Shoot the Dog

by Brad Smith

  From the art gallery they took the gravel road up into the hills to the site of the partially constructed golf course. Ronnie parked on a rise overlooking the eighteenth hole, where it ran down to the clubhouse.

  “You play?” he asked.

  “Mini golf once,” Kari said. “We were blasted, so I don’t remember much about it. You had to shoot the ball over little bridges and through windmills, shit like that.”

  “This will be a world-class course,” Ronnie told her. “It’s going to be a PGA Tour stop, which means the best golfers in the world will play here. It will be incredible.”

  Kari looked at the expanse before her, the dirt pushed into mounds, drainage pipes spread here and there, earthmovers climbing over the landscape like noisy beetles. She exhaled and turned to glance back toward the casino complex. It looked even bigger from that vantage point.

  “Like, what does this place make in a year?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Ronnie said. “Hundreds of millions. You know the Forbes list?”

  “Yeah. You’re on it?”

  “Not yet, but I will be.” Ronnie offered his palms forward and skyward, like a preacher giving a benediction. “When I came here, this place was a wasteland. Physically, spiritually. And look at it now.”

  “It doesn’t seem all that spiritual.”

  “Oh, but it is,” Ronnie said quickly. “It’s not something you can see. How could you? But a spiritual reawakening has occurred here. And I’m the one who brought it into being. But I’m not saying that to be boastful.”

  “It sounded a little boastful,” Kari said, laughing.

  Ronnie turned to look at her but it seemed she was just teasing him. So he laughed along with her, just a little, to show he was a sport. She indicated the gaping hole in the ground to the right of the clubhouse.

  “What’s that?”

  “The lake,” Ronnie said. “They’re installing a poly lining and a heater. The water will be crystal clear year-round. Incredible.”

  “I wouldn’t put it there,” Kari said, looking down at the site. “I’d put it over there, on the other side of that building. What is that building?”

  “The clubhouse.”

  “I’d put it on the other side.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. That way you could see the trees in the background. Maybe you could see them reflected in the water.”

  Ronnie considered the notion for a time before changing the subject. “I thought we’d have dinner in my suite,” he said. “Just the two of us. I have fresh lobster. Or buffalo steaks, if you wish. I know you’re not a vegetarian.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know everything about you.”

  “Hang on to your hat, but sometimes magazines lie,” she said.

  “So you are a vegetarian?”

  “No fucking way,” she said. “I have to have meat. I meant, just in general. Don’t believe everything you read.”

  Back at the hotel, Ronnie walked her to the elevator, then said he had to go back to work for an hour or so. He told her he’d see her at his suite around eight.

  “It will be fun,” he said.

  “Can’t wait,” she told him and stepped into the elevator.

  Ronnie watched her as the doors closed and then he went back outside and climbed into the cart and headed for the golf course. He hoped the foreman was still on the site. Ronnie needed to tell him to move the lake to the other side of the clubhouse.

  • • •

  “Fuck,” she said when she walked into the suite.

  “He’s in love with you,” Nicole said. She was lying on a white leather couch in the living room, a glass of Dom in her hand. She had changed into shorts and a wifebeater. The TV was on, some black-and-white film from Turner Classic Movies. Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Duh,” Nicole said. “Look at this fucking place. There’s like thirty pounds of prawns on ice in there. If that ain’t love, what is?”

  Kari kicked off her sandals and sprawled in a chair beside the couch. After a moment she reached for the champagne on the glass coffee table. It was nearly empty and she drank from the bottle, spilling a little down her chin. “I don’t want to fuck him,” she said, wiping her mouth with her hand.

  “Then don’t. Lincoln freed the slaves.”

  Kari had another drink, killing the bottle. “Why don’t you fuck him?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “Free champagne, bitch. Go get us another bottle.”

  Nicole got lazily to her feet and crossed to the stainless refrigerator in the open kitchen area across the room. “You want something to eat?” she asked.

  “Bring the prawns.”

  Kari peeled the red T-shirt off while she waited. She smelled the fabric and looked at the manufacturer’s tag before tossing it aside. Made in China, of course. So much for the Native way.

  “You’re right about one thing,” Nicole said, returning. “He doesn’t look like any Indian I’ve ever seen.” She set a plate of cold prawns on the table and poured Dom for them both. “He got you the gig, though, didn’t he?”

  Kari had a drink and made no reply. Instead she reached for a couple of the fat prawns. She ate one and washed it down with the champagne. “I can’t believe you came up here empty-handed. No X, no coke.”

  “I told you I couldn’t score any X,” Nicole said. “What about the big chief? There’s got to be drugs around here. Fucking place like this, oozing money, don’t tell me there’s no dealers around.”

  “I’m not asking him for X,” Kari said.

  “Why not? You’re already beholden to him.”

  “Beholden? Who says that?”

  Nicole gestured to the oak dining table across the room. “I was reading your script. Somebody in there was beholden to somebody else. Shit, you even read the fucking thing?”

