Death Along the Spirit Road (22 page)
Read Death Along the Spirit Road Online
Authors: C. M. Wendelboe
“Can I help you?” The receptionist smiled easily at him.
Manny unfolded his badge wallet. She looked first to the ID, then to Manny and handed it back. “I’d like to talk with Clara Downing.”
“Ms. Downing is awfully busy,” the receptionist stammered, then stopped and took a deep breath before continuing, “I can set up an appointment for you.”
“Is she in?”
She shot a glance at a door marked with Jason Red Cloud’s brass nameplate. “She’s so busy today, with the death of Mr. Red Cloud and getting the firm in order for auditors.”
Manny leaned over the counter. “I’ve been calling here every day to talk with her. Now do I need to issue a summons for her to appear at the Rapid City FBI field office?”
She dropped her eyes and stood. “This way, please.” She escorted Manny through an enormous door that appeared far older than any he ever saw in a modern building. One gouge on the door looked like a giant chain had drug itself across the wood, leaving a deep, insulting wound. Another scar may have come from a huge fork once imbedded in the wood. Worms had gotten to the pith and eaten holes in random fashion on the front of the door.
Manny stepped onto hardwood floors, glossy and reflecting the sunlight from a row of windows. The floors matched the door, with nail holes and gouges in deep planks of varying shades of brown and gray. The wood had been used hard for a hundred years before being salvaged for this office.
One wall was paneled with decrepit, cracked, graying barn wood. A barbed-wire display hung on the wall, completing its Western motif. The wall opposite the windows hosted the heads of animals: deer and antelope, black and grizzly bears, a mountain lion bigger than any Manny had seen on the reservation.
But it was the last display that fascinated Manny the most. A wall-to-wall glass case containing original Lakota artifacts stood in front of a painted mural depicting Plains Sioux Indian life. A forty-tipi
tiospaye
camped along a meandering creek. Off to the right, Indians on horseback hunted buffalo, their bows cocked at the ready. Farther yet another group crouched low, bows across their backs and arrows clenched in their hands, and stalked enemy Crow warriors.
tiospaye
camped along a meandering creek. Off to the right, Indians on horseback hunted buffalo, their bows cocked at the ready. Farther yet another group crouched low, bows across their backs and arrows clenched in their hands, and stalked enemy Crow warriors.
Manny gasped. Next to the hunting scene hung an original Ghost Shirt, the brain-tanned deerskin adorned with painted geometric patterns across the breast and sleeves. He was no expert in Lakota artifacts, but he thought the notation “1890” was correct. Images came to him: unarmed women, along with the elderly and children, fleeing cavalry troopers at the massacre of Wounded Knee. He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer for the innocents who journeyed the Spirit Road before their time.
Beside the Ghost Shirt hung a quiver, which was beaded to match the shirt, the same design that the warriors had on their backs as they stalked the enemy. Four flint-tipped arrows jutted from the quiver.
Manny squinted. An original Colt Army .45 caliber revolver, the patina faded on the case-hardened frame, dangled from an elk-horn peg beside the Ghost Shirt. The checkering on the chipped plastic grips was worn smooth from years of hard use, and the revolver’s front sight tilted to one side where it had once struck something hard. Dried powder marks caked the front of the cylinder, but it showed no rust and looked as if it could have been picked up right there and fired.
In the bottom of the display, a small leather pouch sat on a driftwood shelf beside a red catlinite clay pipe, from a Pipestone, Minnestota, quarry. Teeth marks made perhaps a hundred years ago were deeply cast into the pipe’s stem. A beaded turtle medicine pouch like the one Manny carried around his neck was hanging from a rust-browned Springfield .45-70 rifle. Manny imagined a Seventh Cavalry trooper firing it at the Greasy Grass.
“Jason liked old things,” a voice called out. A woman in her midthirties faced him, tall as he was even as she leaned against the doorway with her arms crossed. A wry smile that accentuated her high cheekbones played at the corners of her mouth, and a single hoop earring peeked out from behind sandy hair. Her hand thrust out from her gray pinstriped business suit. “Clara Downing. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Now how would you be expecting me when you haven’t returned any of my calls?”
