The Last Annual Slugfest (13 page)

“Do you have any idea where this is?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Those trees, they’re the last two of the Nine Warriors. See.” He pointed to markings along the river on the map. “Here are the other seven Warriors. They were giants a hundred years ago. Good landmarks. But you can tell this spot where the rancheria is—it’s the only place where there are two Warriors that close together with a curve in the river like this. You know where the W curve is, don’t you?”

“Sure. But are you certain there was never a rancheria there?”

He stepped back from the podium. “Vejay, I grew up here in Henderson. I had to take California history in school. If there had been an Indian reservation right near here, don’t you think they would have told us about it in school?”

“Maybe—”

He put a hand on my arm. “You’re going to say maybe it lasted only a little while, or my teachers weren’t very well educated. Could be. But listen, I’ve known Edwina Henderson since I was in school. She’s been crazy about Henderson history and anything in this area that affected Henderson since she was a kid. You can believe that if there was anything written about a rancheria, anywhere, Edwina would have found it. She would have taken the news down to her Indian support group and they would have had a big powwow together.”

“If she’d announced it here last night,” he went on, “by today there would have been reporters on the phone to her. But she wouldn’t even be here to answer. She’d be on her way to Sacramento; she’d be showing the treaty to all those historical bigshots who couldn’t be bothered with her before. It’s not every day someone discovers an Indian treaty. I remember Edwina telling us at one historical society meeting a year ago, when she gave her Pomo talk, what she’d do when she discovered her rancheria. She got kind of carried away. You could tell she’d spent a lot of time day dreaming about her big find. She said there’d be a lot of publicity, but she wouldn’t be able to stay here to see it. She said if she found something like this treaty here, she’d have to get it up to Sacramento pronto, to the experts there. She said as soon as people knew about it, there would be people out to destroy it.” Inadvertently, he glanced toward the kitchen. “She was close on that, wasn’t she. Just a little off. Didn’t destroy
it,
it destroyed her.” He swallowed. Recovering his composure, he went on quickly. “From what Edwina told us, you can bet that if she’d announced that treaty here last night, she wouldn’t have been in town today. She’d have been up in Sacramento, keeping guard while those big experts went over it. She told us she’d never trust a treaty out of her sight. Said she’d stay up there as long as it took. She said, ‘Bert, if I can ever prove there was a rancheria around here, you better be prepared to come in and take over the Tobacconist’s for as long as I’m gone.’ I remember we all laughed then and said that all her Asian refugees, Indians, and even the Nine Warriors would have to get along without her. But that comment of hers, it was even quoted in
The Paper
when they wrote up the meeting. Edwina wasn’t any too pleased about that. Like I said, she’d gotten carried away. She didn’t need the whole world to know it.”

Suddenly Bert swallowed hard and looked away from me. “Biggest find of her life and she has to die before she can announce it. I’ll tell you, Vejay, if there’s a heaven, Edwina’s looking down from it now, and she’s furious.” He swallowed again. “And if there’s such a thing as the dead having power, I wouldn’t be the person who robbed Edwina of her chance. Edwina wasn’t one to forget. When she held a grudge, she clutched it hard and long, and she made her victim pay plenty.”

I thought of Edwina’s ongoing pique over Donny Fortimiglio’s experience with her tobacco, and of her not speaking to Leila for months. I wondered what she had done to the “unworthy” person who Leila had had the affair with. “How did she make them pay?”

Bert looked at me quizzically. “In the past? That’s gone now. Edwina’s gone.” He glared down at the treaty. “All because of this. Just not fair.”

I could see I wasn’t about to get any more lucid comments from Bert. Either he was just what he seemed—too disheartened to be bothered with the past—or he was putting on a good show, to cover his unwillingness to answer. If Angelina had been Leila’s lover, and Bert had been her father’s close friend, he wouldn’t be about to tell me how great Edwina’s retribution had been. He wouldn’t give me Angelina’s motive for the killing.

With a sigh, I said, “I guess I’d better call the sheriff.”

“I
MIGHT HAVE KNOWN!”
Sheriff Wescott had made excellent time getting to Steelhead Lodge. As he strode toward me, with his photographer and print man, he glared. “I don’t know why I bother to tell you anything.”

