Buffalo Jump Blues (17 page)

The site explained that the Spanish word for highwayman was
bandolero,
and that the English highwayman and the Spanish bandolero were the bad guys that the coachman needed to defeat to stay in the game, because both were attempting to rob the horse-drawn stage with its sacks of shiny coins. The highwayman was depicted as dapper, dressed in black, wearing a tricorn hat and a domino mask. He was armed with twin flintlock pistols. The bandolero wore a brocaded Mexican hat and a long coat. Across his chest were crossed bandoliers that held shiny cartridges, a short sword, a pistol, and a
knife. The highwayman rode a black Arabian stallion, the bandolero a buckskin Criollo.

“Remind you of anyone?” Martha said.

“Theodore Thackery was wearing a gun belt over his bathrobe. Put him in a duster and he's ready to rob the rich.”

Martha nodded. “While you were boiling water I looked at a few other sites for highwayman. Most of them show a man wearing a gun belt or a cartridge bandolier.”

“I should have thought about him earlier,” Sean said. “He lives on the range where he can see the bison from his porch. Who else would be better situated to pass on information about the herd?”

Martha dropped her thumb onto her forefinger, shooting the bandolero on the screen.

“Now him, we talk to,” she said.

T
hey dropped the Land Cruiser at Sean's Tipi and he slept in the passenger seat of the Cherokee all the way to the MacAtee Bridge turnoff, jolting awake as the tires crunched gravel.

“Feel better?” Martha said. She pulled the Jeep into the fisherman's access upriver from the bridge. “Wash your face. I'm going to need you to have your faculties.”

He splashed water at the river, where the exoskeletons of giant salmonflies clung to the bankside willows. A few of the adult insects flew like biplanes on double sets of wings, and Sean caught one that landed on his sleeve. It looked at him with pinhead eyes.

Martha walked up. “I thought you were a purist. No live bait.”

“One can always backslide,” Sean said. He opened his hand, and, after the salmonfly flew across the river, told her about John Running Boy catching a bird in flight.

“Barehanded it, you say? And you didn't tell me? Don't you know what the symbolic meaning of that is?”

“I guess not.”

Her voice held a note of exasperation. “There
isn't
a meaning. Don't you know irony when you hear it? Get your head in the game, Stranny. Let's concentrate on Theodore Thackery.”

“Okay.”

“How do you think we should approach him? I'm inclined not to dance around, just tell him straight out that we know he was with Brady and Levi Karlson at the buffalo jump. Catch him off guard.
He's the kind of man I read as basically honest. If he denies it and he's lying, we'll know it right off the bat.”

“Are you asking me? Or asking me to agree?”

“Both.”

—

Thackery didn't answer the knock.

Martha pointed with her chin. “Is that the same truck that was here last time?”

“The Jimmy? It was night, but I think so.”

“Humpff.”

She called out, no answer, then turned the handle. Unlocked.

The cabin was homestead-era, logs blackened with a hundred years of soot, the chinking, once white, now a butter color with lighter repairs. A kitchen—small, spick-and-span; a bedroom—spartan; a study with maps on the walls, a file cabinet, a desktop computer backed up by a Remington manual typewriter. The living room was done up in western rustic decor with a rough pine table and slat-back couch with Indian print cushions. A buffalo hide was spread on the floor. An upright piano stood against one wall, a gun case stood against another. Pump 12-gauge, a battered bolt-action Winchester in .300 magnum, a .22, a double-barreled fowling gun with Damascus barrels, a Kentucky squirrel rifle that looked original, with a barrel the length of a broom handle. There were spaces for a couple more guns.

Martha spread her fingers on the piano keys and sunk a chord.

“D minor seventh,” she said. She played a jazzy couple of bars, her fingers rippling.

Sean raised his eyes.

