The Witch's Tongue (22 page)

FBI Special Agent Stanley Newman looked across the government-issue desk at his partner. “So how’re you this fine morning?”

Agent McTeague did not look up from her work. “Good enough.”

“Have a nice time with Charlie last night?”

She turned a page on the Wolfe homicide report. “What I do on my personal time is none of your business.”

He snorted. “Well,
excuse me
.”

“Very well, Stan. You are excused.”
Now please go away
.

He grinned at the handsome lady. “Do you know that Charlie has a girlfriend?”

“If you are referring to the James woman, of course I do.”
But she is a
former
girlfriend
. McTeague turned to file the folder. “The lady was waiting in Moon’s car when the antique dealer got shot. Now she’s back East somewhere.”

“Baltimore.”

She gave him an odd look. “You have been checking on her?”

He nodded. “I don’t think she’s coming back to Colorado.”

Good
. McTeague rummaged through her beaded purse, found a platinum compact. “I suppose being present at the shooting of Mr. Briggs must have been terribly traumatic for the poor woman.”

“And seeing her boyfriend about to get perforated probably didn’t help.” He watched his partner inspect her face in the compact mirror. “Especially because of what happened sometime back.”

She found a hair that had gone awry, tucked it neatly back into place. “Which was?”

Newman wore a deadpan expression. “Approximately five years, one month, and six days ago, Miss James witnessed the shooting of her fiancé.”

McTeague stared at the silvered glass without seeing her startled reflection. “What were the circumstances?”

Newman’s face was grim. “The fiancé was an off-duty detective, Baltimore PD. One fine day, he went into a pawn shop while she was sitting in his car at the curb. The owner of the establishment spotted the automatic pistol under the detective’s jacket, thought he was about to be robbed for the third time that month, pulled a pistol out of the cash register and shot the off-duty cop five times. Death was instantaneous.”

McTeague snapped the compact shut, dropped it into her purse.

“As a result of witnessing this incident, Miss James consulted a shrink for quite some time.”

“Does Charlie Moon know about this?”

Newman shrugged. “Not unless she told him.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Of course not, McTeague. This information is part of a confidential Bureau file—it is none of Charlie’s business.”
The more interesting question is—are you going to tell him?

Having promised the Catholic priest a dozen times or more that she would not visit the dwarf, Daisy Perika was hesitant to break her word to Father Raes Delfino. The shaman was worried that by one devious means or another, the clever Jesuit would find out if she wandered into
Cañon del Espiritu
, just happened to pay a call at the abandoned badger hole where the
pitukupf
had made his home for ages. But the tribal elder was unsettled about the strange goings-on up in Spirit Canyon, and thought she might make an exception. The canyon was, after all, practically her backyard—and Daisy was consumed with curiosity about what had happened to Jacob Gourd Rattle. Had he really abandoned his silly white wife in
Cañon del Espiritu
, or was Jacob still lurking up there in some dark little tributary of the main canyon—or were his bones moldering under the ground? Since that morning when Kicks Dogs had last seen her husband walking away with his buffalo robe—or
said
she had—there had been no sighting of the man.

Daisy Perika was at the small kitchen window that looked over the porch toward the mouth of the canyon. She leaned against the wall, closed her eyes, felt like dozing. But it was too early in the day for a nap.
I’ll just stand here, think about things
. It was so very quiet. So very still.

Until.

Something tugged hard at her skirt.

“Yaaaaaa!” Daisy lurched forward, bashing her forehead against the window. Ready to do battle, the game old woman turned to face the intruder.

It was the little man.

She gasped, found a raspy voice. “You did that on purpose—to scare me to death!” Daisy took a kick at him. Missed by a millimeter, lost her balance, almost toppled.

The knee-high
pitukupf
looked up at the Ute elder, his homely features feigning innocent curiosity at her peculiar antics.

The furious woman shook her fist. “Don’t give me that baby-face look, you nasty little imp!” She grabbed a fly swatter, made a vicious swipe that would have knocked his floppy hat off—had not the little man managed some fancy footwork in a tactical retreat.

Knowing she was too old and slow to catch the elfin creature, Daisy hobbled over to a chair, fell on it with a grunt, emitted a long, wistful sigh. “All these years, that priest has been warning me about you. God knows—I should’ve listened to Father Raes.”

At the mention of the holy man’s name, the dwarf made an ugly grimace. But he kept himself safely outside the old woman’s reach.

Having caught her breath, she laid the fly swatter aside. “What do you want?”

The
pitukupf
blinked, looked around the kitchen.

“Food, I imagine.” She hammered the dwarf with a hard look. “And tobacco.”

