DreadfulWater Shows Up

by Thomas King

  “Stop by next time you’re in town.”

  “I will.”

  Beaumont held up his cellphone.

  Traynor unwrapped a sandwich, sniffed at it, and passed it to Thumps. “Can it wait until we finish?”

  Beaumont nodded. “It can wait.”

  The rest of the game was quiet and relatively pleasant. Traynor held up her end of the small talk, and by the time they got back to the clubhouse, Thumps knew where she had gone to school, how she had gotten into the casino computer business, and why she didn’t like nuts in baked goods.

  “I really would like to see some of your photographs.”

  “Anytime.”

  Traynor turned to Beaumont and Chan. “I’ll drive Mr. DreadfulWater back to his car. Get us a tee time for tomorrow.”

  Beaumont nodded. “Morning or afternoon?”

  “Afternoon,” said Traynor. “I want to go to Buffalo Mountain in the morning.”

  The golf course parking lot was filled with expensive cars. Thumps hadn’t noticed it before, and as Traynor drove the cart down the rows of bright and twinkling Mercedes and Porsches and Lincolns, he found himself hoping that his Volvo looked a little better than he remembered.

  “Thanks for the shirt and the shoes.”

  Traynor shook her head. “Think of them as payment.”

  Thumps wasn’t sure what he wanted to say.

  “For your time today.”

  He unlocked the Volvo and opened the doors. “Good chance the sheriff will find who killed Takashi.”

  Traynor flashed a smile. Thumps wasn’t sure whether it was fire or ice. “I don’t like chance,” she said. And she turned the cart around and headed back to the clubhouse.

  No, thought Thumps as he stood by the car, waiting for the heat to pour out, I’ll bet you don’t.

  Thumps took the back way to the hotel and buried his car between an elephant of an RV and a GMC Kingcab with chrome running boards and spoke wheels. He wasn’t trying to hide the Volvo, exactly, but neither did he want to announce the fact that he was hanging around. If he was right, whoever had killed Takashi was still in the vicinity. Takashi’s room had been searched and sanitized, which meant the man’s death wasn’t a simple thing. If Stick and the Red Hawks had killed Takashi, the killing should have been the end of it. Why kill a man to stop the casino project and then take the time to search his room? Why kill a man to make a political point and then steal his computer? No, something else was going on, and as improbable as it seemed, Floyd might have tumbled to it. But murder was a dangerous game. Did Floyd know what he was getting into? More to the point, did he care?

  The limousine garage was deserted. Thumps had never ridden in a limousine and it wasn’t on his list of things to do. The idea had little appeal. Now a Porsche or a Jaguar, that was a different story. A sports car you drove yourself. Something you could push into the corners and open up on the straightaways. Something low and sleek with a manual transmission. That was driving.

  Riding in the back of a rich man’s bus was not.

  Thumps wondered whether Traynor had a limousine as well as a helicopter. She looked more like the sports car type, but you couldn’t tell with women. If they chose their cars the same way they chose their men, anything was possible. And nothing had to make sense.

  “Can I help you?”

  Thumps hadn’t seen the man and was forced to think faster than he wanted to. “Hi.”

  The man was young and thick and in good shape. There was no handy name tag on the lapel of his blue blazer, but Thumps guessed he was hotel staff.

  “Are you looking for something?”

  The truth was Thumps was snooping, but he knew he would have to come up with a better answer than that. Luckily, he knew a number of ways to gain time in order to construct a more plausible story. Asking questions was one of the best.

  “Is this the limousine garage?”

  “Is there a problem?”

  The man came forward, his weight evenly distributed, his hands out of his pockets, stopping short of the distance an assailant would need in order to attack him before he could react.

  Security.

  Thumps was glad he had allowed himself the golf shirt. He hoped the man knew his name brands.

  “I was looking for one of the drivers.” He pitched his voice in a way to suggest that he owned the place.

  “Are you a guest at the hotel?”