“Like I've told you all along, for everything you know about me, there's something you don't. This thing must be hell to keep in tune, set against an outside wall. She fingered one of a dozen framed photographs on top of the piano. A younger version of Theodore
Thackery with long hair and a Fu Manchu, standing with his arm around a woman with bangs peeking from a beret. Martha brought the frame to her nose, which briefly wrinkled.

“His wife?” Sean said.

She nodded. “Walt knew him a bit, they both belonged to the Elks. I heard she died of brain cancer and he sold the place in town. He lives here year round now, has to snowmobile in.”

“Children?”

“Two. Grown and gone.”

“A recluse.”

“I don't know if I'd call him that. I used to say good morning to him in church, back when I was tarting for votes and believed there was someone in charge of the planet.”

“He keeps the place tidy enough,” Sean said.

“That's what worries me. Men who live alone turn feral. The ones who don't have their springs wound too tight.”

She was looking at the titles in a bookcase. Tom McGuane, James Welch, A. B. Guthrie, William Kittredge, Ivan Doig, Richard Hugo. A who's who of Montana writers.

“There's more drinking and depression on this shelf than in the whole of Ireland,” Martha said.

She bent to look at the next shelf down. Histories of the West, biographies of famous mountain men—Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, Liver-Eating Johnson. She picked out a book titled
One Rifle, Sixty Million Buffalo
. It was the memoir of a commercial buffalo hunter named Josiah Small, with a grainy photo on the cover of a mustachioed man holding a Sharps rifle, sitting atop a dead bison bull, other dead scattered across the plain. She replaced the book on the shelf.

“I wonder why Thackery's Sharps isn't in the cabinet with the rest of the guns,” she said. “And the ammunition belt, I don't see it, either.”

“Is this a legal search, Martha?”

“Who's searching? We're making ourselves comfortable until the man comes back from his evening stroll. That reminds me. You being
here, that is a violation. I better have you sign a contract as advisor to the department to make things kosher. The last thing you want to do is have evidence tainted because someone inside the ribbon should have been outside.”

They walked back onto the porch. A wind had picked up, turning the leaves of the sage. The sun was nailed low above the horizon.

“He didn't tell us how fascinated he was by the era, the buffalo hunting,” Sean said. “You gave him an opening as I remember, when you commented on the cartridges in his belt.”

“He said he was interested in rifles from several eras. From his gun cabinet I'd say he was telling the truth.”

“Where do you think he is?”

“That's a dumb question. Ask a smart one.”

“Do you think anything happened to him?”

“Why is that a smart question?”

“Because the truck's here and he isn't, and there's something in the air that's wrong. I have a bad feeling.”

“Not every day ends in death.” She bent over to tie an unruly shoelace. “Let's take a walk.”

They started up a well-worn two-track, heading into the higher elevation. It was nearly half a mile to the forested skirts of the Gravelly Range, stop-and-catch-your-breath country, vistas to all sides. The road kept climbing, climbing, then dipped into a shallow rain wash. Coming up the other side of the wash, they could see the silhouette of the elevated platform from which Thackery said he viewed the game range.

Martha raised her binoculars.

“See anything?” Sean asked.

“No, but it's got some kind of a partial roof. If he's sitting down I wouldn't necessarily see him.”

“We could call out.”

“Little nervous, are we?”

“A little. I already dodged a charge of buckshot in Browning.”

“Take heart. If he's there, that Sharps of his put us in range about a hundred yards back. He wanted us dead, we're already dead.”

—

The viewing platform was thirty feet above the ground, built on a scaffolding supported by three stout timbers crossed at the top and wrapped with belts of rusted steel. A ladder comprised of two-by-four sections nailed onto one of the timbers led to an opening on the underside of the platform.

“That would be slippery as hell with a little snow cover,” Sean said. He suffered a little vertigo just looking up at it.

