The Story Teller (22 page)

“Look into a ledger book that’s not in the museum and for which there are no records?” Steve pushed his chair back and stood up. “It would help to have some proof the damn book exists.” He came around the desk toward her. “But I’ll see what I can find out. Okay?”

She was about to thank him when the phone at the far edge of the desk emitted a screech. “Look, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t care if you are involved with somebody else. We could still have dinner tonight, couldn’t we? Two old friends.” Stepping back, he picked up the receiver, mouthing the words, “Think about it.” Then, into the receiver: “Detective Clark here.” There was a long silence broken by the sound of his pencil scratching on a sheet of paper.

After a moment Steve snapped the receiver into place. “Before you turn me down again, I’m withdrawing the invitation. We’ve got another homicide victim just washed up in the South Platte.” He reached toward a coat tree near the window and lifted off a blue blazer.

“Who?” Vicky heard the fear in her voice.

“Hispanic or Native American.” He pulled on the blazer. “A lot of bruises and contusions on the body.”

“My God,” Vicky said. “Just like Todd.”

“Wrong, Vicky.” He came around the desk. “This homicide’s a woman.”

Vicky followed him across the room, past the other two detectives still huddled over the desk, intent on the papers spread before them. “Let me come with you.”

“No way,” he said. “You don’t need this.”

They hurried down the corridor. “It might be a friend of Todd’s,” Vicky persisted. “It might be someone I know.”

“You don’t want to see another body.” Steve punched the elevator button and stared at the closed doors, as if he could will them to open. Another moment and the doors parted. They stepped inside the small space filled with a faint odor of cigarette smoke. She felt the floor dropping beneath her. Then the hard stop, and they walked out toward the railing. He took her arm and pulled her out of the way of two uniforms coming through the gate.

“Where did they find the body?” she asked.

He leaned toward her. She could smell the aftershave, the trace of coffee on his breath. “Okay,” he said. “I can’t stop you from going, but I’m not going to take you. The victim’s at Confluence Park.”

*   *   *   

A large crowd had already gathered as Vicky wheeled into a dirt lot behind three police cars, an ambulance, and a white Blazer with a gold City and County of Denver insignia on the side doors. Not far away, the rush-hour traffic streamed along I-25, tires crying out against the asphalt. She ran toward the crowd of bikers and joggers blocking the pathway along the South Platte River. Shouldering past the perspiring, Lycra-clad bodies, the handlebars and spoked wheels, she reached the top of a little hill overlooking the placid, gray-blue river. Below, a line of yellow police tape marked off a half circle on the rock-strewn bank. Inside the tape was another crows—medics, uniformed policemen hovering over what looked like a small, twisted bag of rocks caught among the boulders.

Steve Clark stood in the middle, like a bandleader—directing, admonishing—as the medics lifted the body onto a stretcher and started up the slope, huffing with the weight, although the girl was small, scarcely more than a child. Vicky saw the face, the red marks, the swollen eyes. A black braid fell loose over the edge of the stretcher.

The crowd climbed up, Steve in the lead. He veered toward her. “One of the officers found a wallet over there.” He nodded toward the clump of wild grasses spiking the rocks. “Could be the victim’s. Name is Julie . . .”

Vicky closed her eyes a moment.
The face isn’t what you’re gonna want to see every time you close your eyes the rest of your life,
Steve had told her when she had insisted upon going to the morgue. Todd’s face had been in her mind since. And now there would be another. She turned away and started back to the lot.

“Last name’s Clearwater,” the detective said, walking alongside her. They waited as the white Blazer backed up, then turned into the street, bound for the morgue, Vicky thought, where Todd had been taken. And who would claim the body, who would grieve for Julie Clearwater? A grandmother somewhere on the Rosebud Reservation? A brother or sister? A friend?

Vicky swallowed back the lump forming in her throat. She would not cry again, she told herself, hurrying toward the Taurus, the detective beside her.

“What do you know about Julie Clearwater?” he asked.

Sliding inside, she gripped the steering wheel—the solidity, the steadiness.
Nothing,
she thought, staring through the windshield at the police officers milling around the lot, the bikers starting to roll down the path. She knew nothing about the girl. Except . . . “There’s a student at CU-Denver. Tisha Runner. I met her at Indian Services. She might know something.” Drawing in a long breath, Vicky turned toward the detective. “Todd told Julie about the ledger book. So they killed her.”

Steve dipped his head. She couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t gauge his thoughts. She heard the quick intakes of breath—in and out, in and out. Slowly he brought his eyes back to hers. “They were doing drugs together, Vicky. They met up with some bad people, the kind that
beat kids to death if they try cheating the dealers, start thinking they’re smarter. Both murders have drug-deal-gone-wrong written all over them. I’ve seen enough to know. Forget about your ledger-book theory. There’s no proof.”

Vicky gripped the wheel harder, nails biting into her palms. “You’re wrong,” she said.

“Did you see the victim’s arms?” His voice was softer. “There were needle tracks all over them.”

*   *   *   

Vicky wasn’t sure how she’d gotten to Marcy’s, what route she’d followed. She’d driven through the dusk on automatic. Stop. Go. Turn here. Turn there. Slow for brake lights ahead. On automatic she had wheeled through the drive-in, picked up a hamburger and Coke, feeling the hollowness inside, the light-headedness. Her thoughts on two dead Indian kids, so like her own kids, Lucas and Susan. About the same age, the same black hair and dark eyes, the same caramel-colored skin. It might have been them; what was to keep such unspeakable horror from her own kids trying to make their way in a city—in Los Angeles—where there was no one to look after them, no one to protect them?

