Indian Killer (36 page)

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

“Aristotle Little Hawk, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” said Wilson, flushing with pride.

“I like your books. You really get it right.”

“Thank you.”

Olivia invited Wilson into the apartment, feeling as if she somehow knew him simply because she’d read his books. She offered him a donut from a box sitting on the kitchen table. They were Seattle’s Best Donuts, but Wilson declined. He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, while Olivia sat at the table.

“What kind of book are you writing, Mr. Wilson?” asked Olivia, falling back on politeness.

“It’s about the Indian Killer,” said Wilson.

“You can’t think John has anything to do with that?” asked Olivia, alarmed now.

“No, no. I was just doing some research when I heard about this Indian guy, your son, a high-rise construction worker. I thought it was interesting.”

“It’s the last skyscraper they’re going to build in Seattle.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Can you imagine that? When we think of cities, don’t we think of tall buildings? Now we have all these computers and things. People can work from anywhere. They don’t need to be bunched up in the same big buildings anymore. They don’t even need to be in the same country to work together anymore. Things change, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do.”

Olivia picked up a donut, nibbled at it, then studied it.

“John loves these things,” said Olivia.

Wilson looked around the room. It was spare and cluttered at the same time. Prints with Indian themes hung at strange angles on the walls. The bed was made haphazardly. Boxes of assorted junk were stacked neatly in every corner.

“Where is John?” asked Wilson.

“I don’t know,” said Olivia. “We’ve been looking for him for a long time.”

Wilson looked at Olivia’s left hand. Married to a rich man, judging by the size of the diamond. She wore the standard casual outfit for middle-aged white women in Seattle: a white T-shirt, blue jeans, black blazer.

“Do you have a family, Mr. Wilson?”

“No.”

“No wife?”

“No, never.”

Surprised, Olivia quickly studied Wilson’s features. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, middle-aged, a writer, probably intelligent. He should have been married a couple times by now. Then Olivia remembered that he had been a cop, and changed her mind. He must have lots of problems. She thought about asking him to leave, but decided that it did not matter. She couldn’t see how her troubles could get much worse.

“My son doesn’t even know I’m here, Mr. Wilson. He’d be angry if he knew I had a key to his place. He’s got some real problems, with me, and his father. He’s got problems with everybody. I’m not sure he’d even talk to you.”

“What kind of problems?” asked Wilson.

Olivia hesitated for a moment, then continued, too tired to maintain secrets.

“He’s got everything and nothing,” she said. “Every time we took him to a new doctor, there was something else wrong with him. But hey, he doesn’t drink or do drugs. He doesn’t even take the drugs that are supposed to help him.”

Olivia started to cry, got angry at herself for breaking down, and then cried even harder. Wilson took a step toward her, raised his hand as some sort of clumsy offering, and stopped.

“I’m sorry,” said Olivia, wiping her face with her hands. “I’m just so tired. I can’t sleep. I’m so scared. I keep thinking about this Indian Killer. Sometimes, I wonder. I think, maybe…”

Olivia closed her eyes, swallowed hard, trying to maintain her composure. When she had visited the donut shop just before trying John’s apartment, Paul and Paul Too had told her about John’s wild behavior.

“John was such a gentle boy,” said Olivia. “He wouldn’t even kill bugs. Really. Me, I’m terrified of spiders. Just phobic. I remember this one time, John couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, and I was cleaning the upstairs bathroom. I can remember it like it was yesterday, you know?”

Wilson nodded his head, and glanced at his watch.

“I even remember the song on the radio. The Beatles. That strawberry song, remember? I was singing with the radio, cleaning the bathtub, when this huge spider came out of the drain. I screamed like crazy. Daniel, my husband, was at work. It must have been summer because John was home. He heard my screaming and he came running, you know, to save Mommy. I was trying to smash that spider with my shoe when John came into the bathroom. He just screamed at me, ‘No, no!’ and then I smashed that spider flat.”

