Lizardskin

by Carsten Stroud

  “These evasions, as you call them, are all perfectly legal. They are the law. Everyone has the right to use them.”

  “And in return, society promises to give us justice?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And we’ve agreed that this justice is particularly important when we are dealing with guilty people?”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “The very same people who refuse to live by this social contract?”

  “Perhaps. But that’s the—”

  “So to sum it up, the rest of us have to put up with all this bullshit in the justice system for the benefit, in practical terms, of the very people who are making our lives so miserable. Is that a fair way to put it?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The point is, people hate lawyers because we are the professional liars of modern life. We strangle truth for bucks! The last thing in the world we want is a court system where simple logic rules the day.”

  “What do you respect, Vanessa?”

  “I respect personal integrity and the sanctity of innocence. I intend to protect the second by using the first, and I intend to speak the simple truth as often as I can. I believe that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent and punish—punish, mind you, not rehabilitate—to punish the guilty, and not the other way around.”

  “That’s vengeance, Vanessa.”

  “Vengeance is an underrated concept.”

  Dwight rubbed his nose absently, then winced. “Do I have the right to vengeance, then? For the pounding I took?”

  “It’s questions like that that started the law in the first place. And in answer to your question, no, you don’t.”

  “Am I going to be told what’s going on around here?”

  “When I know, you’ll know.”

  19

  1430 Hours–June 18–Los Angeles, California

  Sometimes integrity is as simple as mowing the lawn. Sometimes strength is shown in the grace notes. Beau could see it as he drove up to the little wood-frame bungalow. Whoever lived at 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive showed that kind of integrity and that kind of strength.

  The house was painted a creamy white, and the fence around it was so new, the wood hadn’t been painted yet. Inside the fence, the yard was a careful arrangement of rocks and desert plants. No attempt had been made to grow an English lawn in the desert climate of Southern California. There are only two things that are naturally green in Los Angeles, money and envy. The people who lived at 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive had tried very hard to keep things simple and honest.

  The house itself was a low wood structure with a big front porch, sheltered by an overhanging roof. Up on the veranda, a swing chair, freshly painted but old-looking, sat in an arrangement of potted cacti and desert roses. The screen door was closed. The draperies were drawn. There was no car in front.

  Vallejo Canyon Drive was a narrow rising lane that led into a low chain of hilly territory, a kind of barrow set in the middle of the tortilla flats of East L.A. By local standards, it was a decent part of town, although the signs of poverty were everywhere, the old cars and the aimless teenage boys on the front steps, the disrepair of the pavement and the walkways, and the general atmosphere of fatigue and crushing boredom.

  Beau parked the Lincoln on the street in front of number 1623 and got out, reeling a little from the hot air and the brutal sunlight after the air-conditioned ease of the Town Car. He had brought a hat along, his best black Stetson, and he was wearing his only lightweight gray suit and his black cowboy boots. He needed the suit jacket to hide the big Smith in his shoulder holster. He put the Stetson on and looked at himself in the Lincoln’s tinted-glass window.

  Christ, what a battered mug. Ugly as Texas roadkill. Shoulda trimmed the moustache. Shoulda lost some weight. Woulda lost some weight if I’d trimmed that moustache.

  He finished off the look with his state trooper sunglasses. Never hurts to look hard in a hard town. And from the stares he was getting around the block, from the old folks on the porches, and from the five Chicano hardcases fixing that diamond-blue Eldorado over there, this looked like a very hard block.

  He walked in through the carefully tended fence and up the wooden steps. The screen door was locked. The inside door was glass and wood-framing, held with a Yale lock. The interior of the house was dark. He could see some furniture and, on the far side of the room, another door leading into a bedroom. Through the front door he could see a small brass-railed bed, and beyond that another door leading through to the backyard. A table and four chairs stood in the backyard, with a vase of dead flowers on it.

