Montana (30 page)

“Relax,” she said. “I’m going to dial a number. The cop who picks up is going to tell you about the fingerprints. The ones that prove Johnny Running Wolf is really Little Fanny Fantonelli.” She felt for the phone again. “So, when you say
like
. . .”

Charlie moved the phone farther out of reach. “Never mind about that now. There are prints? Why didn’t you say so? Give me that number. I’ll dial it myself. On my cell. I can talk to your guy on our way to the reservation.”

L
OLA SAT
in silence after Charlie’s brief conversation with Sanchez. She wasn’t going to ask a third time about that
like
business. The cruiser plunged through the smoking landscape. A venerable plane, seemingly too cumbersome for the propellers that powered it, passed overhead on its way toward a flaming hillside. Orange plumes billowed from the plane’s belly as it heaved itself over the ridge. The chemical cloud rolled down the hill into the smoke.

Charlie nodded toward a line of men in yellow near low flames undulating across the hillside. “They’re setting backfires. That’s good. They need to get this thing under control before it gets down into grazing land.”

Lola felt his gaze upon her. She stared stubbornly ahead. He switched on the cruiser’s lights and chased them through the smoke. Wilson was waiting outside the tribal offices when they pulled up.

“I sent tribal police up to his gran’mother’s place,” Wilson said. “His outfit went tearing by here a little while ago, headed that way. Half the town saw it and the greater part of those people were happy to let me know about it.”

“Why don’t you tell Wilson what you told me?” Charlie suggested as they drove out of town, Wilson sitting in the back seat behind Lola.

“Johnny’s not an Indian. He’s a white guy. Italian, for what it’s worth.”

Wilson passed a hand over his face. “You know, we get people all the time at powwows, women, mostly, a few men, all decked out in turquoise and headbands and fringe and whatnot. Blond hair in braids. A Cherokee princess in their background. For some reason, it’s almost always Cherokee—although Lakota, they’re real popular, too, thanks to
Dances with Wolves.
And for damn sure it’s always a princess. Everybody wants to be us, but nobody wants to live like us. But this is more than some powwow wannabe. The guy’s running for governor, making a big deal about how he’s Blackfeet. If nothing else, it seems like a pretty risky thing to do if he’s not who he says he is.”

“That’s why it works,” Lola said. “Hiding in plain sight, the more public, the better. Oldest trick in the book, mainly because it works. I think he killed Mary Alice. Or at least set it up.”

Hazy sunlight refracted off Wilson’s glasses.

“I know you do,” he said. And then nobody said anything else until they pulled up in front of Johnny’s grandmother’s house.

T
HE
S
UBURBAN
, if it ever had been there, was gone. Tribal police cars surrounded the house. Two officers flanked the doorway. “Nobody here,” one of them said.

Charlie looked to Wilson for permission.

“Go ahead.”

Charlie disappeared inside. A moment later, he was back, motioning them in. The three of them filled the little kitchen.

“I know,” said Lola. “Don’t touch anything.”

The sheriff snapped rubber gloves over his hands and opened and closed cabinet doors. They were empty—as were the closets and the medicine cabinet, the trash cans and the dresser drawers and the refrigerator. The dishes were gone, along with the cutlery, even the ice cube trays. “Man works fast,” Charlie said. He inspected the stainless-steel faucet, the refrigerator door handle. They shone brightly. “Looks like he wiped everything down.”

“Where’d he go?” said Lola. “If he’s been here and gone, he’d have passed us on the way back. There’s only the one road, right?” She followed Wilson and Charlie outside. The two men walked a few yards from the house, then crouched in unison and examined something. Lola hurried to them and saw only prairie. She said as much.

“What do you smell?” Charlie asked her. He made it a command. “Smell.”

Lola lifted her face. The air was acrid. “I smell the fires.” She took another breath, tasted something sharp and sweet undercutting the air’s charcoal tinge. Charlie tore a grey-green leaf from one of the woody shrubs and rolled it between his fingers. He held it beneath her nose, the scent coming strong now, welcome against the smoke.

“It’s sage. Look there.” He pointed toward the prairie.

Lola looked.

“No,” he said.
“There,”
and lowered his arm a little, and then she saw it, the faint twin tracks of bruised plants leading away from the house. Wilson took off his hat and rubbed his hand on his forehead as if to erase the creases there, then shaded his eyes, looking north.

“What are you looking at?” Lola asked.

Wilson turned with a tight smile.

“Canada.”

W
ILSON CALLED
his counterparts on the Blood Reserve in Canada while Charlie talked to Border Patrol. “Not that it’ll do much good,” he told Lola.

“Why not?”

Wilson jumped in. “No way he went to the formal crossing. And the Blood Reserve is only twelve miles north of the border. We go back and forth all the time. He’ll probably try to move from one reserve to the next.”

Charlie held the car door for Lola. Wilson got in behind her. She took a long last look at the northern horizon, and put her head on her knees. Charlie closed her door and came around to his own side and slid in.