Wilson walked a few steps closer to Olivia, who seemed lost in the memory.

“Oh, God, he cried over that spider. Just bawled. Made me bury it in the backyard. We even had a funeral. Isn’t that funny?”

Olivia looked up at Wilson and smiled. He smiled and nodded his head.

“Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson. “He sounds like a good boy.”

“He was,” said Olivia. “He was.”

“You don’t have any idea where he is?”

Olivia sat up in the chair, wiped her face again, sensing Wilson’s impatience.

“No, Mr. Wilson, I have no idea.”

Wilson took the foreman’s photograph out of his pocket and showed it to Olivia.

“Is this your son?”

Olivia stared at the photograph of her son, his face empty and dark.

“That’s John,” she said.

Wilson tucked the photograph back into his pocket and turned to leave.

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Wilson as he opened the door.

“Mr. Wilson,” said Olivia just before he closed the door behind him.

“Yes.”

“If you see John, tell him to come home.”

Wilson left Olivia alone at the table. He raced down the stairs and jumped into his pickup. He figured he could find John or somebody who knew John at Big Heart’s. As he drove away, Olivia watched him from the apartment window. She knew that everything was going wrong, but she felt powerless to stop it. Her husband was probably asleep on the couch in his study. That’s how it must be. He had been too tired to walk up the stairs to bed, so he slipped off his shoes and pants, loosened his tie, and then curled up on the couch. He had probably called out to her, had not received a response, and had assumed she was asleep. That was how it must be. He was asleep on the couch, wearing a nice shirt and loosened tie. A decent man, he was probably dreaming about his son. Daniel twisting and turning in his sleep. All of it quickly becoming a nightmare. Olivia loved her husband. She watched Wilson’s pickup until it disappeared into the rest of the city. He drove north. Olivia looked south toward downtown Seattle and counted the number of streetlights. One, two, three, then ten, then more. She counted until there were none left to be counted, and then she began again.

M
ARIE AND BOO SET
out to deliver their sandwiches on that last night. They drove from the Belltown shelter south toward Pioneer Square. A white van. Three traffic signals. Red light, stop. Green light, go. A stop sign that was mostly ignored. Intermittent wipers sweeping against the windshield every few seconds.

“You know,” Boo said. “You’re like the ice cream man in this truck. Remember how they used to play that music? Man, you could hear those trucks from miles away. We should hook some music up to this rig, don’t you think? We’d have homeless folks just chasing us down the street.”

Marie laughed. She stopped when she saw King staggering across the street. His face bloody. Marie helped King into the truck and saw that his wounds were not that serious. She bandaged him up with the first-aid kit. King told her that two white guys in a pickup had jumped him.

“Jeez,” King had said. “They would’ve killed me, I think. But some other white guys broke it up.”

Marie looked at King. She saw that blood and recognized it, knew that Indian blood had often spilled on American soil. She knew there were people to blame for that bloodshed. She felt a beautiful kind of anger. On the Spokane Indian Reservation, an old Indian woman grew violently red roses in the same ground where five Indian women were slaughtered by United States Cavalry soldiers.

S
EATTLE POLICE OFFICER RANDY
Peone turned from Denny onto Third in downtown Seattle and saw a barefoot old Indian man staggering down the street.

“Officer, Officer,” the old man slurred. “I want to report a crime.”

“What crime?” asked Peone.

“I’ve been assaulted.”

The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and bruises. His left eye would be swollen shut in the morning.

“Who assaulted you?” asked Peone.

“A bunch of white kids,” said the old man. “They stole my shoes.”

The officer looked down at the old man’s bare feet. They were stained with years of dirt and fungus. Peone figured the old man was delusional. Who would want to steal the shoes that had covered those feet? But the old man was in a bad state, and there had been a number of racial attacks since the Indian Killer case became public, and especially since that white kid had been kidnapped. Though the child was safely home now, the Indian Killer was still at large.