  Beau recognized the style of the house. Down in Tularosa they’d called these railway-car houses shotgun shacks. The idea was, a husband who came home and found his wife in bed with another guy, he could just pull down the shotgun off the wall, stand in the front door, and get a clear shot right through the house at the guy going out the back door. And not hit the walls or the windows.

  It looked and felt empty, but he knocked on the frame anyway.

  The sound boomed in the leaden silence of the afternoon.

  Nothing.

  He could have popped the inside door with little effort, but he decided not to. Maybe he could get something from the neighbors. It was a good move, as it happened, because when he turned around, he saw most of the neighbors standing on the sidewalk, blocking his path. Five young men from across the street had stopped work on the Eldorado. They were lined up in the pathway, wearing head scarves and—God help us—hair nets. They had their arms folded across their bare chests, and their meanest faces on, drooping mustachios and bad skin.

  And hair nets.

  Beau sighed and walked back down the stairs. He decided not to open up the conversation by asking them where their husbands were and how come Chicanas grew such nice moustaches.

  “Buenas tardes, hombres. Soy polica. Hablan ustedes Ingles?”

  “Choo gotta batch?”

  He dragged out his state trooper ID and flashed it around. Somehow, it didn’t open up the gates of heaven for him. A slope-shouldered guy with a railroad scar that tore across his upper lip and right cheek, one of the guys with his long black hair in a net, sneered. It didn’t help his looks at all.

  “Don mean a focking thing aroun here, pendejo. Wha’choo wan with this place?”

  Beau, who knew damned well what pendejo meant, gave himself some air and tried again. “I’m looking for the owners of this house here.”

  “Hey, choo go ass the Firs California Stay Bank. Dey own everything aroun here.”

  “You know if the people are home?”

  “No, cowboy. They gone.”

  Beau reached into his side pocket. Everybody jumped a bit. Beau pulled out the picture of the young Indian girl, thinking maybe she wasn’t Indian after all. Hair Net leaned over to look at it, his ruined face twisted in concentration. He smelled of garlic and sweat. He was a little terrier of a guy, no more than five five, but thick as Texas beef. He looked up at Beau, frowning.

  “Si. We know her. Why you wan her? She’s a nice lady. She don do nobody no harm.”

  Beau didn’t feel that now was a good time to mention that he’d cracked her skull with a gun butt last Friday night.

  “She was hurt in Montana last week. We’re trying to find out who she is. She didn’t carry any ID.”

  “Who hurt her?”

  “We’re working on that now. You can help me. If you know who she is, that’d be a start.”

  “Wha’choo gon do with this guy, choo catch him?”

  “Break his arms. For a start.” Never hurt to give them a little street theater. Although the truth may set you free, sometimes it gets you killed first.

  Hair Net and the gang held a brief conference in blindingly quick Spanish. Beau looked around at the houses and tried to imagine living so close to other people. It would take a lot of personal grace. Hair Net tapped the picture again.

  “Her name was Donna.�
� He turned to one of his friends. They had another short staccato conference in high-speed Spanish.

  “Donna Bent, that’s her name. She lives with this kid, another Indian. His name is Edward Gall.”

  Beau noticed the man’s accent was fading along with the threatening posture. “You know them at all?” he asked.

  “Hey, you know. Jus to see aroun. Nice kids. They kep the place good. Took pride in themselves. Help out with all the kids aroun. You need a loan, or some help with the groceries, Eddie was good for it. We a tight crowd aroun here. Eddie, he’s a chief back in Colorado or someplace. See how nice they kep the house. Thas a hard thin to do, you got no money. Eddie has a job up in Hollywood. Works for this big film company. Was gonna do a film ‘bout us, too!”

  Beau’s face must have shown his doubt. Hair Net bristled like an electrocuted rooster.

  “Hey, no shit, man! We the Falcons! You heard of us?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Hey, you watch. Hombres, vengamos!”