  Thumps had hoped the man would not ask that question. “I believe I left my glasses in the car.”

  The man reached into his jacket the way you would reach for a gun. “Eagle One to base.” He man held the walkie-talkie sideways against his mouth the way they did it in crime dramas. “I have a guest at the garage. Says he left his glasses in one of the limos.”

  “I think I left them there,” said Thumps.

  There was a pause, and then an indistinct voice crackled back. Thumps couldn’t quite hear what base had to say about guests wandering around the garage looking for lost glasses, but he supposed that base had an official procedures book and was even now leafing through it to see what to do.

  “Okay,” said Eagle One, and he slipped the walkie-talkie back into his jacket.

  At this point, Thumps mused, one of three things could happen. One, Eagle One could ask for identification, take Thumps’ name and phone number and promise to pass it on to hotel security, who would notify him if the glasses were found. Two, Eagle One could invite Thumps to come to security with him so they could search though the lost-and-found bag for non-existent glasses. Or three, Eagle One could check with the front desk and discover that Thumps was not a guest, just a local photographer cleverly disguised as a successful golfer.

  “I asked at the front desk,” said Thumps, trying to sound impatient and annoyed, the way rich people do when they don’t get what they want. “And they suggested I come out here and talk to the driver.”

  Eagle One blinked.

  Good, thought Thumps. He understands arrogance.

  “What was the driver’s name?”

  “Floyd. I believe it was Floyd something. Really, I would have expected a resort such as this to have a better system in place for dealing with misplaced articles.”

  “We have a lost and found.”

  “Excellent,” said Thumps, working on his enunciation. “Could you give them a call on your radio?”

  “They don’t have your glasses.”

  “Well, perhaps the driver has them.”

  “He’s not in today.”

  Normally Thumps would have quit while he was ahead, but the golf had left him feeling important. “Really? I’m sure I saw him earlier.”

  “He called in sick.”

  “Ah,” said Thumps, jamming his hands in his pockets and pouting, “then there’s little else to do but lunch.” He turned away and then turned back. “What’s your name?” It was an excellent ploy, and he congratulated himself for thinking of it.

  “Ah . . . Steve. Steve Webster.”

  “Well, Steve. Thank you for the assistance.” With that, Thumps strolled out of the limousine garage as if he had no place in particular to go and all the time in the world to get there. And he didn’t look back. Not even after he got to the front doors of the hotel.

  The coffee shop was almost deserted. Thumps slid into a booth at the back and looked at the menu. Coffee was two dollars and fifty cents a cup. Pie was six. A cheeseburger without fries was twelve. No wonder the place was empty.

  “Hi, did you have a chance to look at the specials?”

  The waitress was a young woman with a gold tag on her blouse that said Ruth. Just out of high school. All enthusiasm and energy. A happy bubble. Thumps wondered whether this was a summer job before university or the beginning of a fulfilling career carrying plates of food to tourists.

  “How’s the Cowboy Chili?”

  “Terrific.”

  “How about the cheeseburger?”

 
“It’s terrific, too.”

  “And the soup.”

  “All our food’s terrific.”

  “Terrific,” said Thumps. “What do you eat?”

  The girl kept smiling, but he could see a hint of distress or embarrassment at the corners of her mouth. “They don’t let us eat here.”

  “Food can’t be that good.”

  Ruth glanced at the cash register. The bubble burst, and her smile slid into a conspiratorial grin. “It’s not.”

  “The chili?”

  “Bland.”

  “Soup?”

  “Dry mix.”

  “Burger fresh?”

  “Shipped in frozen.” Ruth was having a good time. “And twenty-five percent fat.”

  While Thumps was reasonably sure that Ruth had no idea who had killed Takashi, he knew one thing for certain. Working at the Shadow Ranch coffee shop was not a career move.

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Al’s in town.”

  University. Ruth was definitely going to university.

  “I’ll have some coffee and a piece of cherry pie.”