His hopeful expression suggested that she was right on both counts.

“Well, you can’t have neither.” Daisy clamped a hand on her chest, felt the thumpity-thump of her tired old heart. “Not after what you did to me.” She shook her head. “If you was starving to death, I would not give you a single pinto bean. And if they lined you up at dawn to shoot you, I would not give you a cigarette butt.”

The dwarf scurried over to the pantry, reached out his hand—

Daisy flung a pepper shaker at the annoying little man.

He jumped when it whizzed by his ear, turned to give the shaman a glinty-eyed glare.

“This ain’t no Salvation Army handout-kitchen,” she croaked. “You want to get something from me, you’ll have to earn it.”

At this news, he became quite downcast.

“There’ll be no peppermint candy for you,” the canny old woman said. “No homemade serviceberry pie. No coffee beans to haul back to your dirty little den.” She saw the hateful glint in his slitted eye. “And that big red can of Prince Albert tobacco I got in the cupboard, it’ll stay right there on the shelf.” It seemed there was no limit to shaman’s cruelty. “Even if I have to smoke it myself.”

The dwarf snarled. Bared yellowed teeth at the tribal elder.

“Save that for scaring little children.” Daisy cackled. “You don’t bother me none, you half-pint of warm skunk-spit.”

It seemed the little man had never been so insulted, or so angry. For a flesh-tingling moment, he crouched as if about to pounce on the old woman.

Daisy motioned for him to come right on. “Make your move, runt—I’ll reach down your throat, grab you by the guts, and jerk you inside-out!”

Apparently sensing that he had met his match, the dwarf became docile as a baby lamb. He climbed onto a chair, ascended from there to the kitchen table—where he sat with spindly legs dangling over the floor. He eyed a biscuit pan.

“Just you try,” she said. “And did I also mention that you can’t have no beef jerky?” Daisy waited for this to sink in.

It did.

In the archaic version of the Ute tongue the little man always used, he made a plea to the hard-hearted old woman. All he wanted was a cold biscuit.

Daisy shook her head. “I meant what I said.”

He muttered again, made a grudging offer.

The shaman made a show of thinking about it. “No, I don’t think we can set up a trade. There’s nothing you’ve got that I want.” But to demonstrate an inner reservoir of selfless charity, she pushed the biscuit pan toward him.

The
pitukupf
snatched three, stuffed two in his pockets, began to gnaw on the other.

The tribal elder waited until he had swallowed it all, then said: “Maybe there is a little something you could do for me.”

Her small visitor waited to hear what this might be.

“There’s been some odd stuff going on up in
Cañon del Espiritu
.” The shaman knew how to slip the knife under his skin. “But I doubt you’d know anything about it.” She gave the visitor a pitying look. “You’re getting old and tired like me. I expect you’ve been sleeping away your life in that badger hole—and wouldn’t have heard a herd of wild buffalo stampeding down the canyon, tromping all the trees and bushes down.”

He made a tart reply to this.

The shaman pretended not to recognize the archaic expletives directed at her ancestry. “I imagine that you didn’t even notice—about the time of that last big snowstorm—when Jacob Gourd Rattle and his
matukach
wife were camped out in Spirit Canyon.”

A sly grin creased the little man’s thin face. He mumbled his mumbles, conferring the intelligence that he knew all about the white woman and her Ute husband. But having offended him with her insults, the Ute elder must now demonstrate her good faith. The
pitukupf
licked his dark lips, looked toward the pantry.

Having had many unsatisfactory dealings with the little man, Daisy was wary. But the crafty old woman sensed that she had gone about as far as she could go. She agreed to the deal.

Minutes later, the little man had the handles of a plastic grocery-bag linked over his skinny shoulder. In it was hard candy, half a berry pie, three strips of rancid beef jerky—everything except the Folgers coffee and Prince Albert smoking tobacco. These would be rendered up after he had provided certain information.

“Okay,” the shaman said, shaking a finger in his face. “Now tell me what happened with Jacob and Kicks Dogs in Spirit Canyon.”

The
pitukupf
told her immediately. Someone was still up there, he said—pointing a crooked finger more-or-less toward Three Sisters Mesa. But he would not say who. And more curious still (if the little trickster was to be believed) neither Jacob nor his pale-skinned wife had set foot in
Cañon del Espiritu
. Having kept his side of the bargain, her guest pounded a tiny fist on the table, demanded the promised coffee and tobacco.

