The Deader the Better

by G. M. Ford

  “Sometimes longer. Don’t sleep here much, though.”

  “He rents a room but doesn’t sleep in it?”

  “Hardly never.” He anticipated my next question. “Got no idea. He drives off in some rental car, and I don’t see him again till the next day.” He waved a hand. “None of my damn business what he’s doin’ anyway.”

  As I stepped out the back door, I had my first lucid moment in weeks. I was kicking through the sodden leaves when I got a hurried little coming attraction of a movie where all of this made sense. I think I may have said, “Shit,” as I started for the RV, but I can’t be sure.

  Carl was where I left him. Robby was gone. “Nothin’ new,”

  he said.

  “Narva left her cell number. What did we do with it?”

  He handed me a torn scrap of paper. I dialed. Voice mail. She probably didn’t want it ringing in the Records office. I waited for the tone and left my message.

  “Where’s Robby?”

  “Wiring nine.”

  I grabbed my jacket from the settee.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “First I’m going to desecrate a grave. Then I’m leaving the country.”

  “Probably best in that order,” Carl said. They sat on the pile of rocks they’d just moved. Harold wiped his brow with his sleeve and then blew his nose down into the grass. Ralph downed a bottle of Coors in one swig and then reached into the cooler for another. Floyd and I dug carefully, probing the soil with our shovels, as if neither of us wanted to be the one to find anything. We found the collar first. Moved one way and found vertebrae. Moved the other, found the head. I put on the blue rubber gloves from the house and carefully worked the skull out of the ground. The lower jaw was now a separate piece, but it didn’t matter. Didn’t need a pathologist, either. I turned the skull toward Floyd.

  “Ah,” Floyd said. “The rare and elusive three-eyed dog.”

  32

  “THIS IS THE MAN WHO COME AND TOOK CLAUDIA AND the kids back to their people,” Juanita said. The guy gestured to the chair at the right of the desk. I took a seat. He wore his hair long. Parted down the middle and braided. Broad pockmarked face stretching a pair of bifocals to the max. Juanita said he was the tribe’s legal advisor.

  “Leo Waterman,” I said.

  “Paul Flowers. At least that’s the English version,” he said. Juanita grabbed the doorknob. “I gotta go. The kids are coming in for lunch.”

  He folded his hands on the desk. “What can I do for you, Mr. Waterman?”

  “Can I tell you a story?”

  “Storytelling is an important tradition among the Hoh people.”

  I started all the way back on that Thanksgiving afternoon and ran it up to the present. He never moved his hands, and as far as I could tell, he never blinked. He sat there like a rock until I was finished. “And then…about an hour ago,” I said, “I remembered what Juanita said about the Lummi trying to throw money at the Hoh and I realized that what she probably meant wasn’t Lummi but Loomis.”

  He turned his head and looked out toward the ocean. His braids were held in place by blue rubber bands. “Like any organization, the tribe has politics,” he said. “There are as many positions as there are people. But…you know…for the sake of conversation, let’s say that the points of view can be divided into the liberal and conservative elements within the tribe.” He looked back my way. “The conservative element—of which I would surely be said to be a member—we look at doing business outside the tribe as a necessary evil. I think it’s safe to say that we would prefer to be left alone to live our lives and transmit our values in any way we see fit.” He stuck out his lower lip. “Ideally, I suppose, without any outside influences whatsoever.”

  “Pretty tough here at the millennium,” I said.

  “To be sure,” he said. “Which leads us to the more liberal outlook.”

  “Which says?”

  “Which says that there’s a world of opportunity out there. They look at tribal casinos and fireworks stands and cigarette outlets and liquor stores and all they see is the money falling into their pockets.”

  “Hard to ignore.”

  He sighed. “Impossible.”

  “You seem to have stemmed the tide rather well,” I said. He nodded solemnly. “We are still very conservative. The reservation is dry. We don’t gamble or sell cigarettes or fireworks.” He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s not going to last,” he said. “We came within eight votes of leasing nine hundred acres of our land for ninety-nine years.”

  “To Loomis?”

  He nodded. “Next time—and I have no doubt that there will be others—next time, the temptation will be too great.”

  “What did they want the property for?”

  A wry smile bent his lips. “They don’t say. Loomis is merely an acquisition firm. They specialize in putting together industrial and commercial properties and then resell ing them to principals. They claim not to have a customer, but to be buying purely on spec.”

  “Claim?”

  “Their motives were obvious.”

  I waited; he didn’t disappoint. “Against the advice of their elders, twice in the past five years members of the more liberal elements of the tribe have insisted that we sue both the state and federal governments over petty matters.”

  “Over?”

  He had to mull it over. “Ostensibly, the issues were such gum-on-the-shoe things as the right to fish our tribal waters in any way we saw fit. Or the right to locate the tribal landfill in the area of our choice.”

  “But really it was over…” I pressed.

  “Sovereignty.”

  “Of the tribe?”

  “And its land.”

  “And?”

  “On both occasions, we won.”

  “You don’t seemed pleased.”

  He got to his feet and walked over to the window. “Like most things, sovereignty is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it means that we are no longer burdened by the vast majority of the rules and regulations of the dominant culture.”