  And right there on the sidewalk, under the brutal sun, they sang, five voices beautifully blended. Beau knew the song. It was “Rogaciado,” a traditional Mexican song. Beau had grown up with songs like that in the scented Mexican nights. It brought back wood smoke and fajitas hissing and crackling on hot iron, and yellow lights in the cantina window, and the river running under starlight. The Falcons sang “Rogaciado” well enough to bring his heart up in his chest. He listened in solemn silence.

  Hair Net finished with a little bow and waited for Beau’s reaction. Beau clapped and grinned at them.

  “Jesus. Magnfico! I know that song. That was beautiful.”

  Hair Net seemed to rise up and float a little off the ground. “Yeah. We the Falcons. Choo remember that name!”

  Beau said he would.

  “Maybe you li’ a beer?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  Hair Net turned to one of his friends. “Cervesas! Y mas fria, por todos. Por favor.”

  Beau smiled and bowed a little bow. “Gracias. Es muy caliente!”

  The beers came on the run. They cracked a few, and Beau raised his can in a toast. “Los Falcones!”

  “Los Falcones!”

  They drank to that in silence. Hair Net wiped his moustache.

  “So wha you gonna do now?”

  “I guess I’ll go find his film company.”

  Hair Net looked around at his companions. “You a cop, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So choo make us deputies.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. An we deputies, we let you in the house.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Sure.” He reached into his pocket and tugged out a chain full of keys. He flipped through them until he found a large brass one. He held it up for Beau to see.

  “I got keys for all aroun here. We the Falcons, man. This is our turf. Donna give us the keys, ask us to water the plants and stuff. Come on, we look aroun.”

  Beau thought it over. “Okay. Thank you.”

  Hair Net held up his hand. “Firs choo gotta make us deputies.”

  Beau smiled. “Okay. Repeat after me.”

  They formed up and stiffened, chins in and chests out.

  “We the Falcons …”

  “We the Falcons—”

  “Being of sound mind …”

  “Been of soun mine—”

  He took them through it, grinning. They grinned back, and when he was finished, he pronounced them duly sworn in as a posse.

  “Now,” said Hair Net, showing a set of brilliant teeth and two solid-gold canines. “How much this posse job payin?”

  A hundred bucks lighter, Beau stepped into the cool dark of the little bungalow. Hair Net and the Falcons stayed outside, slapping each other on the backs and flashing their bills.

  Beau figured it was a fair trade. They had some fun with him, and he was in the house.

  Now that he was in it, he smelled death in it.

  Not a body or anything mortal here. But it smelled the way places smelled when the lives that had been lived there were over forever. It lay like dust on the threadbare furniture and the old army cot in the corner of the living room, where a wool blanket hanging from a pole must have provided the old man, Jubal, with what little privacy there was to have in the house. It hung in the air and moved like dust motes in the dim shaft of street light that transected the room.

  Beau felt a sudden heat in his throat, and his heart began to pound. It took him a moment to realize what he was feeling.

  It was anger.

  Joe Bell had broken this peaceful place, this small island of good lives in a wasteland of greed and stupidity. Beau couldn’t prove it, but he knew it the way he knew his own life and the little victories he had won and the great losses he had survived. Standing there in the center of this small house, seeing the care that had been taken in the furniture, the way it had been scrubbed and painted and scraped and polished, Beau felt the sudden leaden weight of all his years and everything he had seen.

  Up until then, this had been, for Beau, a hybrid case, partly constructed of self-interest, to show that Joe Bell had fired without cause and that his lawsuit was malicious, and partly simple curiosity, the cop’s desire to see how things happened and why they happened the way they did.

  Until now. In this room.

  Looking at the wedding picture above the sofa, the young couple in their modern clothes, the lean brown girl in a yellow dress and the young man in his somber black suit, their faces clear as well water, their hands together. And around them, in a scattered grouping, heavy-bodied Indian men in jeans and cowboy shirts, holding drums and feathered robes and frowning into the camera, as became the gravity of the moment.

