Bad News

by Donald E. Westlake

And also for the time, since they’d taken her watch. So now and then, when the spirit moved her, she could go over to the window to see how much the shadows had lengthened out there, if she wanted to confirm that a whole lot of dead time was passing by.

  When the nasty buzzer sounded at the door again, she happened to be over by the window, shoulder leaning on a bar as she looked out at the world, where now the shadows were so very long, they’d definitely combined into nighttime; she’d been in here for hours. At that sound, she moved away toward the center of the room and stood by the table as the door opened and a different deputy stood there, saying, “Visitor.”

  Visitor? For one fleeting instant, she thought the visitor was Fitzroy, come to say forget it, let’s call the whole thing off, let’s just go home, we were nuts to think we could try this stunt. But no. A) Fitzroy wouldn’t do that. B) Fitzroy wouldn’t show his face anywhere near Little Feather. C) They weren’t nuts to try this stunt, they were going to go ahead with this stunt and it was going to work, and she would have the biggest, whitest, grandest, softest, cushiest house on the reservation, and screw everybody.

  So she said, “What visitor?”

  “Your lawyer, ma’am.”

  Oh, Marjorie Dawson. About time. Little Feather didn’t want to have to spend another second in this damn place. “Then let’s go,” she said, and they went.

  Walking past the men’s cell compound, she just caught a glimpse of herself, doing the perp walk on TV. Goddamn! After six o’clock, then—the local news.

  Down another corridor, and the deputy opened a door and said, “In here, ma’am.”

  She stepped inside, and he shut the door behind her, and she looked around. This was a women’s cell again, without the bars and the bunk beds, but with the square wooden table and the two wooden chairs, on one of which sat Marjorie Dawson, facing Little Feather but studying papers spread on the table in front of her. Looking over her reading glasses, she said, “Come in, Shirley Ann.”

  Little Feather stepped forward, rested a hand on the back of the empty chair, and said, “My name is Little Feather.”

  “Sit down, Shirley Ann,” Marjorie Dawson said as though Little Feather hadn’t spoken at all.

  “My name is Little Feather,” Little Feather insisted.

  Marjorie Dawson gave her a flat look, as though she were a file put away in the wrong place. “We’ll discuss that, if you wish,” she said. “In the meantime, please sit down.”

  Little Feather sat, placed her folded hands on the table in front of her, and waited. She was not, she sensed, going to warm to Marjorie Dawson.

  Looking down at the papers on the table, Dawson said, “You’re a very foolish young woman, Shirley Ann, but you’re also a very lucky one.”

  Little Feather waited.

  Dawson looked up at her. “Don’t you want to know how you’re lucky?”

  “I already know I’m lucky,” Little Feather said. “I want to know how I’m foolish.”

  Dawson gestured at the top document in the folder, and Little Feather saw it was a copy of her letter. “This isn’t even a good attempt at extortion,” she said. “If you escape jail time—”

  “It isn’t an attempt at extortion at all,” Little Feather said.

  Dawson shook her head and her finger at Little Feather. “I’m afraid you don’t realize the seriousness of the situation.”

  Little Feather frowned at her. “Whose lawyer are you supposed to be?”

  “I’m your lawyer, as you well know, and I have spoken with Judge Higbee, and—Don’t interrupt me!”

  Little Feather folded her arms, like Geronimo. “You talk,” she said, like Geronimo, “and then I’ll talk.”

  “Very well.” Dawson seemed a bit ruffled. She patted her hair, none of which was out of place, and looked down at Little Feather’s letter, as though to gain strength from it. “You have attempted here,” she said, “to obtain money through false pretenses. Let me finish! I’ve spoken with Judge Higbee, and I’ve pled your case, and—Let me finish! And I’ve pointed out to Judge Higbee that you have no prior police record of any kind, that this is your first offense, and that I very strongly suspect others put you up to it. The judge has agreed to let you go with only a warning, if.”

  Again she glowered over her glasses at Little Feather, who this time didn’t try to say anything at all, but merely watched, and waited her turn.

  “If,” Dawson finally went on, “you will sign a statement renouncing the claims in this fraudulent letter, and if you will depart Clinton County at once, never to return, the judge is prepared to release you. I have done the statement,” she finished, and then found another document in the folder and pushed it across the table toward Little Feather, who didn’t bother to look at it.

  Reaching down to her briefcase again, Dawson came up with a fat black pen with a screw top. She unscrewed the top, extended the pen toward Little Feather, and, when Little Feather didn’t take it, Dawson at last looked up and met her eye.

  Little Feather said, “You done?”

  “You really must sign this,” Dawson said.

  Little Feather said, “You done? You took your turn, and if you’re done, it’s my turn.”

  Dawson did an elaborate sigh, put the pen on the table, and leaned back. “I don’t know,” she said, “what you could possibly have to say.”

  “And if you don’t shut up,” Little Feather told her, “you never will.”

  That did it. Dawson gave her a look of stony disbelief and crossed her own arms like Geronimo.

