Hawk Moon Page 2

  The only thing that didn't fit in this graceful painting of the countryside was the casino, a long, sloping building crosshatched with neon and blaring with loud tinny country and western music. The parking lot was half-full, and this on a weekday morning. On weekends and holidays, traffic was backed up three miles to the highway. Occasionally, they were even bringing in lounge acts from Vegas. I had no doubt that Wayne Newton would someday be out here, shameless in headdress and singing ersatz "Indian" songs. Some of the tribe, Iron Crow included, didn't like the casino, objecting that the place made them too much like the white men who had exploited their own tribesmen all these years — but the casino was bringing new and prosperous life to the reservation, and who could object to that? There was a new health clinic, a new activity center on the reservation, and several houses were planned for La Costas with young families. And while a group of white businessmen managed the casino now, tribal members hoped to take over complete management in five years.

  We flew on, easy, steady, safe, Iron Crow concerned only once when the engine sputtered a little.

  But most of the time he was positively beatific, a veritable bird, as one with this old open-cockpit barnstormer.

  When I told him we needed to go back, he frowned and looked as unhappy as any other little kid might when you told him you were going to take the magic away.

  "I didn't wet my pants," Iron Crow smiled at his sister.

  "I know," she said. "That was the first thing I looked for." They both laughed.

  Iron Crow was still a little wobbly when we got back to the car, flying in a biplane making some people unsteady on their feet for a time. Two teenagers from the small airport took care of my plane for me. I'd flown over from my place near Iowa City and then rented this Chevrolet for a few days.

  On the way back to town, Silver Moon wondered aloud if she might not try a little flying, too.

  "You'd be scared, Sis," Iron Crow said in his older-brother tone.

  "Bet I wouldn't be," Silver Moon said, taking up the mantle of little sister.

  They were in the back seat, at their own choice. Stocky as they were, maybe they felt they needed the extra room.

  "So you enjoyed it, Iron Crow?" I said as I drove.

  "Very much. Could we go again?"

  I noticed that he still hadn't taken his Snoopy helmet off. Apparently he liked wearing it.

  "If I'm around here long enough, sure."

  "Maybe we could do a roll or two."

  I smiled at him in the mirror. "I think we'd better wait a while for that one."

  Silver Moon laughed. "I think you've started something here, Robert Payne."

  "Maybe I have," I smiled.

  And that was when we heard it, the siren of a boxy white ambulance racing down Moon Valley's main street. West, it was headed. Toward the casino.

  "Serves them right," Iron Crow said, nodding to the ambulance. Not all the La Costas had been in favor of building the casino. "Goddamn gambling, anyway. It's not right."

  "Pardon his French," Silver Moon said.

  We drove on for another five minutes, countryside becoming the dusty streets of a small Iowa town, and Iron Crow said, "Oh shoot, I did it, Sis."

  "You sure did," she said.

  She leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder with a stubby, insistent finger. "He did it, Mr. Payne. He peed his pants."

  "You shouldn't've forgot my diapers, Sis," Iron Crow said. Did I tell you that, Robert, that she forgot to buy me my diapers?"

  I grinned at Silver Moon in the mirror. "Yeah, I guess I do remember you saying something about that, Iron Crow." Silver Moon grinned back.

  Chapter 2

  After I dropped Iron Crow and Silver Moon off at the settlement, where they lived in a handsome new house trailer thanks to the money that the casino had started paying each member of the tribe, I walked back to my car in time to see a group of young children doing a ceremonial dance behind the small concrete block building that was their grade school. Casino profits probably accounted for the new roof that was just now being put on. The tar smelled hot and rubbery in the sunlight.

  I'd learned just enough La Costa to understand that the ancient dance the boys and girls were doing celebrated the journey of the sun as it helped sustain the men and women of the tribe who built new buffalo-hide teepees before the snows came.