“I'll take the honor,” Martha said. She unbuckled her utility belt, handed it over, and began to climb. About halfway up, a zephyr of wind took off her hat. Sean chased after it as it flipped over and over, finally trapping it with his shoe. When he picked it up, he noticed that the crown had settled over a bottlenecked cartridge case, mottled and corroded by exposure. He couldn't read the head stamp on the rim, but thought it might be from a Sharps or one of the old rolling block Remingtons of the nineteenth century. Frost heaves unearthed such artifacts all the time, arrowheads as often as cartridge casings, the bloody history of the land written in stone and brass. He idly rolled the case in his fingers.

“You all right up there?” he called out.

No answer. Sean pocketed the case. Ten minutes passed before he saw her descending from the platform. She climbed down, a more sober woman than when she'd climbed up, and she'd been sober then. She buckled her utility belt on and squared the hat.

“Remember what I said? ‘Not every day ends in death'? I was wrong.”

Sean grimaced.

“It's a pisser being right,” Martha said. “You get a premonition about things like this and it's confirmed, you feel like the dead are singling you out to talk to. I've been there. Welcome to the club.”

“Suicide?” Sean was looking up at the platform.

“Looks like it. He's got the Sharps and he's wearing the ammo belt. One sock off, like you'd do to work a trigger with your toe. I'm going to go back to the cabin to use the landline. You want to have a look, have one. You know not to touch anything.”

The platform was bigger than it had looked to Sean from ground level, long enough for two men to lie down in nose to toe and tall enough to stand in without banging your head on the roof, which was elevated on poles so that there was an open space all around at about sitting eye level. A spotting scope set up on a tripod, a folding chair, a two-by-ten affixed to one wall with braces that made a work surface—it was as tidy as the cabin. A comfortable setup, Sean concluded, though the platform swayed disconcertingly in the wind.

A metal clipboard clamping a stack of papers drew Sean's attention. The top sheet was a photocopy of a topographic map of the game range, scribbled on in pen. Sean recalled Martha saying that Thackery had showed a stack of similar maps to Harold. No personal touches except a campy calendar called “Babes, Boobs and Bait,” Miss July wearing hip boots and a smile as dead as the salmon she displayed with her fingers hooked in its gills.

Thackery was dead, too. As dead as the salmon and not as pretty and smelling worse. He was on the floor of the platform, on his side but in a sitting position, his legs hooked around the seat of the chair, which had tipped onto its side. Stranahan only had a partial view of his face, but the eye he could see was bulged out like a hard-boiled egg. He could have seen the back of the head if there'd been a back of the head to see. He was surprised the birds hadn't been at him, but the roof must have shielded the blood from view.

Sean pried his eyes from the carnage. The spotting scope was set up to look south, toward the slope of land where Thackery had talked about seeing the buffalo. If that was his last view of the world, Sean thought, it was a damned good one. His eyes tracked up to the roof, a shaft of sunlight lancing like a sword through a ragged hole the
shape of a playing card. Blood spatter on the boards there, bits of matter that might be brains.

When Stranahan climbed down the steps, Martha was grinding up in the Jeep with the hubs locked.

“Harold and Gigi are coming,” she said. “Walt, too. And the coroner, just in case he's playing possum. Meanwhile, I got sandwiches and iced tea.”

They ate Martha's elk loaf sandwiches in silence, sitting with their backs to the tires and tossing the tea thermos back and forth. When they were done eating, Sean flipped her the old cartridge case.

“That look like the ones in his belt?”

“Could be.”

“I found it under your hat.”

Martha grunted noncommittally.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“The guy up the hill? I'd rather not speculate until there's more to speculate with.”

“I mean us. Strange, isn't it? Harold's on his way and you and him are together when it should have been you and me.”

“Now you bring this up.”

“I know. We keep missing each other. Misunderstandings and all.”

“I could ask about you and Katie.”

“There's skin I can't touch and a mind I can't know. Every time could be the last time and maybe already is.”

“Love makes philosophers out of all of us.”

She flipped crumbs off the wax paper she'd wrapped her sandwich in and stood up. “Here come the troops.”

H
arold Little Feather leaned against his truck, his arms folded across his chest as Martha talked.