  Little Feather uncrossed her arms and said, “You don’t act like you’re my lawyer, you act like you’re the other guy’s lawyer.” She pointed to the letter she’d sent. “I am Little Feather Redcorn,” she said. “My mother was Doeface Redcorn, my grandmother was Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, my grandfather was Bearpaw Redcorn, who was lost at sea in the United States Navy in World War Two, and they were all Pottaknobbee, and I’m Pottaknobbee. I’m Pottaknobbee all the way back to my great-grandfather Joseph Redcorn, who fell off the Empire State Building.”

  At that, Dawson blinked and said, “Are you trying to make fun—”

  “He was working on it, when they were building it, he was up on top with a bunch of Mohawks. My mama told me the family always believed the Mohawks pushed him, so I believe it, too.”

  Dawson stared hard at her, thinking. “You believe the claims in this letter.”

  “They aren’t claims, they’re facts,” Little Feather told her. She felt indignant at the way these clowns were treating her, not even giving her a civil conversation, and indignation gave her as much self-assurance as innocence would have done. She said, “I never extorted anybody. I never demanded anything. I just said I want to be back with my own people, and since I don’t know any other Pottaknobbees, I wanted to get back with the Kiota and the Oshkawa. And this is the way they treat me, their long-lost cousin. Like I was an Iroquois!”

  Dawson looked less and less sure of herself. She said, “The tribes are certain there are no more Pottaknobbees.”

  “The tribes are wrong.”

  “Well . . .” Dawson was floundering now, looking at her documents for help, finding no help there.

  “If you’re my lawyer,” Little Feather said, “you’ll get me out of here.”

  “Well . . . tomorrow . . .”

  “Tomorrow!”

  “There’s nothing further can be done tonight,” Dawson said. “You can’t post bail—”

  “I thought about that,” Little Feather said, “and I can put up property. I can put up my motor home, I’ve got the title to it. That’s worth more than five thousand dollars.”

  “But that would also have to be tomorrow,” Dawson said. She looked and sounded worried, as she should. “Shirley Ann, if you—”

  Little Feather pointed a very stern finger at her. “My name,” she said slowly and distinctly, “is Little Feather, but I think you should call me Ms. Redcorn.”

  “Whoever you are,” D
awson said, trying to rally, “of course if you were willing to sign the statement, you could leave immediately—”

  “And forever.”

  “Well, yes. But, as things stand, and I can see you are adamant about this, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done now until tomorrow.”

  “And what are you going to do tomorrow?”

  “Speak with Judge Higbee, ask the judge to speak with you in chambers, see what’s best to be done.”

  “But I spend tonight in here.”

  “Well, it’s not possible to—”

  “Not charged with anything, didn’t do anything, but I spend the night in here.”

  “Tomorrow—”

  Little Feather rose. She felt very angry, and didn’t see any reason to hide it. “I’ve been in here for hours,” she said. “My real lawyer would have spent that time getting me out of here and not trying to get me to confess to things I didn’t do.”

  “Tomorrow, we’ll—”

  “There’s still one thing you can do for me tonight,” Little Feather told her.

  Dawson looked ready, even eager. “Yes? If I can.”

  “Call the deputy to take me back to my cell,” Little Feather said. “I have to make up my bunk.”

  16

  * * *

  Judge T. Wallace Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in this life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity.

  Joe Doakes steals a car, drives it to his girlfriend’s house, leaves the engine running while he goes inside to have a loud argument with his girlfriend, causing a neighbor to call the police, who arrive to quiet a domestic dispute but then leave with a car thief, who eventually appears before Judge T. Wallace Higbee, who gives him two to five in Dannemora. For what? Car theft? No; stupidity.

  Bobby Doakes, high on various illegal substances, decides he’s thirsty and needs a beer, but it’s four in the morning and the convenience store is closed, so he breaks in the back door, drinks several beers, falls asleep in the storeroom, is found there in the morning, and Judge Higbee gives him four to eight for stupidity.

  Jane Doakes steals a neighbor’s checkbook, kites checks at a supermarket and a drugstore, doesn’t think about putting the checkbook back until two days later, by which time the neighbor has discovered the theft and reported it and is on watch, and catches Jane in the act. Two to five for stupidity.

  Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake their heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only true crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.

  Which made the people like Marjorie Dawson so useful. Not the brightest bulb on the legal marquee, she was nevertheless marginally smarter than the clients she accompanied into Judge Higbee’s court. She knew the proceedings, she knew the drill, she knew how to move the defendants through the routine without letting them make excess trouble through even greater displays of stupidity, and she did it all without complaint and with the acceptance of the rather miserable stipend offered court-appointed attorneys by the state. She did not make trouble. She did not herself perform overt acts of stupidity.

  So why was she in Judge Higbee’s chambers this morning, saying this Farraff woman required a hearing? Required? A hearing? Shirley Ann Farraff, an over-the-hill showgirl from Las Vegas, tries an old scam on the proprietors of the Silver Chasm Casino, presenting herself as a nuisance to be bought off, and instead is turned in. It being a first offense, and the proprietors of the casino not wishing to be unduly harsh—nor to receive undue publicity—Judge Higbee acknowledges this particular stupidity with a pass, so long as the defendant agrees to perform all her future acts of stupidity in some other jurisdiction.