  EDWARD PIZI GALL

  AND

  DONNA SWEETWATER BENT

  MARRIED MAY 24, 1988

  ROSEBUD RESERVE, SOUTH DAKOTA

  AND FAMILY

  Something had happened to all these people, and Beau was a part of it. Beau had helped to break the hoop of these people. There they stood in a brief moment of promise and peace, with their deaths laid out for them in the future, but hidden by the bright light of the moment. And Joe Bell had made it happen. Joe Bell and whoever was helping him. They knew how this circle had been broken.

  Because they were all there in the picture: Jubal Two Moon, toothless and erect, his face drawn and leathery, but smiling and proud; Earl Black Elk, glowering and dark but solid as iron, with one rough hand on Donna’s shoulder, a protective gesture; and James Chief Comes In Sight, the Cheyenne friend, his heavy oval face bright with sunlight, his hooded eyes and sunken cheeks the same face that Beau had seen, lit by a pale moon, a black hole in the right cheek, lying in blood and brains at Arrow Creek. And others, eleven of them in all, broad Indian faces and heavy hands, sunburned and as much a part of the Dakota earth around them as a cottonwood root.

  And at the back, a tall lean man with his long black hair pulled back tightly, the sun hitting his hard skull-like face, his eyes hidden in shadow, dressed in black with Navajo silver at his wrists and on his belt. A good face, but too strong for beauty and too grim for the occasion. It wore a smile precariously, the way a man looks who stands too close to the edge of a building.

  He was striking and memorable, that one. His clothing was different as well. He was dressed in black, but expensively, and under his linen shirt he looked hard and fit. His mouth was a thin cut, like a seam in a rock face.

  Beau stared at him for a long time, feeling a faint tremor of memory or insight. He tried to wait for it, to keep still and let it come. And it did.

  This was the man Charlie Tallbull had described. The “black man.” This was probably the man who took the Polaroid of Beau in the hospital bed, the man who had gone out to Lizardskin to leave him the message. This was the hidden man, maybe the Shirt Wearer that Charlie Tallbull was talking about, the man his boys thought was Crazy Horse returned.

  Who the hell was he? />
  He stood there, in that rapt stillness, so long that the wound in his right leg flared up in sudden pain and bent him over double. He staggered and hopped to a thin wooden chair by the low corduroy couch, sat down, and extended the leg. The muscle burned quietly under the flesh, like a fire in a coal seam. There was no blood coming through the bandage to mark the suit.

  Just to remind you, Beau.

  He looked up at the wedding picture. It was hard to connect these people with the fight at Arrow Creek. He could see a time when the three of them might have sat down at a table at Fogarty’s and talked about the things they had seen, the glasses going round and maybe some music, something like “Rogaciado,” or Roy Orbison singing “Only in Dreams.” The picture made these people real to Beau, in a way that the grim carnality of their deaths had not.

  They had lived hard lives. Beau had seen enough of the life on the Rosebud, on any Indian reserve, to know that. Yet they had made their marks, gone to Iwo Jima, or to Vietnam, the younger ones to Los Angeles to make a life, and the older men had come back with medals and the undying gratitude of the government, back to walk in the empty bleached-out streets or on the barren earth of South Dakota less than a hundred miles from the Powder River country and the Bighorns, where their ancestors had hunted and fought and died.

  Where, finally, they, too, had died, in a short sharp brutal collision, in a space of a few hours. To die like that, after having gone so far out in the world, to fall back into the vortex of the old land, as if drawn by some terrible gravity, compelled by some natural velocity—there had to be a rhythm to it, some kind of inner balance.

  To find that hidden thing, that buried magnetic force that had twisted and misshapen these lives, that had finally pulled them under the long yellow grass of their own land … that would mean something. That would force meaning into it.

  Beau would do that.

  Find the thing that was buried. Drag it into the light.

  Make amends.

  Because although he did not intend it, and in truth could have done nothing to change it, he had helped to shatter this picture.