Hawk Moon (28 page)

"Bullshit. A light just went on."

"They're on automatic timers." His voice was a croak of pain. "In case of prowlers."

"Right," I said to Cindy. "How about you keep him here and I go up there?"

"I can't guarantee I won't hurt him some more."

I smiled. "Well, I guess there's no way I can stop you if I'm not here, is there?"

I went up to the house.

A
mong white policemen, it was generally acknowledged that if most of your homicide victims were red or black, your career was in serious trouble.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

H
vacek lived until December 6, but he never regained full consciousness so Anna could question him no more.

She did, however, write down everything she knew in a letter and mailed it to Douglas Shipman. She advised him against enlisting the help of either the Mayor or the Chief, otherwise she would be forced to make her letter public.

On the night of December 10, Douglas Shipman stood outside the police station, which was located in the downstairs of a hotel, and waited for Anna to appear.

The town was decorated for Christmas. Wreaths, bells, paintings of Santa Claus were everywhere. A light snow had begun falling along with night.

Anna came out just after 6:00 P.M., bundled up for the freezing weather. She was startled to see Shipman.

"I wondered if I could walk you home, Officer Tolan?"

"All right."

They began walking.

"I got your letter."

"I assumed that's why you were here."

"And I've done some checking up on you."

She looked over at him. "Going to try and sully my name in some way?"

"On the contrary. I'm going to make you a rich woman."

"Oh?"

"Yes. I've had my lawyer give you more than twenty
thousand shares in my most prosperous company. You can sell the stock now for a small fortune, or hold on to it and make even more eventually. At least that's my opinion."

"And all I have to do for this is to — what?"

"Forget about Tall Tree."

"He's innocent."

"So you say."

"You know he's innocent."

"Do I, Officer Tolan?"

They walked on. The street lamps gave the white snow a buttery glow.

"Do you have any idea how much money I'm offering you, Officer Tolan?"

"I'm more concerned with Tall Tree."

"I'm offering you a great deal of money, Officer Tolan. A very great deal."

She started walking away from him, then, and very quickly, as if he were contaminated.

"I don't want your money, Mr. Shipman," she called over her shoulder as she headed into the darkness between street lamps. "I just want you to tell the truth."

T
he front door was ajar. I put out my hand to push through and noticed the bloody handprint on the edge of the stucco doorway. Still glistening. Bryce Cook's, no doubt.

The downstairs was chill and dark. Long-ago fires in the fireplace smelled woody and warm. The shape and slant of the stairway was outlined in the shadows.

I crossed the vestibule to the steps and that was when I heard something crash upstairs. And then a curse: female.

I went up the stairs slowly. When I reached the landing, I looked right and saw nothing but the deep darkness. To the left, however, and far down the narrow hall, burned an electric lamp dim as a guttering candle.

I took out my Ruger. I went on tiptoe, closer, closer to the faint light, waiting for some crashing sound to startle me again.

I pressed flat on the far side of the lighted doorway, Ruger ready. I said, "I'd like to talk to you, Mrs. Heston."

Silence.

"Did you hear me, Mrs. Heston?"

Clank of bottle-neck on drinking glass.

"Mrs. Heston?"

"How did you figure it out, Mr. Payne? How did you know that I killed those two women?"

"I remembered those library books in the back of your car," I said. "One of them was True Crimes, volume two. I looked it up at the library and found a story on Native American mutilations. Then I ran some statistics on the computer about copycat killings. Sometimes the police put out false information to trap copycats. That's what they did in the case you copied. The information about cutting off their arms was false. But you didn't know that."

"No," she said. "That's not how you knew. You have kind eyes, Mr. Payne, and can see into people's souls, and you saw into mine and that's how you knew I killed those two women."

"I'd like to come in now."

Quick sad laugh. "Are you afraid I'm going to shoot you?"

"Your husband wants me to believe he killed those two women."

"Should that make me think of him as noble, Mr. Payne?"

"No. But I thought you should know."

"He did just what my great-great-grandfather did. Disgraced the family with his whoring around. It would've all come out – how those two sisters stole the little girl, and how my husband and Bryce built this place just as The Circle of Six built theirs one hundred years ago – and then what?"

Clank of bottle-neck on glass again.

"I have a sense of propriety, Mr. Payne, of dignity."

She was pretty drunk and I felt sorry for her.

"People always say he made my family name important again, Mr. Payne – but only with money. I restored the dignity. All the work I've done over the years – and people said it was all him. And then he built this place and brought that Indian whore here and—. But I shouldn't hate her, should I?"

"I don't think so."

She hiccoughed. It wasn't funny; it was sad.

"I'd like to come in and talk to you," I said.

"I look like shit."

"So do I."

This time there was some gentleness in her laugh. "I really do like you, Payne." Then, "I have a gun. I shot Bryce with it. I wanted to shoot my husband, too, but he got away." Pause. "And I'm drinking again. Four different times at the clinic and I'm drinking again."

"You know what I'd like to do?"

"What?"

"Come in and have a drink with you."

Pause. "You want me to give you the gun, don't you?"