“Look,” I said, “we are giving you a document you never would have found on your own. The natural response to that should be ‘Thank you.’ ”

“You were tampering with evidence—fooling around with that podium.”

“It wasn’t evidence until we discovered the treaty. Till then it was just another piece of furniture to be carted back where it belonged.”

“If you hadn’t been poking around here, in a murder case I just warned you to keep clear of, you wouldn’t have been anywhere near this podium, right?” He was standing in front of it. “And you wouldn’t have been wrenching the drawer open!”

“And
you
wouldn’t have the treaty now.”

With a silent shake of the head, he turned his gaze to the podium. This was as close as I would get to an admission that I was right. It was probably the only time I’d get the last word. But a victory over the sheriff has its drawbacks. I decided a low profile would serve me best now. So I stood back and watched the print man work. I listened as Bert recounted an edited version of how we came to find the treaty. Either Bert was still subdued from the reality of Edwina’s loss, or he was on his best behavior. He didn’t end each sentence with “sir,” but he might as well have. It was a very un-Bert-like performance.

After the print man finished, Sheriff Wescott turned to me and said, “Of course there won’t be any good prints now, after you two have been over it.”

“There never would have been good prints,” I retorted. So much for lying low.

“Do you know something I don’t, something else you’ve been holding back?”

In the past I had withheld information. It was a sore spot with him. I said, “It’s nothing you couldn’t figure out yourself, if you took the time instead of badgering me. The reason you wouldn’t have found the murderer’s prints on that podium is that the treaty is still there. If the murderer’s prints were on the podium, he would have found the treaty and it would be gone.”

“That’s fine for speculating in a vacuum, Miss Haskell, but have you considered that maybe the murderer did try to get into that drawer? Maybe there were marks of attempted entry that you have now destroyed. If you had thought … If you had called us before breaking in—”

“Sheriff Wescott, we didn’t know there would be anything in the drawer,” I said in exasperation.

“You suspected or you wouldn’t have forced the drawer open.”

“Did you want us to call you every time we had an idea or opened a drawer?”

“I want you to do as I told you and stay out of this. How much clearer do I have to make that?”

I shrugged theatrically. It would have been hard to keep a higher profile than I was. I knew that, but I was too angry to rein myself in. “Is that all, Sheriff?”

“Just a final warning. I don’t want to see you near anything to do with this case. I don’t want you within ten feet of this podium, or of Edwina Henderson’s house, and unless you have a lighted cigar in your mouth, don’t go anywhere near the tobacco shop.”

“Then I assume I can leave.”

“Yes,” he snapped.

I strode out, too angry to close the door softly even though I knew how adolescent it was to bang it. I climbed into my pickup, backed it up, and screeched out of the parking area. I was all the way to North Bank Road before I realized that I didn’t know where I was headed.

I turned toward town. Though the day was still overcast and windy, traffic built up as I neared the commercial block of North Bank Road. This wasn’t anything like it would be in summer, when the tourists in their campers, station wagons, and pickup trucks filled every parking space along the street and down by the town beach. Now traffic slowed as drivers considered whether to turn up Zeus Lane or eyed parking spots by Thompson’s Grocery or Gresham’s Hardware. I slowed too, and when a car pulled out across from the café, I scooted in.

I might have been headed home, for lack of any other destination, but the sight of the café reminded me that it was nearly two in the afternoon and it had been a long time since breakfast. Meter reading brought with it a big appetite. I’d seen former meter readers who’d been promoted to office jobs balloon into Humpty Dumptys. But considering Mr. Bobbs’s opinion of me, that was a problem I was unlikely to face. Right now, my days of climbing up and down the hillside or walking a quarter of a mile up a driveway too potholed for the truck to handle made three hefty meals essential.

As I settled at a table, Marty came over. “Well, don’t be a stranger. It’s been a couple hours since you were here last. You ready for our new Special—coffee without a doughnut?”