  The children sang in strong, proud voices in the dusty schoolyard, symbolizing with the quick, precise movements of their fingers and hands the long distant days when the tribe had lived in round bark lodges called wickiups, and when their clothing was made of deerskin, and when their headdress was a tuft of horsehair dyed red and tied in the manner of a scalp lock, with the rest of their heads shaved clean.

  They joined hands now and began moving in a circle, singing of autumn and the hunts of winter that lay ahead.

  I had just reached my car when I saw — in one of those terrible frozen moments, like a horrific snapshot — the accident that was about to happen.

  A girl of perhaps five had run into the asphalt lane angling past the front of the school. She was all flashy brown legs and sudden startled scream. From the opposite direction came a panel truck moving roughly twenty miles per hour. Driver slammed on brakes. Girl froze. Truck skidded. Wouldn't be able to stop in time.

  Brown blur — brown of khaki, starched khaki, crisp tan law-enforcement khaki — a female officer who was slender, pretty, Indian. I got all this in a glimpse. But most importantly, she was quick and agile. It was a perfect TV moment, the way she leapt for the little girl, scooped her up like a football, rolled her up tight for protection, and then dove off to the side of the road. Tumbling.

  Safe.

  The little girl exploded into tears as the officer released her.

  Three people, stout with authority and middle-age, came running from the school to snatch up the little girl again. The officer, finished here, started dusting herself off as she walked to her car which happened to be parked next to mine.

  "Man," I said. "That was brave as hell."

  She glanced at me and just kind of shrugged slender shoulders. She had the face of a sad doll, equally perfect in shape and sorrow. There was erotic intelligence in the brown eyes and lopsided smile.

  "I guess I don't take compliments very well," she said. "Anyway, I was just doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm the reservation cop and the little girl lives here."

  I wanted to say more but she didn't let me — and clearly didn't want me to — slipping neatly into her car and backing away before I'd even opened my door.

  She turned west, back to the drab gray expanse of reservation.

  "You see it?"

  "Guess I'm not sure what you're talking about."

  "The fight."

  "Guess I didn't," I said.

  He leaned forward. Glanced along the counter to see if any of the waitresses or patrons happened to be Native American. "Two bucks got into it."

  "Drunk as all hell."

  "That was the ambulance I heard earlier?"

  Leaned even closer. "Kicked the living shit out of each other. I didn't see it personally, but a couple of the guys in the casino said it was one hell of a fight. He says they went ten minutes. Blood all over the place. One of them's in a coma. That's what the ambulance was for."

  "I see."

  A smirk. "Guess those bucks still know how to fight, huh?"

  "Guess they do."

  As a former FBI agent — I worked for six years as a psychological profiler back when nobody, not even many of the people in the Bureau, knew what it was — I was not exactly a political liberal. But I didn't like the way this city man with his cheap dusty suit and gravy-flecked tie talked about the Indians here. He might have been handling feces, there was such displeasure in his voice.

  "Had a brother lived up here after he got out of the service," the man went on. The half-whisper again. "Said they were the laziest, dumbest bastards he'd ever seen." He shook his head. "Said they couldn't handle the
ir liquor worth a damn, either. That's not a cliché, you know — about Indians and liquor, I mean. They can't handle it for beans." Shook his head. "No, sir. Not for beans. I come up here maybe twice a month to play a little blackjack and I always see a couple of bucks gettin' into it with each other. Just the way they are, I guess. Poor bastards probably can't even help it."

  There were a lot of white people in these parts who thought like this man; people who begrudged the little our government gave the Indians after we had slaughtered them and put them on reservations. Not that the Indians were perfect. Some had certainly been killers and savages; and some of them who lived on reservations today were thieves and thugs and murderers. But reservation life was not easy and a whole lot of white folks didn't seem to understand that — maybe on purpose. On reservations, unemployment tended to run up to forty per cent and few teenagers got an education beyond high school. Indian males were three times more likely to die of cirrhosis than white males. And the suicide rate among teenagers on some reservations approached fifteen per cent. The incidence of addiction to liquor and hard drugs was depressing. I knew all this because of the book I was writing, the one I'd promised my wife I'd get around to and never did. Not while she was alive, anyway.