She let herself into the man-made coolness of Marcy’s house. From out in back came the slow, rhythmic sound of drums. Through the patio doors beyond the kitchen, she could see a group of women sitting cross-legged in a circle—long hair falling across shoulders and backs, loose, robelike dresses billowing over the patio. Marcy curled over a small drum.

Suddenly the tapping stopped, and before Vicky could escape down the hallway, Marcy sprang to her feet and slid back the patio door. “Come join us,” she called.

Vicky held up one hand and began pleading exhaustion, work to do. She would have a bite to eat in her room, she said, and then fall into bed. She didn’t mean
to be unsociable; she was sure they were having a good time—how should she put it—a meaningful experience.

She was rambling, grateful that Marcy finally broke in. “You could be so much help to us.”

Vicky stared at the woman framed by the patio door, like a butterfly pinned to the glass. She was thinking she’d been no help to anyone lately—not to Todd, not to a Lakota girl. Certainly not to the police.

She forced her mind back to what Marcy was saying: something about tapping into the strength and courage and endurance of Native American women. “You have endured, Vicky,” her friend said. “Through centuries of pain and disruption because of your spiritual strength.” Marcy stretched out her hand, as if she might reach across the space between them. “If you would just talk to us. Tell us how we, too, can tap into our spiritual strength and become whole and vibrant.”

In her mind’s eye, Vicky saw the broken body of Julie Clearwater. She had to fight the urge to run, get in the Taurus, and drive—across the city, across the plains, back to the reservation. She said, “It will have to be another time, Marcy.”

Ignoring the disappointment in her friend’s face, Vicky walked down the hallway to the bedroom. As she closed the door she heard the patio door slam into place, detected the little ripple through the floorboards, and felt a wave of regret that she was not the kind of friend Marcy seemed to need.

She sank into the pillows propped on the bed and tried to concentrate on the yellow legal pad and pen in her lap. What was she missing? Why couldn’t she see it? Somewhere there was proof the ledger book existed, that it had been in a carton stacked on shelves amid hundreds of other cartons.

She wrote in block letters:
TODD.
Under the name,
SMEDDEN COLLECTION.
And under that,
LEDGER BOOK.
She drew long, black lines between the words, around
the words, trying to find some kind of connection. What was she missing? Why couldn’t she see the connection? She made more slashes—a series of lines nearly cutting through the paper. Then she threw the pad aside and dug into the white bag for the hamburger. The filmy curtains moved at the window in the faintest stir of air; the drumming was light and muffled, a barely perceptible tapping, like a small animal nibbling at the side of the house.

She had only eaten half the hamburger and taken a few sips of Coke before she fell asleep to the sounds of a drum beating in a faraway place and time.

21

T
he jangling noise came from far away, and for a moment Vicky thought she was on the reservation, where dancers were approaching the powwow arbor. Suddenly she jerked upright. A faint light from the street lamps outside drifted through the window. There was the soft shushing noise of the air conditioning. She was at Marcy’s, and the phone was ringing on the night stand.

She lifted the receiver.

“It’s for you, Vicky.” Marcy’s voice came over the line. Her friend had already picked up an extension.

There was a soft click, and another voice, more desperate. “Vicky Holden?”

“Yes,” she said, a slight sense of disorientation still present.

“Tisha Runner. You probably don’t remember me.”

“I remember you,” Vicky said, her senses alert now.

“Can you come over?” The thud of drums echoed in the background.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the powwow. Denver Indian Center.”

Vicky glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand: 9:45. She’d dozed off for more than hour. “I’ll be there,” she said.

In five minutes she had splashed cold water on her face, touched up her lipstick, and was back in the car,
sipping on the Coke—it was lukewarm now. Another twenty minutes and she parked in the last vacant space in front of the white, low-slung building—an elementary school at one time—that housed the Denver Indian Center.

Spreading from the center, like spokes from a wheel, were streets clogged with old pickups and trucks in front of small, frame houses—the Indian neighborhood in the river bottoms of the long-dried-up tributaries of the South Platte. Doyal and Mary lived only a few blocks away.

The muffled
thump, thump, thump
of drums floated into the night air. Vicky followed the sound around the building to what had once been the gymnasium. Inside, the drumming reverberated off the cement-block walls, filling the cavernlike space. Indian families sat on folding chairs arranged in a wide circle around the dancers: a group of men and boys swirling and dipping, bare feet pounding the tiled floor.

Vicky stood inside the door a moment, transported into another time and place. The dancers wore buffalo headdresses covered with matted brown fur, horns curving upward. They danced as her people had always danced, to ask the buffalo to share his qualities with the people: strength, courage, endurance, and generosity.

“You wanna stay? Three dollars.” The voice startled her, brought her back to herself. An old man sat at a small table next to the door. In front of him was an open cigar box with dollar bills and coins stacked neatly inside.

“Yes, Grandfather,” Vicky said. She removed three dollar-bills from her handbag and handed them to the old man, then started past the circle of folding chairs, her eyes searching the brown faces for Tisha Runner. She didn’t see the girl anywhere.