  “Yeah, I read it,” Kari said. “I fast-forward the scenes I’m not in.” She had another drink and then got to her feet. “I’m going to have a bath. You can sit there sucking back free Dom and thinking of an excuse I can use not to have dinner with that fat fuck tonight.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “While you’re at it, you can think about why you came up here with no drugs. You do realize that you’re beholden to me.”

  “I didn’t say I had no drugs,” Nicole told her.

  Kari was in the doorway that led to the master bedroom. She stopped and looked back.

  “You little bitch,” she said. “What’d you bring me?”

  • • •

  After her fractious interview with Ronnie Red Hawk at the casino, Claire drove back to Kingston and spent an hour or so at her desk, making phone calls and returning e-mails. She called Virgil a couple of times and got no answer. She’d tried him the night before as well, with the same result. She didn’t leave a message because there was no way to do so. She’d threatened to buy him an answering machine, if in fact anybody still made such a thing, but she knew he would never use it anyway. Giving up, she went home, scrambled a couple of eggs for dinner, and slept in her own bed on Pearl Street for a change. The next morning she got up early and headed for Watertown.

  She took 87 to 90 and followed the thruway west to Route 12, heading north. It was oppressively hot, once again, but she drove with the windows down, the air-conditioning off. She sifted through her CDs and, passing the countryside, she listened, in succession, to Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams and Norah Jones. By the time she reached Watertown nearly four hours later, she had moved on to John Prine, whose stuff Virgil had introduced her to. As she pulled into the parking lot of the Watertown Police Department, Prine was singing about a great compromise. The song was ostensibly about a woman who’d spurned the singer, but Claire was convinced that it was about something bigger than that. She just hadn’t figured out what yet. She could ask Virgil, who undoubtedly had a theory about it, but she’d rather
solve it herself. And then tell him.

  The building was constructed of red cinder block, and it resembled a community college more than a cop shop. It was located in a leafy area in the southwest corner of the city, a considerable distance from the downtown core, where Claire always thought that a police station should be.

  Inside she was directed to the chief of the department, Bernice Heisman. She was tall and fit, maybe fifty-five or so, African American. She was dressed casually in khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt with the department’s logo on the pocket.

  “Heisman like the trophy?” Claire asked, shaking hands.

  “No relation,” the woman said.

  They sat down in a sun-filled office that looked west, toward the thruway. Chief Heisman had pictures of family on her desk, and another shot of herself dressed in an evening gown while attending some official function, it appeared.

  She opened the laptop on her desk. “I sent you an e-mail about an hour ago,” she told Claire, “in response to your query from yesterday.” She glanced over the computer at Claire. “I guess I could have waited for you to show up.”

  “I felt like a drive,” Claire said by way of explanation.

  “The impatience of youth.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Claire said. “The youth part anyway.”

  Heisman hit a couple more keys on the laptop. “What I sent was basically what you probably already have. Ronnie McDonald slash Levack was a pothead and petty thief who got nailed on a racketeering charge with the stolen car ring. He took the fall mainly because we didn’t get the big boss, some Algerian national who was running the thing out of Montreal. The Algerian never left Canada while the operation was ongoing, and then he skipped before the feds could extradite. But I’m sure you got all that information from the database.”

  “I did,” Claire said.

  “So you really were just out for a Sunday drive?” Heisman said. “I don’t think so. What are you looking for from us?”

  “I was hoping to talk to someone who had some face time with Ronnie,” Claire said. “The guy thinks he hung the moon, but he’s a bit of an enigma. Just the fact that he looks the way he does and calls himself a Native American is enough to make you want to scratch the surface a little.”

  Chief Heisman closed the laptop. “Bill Sully,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s who you need to talk to. He was on the city force here for thirty years. He retired a couple years ago but I know he arrested Ronnie multiple times. If anybody could tell you anything, it would be him.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  Heisman swiveled in her chair to look out the window. “Sun’s shining. He’ll be at the Watertown Golf and Country Club.” She glanced at her watch. “Probably finished eighteen. You hurry, you just might catch him having lunch in the clubhouse.”

  The golf course was on the south side of town, up a winding street that passed the city zoo. In spite of the day’s heat, there were a number of people out walking along the shoulder of the narrow road; they seemed to be of the opinion that the road was theirs and Claire was forced to slow down a couple of times to allow oncoming traffic to pass.

  The course was an older design, to Claire’s eyes, the fairways lined with ancient oaks and maples, the bunkers filled with white sand that glistened under the hot midday sun. The clubhouse was a modest frame building that might have been a private residence at one time. A number of people were eating lunch on an outside deck when she pulled into the parking lot. One of them was Bill Sully.

  He was tall and young-looking for a retiree, with thick dark hair trimmed short, military style. He was dressed in green shorts and a beige polo shirt with an Adams Golf logo on the pocket. He was nonplussed by Claire’s sudden appearance but then—after his lunch partners made a few cracks about Claire being his girlfriend, there to drag him off the links—he suggested they talk inside.

  It was cooler there in the air-conditioning and they took a booth at the back of the dining room. The interior was nearly empty; apparently the membership preferred the fresh air, in spite of the humidity. Sitting down across from her, Sully motioned with his forefinger to his left ear.

