The Story Teller (11 page)

H
ushed voices floated outside as Vicky and Father John walked up the sidewalk to the porch that ran along the old couple’s house. Father John rapped on the thin frame of the screen door. The inner door stood ajar, and Vicky saw Mary Harris—she must be eighty now—totter around a group of men. She squinted past the screen. “Father John and Vicky? That you?”

The door swung open, and they stepped into the small room thick with the odor of fresh coffee and stale cigarette smoke. The old woman gave Vicky a quick hug, as if she’d been expecting her. It was the tall, redheaded priest in blue jeans and plaid shirt setting his cowboy hat on the small table by the door that she hadn’t expected. “How’d you get here?” she asked, thrusting both hands into his.

As he began explaining, Vicky glanced about. She didn’t recognize any of the men huddled together, eyes turned toward the newcomers: a white priest, an Indian woman. Nor did she recognize the young women moving past the door that opened onto the kitchen, yet not long ago she had been like them—an urban Indian come to the city from the wide spaces of a reservation, looking for what? An education, a job, a new life?

Across the room, Doyal Harris was maneuvering himself out of a recliner wedged into the corner. One of the men nearby took the old man’s arm and pulled him
forward. He was even older than his wife, Vicky guessed, by the gnarled knuckles and wrists, the paper-thin, yellowish skin. He shuffled across the room, eyes on Father John. “Good to see you, Father.”

“I’m so sorry, Grandfather,” Father John said, shaking his hand. “Todd was a fine young man, a good man.”

Vicky saw the tears welling in the old man’s eyes, the effort of control in the succession of swallows, the way he squared his shoulders.
“Ho’hou’,”
he said softly. There was a mixture of appreciation and gratitude in his voice: this priest understood the Arapaho Way. Only a few—the generous, the kind—could be called good.

Eyes still on Father John, the old man went on: “When that coroner lady called, I said, it’s my brother, ain’t it? ’Cause he’s an old man. His heart’s gonna give out on him one of these days. I keep tellin’ him, ‘You gotta take care of yourself,’ but he’s so gol-darned busy takin’ care of that sickly wife of his.”

He stopped, as if he’d found himself on the wrong track and had to devise another route. “Then I thought it’s her. That old woman my brother married up with went and died. But the coroner lady says it looks like it might be Todd, and they was gonna send a car for us to come down and identify him.” Doyal shook his head, a violent gesture. “I never thought it was gonna be about Todd.”

Vicky heard the gasp from the old woman beside her, as if Mary was hearing the news for the first time. She slipped an arm around the woman’s thin waist, and the group of men parted to make way as Vicky led her back to the sofa. Settling into the cushions between two other grandmothers, the old woman clasped her hands in front of her chest, as if she were praying or bracing for other blows.

Out of the corner of her eye, Vicky saw Father John ease Doyal back into the recliner. Another moment and
Father John was at her side, just as one of the men in the center of the room broke from the small group and stepped toward them. He was Arapaho, Vicky realized, middle-aged, with short, gray-flecked hair and narrow black eyes.

“I seen it on TV,” he said to Father John. “I said to the wife, ‘Might be some poor Indian kid caught up with a bunch of no-goods. Sometimes them kids come off the rez and don’t have no city sense.” His gaze trailed back to the group, as if for confirmation. “No city sense. Get lost here. Take up with the wrong people. Start thinkin’ they’re gonna get rich, like that’s what matters.”

“I never thought it was gonna be Todd in that river.” This from a younger man who joined them. Probably not much older than Todd, with black hair pulled back into a ponytail. “Todd was a good guy,” he said. “Goin’ to school. Gonna make something of himself. Gonna help the people. Never hung around with no rough guys.”

There was the clap of a back door slamming, a growing chorus of voices in the kitchen. A young woman with black braids stepped through the door and walked over, sidling next to the man in the ponytail. She waited quietly as the man went on talking about how Todd was a good kid, how the old people depended upon him. “Why’d anybody want to murder him?” the man asked.

Father John said, “We should have some answers as soon as the police finish their investigation.”

A hopeful notion, Vicky thought. How much time would the police spend on a botched drug deal? A dead Indian?

The young woman who had been standing there suddenly backed away and disappeared into the kitchen. Vicky wished she had added her own comments to the halting search for answers, the hopeful
suggestions. Had she spoken, perhaps the woman wouldn’t have left, wouldn’t have felt she had nothing to contribute. Serious matters were men’s business. An image of herself flashed in front of Vicky: she was leaning past the kitchen doorway, straining to overhear what Ben and the other men were saying. The calves lost in the storm, the downturn of the beef market—serious matters that affected her and the kids. Yet she had stayed in the kitchen and waited until Ben called for more coffee, some of those chips, and that hot chili sauce.

Vicky pushed away the memory. “The police will want to speak with you,” she said to the man in the ponytail. “They’ll want the names of Todd’s friends.”

“Todd never brought any friends around,” he said. Then: “’Cept for that girl.”

Vicky drew in a sharp breath. There
was
a girl. She was right after all. Which meant his murder came down to something simple and stupid—a mugging. She could accept a mugging. She would never accept a drug deal.

“What’s the girl’s name?” Father John asked. His tone registered the same level of determination she was feeling. No matter what the police said, she and John O’Malley would want to know why a kid like Todd had ended up in the rocks and weeds of the South Platte River.