“We’ll run the prints again, officially, at my request. I’ll get that started the minute I get back. I’ll put the word out at airports, too, in case he tries to get on a plane. The technical term at this point is ‘person of interest.’ Doesn’t mean he’s a suspect, but for sure we think he could help us in the investigation. By the time they pick him up—and they
will
pick him up, Lola, don’t you worry—I plan to have enough to justify holding him.”

“As soon as I get back,” Wilson said, “I’ll email the Blood some photos. If anybody up there has seen him, they’ll remember him. That nose might have been his best friend for a long time, but now it’s his worst enemy. He can’t un-break it, at least not overnight.”

Charlie spoke again. “Oh, and you’re free to go back home, or wherever it is you want to go. I know you’re not happy with the way we’ve handled this, but I had to rule you out, not just as a suspect, but as somebody who might have useful information. Which you might not have had then, but you sure as hell found some.” He steered with his left hand out and extended his right in a handshake. Lola had gotten used to the way Indian people shook hands, quickly touching fingertips and then pulling away, but Charlie folded her hand in his and held it until a series of snaking curves demanded his full attention. He rounded them and reached for the radio.

“Tiffany? Whatever else you’re doing, drop it. We’re going to be busy, really busy, for the rest of the day.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A
t Charlie’s insistence, Lola met him at the cafe for a final breakfast before leaving Magpie.

“I’ll buy,” he said. “It’s the least I can do after keeping you here all this time.”

Lola had already picked up a rental car after dropping off Mary Alice’s truck at the dealership in town, where it would be sold and the proceeds sent to Mary Alice’s parents. Charlie was keeping her waiting. Lola put her menu down and studied the dirty yellow stratum of smoke above the mountains, the result of the fire’s latest run. Joshua topped off her coffee.

“Everybody’s talking about Johnny Running Wolf. Half the people on the rez say they knew he was a whiteman the minute they saw him. The other half are saying the guy really
was
Johnny. That this is just one more way to make the tribe look bad.”

Lola knew better than to protest that one man’s actions couldn’t possibly reflect on an entire people. She ran her hand across the tabletop. It came away grimy with soot.

“You think he killed her,” Joshua said.

“Sure. Set it up, anyway.”

Joshua pulled a damp rag from his back pocket and rubbed at the table, leaving circular dark smears. “Maybe he did,” he said. “Maybe not. Just when you think something’s one way, it turns out to be another. That’s something Mary Alice learned.”

Lola wondered if anybody in Magpie ever said a thing directly. Joshua snapped his wrist and popped the rag and put it back in his pocket. His eyes met hers. Lola remembered Mary Alice telling her that among Indian people, a direct stare was considered rude. “It gets them in trouble, Bub-ette,” she’d said in one of their rare phone calls. “People think because they don’t look you in the eye, they’re all shifty and evasive, when all they’re really trying to do is show some respect.” Lola had been dissed, and she didn’t know why. Joshua left without taking her order. Nell came out of the kitchen and Lola waved her over. “I’ll have the cinnamon bun.”

Nell stopped. “Come again?”

“I’m going to spend the next two or three days on airplanes, with nothing to eat but pretzels and peanuts. I might as well put as much food in my stomach as I can in one fell swoop.” When the cinnamon bun arrived, though, she had second thoughts. Her fork hovered. She pondered the best way to launch her assault. Carve away at the sides, or dive right into the middle, where the icing pooled in a viscous lake? The ranchers rose, a herd on the move, and ventured bets.

“A buck says she won’t eat it all.”

“A buck says if she doesn’t, you’ll be the first one going for the leftovers.”

“Har. Neither one of you has got a buck. It’s a wonder Nell lets you eat here.”

The door banged behind Charlie. He looked at the commotion around Lola’s table. “What am I missing?”

“Lola ordered the cinnamon bun,” Nell said.

Charlie brought out his wallet.

“Put your money away,” one of the ranchers said. “You’re late to that party.”

Lola took a quick bite, and then another. “Oh, my. This is fine. Somebody’s going to lose some money. I’m eating all of this.” The ranchers departed singly and in pairs, turning square, good-humored faces upon her and commenting on the efficient dispatch of the cinnamon bun, on the money she would cost them in lost bets, on a waistline that they insisted had expanded visibly since she’d walked in the door that morning. Lola tried to remember another place where a remark that a woman appeared to have gained weight was offered as a compliment. She’d taken their initial silence as hostility. It occurred to her now that it might simply have been shyness, or even an excess of good manners, not wanting to impose themselves on someone without an initial greeting, an offhand comment about the weather that invited response. She’d never so much as said hello.

Charlie pointed to the bun. “Bet they don’t have those where you’re going.”

Lola waved her fork at him. “Found him yet?”

“Not yet. But I’m not worried. For a place that barely has Internet, word travels pretty fast in Indian Country. Somebody will spot him. A lot of First Peoples live in Calgary. Wilson’s making sure the word gets to them, too. Hey, Nell. Where’s Joshua?”