"I promise I won't try to take it away. If you want to give it to me, fine. If you don't, fine. We'll just have a drink."

"Oh shit, Payne, it's just all so confusing and when I wake
up tomorrow—Oh God, I won't be able to face it. Any of it. They gave me electro-shock six times, did I tell you that?"

"No, I guess you didn't."

"’Riding the lightning’" is what the regulars called it. I rode the lightning. I loved it. That was the awful thing. Everybody else who got it hated it but I loved it because it made me forget."

"I'd really like to come in and have a drink."

"I was never unfaithful to him, even when I had a chance."

"You're not the kind. You're a good woman."

Then she was crying. "It's so bad when you wake up and you can't quite remember anything. That's how I'll be tomorrow – I'll be so scared . . . Can you get me help, Payne?"

"Yes. Yes, I can."

And then she did it.

Pulled the trigger. I was through the door in moments, running the length of a long den with fireplace and built-in bookcases.

She sat in an important leather chair, the sort that many generations of tycoons have favored.

The gun was still in her hand.

I raised my eyes and saw the hole she'd put in the wall behind her.

"I've never, never been able to do it, Payne. I just don't have the guts. I've tried but I just can't go through with it."

She had aged many years since the last time I'd seen her, a sorrowful aging of the eyes especially. And some madness, too. Definitely some madness.

Her left hand lay delicately on the breast of her white blouse; her right offered the gun for me to take. It was a Walther P-5, very big for her small hand. "This is Bryce's gun," she said.

As I hefted the gun in my hand and slipped it into the pocket of my sport coat, she raised her eyes to me. "It's over now, isn't it, Payne?"

"Yes, it's over now."

"I don't know why he would have done such a thing. I gave him a name that was so important to protect."

She started crying.

"I suppose it's silly, isn't it, about the name?"

"No, it isn't silly at all."

"Would you hold me, Payne? I'm so scared. I feel like I'm a little girl."

She stood up and I took her in my arms and held her. She put her warm face into my neck and sobbed. Her knees began to shake and I was afraid she might slip to the floor so I lifted her and carried her back to the important leather chair and she sat in my lap and cried in the island silence and island darkness.

I wasn't sure what she was crying about now — many, many things, I suspected — or whether I should try to talk to her or not.

She said, "I used to sit in my father's lap this way." She leaned her face away from my shoulder so I could see her. "I loved my father very much."

"Yes; you told me that once."

"I have to be strong now, don't I, Payne?"

"Very strong."

"Do you think I can handle it?"

"Yes.”

"Maybe I'll surprise myself."

"Maybe you will."

"Will you call the police now and get it all started?"

"Yes."

"I'd appreciate it."

She got up. It was an awkward moment, like high-school necking when the parents suddenly turn on a light. She made a fuss of straightening her blouse and dark slacks.

There was a wide desk. I walked to it and dialed the Cedar Rapids police.

I asked for the Detective Bureau and drew a cop named Ferguson. When I told him what had happened, and when he realized the social status of the people involved, he said, "Holy shit."

I looked back at the beautiful ruined woman.

"Yeah," I said into the phone. "Holy shit."

Colonel Richard Greaves often talked about teaching one of his Indian guides new words. When Greaves taught him "inexorable," the guide said, "The white man murdering us was inexorable." Greaves laughed but the Indian did not.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

B
ut to no avail did Anna Tolan work to convince Chief Ryan that he should go to the Mayor with her theories. Christmas came, and went.

Three days before the execution was scheduled, the worst blizzard of the new century struck. Cedar Rapids was basically shut down. Even some trains were stopped.

On the third day of the blizzard, just as she was about to leave the police station for her morning rounds, a newspaperman, bundled up as a mummy, came in the front door and said, "Did you hear about Doug Shipman?"

Several officers, Anna included, turned to the newspaperman immediately.

"Had some kind of breakdown. They're puttin' him in the bug-house upstate. Apparently he just broke down completely."

"When did they take him?" Anna asked.

"Early this morning. The servants said they've never seen nothin' like it."

F
orty minutes later, Anna was admitted into the Shipman mansion.

A servant led her into the den where Mrs. Shipman, a fetching auburn-haired lady in a silk and organdy dress stood
looking out the window at the falling snow.

She turned and said to the servant, "Please close the door, Samuel."

"Yes, ma'am." Samuel closed the door.

Mrs. Shipman — Eleanor to her friends — then did a most unexpected thing. She crossed the room to where Anna stood. And slapped her hard across the face.

"I'm glad you came. You're the reason my husband had his breakdown. You and your constant pestering."

"He killed that woman."

"No," Eleanor Shipman said. "He did not."

From the pocket of her dress, she took a sheet of paper that looked familiar. "This is the letter you sent my husband, along with your "list of evidence" as you called it." She waved the letter angrily in Anna's face. "You're right, he
was
at the murder scene and he
did
drop his black moon lure but he got there too late. Somebody had already murdered the Indian girl — somebody whose reputation in this town among the respectable people would be ruined utterly and forever."