“Julie somebody,” the man in the ponytail said. “Lakota. Todd said she was related to the Wolf people up on the Rosebud.”

The screen door opened again and a couple stepped inside, the woman carrying a pajama-clad baby. Behind them came several men. The newcomers moved wordlessly toward the old people and grasped their hands, first Doyal’s, then Mary’s. From outside came the sound of doors slamming, boots scuffing the sidewalk. Headlights blinked through the curtains at the front window.

Vicky caught Father John’s eyes. There was weariness
there, a gathering of grief. Without saying anything, they stepped over to the old people and paid their condolences again. Then they made their way through the crowded room and out the door.

A shiver rippled over Vicky’s shoulders as they walked down the sidewalk, and she wondered if it was the evening air or the cold sense of death inside her. She felt slightly sick, and she realized she hadn’t eaten all day.

“I know a place where we could get a bite,” she said, glancing up at the man beside her.

“I’ll follow you,” John O’Malley said.

10

T
hey settled into a booth with Naugahyde seats cracked from use. Headlights on Sheridan Boulevard streamed into the darkness beyond the plate-glass window. From the kitchen came the noise of dishes and pans clanking together, and every few moments a waitress burst through the heavy swinging doors, a loaded tray hoisted high overhead. Other late diners occupied booths and tables scattered across the restaurant. A couple of men straddled stools at the counter, hunched over plates heaped with french fries and hamburgers.

Vicky turned her attention to the man across from her, scarcely believing he was here. The familiar face: red hair with flecks of gray at the temples; blue eyes filled with light; tiny laugh lines at the corners of his mouth; an almost unnoticeable cleft in his chin. He sat tall in the booth, handsome in a quiet way, a kindness about him, a comforting presence. She had tried hard over the last few weeks to put him out of her mind. How difficult it was to have him in her life as a friend, a dear friend, but only a friend.

A waitress appeared and took their orders. Hamburgers, coffee. How many times had they sat like this in some restaurant, talking about how to help somebody in trouble? A couple trying to reclaim their kids from social services. A kid who had violated probation. And the homicides they’d found themselves involved
with—the tribal chairman, the drug dealer in a ditch, the cowboy who’d come home to right an old wrong. Another murder now—a young man they had both believed in—and they were together again.

There was so much she wanted to ask him as she waited for the waitress to finish filling their coffee mugs. Why had he returned from Boston? How did he happen to be here at the right moment, when the people needed him, when she needed him? She was still trying to phrase the appropriate questions when he asked what had brought her here.

It startled her to realize their thoughts were following the same track. She took a sip of hot coffee before telling him how the tribe had hired her to recover the Arapaho artifacts from the Denver Museum of the West, how one of the most important objects, an Arapaho ledger book, seemed to be missing.

Father John leaned across the table toward her, eyes narrowing, she thought, into a darker shade of blue. “There must be an explanation.”

“I’ve given the museum until Friday to come up with one,” Vicky said. Then she told him the curator claimed she had never heard of the ledger book, yet she knew the exact value—$1.3 million. There was so much else she wanted to talk over with him—her desire to do a good job for the tribe, the museum’s exhibit on the Sand Creek Massacre that left out any mention of Arapahos—all the thoughts that had occupied her mind this afternoon and had seemed so important before she’d learned about Todd.

Instead she said, “The police think Todd’s murder had something to do with drugs.”

“Drugs?” Father John clasped his hands around his coffee mug, his eyes steady on hers. “How could they think that?”

“Steve,” she said, then corrected herself. “Detective Clark. An old friend.” She caught the brief change of
expression in John O’Malley’s face as he looked away—how many men had she known in her life? “We were at CU-Denver at the same time.” She hurried on, wanting to explain. “He’s a good detective, I’m sure. Sharp and very dedicated.”

“He’s wrong about Todd,” Father John said, looking back at her, a hint of anger in his voice.

She said, “They found heroin wrapped in dollar bills in his pockets. He had a pager on his belt.”

“I don’t care what they found,” Father John said. “It could have been planted to make it look like a drug murder.”

Vicky smiled. She had missed their talks, the way he always tuned in to the direction of her thoughts, sometimes before she knew where they were headed. She sipped at her coffee as the waitress delivered two plates of hamburgers and French fries, a bottle of ketchup. The moment the waitress turned away, she said, “Todd came to the reservation last weekend. He was upset about something. He wanted to see you.”

Father John was shaking the ketchup over his fries. He looked up. “My assistant told me,” he said. “Do you have any idea what was going on?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.” Vicky bit into her hamburger. It was as tasteless as cardboard, not like the food she remembered here. She tried a couple of fries that had the flavor of stale grease, and pushed the plate aside. Then she told him everything else she knew: the stuffed mailbox at Todd’s apartment, his failure to see Mary and Doyal in a while—a sign of disrespect.

Father John took a bite of his own hamburger. After a moment he said, “Let your friend the detective sort it out, Vicky. He’ll find Todd’s friend Julie. Maybe she’ll know something.”

“That doesn’t mean she’ll tell the police,” Vicky said. “But she might tell me.”

Father John took a quick swallow of coffee, eyes
narrowing again. “Look, if Julie does know something about Todd’s murder, it could be dangerous for you. Let the police do their job.”

“But will they?”

“You said yourself your friend is a good detective.”