I laughed, at first softly, then too loudly. Leave it to Marty to dissipate anger. That, of course, was why he’d gotten this job. In summer, dealing with the frustrations of customers lined up to get into the only eatery in town required a high level of diplomacy. “One a day’s my limit,” I said. “Give me a tofu scramble sandwich.”

“On black bread?”

“Of course. Do you serve it on Wonder?”

Marty made a show of grimacing. “Coming up.” Marty was a vegetarian. Given the slightest encouragement he would announce the vitamin content of every ingredient in your meal, and if that particular meal should be a hamburger, he’d expound on the carcinogenic effects of high heat.

I walked past the counter to the bathroom. No line—a sure sign it wasn’t tourist season yet. Then I settled at the table, sniffed at the enticing aroma of garlic and soy sauce as Marty mixed them with the tofu, and pondered Edwina’s treaty.

Surely Edwina had been killed to prevent her announcing her find. If she
had
made her declaration, what would have followed?

For one thing, the local Indians would have been pleased. Of course, not many of them could have lived on a rancheria as small as that one. On either side of the river, no more than one family could have lived in comfort. The Pomos weren’t Pueblo Indians like those of the Southwest. Historically, they built comfortable wooden tipis near the rivers in winter and spring, and temporary shelters in summer when they went in search of food. They also built large round brush houses for village gatherings. But they didn’t live on top of each other.

Actually, the only Pomo I knew was Hooper, who worked for Edwina in the tobacco shop and who had guarded the food table at the Slugfest. Hooper had long hair and habitually wore jeans and a plaid woolen shirt. There was little about him or his house to distinguish him from any other Hendersonian of limited means. Hooper had taken on the role of Pomo leader of the area, possibly because there weren’t any other Pomos here, or because those people who had some Pomo blood didn’t care. In any case, Hooper was certainly one person who wouldn’t have killed Edwina Henderson.

My tofu scramble arrived. It smelled even better close up. Taking a bite, I muttered, “Delicious.”

But what else would have happened if the rancheria had been announced? The Pomos could eventually have opened a business on the land. Depending on what that was, it could have benefitted or harmed the Henderson and Guerneville merchants. But I doubted that any commercial endeavor there would have affected Leila Katz’s Women’s Space Bookstore. And even if the Pomos had put up a hotel, the clientele would have been entirely different from the guests at Steelhead Lodge. The Placerville Anglers Association wouldn’t be likely to change allegiance.

Regardless of what the Pomos might have done, Edwina’s announcement of the treaty would have brought the historical society a lot of attention. Its members, including Curry Cunningham, would have been interviewed by the press. I couldn’t see him objecting to that. Curry was out to avoid annoyance, not attention, particularly when it put him in the role of town benefactor.

I took a swallow of natural lime soda. (Marty refused to serve Coke with tofu.)

Angelina Rudd? How could a Pomo rancheria affect her? Her fish would swim out, spend a couple years in the ocean, and then, as Maxie Dawkins had said, they would battle right back up the chutes. Whatever happened upriver couldn’t affect that.

And Chris? I supposed the Pomos might fish in the river. There might be a few hundred less steelhead trout and a smaller percentage of the Russian River salmon making it into the Pacific. But the salmon that formed the basis of the fishing fleet’s catch came from the north. Those that originated in the Russian River were negligible.

I finished my sandwich.

As far as I could tell, the only change made by the discovery of the rancheria was a potential one: benefit to Hooper. Unless there was something about that land that I didn’t know.

I downed the rest of the lime soda, paid Marty, and headed out to the one place that the sheriff had forgotten to warn me away from.

The sky was darkening. At two-thirty in the afternoon, it looked more like dusk. The air was getting colder. There was no question but that a big storm was lurking beyond the breakers, waiting for those strong Pacific winds to blow it in. Tonight, again, I’d worry about that bathroom window.

As I drove toward Guerneville, it occurred to me that the rancheria, small though it was, would be a valuable piece of property. For years the Russian River had been a sleepy summer resort area. Twenty or thirty years ago, a week at the river was really getting away. But now, people in Sebastopol, just a few miles south of the river, commuted into San Francisco daily. The Russian River was no longer suitable only for vacations. And land, any land near Guerneville, was valuable.