“You met the man,” she said. “What's your take on him?”

“Struck me as the kind of a man who lives by a code. Be hard to live with, that kind of man, but strong in his head, you'd know where you stood with him.”

“It's the strong who have the guts for suicide.”

Harold nodded, looking off. “I'll try to make myself useful, see what there is to see while Gigi's in the treehouse.”

When he'd walked away, Martha shook her head. “He never once met my eyes. We're in the doghouse, you and me. Harold's pissed because he wasn't in the loop and you didn't consult him about going to the reservation, and Gigi's got a bug because we climbed to the platform without wearing gloves.”

They stood there, feeling chastised, while the sun dropped toward the ridges of the Gravellys. The duly elected death pronouncer, a pathologist named Dirk Stanislaus, arrived in a caravan with Walter Hess. He climbed up, climbed down, handed Martha a piece of paper with the official declaration of death, and said he'd be back in a couple hours to cart the body to the morgue. He had to go see if a woman in Ennis who'd cooked her head in an oven was done medium or medium rare.

“We're not going anywhere,” Martha told him, and when he was gone, “That man isn't the least bit funny. I miss Doc. I mean, I see him in the morgue now and then, but I miss him in the field.”

“I know what you mean,” Walt said. “But the thing about life, Marth, it changes once ever' seven years, I saw it on a show. And Doc, he was in the field about seven years, that's my recollection. So it was time for him to move along.”

“Is that right? How many years have you been on the force?”

“Eight.”

“You're past due.”

Sean heard his name called and spit out the stalk of grass he was chewing. Harold was glassing into the distance and took down his binoculars and handed them over. “Look about three hundred yards across the way, to the right of the little juniper.”

Sean raised the ten-powers. “Stack of hay bales.”

“That's it. I found these.” He handed Sean a pair of peeled sticks bound together near one end with rawhide lacing.

“Shooting sticks?”

Harold nodded. “The kind buffalo hunters used. This was his range. He'd put up targets against the bales and shoot from here. I found three cartridge cases, stamped .45-70. That's Thackery's caliber. You look close, they all have hairline splits at the neck, pressure cracks, so that makes them unsafe to reload. My guess is he pocketed the good ones and left the ones he had no further use for.”

Sean placed the cartridge he'd found under Martha's hat alongside the .45-70s. It was close to the size, but a little longer. He told Harold where he'd found it.

“And you figure what?”

“Nothing,” Sean said. “It's just an old case.”

“Lot of them around.”

Harold planted the sticks in a V and knelt behind them, aiming an imaginary weapon. “We okay?” he said without glancing up. “About Martha?”

“Martha makes her own choices.”

Harold squeezed the invisible trigger. “Next time,” he said, “give me a heads-up before you go to the reservation. You look like you
could be half Indian but you aren't. White people don't want to be seen as having prejudice, so they go out of their way to treat Indians like they're anyone else. And that's right about half the time. But there's a fundamentally different outlook, especially with the older generation. I can help you navigate that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I see Gigi's back on the ground. Let's see what we're dealing with.”

—

“So did he eat it or was he force-fed?” Martha drummed her knuckles on the hood of the Jeep. “Don't give me any wait-and-see on this.”

“He's what we call a stargazer.” Georgeanne Wilkerson pushed two fingers against the soft skin under her jaw. “That's where the muzzle was. Last thing you see is sky.”

“So, suicide?”

“All I can say is he didn't have half his head blown off before he reached the top of the steps. Nobody could have got him up there without leaking evidence. The gun, the positioning of the body, the hole in the roof, that could have been arranged.”

“I thought I saw powder burns on his face, what I could see of it.”

“I saw that, too. I'm not a gun expert, but those old Sharps used black powder, which doesn't burn completely as it passes through the barrel. There's a lot of residue at the site of the wound, which of course is consistent with suicide. And I measured the distance between the muzzle and the trigger of the rifle, and then I measured between his toe and his chin in a sitting position, just to make sure it was possible. That gun's got a really long barrel, but it's short enough for him to have shot himself in that manner.”

