A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery

by Craig Johnson

  Sancho sat on the bench by the steps and turned the copy of Tisdale’s faded, black-and-white head shot in his hands, then stretched an arm out and forced Henry and me to stare it in the eye. “Tell me that’s not him.”

  The thing looked like a photo of a ghost. The eyes were the same, but the identifying feature was the ears—ears exactly like his grandson’s. “So what was he doing flying around Mexico?”

  “You tell me.”

  The Bear added. “And dead, no less.”

  I thought about it. “If he’s Sarah Tisdale’s father, then he had to be back here in Wyoming for at least a night.”

  Saizarbitoria sipped his Rainier. “Uh-huh.”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  He looked at the can. “That this is the shittiest tasting beer ever?”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking.” The Cheyenne Nation chuckled, and I took a long swig out of my own can, just to make a point. “That he was still on the Company payroll down in Mexico.”

  Sancho belched and made a face. “Lawyers, guns, and money?”

  “I guess I need to talk to Eleanor Tisdale, not that I’m looking forward to it.”

  The Basquo nodded his head, knocked on the bench as if it were a door, and broke into a faux, flowery announcer voice. “Mrs. Tisdale, we’re sorry to report that we think your daughter’s dead, but guess who we have behind door number two?” I sighed, and he continued. “You guys know anybody at the CIA?”

  Henry and I glanced at each other, and then I pulled out my pocket watch. “As a matter of fact, we do.”

  • • •

  Wally was surprised to see me at eight o’clock at night at the door of the main house at the Lazy D-W but maybe even more surprised to see the Cheyenne Nation. The patrician-looking silver-haired man led us into their den, where Donna sat with a wine glass of sparkling water at her side.

  I noticed that she casually flipped the top sheet of a prodigious stack of papers to keep the Bear and me from seeing the title. “Are those your memoirs?”

  She laughed. “Something like that.” She and her husband made eye contact for a moment, and then Wally gave us a brief nod and left.

  Looking at all the stacks of books, photos, plaques, and awards that the woman had accumulated over the years, my eyes wandered around the crowded room—Donna with presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson; Donna with ex-senators; Donna with movie stars. I pointed toward the one of Donna and LBJ standing together. “Relation?”

  She smiled. “Nope, but he gave me the best advice I ever got about public life.”

  “And what was that?”

  “You know, Walt—never turn down the opportunity of a free meal or a chance to go to the bathroom.”

  There was another photograph near where Henry sat of Donna in a parka and a man in army fatigues and an Airborne cap. The Bear reached over and tapped the glass protecting the black-and-white photo of the two, who were seated with a snow-capped mountain in the background. “Is that Larry Thorne?”

  “The man who brought modern skiing into the United States Army despite the United States Army. Sure is.” Donna smiled and pulled her chair closer, plucking the frame from the wall, turning it over, and handing it to Henry. “Recovery mission; the bodies from a military transport that crashed on an Iranian glacier in ’63. There was bad weather, and I radioed him to see if he wanted to wait on the operation. The weather got worse and transmission got sketchy, but I finally got through and Larry asked me if we wanted them to put the bodies back—they’d already gone up and gotten them.”

  The Bear carefully returned the photo to the wall. “He was the only white man that ever outran me.”

  “Fort Bragg?”

  Henry nodded. “Twice our age, and he could run all of us into the ground.” The Bear glanced back at the photo, the man’s features looking like they’d been carved from soapstone. “There were rumors that he was a Nazi.”

  Donna laughed. “He was from Finland.” Johnson settled back into her chair and stared at her lap. “Lauri Torni. He fought against the Soviets when they invaded Finland; then when the Germans invaded Russia, the Finns went after what they’d lost to the Russians.” She looked up at us. “The friend of a friend is a friend, the friend of an enemy . . .” She didn’t have to finish the proverb. “Anyway, after the war, ‘Wild Bill’ Donavan, who knew what Torni was worth, got him and shipped him off to North Carolina as a citizen and second lieutenant with a new name, Larry Thorne.” She smiled at the Cheyenne Nation. “And that’s probably where you met him.”