  He sat down on the wide windowsill and picked at the twill of his trousers. “Which of course means that the dominant culture is no longer necessarily required to be burdened by ours.” He threw up a hand. “A subtlety which escaped a great many of our more impetuous members.”

  I decided to lay my own burden down. “I’m lost,” I said. He nodded. “What I’m saying, Mr. Waterman, is that someone in Loomis’s legal department was quite shrewd. Somebody read about our legal victories and quite cleverly reached the conclusion that any piece of property which abutted only the Hoh reservation was not subject to environmental regulation of any kind.”

  “So whoever owned it could do whatever they wanted with the land.”

  “Precisely.”

  “A copper smelter.”

  He nodded.

  “A nuclear landfill.”

  And again.

  “A maximum-security prison.”

  “As the law stands now, not only are we hardly in a position to litigate, but the local dominant culture would welcome virtually any enterprise that provided jobs and added to the local tax base.”

  Flowers was right. The locals would line up for galley slave positions.

  “How much did they offer?”

  “Ten thousand dollars an acre.”

  “Nine million dollars.”

  “Divided by two hundred thirty-five members of the tribe.”

  “Which comes to…”

  “Just under thirty-nine thousand dollars per person.”

  He read my mind. “That figure was for land to which there is no access. No road. No services of any kind. The parcel to which Mr. Springer’s property was joined, having such amenities, would be worth, say…half again that much.”

  A shiver ran down my spine as I did the math. I’d walked in knowing who and how; now I knew why. If Flowers was right, that made the thousand acres next door worth at
least fifteen million dollars. And the cut wasn’t by two hundred or so. No…now the cut was down to four or five. And all of a sudden murder became a viable option. All you had to do was get rid of one pesky fisherman whose sin was to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time with a dream he wasn’t willing to compromise.

  33

  FLOYD CAUGHT THE BOW LINE AND TIED IT OFF. “YOU got a call,” he said.

  I stepped out of the boat onto the floating dock. “Who?”

  “The very put together Miss Haynes. Said last she heard you was staying here. Wants to have a word with you. I told her to come on by. That I was a much more charming fellow than the likes of you, but she insisted.”

  “She leave a number?”

  He handed me a scrap of paper. “Thanks,” I said and stepped off the dock onto the boat ramp. We walked up the incline together. “Where’s everybody else?”

  “All that rock moving gave the Booze Brothers a thirst.”

  “Sunrise gives those guys a thirst.”

  “They ran out of beer. Started making a pain of themselves. I sent them to town with Boris. They promised to stay in the car. It was either that or kick some ass.”

  “I’ll get them out of here as soon as I can,” I promised.

  “You get what you wanted from the Indians?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Problem is, I don’t know if it’s going to do us any good.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because we’ve only got till Friday to get somebody to break.”

  I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and dialed.

  “Chamber of Commerce, Ramona Haynes.”

  “I understand you were looking for me.”

  “Indeed I was,” she said. “You’re hard to find.”

  “I’m told that good men are always hard to find.”

  “Or vice versa,” she said quickly.

  Suddenly I seemed to be fresh out of snappy rejoinders. Good thing she picked up the slack. “I’ve thought it over and decided you owe me lunch for keeping you out of jail the other day.”

  “It is the least I could do, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll call it a down payment,” she said. We settled on the Stevens Falls Bar and Grille at one.

  “Glad to see you’ve regained your sanity,” Floyd said.

  “I just want to thank her for saving our bacon the other day,” I said.

  Somehow, Floyd didn’t look convinced.

  I cleaned up. Brushed my teeth. Put on a clean shirt and a fresh pair of jeans and made it downtown with three minutes to spare.

  The place was packed. Maybe a dozen people were milling around the lobby waiting for tables. I excused my way into the dining room and found her sitting at a window table to the right of the door. She wore an emerald-green silk blouse tucked into a pair of blue jeans. Cowboy boots and a silvertrimmed western belt. Earrings matched the blouse.

  “Hey,” she said. We shook hands as I took a seat. Her hair had more red highlights than I remembered. She made a face. “I really need to use the little girls’ room,” she said. “I was afraid we’d lose the table.” She got to her feet. “Be right back.”

  She was back before I worked my way to the bottom of the menu.

  “Thanks for holding down the fort,” she said.

  “My pleasure.”

  “How’s fishing?”

  I told her about Boris catching the salmon. Left out the gunfire. Poor ambience.

  She ordered a chicken Caesar salad and an iced tea. I opted for a Reuben sandwich and a root beer. “You didn’t tell me your family owned the mill,” I said. She held her glass in two hands and looked at me over the tea. “It’s not the kind of story that brightens anybody’s day.” She put the glass on the table in front of her. “So I imagine you heard about my father shooting himself.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry” sounded stupid, but I said it anyway.

  “He felt responsible,” she said. “For everyone. For the town.” She told me the whole story. How the auctioneers took everything. The mill, the equipment, the family home, his cars, the cabin on San Juan Island, twenty thousand acres of replanted timber. How they even took the clothes in her mother’s closet, where they’d hung untouched since her death five years before. How it was just too much for her father to bear. Before I could say something inane, a phone began to ring. We had one of those “is it mine or is it yours?”

  moments.