“What calls, Agent Tanno?”
“If I was one to jump to conclusions, I’d think you had something to hide.”
“What calls?” she repeated.
Manny took his cell phone from his pocket and checked his outgoing calls. “I tried to reach you here four times in the last couple days. You promised to call me back, but you didn’t.”
Clara glanced at the closed door and her jaw tightened. “Emily sometimes takes it upon herself to protect me.”
“Do you need protecting?”
“Maybe,” she grinned. “You volunteering?”
“If it means getting straight answers from Jason Red Cloud’s executive assistant, then I’m volunteering.”
Clara smiled. “Then straight answers it will be, and I’ll deal with Emily later. Now can we start fresh?” Clara continued to smile, and her bright eyes disarmed Manny.
“Fair enough. Manny Tanno. You started to tell me about Jason’s collection here.”
“Clara Downing.” She stepped to the display case and tapped the glass with her ring finger. She was single. “Jason was an ardent collector of all things ancient belonging to the Lakota.” Then she paused. “I’m sorry. I seem to have forgotten you are Lakota also.”
“No need to apologize. Please continue.”
“Jason collected these antiquities at great expense. The Ghost Shirt was such a powerful symbol of the Lakota plight; it took him years to get an old man on the Rosebud to finally sell it. And he claimed the medicine bundle was Chief Red Cloud’s own. Jason said he had thoroughly researched it, said the pouch wasn’t buried with the chief there at the Holy Rosary cemetery, and he just had to have it. He claimed that it was part of his heritage. But Jason never was related to Chief Red Cloud, like he boasted.”
She paused. He wanted to respond, but her beauty distracted him and he fought to come up with something that would sound brilliant. But he couldn’t.
“They tell me you have an uncanny ability to look at cases objectively,” she said. “To shuffle through the heap of information and come away with just the right pieces that fit the puzzle.”
“Who are ‘they’ ?”
Clara laughed. “
Newsweek
for one. CNN for another. They say you’re the only one who can catch Jason’s killer.”
Newsweek
for one. CNN for another. They say you’re the only one who can catch Jason’s killer.”
Manny’s face warmed. “I landed the assignment, so I’m stuck on the reservation until I solve the murder.”
“Is that so bad?”
Manny shrugged. “I didn’t leave anything on Pine Ridge that I needed to come back to.”
He was speaking frankly to this woman he had just met, and he checked himself. “I take it this was Jason’s office?”
“It was.” She motioned for Manny to sit in a black and white cowhide chair that rested on a tattered rag rug. Manny placed his arms on stag-horn armrests while she sat on the edge of Jason’s desk. “What do you want to know, Manny?”
He hadn’t told her to call him by his first name.
“You’re in charge of the Red Cloud Corporation now?”
Clara smiled. “As much as I have been the last five years. Jason called me his executive assistant, but I had to be more than that. I had to do a lot of his day-to-day paper shuffling. Office acrobatics. You know, parry a bill collector here, fend off a paper server there. Protect the ‘Donald Trump of the West.’ ”
“So it’s true, he had made poor investments. Enough that he was on the brink of losing the business?”
“He almost filed Chapter 11 last year, but we pulled through.” She turned to her phone and ordered coffee. “Jason was a gifted architect, but as a businessman he was a dismal failure.”
“This is the first time I heard that. I’d always heard he was some kind of icon for Oglala prosperity.”
“He had his successes, but I took the blame for any failures of the business.”
“Even if the failure was his fault?”
She nodded. “If people blamed him for botched projects, they might not have faith in future Red Cloud ventures. In the business world that Jason inhabited, I was the assistant that screwed things up now and again.”
“So that’s why she thought you were inept.”
“How’s that?”
“Nothing,” he said, thinking back to his conversations with Elizabeth and Erica. “How long had you known Jason?”