  Thumps settled into the booth and took out a pen. On his napkin, he made two columns. At the top of one, he wrote Stick. At the top of the other, he put an “X.”

  Under “Stick” he wrote “opportunity” and “motive.” Thumps sighed and crossed them off. The opportunity was circumstantial. No one had seen Stick at the complex. No one had seen Stick with the dead man. So far as Thumps knew, Stick hadn’t threatened Takashi or Genesis Data Systems. And even if he had the opportunity, the motive was weak. No matter how Thumps imagined the crime, it made no sense to kill Takashi. Not if your goal was to stop the complex. So why had Takashi been killed? Traynor’s problem seemed to have more to do with the death than the protest. If she was right about someone trying to sabotage her company, then killing Takashi might make sense. He was a key player at Genesis. His death might slow the project and allow a rival company to step in. Industrial espionage was big business. Maybe dog-eat-dog was no longer just a figure of speech. Maybe today’s dogs were armed.

  By the time Ruth returned with the coffee and the pie, Thumps’ deductions had deteriorated into circles, squiggles, and wavy lines, and the neat columns were buried under cartoon tornadoes and funny faces.

  The pie was of no better quality than his deductions. Canned cherries set adrift in a sea of bright red Silly Putty, sugared to taste. The crust was cosmetic, with the consistency and taste of damp cardboard.

  “How’s the pie?”

  “Terrific.”

  “You want anything else?”

  Thumps had a quick flash. “How much are your doughnuts?”

  Ruth shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “We don’t serve doughnuts.”

  “Okay. Just the bill.”

  “Are you charging it to your room?”

  Now there was a delicious thought. Dishonest, to be sure. No, not dishonest, exactly. Clever. Maybe even satiric. A joke among friends.

  “Room 243,” said Thumps. “Can I charge the tip to my room, too?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Thumps felt expansive as he walked out of the Shadow Ranch coffee shop and stepped into the bright afternoon light. The day had not started off well, but it had picked up speed and was moving along nicely. New golf shoes. A new golf shirt. Eighteen holes on a course he couldn’t afford to play. And a dreadful lunch. All on corporate America. To be sure, there was still a dead body to deal with, Claire’s prodigal son to locate and clear of any suspicion, and a chat to have with Floyd to find out what he knew. But right now, Thumps was warm and sleepy. A nap would be nice. That’s probably what Freeway was doing at this very minute. Stretched out in a square of sunlight on the bed, rolled up on her side, her head twisted over at an impossible angle to catch as much warmth on her chin as she could manage. Lazy damn cat.

  Yes, Thumps grumbled to himself, a nap would be very nice indeed.

  TWELVE

  Thumps wasn’t sure how it had happened, but as he drove back into town, he realized that he was now looking for two men. And if he assumed that neither Stick nor Floyd had anything to do with Takashi’s death, then technically—and ignoring the sexist assumptions—he was looking for three men.

  As he examined the dilemma logically, it was clear that he should concentrate on finding Floyd and talking to him. The killer certainly did not want to be found, and evidently neither did Stick. In Thumps’ experience, people who were determined not to be found could stay hidden for a long time. Sometimes they could disappear altogether. Without a trace.

  Stick would show up eventually. Native people seldom ran too far from home, and even those who went away always seemed to return. But if Thumps were right, Takashi’s killer probably had no such ties, and each day that went by made it less likely that he would ever be found.

  Thumps was already in Chinook before he remembered that he didn’t know where Floyd lived. Cooley still lived with his mother on the reserve, but Thumps couldn’t imagine Floyd bunking there.

  The gas gauge was below the empty mark, a meaningless caution since the gauge had stopped working two years ago. But just to be safe, Thumps pulled into the Shell station, filled up, and checked the phone book. No luck. He could ask around, but that would take time, and Floyd would hear that Thumps was looking for him. Floyd had found Thumps, but it didn’t mean that Floyd wanted Thumps to find him. As Thumps had discovered in his other life as a cop, people were funny about things like that. And Floyd did not seem to have a well-developed sense of humour.