“Did you bag his mitts?”

“And the foot. But you don't get as much residue on your body from firing a rifle as a handgun. And you can wrap a man's hands around a weapon, or his toe, and get the GSR, so it isn't conclusive.”

“All right. What kind of time frame?”

“He's still in rigor, so within the past forty or fifty hours. The facial muscles are starting to soften and the finger joints exhibit secondary laxity, so I'd say the earlier part of that range.”

“He was alive Friday morning,” Martha said. “Sean and I talked to him.”

“Then not too long after that.”

“You can have that effect on people,” Walt said.

Martha glared at him. “You're overdue for the change, remember? I can facilitate a transfer.”

Sean interrupted the testy silence by asking Wilkerson what she'd done with the clipboard. She got it from the backpack she'd carried up into the observation platform, removed it from a Ziploc, and placed it on the hood of the Jeep.

“I saw this the first time I came,” Harold said. “He showed me the page where he saw the herd.”

“What I'm wondering,” Sean said, “is if that was the only time he saw bison here. Okay if I look?” Wilkerson nodded, handing over blue latex gloves.

He started leafing back through the pages. “These are photocopies of a map of the game range,” he said. “They're all the same map, but each one has a different date. He marked down where he saw game—species, number, time of day, weather, pretty detailed. See the circles?” He pointed.

“What are you getting at?” Martha said.

“What I'm getting at is that if Thackery was the mastermind behind the jump, he had to have known that the bison were going to show up on the game range. That means he had to have seen them there before. How else would he know where to plan the jump? He was waiting for them to come back and then give the word.”

Ettinger nodded that she understood.

Stranahan paused at a map dated three weeks before the jump. The map was marked with three red circles, the larger one with a “7” written inside it and the two smaller ones, nearby, each with a “1.”

He read aloud. “June twenty-one. Six a.m. Seven cows, two bulls. One cow with broken left horn.”

He leafed back. Another sighting June second—seven bison. Then nothing until way back in April. Five. In all three sightings, there was a cow with a broken horn. Sean pointed out the common thread.

“She's the matriarch,” Harold said. “She was leading excursions into her ancestors' territory. When the people hunted buffalo, it was the old cow they killed first. The others would mill around until they shot them, too.”

“I wonder why they didn't stay?” Sean said. “They would have been shot if they had stayed, but they didn't know that.”

Martha frowned. “Maybe sleeping beauty up on his perch drove them back into the timber, knowing what would happen if he didn't.”

“Then turn around and organize a buffalo jump a couple months later?” Walt's expression was skeptical.

“Not so crazy from his point of view, according to what Sean told me,” Martha said. “John Running Boy said the bison were sacrificing themselves, that killing them would shine a spotlight on the plight of wild bison trying to return to public lands. It doesn't have to make sense to us if it made sense to them.”

She tapped her foot. “We're losing track of the next step,” she said. “What do people who commit suicide do before pulling the trigger? What, nobody?”

Walt raised his hand, like a child waiting to be called on by the teacher.

“They leave a note,” he said. Walt, who had investigated one hundred eighty-four murders during his tenure as a homicide detective in Chicago. He swallowed his Adam's apple. “I've seen it on TV, Marth.”

She could be around him another eight years and never would get his sense of humor.

—

Two hours into their looking for a note, or anything else that could shed light on Thackery's death, the coroner returned for the body. Sean and Harold lowered it from the platform on ropes while Walt shone a flashlight from underneath. The corpse came down stiff, a protective bag over the head, looking like a man sitting in a chair. They watched the taillights ruby their way down the valley, leaving the world engulfed in a vast darkness.

“I could use a brew at Tits and Tails,” Walt said. “I don't know about you young-uns, but it would go a ways toward washing out the taste of death.”