  “My hearing isn’t great,” he said. “Especially with my buddies yapping away. Collateral noise, you know.”

  A waitress approached and asked Claire if she would be eating. She realized she was hungry and ordered a grilled cheese and an iced tea. Sully asked for a light beer. After the waitress left, Claire told him why she was there and then waited as Sully thought for a while about what to say. He had a deliberate manner about him that was common to cops who’d spent a lot of time testifying under oath.

  “I knew him from about sixteen on,” he finally began, then corrected himself. “Actually, before that, because I was at his mother’s house on a few domestics, and I remember Ronnie being there then, always hiding in the corner. His mother lived off and on with this asshole Levack. He used to slap her around when he was drinking. He’d get drunk on her paycheck, then smack her when the money was gone.”

  “He didn’t work?”

  “He was a trucker, when someone would hire him. I think he was on the dole most of the time.”

  “McDonald was the mother’s maiden name?”

  “Yeah,” Sully said. “Sometimes Levack was there and sometimes he wasn’t. There were other boyfriends. That’s why nobody ever really knew for sure who Ronnie’s papa was. Got to be hard on a kid, not knowing that.”

  Claire’s iced tea arrived and she took a sip. It was extremely sweet, almost like syrup. “This Levack was Native?” she asked.

  “Good question. He claimed to be when it served him. Looking at him, it would be hard to say, but he could have had Native blood in him.” Sully laughed. “The real Indians around here never wanted to believe it, they didn’t want anything to do with him. The guy was a whiner, one of those types that figured the world was picking on him.”

  “He still around?”

  “No,” Sully said. “I don’t know what happened to him. He disappeared when he was out on his own recognizance on battery charges against Ronnie’s mother. He skipped and nobody saw him again. I’m sure there are still warrants out for him, from twenty years back.”

  “What about Ronnie’s mom?”

  “She died. Had to be, I don’t know, eight years ago, maybe ten. Before Ronnie hit the big time.”

  “Ronnie must have hated Levack, the way he treated her.”

  “It was a strange situation,” Sully said. “You would think that but then Levack would do stuff like take Ronnie fishing. I’d see them down by the rapids, like a real father and son. So I got no idea what Ronnie thought. No wonder he was screwed up, living in that house. I know Levack tried to make Ronnie into a tough guy but that wasn’t Ronnie. He never even played sports, that I remember. He was a sneaky little bastard, always up to something, at least before he went to jail.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “He changed inside,” Sully said. “Most guys don’t but Ronnie came out different. He quit acting like a punk and started acting like he was somebody. Like he was entitled. But too entitled, you know?”

  “This was when he decided he was Native?”

  “Yeah. And it made him strut.”

  Claire had another drink of the tea and then set it aside. She would ask for water when her sandwich arrived. “He get into trouble with you guys after he came out?”

  “Never. Matter of fact, he wasn’t around very long. I sort of remember him dressing like an Indian and acting the part, and then he was gone. It was a couple years later we heard about Running Dog. Even then, we were thinking—Ronnie? They must be talking about a different guy.”

  “Does he come back here?”

  “To town? No. But he bought a huge tract of land east of here a few years back, couple thousand acres of bush. I’ve heard he goes there, it’s like a retreat or something. I think he built a house there, or cabin or something.”<
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  “Was he violent at all?” Claire asked. “Did you ever know him to hurt anybody?”

  “Violent, no,” Sully said. His beer had been sitting on the table untouched. Now he took a drink and carefully wiped his mouth. “But I’ll tell you a story.”

  FIFTEEN

  Virgil stood in the entranceway to the barn and watched the scene across the yard. It was late Monday morning and the film crew was set up around the pile of firewood behind the log cabin. The actress Kari Karson, wearing a long cotton dress and buttoned-up boots, with a bonnet hanging off the back of her neck, was trying unsuccessfully to split a length of firewood from the pile.

  Virgil suspected that the woman had never held an ax before, unless it had been on the set of a slasher movie, and he also suspected that the wood she was trying to split was extremely hard, and green cut to boot. The director was taking none of this into consideration, if in fact he had any notion of it, which seemed pretty unlikely. Instead he’d been not-so-subtly ridiculing the actress for the past ten minutes, as if that might remedy the situation.

  The workhorses, Bob and Nelly, were grazing in the field beyond the action, where Tommy Alamosa had wanted them as backdrop to the shot. Now, as Virgil watched from the barn, Bob decided to wander over to get in on the action, social creature that he was. The director noticed.

  “Get that fucking horse out of here,” he barked. “Where’s the guy?”

  Virgil, being the guy, walked over.

  “We want the horse in the background, not sticking his head over the fence and ruining the shot,” the director said. “Did anybody explain that to you?”

  “They did,” Virgil said. “I don’t believe anybody explained it to Bob.”

  A couple of crew members got a kick out of that, and the director’s face reddened. “That’s funny,” he said. “I got a comedian for a wrangler and a fucking actress who can’t cut a piece of wood in half.”