  Ora Mae was at her desk looking over the new listings when Thumps walked through the front door. She glanced up and shook her head. “Well, aren’t you the looker.”

  “I was playing golf.”

  “Well, la-di-da, I thought golf was a rich white boy’s game.”

  “It is.”

  “You ain’t no rich white boy, honey. And unless I’ve lost touch with the better labels of this world, you can’t afford those rich white boy’s clothes, either.”

  “It was business.”

  Ora Mae shook her head and went back to the listings.

  “I need some information.”

  “Do I look like an information centre?”

  “It’s for Claire,” said Thumps. “I need to know where Floyd Small Elk is living.”

  “Floyd? That mean sonofabitch?”

  “He’s not in the phone book.”

  “’Course not. Most folks in town wouldn’t rent him a bench.”

  Thumps tried charm. “But you know where he lives, don’t you?”

  “You sure this is for Claire?”

  Thumps crossed his heart.

  “Okay, this one is free.” Ora Mae wrote an address on a piece of paper and held it out. “So, what you going to do? Arrest him or just take his picture?” On the wall was a large poster advertising Buffalo Mountain Resort. Ora Mae caught him looking. “Just because you found some fancy clothes doesn’t mean you can even afford the dreaming.”

  “Why do you suppose Takashi wound up in the condos?”

  “Don’t you mean how?”

  “No. The man’s a computer programmer. Every day of the week he goes from Shadow Ranch to the computer complex at Buffalo Mountain. Every evening he goes from Buffalo Mountain back to Shadow Ranch.”

  “It’s called a routine.”

  Thumps walked up to the poster and put a finger on top of the computer complex. “If he’s at Buffalo Mountain, then he should be here.” He moved his finger across the poster to the condos. “But he winds up dead here. Why?” He waited to see whether Ora Mae wanted to help out.

  “Is this a philosophical question or are you asking me about the security system?”

  “There’s a security system?”

  Ora Mae looked back at Sterling’s office. The door was closed. “DreadfulWater, does this line of bull work on any women you know?”

 
Thumps blinked and sat down in the chair by Ora Mae’s desk.

  “Now, if you want to ask me about the security system at Buffalo Mountain, just do it. Don’t waltz me around with how Mr. Dead Guy got from point A to point B.”

  “What’s the security system like?”

  “That’s better.”

  Ora Mae began sorting through the listings on her desk.

  “You going to tell me?”

  “Honey, they call it security because how it works is a secret.”

  Thumps hadn’t wanted this job in the first place. And between being a rent-a-golfer for Genesis Data Systems and a punching bag for Ora Mae, he was beginning to get pissed off.

  “It’s a computer-controlled security system.” Ora Mae leaned forward on the desk. “All the outside doors to the condos are on key cards.”

  “What about the computer complex?”

  “Key cards.”

  “Same card?”

  “Are you kidding? Each building has a separate card.”

  “Could someone break in?”

  “Sure, if he had the right equipment and enough time.”

  “Cameras?”

  “At the entrance to each building, and in the hallways and stairwells. There are sweep cameras for the parking lot and the immediate grounds.”

  “And?”

  “They’re not operational yet.” Ora Mae picked up a pen and wrote a note on one of the listings. “Any more questions?”

  Thumps looked at the poster. The tribe had done well. All he had to do was help keep the resort from going down the toilet. “Only one. How would you carry a body from the computer building to the condos without being seen?”

  “I thought you wanted to know why, not how.”

  “Humour me.”

  Ora Mae looked at the poster. “Probably through the maintenance tunnels.”

  Thumps could hear the hesitation in her voice. “But?”

  “But you’d have to have a master key card.”

  So, that’s how it was done, Thumps thought to himself. From the guard station, Cooley had a clear view of the entrance to the condos. The killer might have risked moving the body, hoping Cooley wouldn’t see him, but why take the risk if you had a better way?

  “Would Takashi have had a master key card?”