“Since before I came to work for him.”
The receptionist carried a silver serving tray into the office and set it on the desk. Clara handed Manny a cup and cradled hers in her hands.
“My folks ranched on the Rosebud, on the same place my grandparents did. The Red Clouds’ ranch butted against ours, right across the reservation line in Pine Ridge. They hadn’t been active in their ranching operation for some years; the development business took all their time. When Jason’s folks were killed in that car wreck, my parents helped him settle his affairs. He had been out of college and working for the corporation only a year when they died, so he was pretty unsure what to do. My folks helped him through that.”
“Growing up on the Rosebud must have been interesting for you.”
Clara nodded. “When I graduated from Rosebud High, I was the only White girl walking down the aisle to get her diploma. But I never felt out of place. I was always at home there. After graduation, Jason called me and asked if I wanted a job. I think he felt obligated to my folks and knew they didn’t have the money for my college. I was grateful that Jason hired me.”
Manny sipped the coffee. “I got the feeling Jason was lucky to have someone loyal working for him.”
Clara chuckled. “Jason was like a big kid. He would lose his show-and-tell books when he met with clients. He would forget appointments. He would go away weekends to the casinos and never say when he’d return. Before long, the business suffered. He was constantly distracted. He had a series of failures, projects that could discredit him, all kept hush. This Pine Ridge resort was his chance for a comeback.”
“But how did he keep his business problems a secret?” Manny’s cup warmed his hand, and he felt the warmth from Clara as well. “If he had that many failures, someone would know.”
She stood and refilled their cups from a carafe. “Like I said before, I’d always take the heat for his screwups. Besides, there was always that ‘legendary’ Jason Red Cloud charm. People just believed whatever he said. Like the Jackson Hole project.”
“Tell me about that.”
“There was no Jackson Hole project. Jason designed the Wyoming resort to compete directly with Teton Village. Skiing. Shopping. Five-star restaurants. But it was just one more pipe dream to sell people on the corporation.” She pointed to an artist’s rendition of a resort built on the side of a mountain in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, eight miles from Jackson Hole. “He landed some high rollers, big investors. Until he lost his shirt on the stock market and gambling. Then the investors—some were less than honorable themselves—threatened him. They pressured him to come up with either the resort or their money—with interest. That’s where the Red Cloud Resort on Pine Ridge came in. It was Jason’s escape from a nasty situation, from the threats he got every week.”
“Who threatened him?”
Clara shrugged. “All he’d say is that people had bad intentions toward him and he needed to come up with the thirty million the tribe was going to lay out for the resort. He claimed he’d have enough leftover after paying off the investors to get the Jackson Hole project under way. But I always knew there was no Jackson Hole project.”
“How could he rope investors into something that didn’t exist, on just his architect’s rendering?”
“That, plus the strength of the Red Cloud name. This company has never had to forfeit a bond in any project it promoted. But there’s more to your investigation?”
“There is. A lot more. Though I’m not certain where it’s leading.” Manny told her about the artifacts that Ricky Bell stole on Jason’s behest.
“That doesn’t surprise me. I can see him hiring Bell to steal those items for him, just to get his mojo back. Put himself on top once again.”
“And Lakota antiquities would help him get back on his feet?”
Clara nodded. “My folks said that when Jason first started working here out of college, the Red Clouds allowed him leeway to develop clients on his own, get his feet wet, get a feel for what it took to become successful. Early on he made some bad decisions, and the company lost a bundle. But after his parents’ death, he got the hang of the business. He always said Chief Red Cloud’s spirit was helping him succeed. He had a string of successes that boosted the firm’s reputation and helped expand the corporation. The Red Clouds had built up a thriving development business, reclaiming land thought unusable by any other developer: desert land deemed too harsh to live in or forest acreage that no one else wanted to fight the permitting process to acquire. When they died, Jason was the sole heir. There is no corporation.”
Manny stood and stretched. “How’d he handle his success?”
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