“What’s your name?” Peone asked the old man.

“Lester,” he said.

Peone climbed out of the cruiser, tucked the old man into the back seat, jumped back into the car, and radioed the dispatcher.

“Dispatch,” said Peone. “This is unit twelve. I’ve got me a drunk who needs a band-aid and bath. I’m taking him to detox.”

Peone was on his way when he passed John Smith kneeling on the sidewalk farther north on Third. John was singing loudly and had attracted a small crowd. He was also holding a pair of shoes that could barely be defined as shoes. Peone figured he had found the man who had beaten up the old guy and stolen his shoes. These two Indians were probably buddies and had fought over the last drink in the jug. He pulled up close to John and turned his flashing lights on. The red and blue distracted John from his singing. Peone looked at John. A big guy, thought the officer, who only briefly considered calling for backup.

“Hey, there,” Peone said as he walked up to John, who was still entranced by the flashing lights.

“He’s crazy,” said a guy from the crowd that had gathered. “He’s singing church songs.”

The crowd laughed. Officer Peone looked at John and wondered which mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be-crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except for the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

“Okay, okay,” Peone said to the crowd. “The show’s over. Let’s clear it out.”

Since it was Seattle, the crowd obeyed the officer’s orders and dispersed. John had forgotten about the flashing lights and was singing again, in Latin. Peone had been an accomplished altar boy way back when and recognized the tune. He could almost smell the smoke from the thousands of altar candles he had lit.

“Hey, chief,” said Peone. “You okay?”

John stopped singing and noticed Peone for the first time. He saw the blue eyes and blue uniform, the pistol and badge. Blue sword, scabbard, white horse. The bugle playing.

“He’s gone.”

“No, he’s not gone. He’s in the back of my car.”

John stood, walked over to the car, and looked inside. He saw the old Indian man. He threw the Indian’s shoes at the window. They bounced off the glass and landed on the sidewalk.

“That’s not Father Duncan,” said John.

“Who?” asked Peone.

“Father Duncan. He’s gone.”

Peone could see the terrible sadness in John’s eyes. The officer wondered where the Indian thought he was, and who he thought he might be. Probably a schizophrenic. He was big and strong enough to hurt a man, but Peone, through years of applied psychology lessons taken on the streets, knew that most schizophrenics rarely hurt anybody except themselves.

“Hey, big guy,” said Peone. “You been taking your medicine?”

“No,” said John. “They’re trying to poison me.”

“Is that why you hurt your friend?” asked Peone, pointing toward the old man in the back of the car.

“He’s not my friend. I don’t know him.”

“Really?” asked the officer. “Well, then, what happened to his face?”

“I don’t know,” said John.

Officer Peone knew he would have to take John to the hospital. He was obviously sick and needed help. He began to wonder if John might be dangerous, might be the Indian Killer. Why hadn’t he called for backup?

“Hey, chief,” said Peone. “Let’s you and me go for a ride.”

John, suddenly frightened, took a step back.

“You could be the devil,” John said to Peone.

“I could be,” said Peone. “But I’m not. Come on, why don’t I take you and your friend to the hospital. Get you both fixed up, okay?”

“I’m afraid,” John whispered, then he kneeled and began to pray. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…”

“On Earth as it is in Heaven,” continued Peone.

Surprised, John stared at Peone.

“Give us this day our daily bread…,” said Peone.

“And forgive us our trespasses,” said John, “as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation…”

“But deliver us from evil…”

“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever.”

“Amen,” said John and Peone together.

John closed his eyes and pressed his head against his clasped hands. He was praying. Peone reached for his handcuffs. John heard the jangle of the cuffs and keys, opened his eyes, and panicked. He leapt to his feet and ran into an alley. Peone ran a few feet after John before he came to his senses. He climbed back into his car, told the dispatcher what had happened, and then shook his head.