  I had an egg-salad sandwich and a glass of iced tea for lunch. I also had a new pal on the stool next to me. Leather-stocking had taken off in search of casino riches. My new buddy wore a green John Deere cap and wanted to talk about last week's murder in town here.

  "Cut her nose off."

  "That's what I heard," I said.

  "The Indians used to do that."

  "I know."

  "So did the Egyptians. Long time ago, I mean."

  "Uh-huh."

  I had been going to treat myself to a slice of apple pie with maybe a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side but somehow the conversation killed my appetite. I wanted to be back up in my old biplane watching Iron Crow in his Snoopy helmet grinning his ass off.

  I decided I must have unwittingly taken the unlucky stool at the counter. The one where people didn't let you eat your egg-salad sandwich in peace. The one where people wanted to talk about the most depressing things they could think of.

  With my luck, the next guy who sat down would want to tell me how Attila the Hun had once slaughtered more than 3,000 children in a single afternoon.

  I paid my bill and left.

  What you have to remember about the Indians is that they saw their own kind slaughtered to a degree that is unthinkable in most cultures. At Sand Creek, for example, the US Army, in less than thirty minutes, killed 123 Indians — of whom (according to one observer) 98 were women and children.

  Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

  May 7, 1903

  Just about the entire Cedar Rapids Police Department — all twenty-one members — turned up at the murder scene that night.

  The reason was simple enough. Cedar Rapids didn't get that many murders, and rarely one as savage as this.

  Her name had been Rain Tree and she had been twenty years old and she had been quite beautiful as young Indian women went. Had been. After stabbing her three times in the chest, once directly in the heart, her killer had then cut off her nose.

  Anna Tolan had been spending a quiet night at Mrs. Goldman's boarding house, reading a new book she'd ordered on "scientific detection." Though everybody on the force laughed about all the books she read on the subject, Anna believed that in this century pioneers such as the French rogue-turned-detective named Vidocq, Sir Edmund Henderson of Scotland Yard and Alan Pinkerton of the United States would all be proved correct — that murderers could be brought to justice through scientific means. Oh yes, and there was one other, perhaps the most important of all: a Frenchman named Marie-Francois Goron, who had dubbed his new science "Criminology."

  Only Mrs. Goldman encouraged Anna. Mrs. Goldman's husband had been a high-school teacher and an educated man before his untimely death six years earlier . . . and so Mrs. Goldman was open to exciting new scientific concepts. As she always said, "Just walk down the streets of Cedar Rapids and look around. Electric lights and telephones and motorcycles and electric streetcars — who could have predicted these things?"

  After the death of her parents in a terrible flood, Anna had moved to Cedar Rapids and gone to live in Mrs. Goldman's boarding house. The stylish, sixty-ish woman became a second mother to Anna, helping her through the worst of the ridicule and scorn when she decided to become a police officer, something many people in Cedar Rapids, including several fundamentalist ministers, publicly and angrily criticized. Mrs. Goldman had also introduced Anna to the women's movement. Anna now spoke openly of a woman's right to vote.

  Anna, too, went to the murder scene that night.

  The body was found near the Lymington brick factory on a leg of the Cedar River. Lanterns lit the scene now. More than 200 citizens stood around the periphery of the scene, gawking.

  The Cedar Rapids constable's uniform consisted of a blue double-breasted jacket, matching trousers, black high-laced shoes, and a hat modeled on the French kepi. Half a dozen men dressed thus moved about the murder scene now. A sheet had been thrown over the corpse. By now, the sheet was badly stained with blood.

  Anna made her way through the onlookers and walked up to Chief Ryan. As usual, he smiled when he saw her. His only daughter had drowned when she was eleven. It was said that slight, pretty Anna Tolan was his substitute daughter.

  Anna wore corduroy pants, a white sweater and a blue jacket. From her right hand hung a large burlap bag that some mistook as an ugly purse. It wasn't.

  Chief Ryan recognized the bag for what it was immediately. "Better wait till they get through doing their own kind of work, Anna. Then you can go to it."