  “It’s you,” she said.

  I plucked the phone from my belt and put it to my ear. The voice was a shrill tenor. Familiar. Ragged. On the edge of control. “This Waterman?”

  I said it was. “This is Emmett Polster,” he said. He made a noise like a whimper. I could hear his ragged breathing.

  “You want to know what happened to Springer, you meet me. I’ll tell you.” He seemed to gag on the words. “I can’t take any chances,” he said. “You meet me up at the history marker. On top of Linden Hill.” It sounded like he was having trouble breathing. As he gave me directions, he repeatedly stopped to catch his breath. “Two o’clock,” he wheezed. “It’ll take you an hour.” He hung up. I checked my watch. Onefifteen. I hated it. She read my face. “Trouble?”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Sorry.” I got to my feet, pulled a twenty from my pocket and dropped it on the table.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I finally get you cornered, and—”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I said.

  She narrowed her blue eyes. “You promise?”

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “I’ll hold you to it,” she said.

  “I’ll look forward to it,” I said. “’Bye.”

  On my way to the door, I passed the waitress with our order. She stopped and watched, openmouthed, as I trotted out the door.

  I knew Polster was squirrelly, but I hadn’t figured he’d break this soon. And while I didn’t like the idea of going way out in the boonies by myself, it couldn’t be helped. Going back to the homestead for a bodyguard would take the better part of a half hour I didn’t have. I’d been picking at the scabs of people’s lives, trying to get somebody to bleed, and now that I had my candidate, there was no way I could let it slide. I started the car and pulled out into traffic. I followed Polster’s directions. Out of town toward the east. Couple miles past the Chamber of Commerce A-frame. State Road . Linden Hill Road. Two lanes. Oil over gravel. Potholes big enough to swallow the car. I moved in a zigzag pattern as I avoided the worst of the craters. For the first ten miles or so, rustic homes, some little more than shacks, dotted the sides of the road. After that, as I began to wind up the side of the mountain, all signs of habitation ceased. I pulled the car to the side of the road, got out and opened the trunk. I took off my jacket and slipped into the shoulder holster. The weight of the .-caliber automatic felt reassuring against my side. I covered the gun with my jacket and continued bouncing up the road. Polster was right. It took me a little more than fifty minutes from the time I left the highway until I spotted the stone marker at the top of the mountain. In all that time, I only passed one dwelling, a ramshackle family farm nestled in a break between the hills. A series of gray, leaning buildings that would have been every bit as at home in some Appalachian “holler” as it was among the stumps and scrub oak of the Pacific Northwest. Chickens darted about the front yard and a pair of goats danced on hind legs as they plucked the last withered apples from a tree by the side of the house. Satellite dish.

  The bronze plaque on the marker read, “On this spot in , Captain Horace Framer and a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry from Fort Dungeness, although vastly outnumbered, defeated and dispersed a hostile band of Makaw Indians, thus insuring the safety of settlers on the Northern Olympic Peninsula.” No Polster.

  By two-thirty, I had the plaque memorized, and Polster was yet to show. By three, a thick fog was beginning to settle off the mountaintop and I was fresh out of patience. I backed the car out into the road, managed a three-point turn and starte
d back down, suppressing a chill, hoping that Polster was just late and that maybe I’d see him on my way down. As I passed the farm, I rolled down the window. Suddenly the front door banged open. An old woman carried an oldfashioned washtub out into the front yard, where she threw the gray water to the ground with a slap. She stood for a moment gazing at me as I drove slowly by, then turned and hurried back inside.

  I was still better than ten miles from the highway when I rounded a bumpy left-hand corner and came upon a familiar sight. The Studebaker was trying to back into a small turnout cut into the bank, but didn’t have the power. As the truck lurched backward, a light flickered: A small shower of sparks fell to the ground. I heard the motor cough and then shut down, leaving the truck half in, half out of the road. Whitey got out and pulled his cap from his head. He slapped it against his leg and then jammed it back on. I pulled the Malibu to a stop behind the truck and got out.

  He did a double-take. “What the hell are you doin’ up here?” he asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  He stood with his hands on his hips, his body language telling me to make it good, but I wasn’t in the mood to admit having been on a snipe hunt, so I changed the subject.

  “You having that same problem where the battery won’t stay charged?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think I saw it,” I said. “When you backed up.”

  “Saw what?”

  “Your short.”

  I walked over to the back of the truck. “Right here,” I said, pointing to a recess in the rear bumper.

  “That’s the old backup lights. They don’t work. Not even wired.”

  “This one does. It was flickering the whole time you were trying to back the truck into the turnout. I thought I might have even seen a couple of sparks.”

  Whitey lay down in the road and scooted under the truck. I heard him sputter as mud dropped to the pavement. I listened as he poked around.

  “Well, goddamn,” I heard him mutter. “Hey, ah…”

  “Leo,” I said.

  “Yeah, Leo…in the bed in the toolbox…would you give me the dykes with the red handles and that roll of electrical tape?”