The shaman stared hard at the
pitukupf’s
face for any sign of deception. It was like trying to read a match-book cover at fifty yards. The little scamp always found a way to hold something back, or confuse her, or conceal a kernel of truth in the husk of a riddle. And she had no doubt he could lie a blue streak with both hands on the Bible, though the act would probably scorch his palms.

But a deal had been made and a debt must be paid. She presented two red cans to the little man, secretly hoping the combination of caffeine and nicotine would do him in.

Jane Cassidy’s gaunt form was clad in faded jeans, a man’s white cotton shirt, black rubber boots, a tattered straw hat. Armed with a two-foot-long pair of shears, the aggressive woman had mounted a determined attack on her garden, snipping viciously at this and that. Having tired of the shears, she now wielded a hand sickle, happily lopping the heads off orange mallow, yellow dandelions, blue grama, and a host of other undesirable emigrants.

To the man who watched, it seemed that the rosebuds and geraniums cringed as this comical version of the Grim Reaper passed by. Charlie Moon leaned against the trunk of a red willow. Waited for the fuming woman to take a cut at him.

He did not have to wait long.

Jane Cassidy deftly nipped off a sprig of hedge that had exhibited the unseemly ambition to rise up from among its fellows. “You took your time getting here.”

In response to her frantic telephone call, the tribal investigator had left his foreman worrying with half a dozen sick cows. Moon had also driven ninety-two miles without breakfast—only to be met by a woman who did not have the common courtesy to offer him a cup of coffee. In spite of this, he held his tongue.

She paused, attempted to point the steel crescent at the taciturn Indian. “I want a progress report.”

“Sometime back, Mr. Bell invented a wonderful machine.”

“I dislike conducting personal business over the telephone wires.” She raised the sickle, made a wicked slash at a passing bumblebee. Except for unsettling her hat, this effort was without effect. The plump bee went bumbling on its way. “Face-to-face is what I prefer. So tell me, Mr. Moon—what have you discovered about the burglary of the family museum?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like to.”

“Then we are in full agreement on that point.”

“But I have got a notion.”

She adjusted the straw hat, taking care not to muss her hair. “About what?”

“About who stole your stuff.”

“Tell me.”

He pinched off a delicate willow twig, braided it into a circle. “Not till I can prove it.”

She rolled her eyes. “What am I paying you for?”

The big man took her hand, gently put the ring on her thumb. “You haven’t paid me a nickel yet.”

“Do not be impertinent.” She stared in childish wonder at the primitive ornament. “When will you recover my valuables?”

“Don’t know that I ever will.”

She turned the willow circle on her thumb, felt a lump in her throat. “Is that the best you can do?”

“You want to fire me, I wouldn’t blame you.”

I like him
. “I may just do that.”

“It would be the smart thing to do.”

She gave him a thin-lipped look. “Mr. Moon, you are a most irritating man.”

“You are a very gracious lady. I feel fortunate to be in your employ.”

“Sarcasm does not become you.” She threw the sickle on the ground near his feet.

“No, I am dead serious.” He retrieved the curved instrument, deftly cleaved a dead branch off the willow. “Even though I don’t get paid, the fringe benefits are enormous. Where else could I associate with a remarkable person like yourself?”

Jane Cassidy plopped down on a wrought-iron bench, shook her head wearily. “It is this dreadful waiting that I cannot bear. If there were only some way to
make
things happen.”

“There is.” The tribal investigator seated himself beside the woman. “But I doubt you’d do it.”

She removed the twig ring from her thumb, placed it on her index finger. “Why do you say that?”

“You are like most rich people.”

“What do you mean by that snide remark?”

“You really want to know?”

She raised her nose a notch higher. “When you use that tone, I am not sure that I do. But go ahead—hurt my feelings.”

“Ma’am, you hold a penny so tight—old Abe gets a headache that lasts all night.”

She turned her pale blue eyes on Charlie Moon. “It is true that I do not cast greenbacks into the wind. But I am willing to spend serious money to get serious results. If you have an interesting proposal, I will certainly consider it.”

“There’s just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If you don’t take my advice—I will tender my resignation.”

“My, my.” Her smile was without warmth. “I did not realize that you were such a sensitive man.”

He leaned close, whispered in her ear, “Please don’t tell anyone. Aside from excessive humility, being overly sensitive is my only shortcoming.”

“I promise to keep this intimate knowledge of your shameful faults to myself. Now tell me what is on your mind.”

“You must be willing to spend a barrel of money.”

The wealthy woman winced at this image, held her breath for a moment. “Give me the particulars.”

He told her precisely what she must do.

She listened with keen concentration. Nodded at each particular. Decided that this red Indian was the sort of man who did not dillydally around a problem. Mr. Moon went right to the root of the thing.