  "No eyewitnesses?"

  "None so far. But you know how it is. Somebody may wander in later tonight."

  "Do we know anything about the girl?"

  The Chief shook his white-haired head. "Not much. A few people said they saw her in town shopping from time to time but that's about all."

  Anna was already getting stares from the other officers. They looked at what she did — her methodical investigation of the crime scene — as something akin to voodoo.

  The Chief said, "How'd you like that new moving picture at the Nickelodeon, when that fella goes over the falls in the barrel?"

  "You wouldn't be trying to find out if I had another date with Trace Wydmore, would you?"

  "Well, I guess my wife sort of did ask me at supper tonight. How things were going with you and Trace, I mean."

  She would have smiled but somehow that didn't seem appropriate with the bloody body of a murdered girl only a few yards away. "Let's just say they're going at their own pace."

  "He'd make a fine husband."

  "Yes, he would.

  The Wydmores were Cedar Rapids' most prominent family, instrumental in building the opera house that was the largest and most sumptuous outside of Chicago; responsible too for bringing the best architects, doctors, educators and craftsmen here. And Trace Wydmore, second eldest of the new generation of Wydmores, had been almost painfully in love with Anna for more than five years.

  "Well, you keep me posted."

  "I will," Anna said. "I promise."

  Three hours later, the lanterns died like summer night fireflies, and the body was taken away by a horse-drawn wagon belonging to a funeral home — the clip-clop of hooves sounding lonely on the midnight air. Anna was left alone with her tiny lantern and her large burlap satchel, inside of which she had all the things she required for a "criminological" (gosh, but she loved the sound of that word!) examination of the crime scene.

  Anna did not return to Mrs. Goldman's until dawn shone coral in the sky above the Cedar River.

  Chapter 3

  A casino is not unlike a submarine in that it's a very artificial environment that makes you lose all sense of time and weather.

  I am in no way a gambler. Back in the days when I was trai
ning to be an FBI agent, I generally passed up the poker games to read a Rex Stout or watch a "Mary Tyler Moore" rerun. When I was still a teenager I had an uncle who lost his car, his house and finally his wife to gambling. He ended up the loudest and saddest drunk at all the family reunions. I couldn't even play Go Fish with my nieces and nephews without thinking of Uncle Bob.

  And yet this afternoon, first at the slot machines and then at keno and finally at the blackjack table, I spent more than six hours and $350 proving that I really was not a good— successful — gambler at all.

  Not that anybody noticed.

  Farmers, college students, local merchants, housewives, blue-haired ladies and bald-headed men on bus tours, cold-eyed professional gamblers, factory workers, schoolteachers, nurses, off-duty cops — they all had their own gambling problems to worry about in a casino that never closed and never quit offering the promise of big quick money for those stupid enough to believe it. This was the place the James Gang had always dreamed of. Whenever the Pinkertons got too close, Jesse and Frank James often elected to scoot across the Missouri border into Iowa, lay low for a time. The only trouble, Frank always lamented, was that there was no place in Iowa worth robbing. If only they could have seen this casino — vast, bright, noisy, packed, soulless as a politician and bursting with enough greenbacks to bribe a Pentagon general.

  People talked, laughed, belched, coughed, cursed and sang along with all the country and western songs about heartbreak and deceit. People smiled, frowned, winked, grimaced, teared up and rolled their eyes. People ate tacos, hot dogs, ham sandwiches, pizza slices and egg rolls. People wore orange shirts and green pants and red socks and yellow neckties and pink eye shadow and black eyes.

  And in the course of it, the entire six-hour course, I developed a vague tolerance of, if not downright excitement about, gambling. Only when I went into the men's room to take out my bladder and slam it against the wall — after seven Diet Pepsis such drastic measures are required — did I realize what time it was. And realize what I'd done: lost $350. This was the guy who'd always put at least half his schoolboy paper-route money in the bank. Frugal, some said. Cheap was the word some others preferred. $350!