  Henry grinned at the thought of the man and then stiffened. “He was the first Study and Observations Group personnel to be listed as MIA.”

  It was the first time I’d heard the Bear use the proper name of his old outfit, SOG; evidently he was feeling comfortable with the reclusive ranch woman.

  “Hey, Donna?”

  She turned to look at me.

  “I’ve never asked you what it was you did with the government, and to be honest, I really don’t want to know—but it’s getting late, I don’t want to keep you till tomorrow, and I’ve got a situation on my hands that I need some help with.”

  She adjusted her glasses, looking for the entire world like some Harvard don. “Does this concern the My Friend Flicka boy and that man?”

  “As a matter of fact, it does.”

  She nodded, and I could see her weighing the options. “How can I help?”

  I explained the situation, indicating that my only interest was in finding out what was going on in my county concerning the boy, a missing woman, and a bad feeling I had about the whole Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.

  She glanced at a fancy computer monitor and the stacks of papers she’d casually covered up, and all I could think was that these might not be the first things Donna Johnson had been responsible for covering up. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got?”

  I reached in my jacket and pulled out the folded papers that Saizarbitoria had given me—the Basquo had pleaded with us to take him, but I’d told him that if Donna had to kill us after giving us the information we’d requested, it might be better if he went home to his wife and child.

  Johnson took them, stared at the photo first, and then flipped through the pages. “Who collated this information?”

  “My deputy, Saizarbitoria.”

  Donna studied the papers, her eyes sliding over them like fingers sweeping keys on a piano. “He’s very capable, this young man.”

  I nodded and compressed my lips. “Does that mean you have to kill us?”

  Donna smiled. “Not yet.” She looked at me. “If I do this for you, you mustn’t let anyone know that I’ve done it—anyone at all. I’m very serious.”

  I kept my eyes locked on hers, just to demonstrate the severity of the promise. “Agreed.”

  She glanced at the Bear, who crossed his heart. “Honest Injun.”

  She smiled and gave a definitive nod of her head. “Well, it will take a little time, so why don’t you gentlemen adjourn to the kitchen for a few moments—have you eaten?”

  • • •

  “Antelope ravioli; I made it myself.”

  Sitting around the counter in the kitchen of the Lazy D-W, I had to admit that the impromptu meal was one of the finest I’d ever eaten. “Wally, thanks. You really didn’t have to feed us.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind; it gives me something to do. Gardening is over, and things get a little boring this far out from town.”

  I studied him, enjoying the camaraderie of being in his kitchen. Donna’s family had had the ranch for as long as there had been a county, and as near as I could remember, they had both known my late wife. A lot of men would’ve had a problem being Donna’s husband on a lot of counts, but Wally seemed to wear the mantle easily. “Nonetheless, it’s kind of you to take us in on such short notice.”

  Henry scraped the remains of the ravioli from his plate and licked his fork clean. “This was delicious. I could not h
ave done better myself—antelope is tricky.”

  I sipped the fancy beer that Wally had poured out of a growler and smiled at him. “That was a supreme compliment.”

  He sipped his wine and studied the Bear and then me. “I assume that all this has to do with that young man Cord?”

  I was surprised he remembered his name, but then they probably didn’t get that many horse thieves around these parts. “Tucked in and sleeping at the jail.”

  “Is he still fixated on My Friend Flicka?”

  “He and his friend were watching it again when we left.”

  He nodded. “The crazy one that thinks he’s Orrin Porter Rockwell?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s an interesting life you lead, Walt.”

  “I meet a lot of people.” I set my stylish Royal Pint glass down. “So is your wife . . .” I glanced around, just to impress on him and the Cheyenne Nation that I could be covert, too. “Is she really writing a book?”

