cold and clammy, and Vicky could feel the tremor beneath the skin.

  Angela pulled her hand away and rounded on the detective. “What are you doing? Why haven’t you found Skip? Somebody took him, and all you want to do is ask me stuff I’ve already told you.”

  The detective took a moment, smoothing out the top page in the notepad, then locked eyes with Vicky. “We have a witness who will swear she saw Skip Burrows arrive at your client’s house on numerous evenings and not emerge until the next morning. She says Burrows left earlier than usual Sunday evening. She identified Burrows’s photo.” He shifted his gaze to Angela. “Why was that? Did you have an argument? Did he break up with you?”

  “Stupid landlady. What right does she have?” Angela threw a sideways glance at Vicky. “Poking her nose into other people’s business.”

  “As you can see, Counselor,” Madden said, “the relationship between your client and the missing man certainly bears upon this investigation.”

  “Let me remind you,” Vicky said, “my client went to the office as usual Monday morning to find Skip Burrows missing and the office ransacked. Whatever their relationship may have been has nothing to do with what happened that morning.”

  Madden turned his massive head toward Angela. “Burrows and Edward Garrett argued last week. What about?”