“Gigi's the one who says when we're done here,” Martha pointed out. “Are we done, Gigi?”

“You are. I'm not. But I'll come back in the morning when there's light.”

“All right, then.” Martha shook her head in disapproval. “But I really don't see what looking at a woman in a goldfish bowl does for a man.”

“It lifts his spirits,” Walt said.

“Along with another part of his anatomy, if I know men,” Gigi said. She giggled, never more than a breath away from revisiting the girl she'd once been.

“Humpff,” Martha said.

At the bar twenty minutes later, she put a question to the table: “If it is what it looks like, why did he pull the trigger?” She cleared her throat while several sets of eyes pried themselves away from the Queen of the Waters.

“I'd bang her like a screen door in a lightning storm, and I'm not even bi-curious,” Gigi said.

“Thanks for that observation,” Martha said. She waited for someone to fill the vacuum.

“I'll give you a couple scenarios,” Walt said. “First, the guy felt responsible for what happened at the cliffs. A situation he had a hand in turned south and a man died. Whether he's the fella sent the arrow
or it was one of those brothers, doesn't change the outcome. He couldn't go on living knowing he was responsible.”

“What's the other scenario?”

“He wasn't the highwayman. You said he had malaria. Maybe it was getting the better of him. Or maybe he was lonely and the animals wouldn't talk back to him. Folks top themselves off for all kinds of reasons.”

“Men who live alone are statistically at high risk for suicide,” Gigi noted.

Martha set her beer on a bar napkin. “Any reason we should waste our breath talking about murder?” She held up a hand before Wilkerson could respond. “Besides the fact that we don't have enough evidence to rule it out? You still have the table, Walt.”

Walt shrugged. “Whoever killed Hixon would be looking to cover his tracks. Thackery was a wit. He'd have a bull's-eye on his back.”

“How's it done? She cocked an index finger at Wilkerson.

“Easy. Someone could shoot from the ground when he's in the platform. That accounts for the angle. Then the shooter climbs up, wraps the victim's toe around the trigger, and recreates the same shot, except with the muzzle pressed to the original wound, so that there's GSR and it looks like suicide.”

“Wouldn't there have to be a hole in the bottom of the platform from the first shot?”

“Not if the victim was toward the front of it. There could be a clear shot up toward the chin. The killer could have been some distance from the platform.”

“Could forensics determine if there were two shots?”

“Maybe. The bullets for the buffalo rifle are lead; they don't have copper jackets. If the autopsy reveals fragments of copper in the body, that's proof of a shot from a second weapon. Or if I find radiation fractures that run the wrong way, or fingerprints that don't match, or blood spatter that's inconsistent with the angle. I'll be able to tell you more tomorrow.”

Martha nodded. “When you go back to the cabin, keep looking for a note. I know that a third of suicides don't leave one, but he's a guy who was demoted because he couldn't keep his trap shut. He'd leave a note. And on that note . . .” She crooked her finger toward the waitress. “Another round for whoever wants one. I have to get my beauty sleep. Sean, are you coming?”

“No. I'll bunk with the Liars and Fly Tiers at the clubhouse. I'd like to go back to the scene tomorrow with Gigi, if that's okay, so there's no sense driving all the way back to Bridger.”

“Okay with you, Gigi?” Martha said.

Wilkerson said she'd enjoy the company. She offered to give him a ride to the clubhouse, so she'd know where to pick him up in the morning.

“Well, hell, if everybody's leaving,” Walt said, and they all walked out under the neon mermaid. Sean saw that Martha and Harold were not walking together and did not exchange words as they climbed into their vehicles. Trouble in paradise? It was late and he was too tired to care.

—

Martha Ettinger stood on the earthen floor of her barn. She was looking at the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette. It was on the ground, in front of the stall for the old milk cow and the baby bison. The stall door was open. So was the double door of the barn. Martha had closed both before leaving, and she'd swept the floor where the cigarette was. She felt a cold rage burn behind her eyes.