  “God help us.” He rested an elbow on the cherry counter. “For the last ten years.”

  The Bear interrupted. “Tell her not to feel bad. I cannot type either.”

  He laughed. “It’s the Company censors; the last time she turned in six hundred and five pages, they returned two hundred and two.”

  “Ouch.”

  “But she’s decided to attack the problem from a different angle.”

  “How so?”

  “She’s writing it as a spy thriller.”

  “Fiction?”

  “Yes. She’s just changing all the names to protect the not-so-innocent. Most of the fact-checkers at Quantico are so young they won’t have any idea what Donna’s writing about, but it should send a shiver through the intelligence community.”

  A voice sounded from behind us. “Are you telling all my secrets, hon?”

  He tipped the bottle of Domaine de la Solitude and poured her a glass. “Just the ones I know, dear.”

  Donna sat on the stool beside him—the file on Dale “Airdale” Tisdale that she put on the counter had grown. “I have no secrets from you.”

  “Of course not, dear.” He turned to look at me. “The benefits of marrying a spy are that you always know that they’re not telling the truth.”

  Donna made pointed eye contact with Henry and me. “I was not a spy, I was an administrator, a facilitator who made phone calls and got things done.”

  I sipped my fancy beer. “Donna, as long as you don’t break the speed limit too much or write bad checks here in the county, I don’t care what you did—and I hope your book is a best seller.” I pointed at the stack of papers. “Is that the international man of mystery?”

  She placed a steady hand on the pile and looked at me. “Are you sure you really want to see this?”

  I waited a second before replying. “Why do you say that?”

  She looked pained. “Walt, there are things that are better not known—I mean, isn’t it enough that you know who he is and that he’s just a crazy old guy now?”

  I glanced around as if the answer was obvious. “No.”

  She nodded. “Whenever a field agent is involved with an operation, he’s given a new name, history, everything. These cover stories are called Legends, and the problem is that after an extended period of activity and a bunch of Legends, some individuals exhibit marked psychological aberrations—they become the Legend so well that they forget who they are, like an actor who becomes the role forever. Robert Littell wrote a really good book about one of them—fiction, of course.” She smiled.

  “And that’s what happened to Tisdale?”

  Donna picked up the papers and handed them to me. “One of the things.”

  I took them, folded them, and placed them in the inside pocket of my jacket, which was hanging on the back of my stool. “He thinks he’s Orrin Porter Rockwell; what were you guys trying to do, infiltrate the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?”

  She laughed. “Dale Tisdale really was CIA, unlike all these jaybirds around here who say they were—just once, I’d like to get one of the fake ones crossways with me so I could show them what the real CIA is capable of.”

  • • •

  Henry read by the overhead map light as I drove. “So, he hadn’t lost his mind when he was in Mexico, which is a shame because I think I lost mine in Cabo one time.” The Cheyenne Nation studied the papers. “Sometimes it is a gradual process; I think that is what Donna was trying to intimate to us.”

  I steered the Bullet south on I-25 through the chilling night and glanced past Henry toward the invisible mountains, taking comfort in knowing they were there and that I was not climbing them. “Why would the CIA send someone like that back into duty?”

  “Possibly because they did not know how much of a psychological break he had sustained in Southeast Asia?”

  I gave the Bear the horse eye. “Kind of hard to miss a guy with a beard and hair down to his ass who claims to be a historical Western figure.”

  He sighed. “As I said, it would appear that the Orrin Porter Rockwell manifestation of his character is relatively recent—say, when he was arrested by the federal authorities in Mexico. It would appear that the CIA claimed that the entire operation was rogue and they hung Tisdale out to dry.”

  “For the second time at least.” I shook my head. “Remind me to never work for the CIA.”