  So what’s the problem? “Tell me, Marjorie,” the judge said, lowering his several pounds of white eyebrows in Marjorie’s direction, where she sat on the opposite side of the crowded desk, “tell me, what’s the problem?”

  “She insists,” Marjorie said, “that what she said in the letter is true.”

  “Marjorie, Marjorie,” the judge said, “they all insist their fantasies are true. After a while, they come to believe they actually were afraid they were coming down with appendicitis and needed desperately to get to the hospital, and that’s why they were driving at one hundred miles an hour in an uninsured vehicle with an expired driver’s license at two in the morning.”

  Marjorie nodded. “Yes, I remember that one,” she said. “But Your Honor, this one’s different. I’m afraid she really is.”

  “Do you believe her story, Marjorie?”

  “I don’t believe anybody’s story, Judge,” Marjorie told him, “that’s not my job. My job is to get them the best deal I can and make them understand it really is the best deal they can get and make them agree to it.”

  “And?”

  “This one won’t agree to it.”

  “You mean she won’t sign the quitclaim,” the judge said.

  “That’s right, Your Honor.”

  Judge Higbee was a large man, large all over, getting a little larger every decade. When he frowned, as now, whole great reaches of him bunched and puckered, and his eyes became twin blue sunrises over a mountain range in winter. “I don’t like this, Marjorie,” he said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t, Your Honor,” she told him.

  “Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda have filed a complaint,” the judge pointed out, “and they want the problem dealt with. If this damn young woman signs the quitclaim, I can dispose of the matter this morning and have her on the road before lunch, saving the taxpayers close to two dollars. If she refuses to sign, I’ll have to hold her over for trial.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I don’t believe Roger and Frank would be happy to have to come to town to testify against this young woman,” the judge said, “but I don’t see what else could be done, once the complaint has been filed. They’re not going to pay her off, you know.”

  “I don’t think she wants to be bought off,” Marjorie said. “Not like that at least. She doesn’t want to just take some money and disappear. She wants to be here.”

  “Marjorie,” the judge told her, “I truly don’t want her here.”

  “I know that, Your Honor. But she won’t listen to me. She might listen to you.”

  “You want me to see her.”

  “One way or another, Your Honor, you’re going to have to see her, either here in your chambers or out there in session. I told her yesterday that I would try to arrange an appointment with you this morning in chambers.”

  Judge Higbee brooded. In the long march of stupidity that rolled past his eyes day by day, there was rarely anything that required him actually to stop and think, and he didn’t like the experience. He found it discomfiting.

  Marjorie said, “Your Honor, if we go before Your Honor in court, she’ll have to be formally charged, I’ll have to apply for a bail hearing, and we’ll have to begin a very long process that does not end. As you know, Your Honor.”

  The judge looked at the calendar of the day’s events, placed on the desk close to his right hand. “In an hour,” he said. “Ten-thirty.”

  She did not impress. At first glance, anyway, she did not impress, but then she did impress, but not in the right way. She was a very good-looking woman, Judge Higbee supposed, with strong Indian cheekbones and thick black Indian hair, but also with the kind of brassy, aggressive style the judge associated with the phrase “Las Vegas showgirl.” There was a hardness about her he found unappe
aling, not only in the toughness of her look but in the very way she walked, sat, turned her head. The judge judged her to be trouble.

  He hadn’t spoken when she first walked in, accompanied by Marjorie, because he wanted to observe her before making up his mind. No shrinking violet, that was clear; neither the office nor he himself intimidated her. And her night in detention didn’t seem to have had much effect on her.

  Marjorie murmured to the young woman, showing her where to sit—in the chair across the desk from the judge. Marjorie herself moved to the second chair, off to the young woman’s right.

  Judge Higbee let the silence extend a few more seconds. The young woman met his probing eyes without a flinch, gaze for gaze. He suspected she was very angry about something, but holding it in. She did not have the skulking posture that the stupid always present, betraying their guilt while they declare their innocence. She did not blurt into speech, but waited for him.

  What, he wondered, without joy, do we have here?

  Very well. He began: “Ms. Farraff, Ms. Dawson tells me—”

  “My name,” she said, quiet but forceful, “is Little Feather Redcorn. That’s the name I was born with. Later, when my mama left the reservation and moved in with Frank Farraff, she said I had to have a name like the other people around there or I’d be laughed at, so she changed my name, and that’s the name I’ve lived with ever since. But now I’m going back to my first name.”

  Quite a statement. She’d probably been rehearsing that for hours, in the detention cell. Well, he had given her time to get it all out, so now was the time to close down this little drama. Almost gently, he said, “And do you have your birth certificate with you, with that name?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t have any birth certificate, and I don’t know how to get one, because I don’t know exactly where I was born.”

  “There wouldn’t be a birth certificate somewhere, would there, that says your father was Frank Farraff?”

  “My mama didn’t meet Frank Faraff until I was three or four years old,” she said, “when we moved off the reservation and into town, because there wasn’t any work on the reservation.”