  “It is possible that some of it was a rogue undertaking; Tisdale conceived the idea and named it Operation Milkshake. Evidently, because of his specific skill set, he was put in charge of this operation in Mexico that involved the appropriation of crude oil.” He stopped reading and gazed through the dark windshield. “I recall a while back the Justice Department found out American refineries had been buying massive quantities of stolen oil from the Mexican government.” He turned to look at me. “The bandits and drug gangs tap into pipelines out in these remote areas and some of them were even building their own pipelines to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil a year.”

  “So Operation Milkshake was not a penny-ante operation.”

  “No, and it would appear that a portion of the American government wanted to get in on the action.” His eyes dropped. “There were a number of subsequent investigations, indictments, and arrests—one of whom was Tisdale.” He shifted in his seat. “Operation Milkshake . . . That sounds strangely familiar; where does that come from?”

  “Albert Fall, the secretary of the Interior under Harding, was convicted of taking bribes for oil rights on public lands, namely from the Teapot Dome Naval Oil Reserves just a little south of here. In a congressional hearing, the senator from New Mexico was famous for having made a statement about the process of directional oil drilling—‘If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake.’”

  “What a typically white venture.”

  I ignored the remark and continued. “Tisdale appears to be something of an expert in history and would know that statement.”

  “Whatever happened to Fall?”

  “Died penniless in El Paso.” I took the off-ramp at Powder Junction. “Do the papers indicate where all this Mormon stuff comes from?”

  The Bear synopsized. “After an unfortunate incident with a Cessna Bonanza, the U.S. government denied his existence and reported him dead. The Mexican government, left with an unidentified prisoner, dumped him in Penal del Altiplano where he shared a cell with newfound Mormon Tomás Bidarte.”

  I turned and looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  Henry shrugged. “Evidently, Dale Tisdale converted to the point where he actually thought of himself as Orrin Porter Rockwell; as a Caucasian finding himself in the environs of a maximum security prison in Mexico, it might have been a survival instinct and the only way he made it through.”

  “So he and Bidarte were locked up together; I thought there was something that passed between them when they shook hands down at East Spring.” I stopped at the sign at the bott
om of the interstate ramp alongside the rest stop. “How did he get out?”

  The Cheyenne Nation nodded. “As you have surmised, with Bidarte’s help, they bribed their way to freedom by selling Tisdale’s land holdings in East Spring Ranch to Roy Lynear.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” I made the left through the underpass and stopped at the next sign where the Short Drop road crossed Old Highway 87. A Powder River Fire District truck approached from the south with its siren and lights going but made a left before getting to us.

  “He was picked up in Utah by the Highway Patrol while kneeling by a roadside cross; he was then incarcerated in a psychiatric ward for observation, but once he admitted to having lived in Wyoming, they shipped him off to Evanston.”

  “Why didn’t they contact his family?”

  “At that point he claimed to have no living relatives and asserted to be the Orrin Porter Rockwell, and before anyone could ascertain just who he was, he escaped.”

  “So he lived the Legend.”

  “It would appear so.”

  We sat there in the darkness at the four-way stop in Powder Junction, Wyoming, the caution light intermittently flashing and giving me the feeling it was a metaphor. I listened as the siren from the volunteer fire truck stopped—it didn’t sound all that far away. “Then why is he here now, protecting his grandson? Who contacted him? Who knew he was still alive? Bidarte?”

  “The answer to that question does not appear to be in the file.” The big Cheyenne Indian looked at me with a sad smile. “What about the daughter?”

  I sat there, idling. “Unavailable for comment, and not very popular with her parents.”

  He nodded, the yellow light flickering its warmth on the reflective surface of his dark eyes. “Now everything leads to Mexico, Operation Milkshake, and the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God.”

  “Agreed.”

  Another truck pulled up across the road and sat there, obviously waiting for me to go first, so I reached down and flicked the lever, throwing my brights at him so that he’d know it was okay to proceed. “Double Tough says the Teapot Dome Reserves are tapped out and that the federal government tried to sell the place off to private developers but nobody bit.”