Murder on the Red Cliff Rez (2 page)

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Authors: Mardi Oakley Medawar

BOOK: Murder on the Red Cliff Rez
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David was someone meant to be married because on his own, the boy was pitiful. His whole trouble was, the woman he wanted to be married to wouldn't even speak to him except during the three times she'd had to work for him, helping locate idiot tourist deer hunters who'd gotten themselves lost. She'd had to talk to him then, oh yes indeedy, because he was the chief of the rez police. As a tracker paid by the Council, she'd had to take orders directly from him. David could be a malicious little sod when he wanted to be, and to get back at her for that “You know exactly what you did!” he'd been as insufferable as he could possibly be. But did any of this petty revenge heal his wounded pride?
Nope.
Thelma Frenchette was distraught. Always the first to arrive at work, Thelma, a woman in her fifties, took mothering her coworkers very seriously. Especially the young women, who if they weren't watched were likely to slack off. Young women today, eh? But just at the moment, thoughts of lackadaisical twenty-somethings had been zapped right out of her mind. In fact, lucid thoughts of any stripe were impossible. Because Thelma was in such a daze, her balance wasn't what it should be, and she braced her hands against the corridor walls as she slowly made her way down the hallway bisecting the warren of offices.
“My God,” she breathed, repeating the words like a mantra as she moved unsteadily onward. “My God, my God, my God.” She finally arrived in the reception area, a triangular zone central to the building. Stumbling now because she no longer had walls for support, she barely made it to the desk, which was situated behind a glass barrier.
She looked like a relieved rummy as she collapsed in the desk chair. She sat there for a full minute, glazed eyes staring beyond the portraits of past Tribal Chairmans displayed on the paneled wall facing the reception desk. For several minutes her mind refused to budge beyond the thought
He can't be dead.
But he was. No human being, not even Judah Boiseneau, could lose that much blood—and all over the brand-new carpeting!—and still be alive. The office coffeemaker, directly behind her on the shelf above the built-in filing cabinets, began to gurgle, the boiling water emptying from the maker's cistern into the glass decanter. The hiss of the steam and the gurgle were ordinary noises that at any other time Thelma would have heard without noticing. In this situation the sounds were enough to send her jerking straight up in the swivel chair. After the violent start she knew she could no longer endure being all alone in the empty building with a
tchibai,
a dead person.
Thelma snatched up the receiver, then punched nine for an outside line. She watched her fingers dial the first phone number that came to mind. Thelma had been a widow for ten years, shunning any thoughts of ever remarrying—mainly because she reveled in being a Frenchette, a certified member of Red Cliff's most predominant family. People in trouble always called family first, right? Yes, definitely. And as Thelma was definitely in trouble, she turned to the family member able to do her the most good.
The instant she heard his voice a smidgen of the fog inside her brain lifted. But not enough. Thelma Frenchette, big-deal career woman, was coming off like a nine-year-old whimpering to Daddy about bullies on the playground. Seconds later her brother-in-law shouted, “For God's sake,
Thelma, call the cops! I'll be there as soon as I can get my damn pants on.”
Thelma pushed the button for another extension, cutting her brother-in-law off, and dialed nine yet again, then the number for the police. After four rings, Elliott Raven, the police dispatcher and lone body in the cop shop, picked up. Words tumbled out of Thelma.
“Elliott? Perry told me to call because, I, you know, get in first and I was doing, you know, what I always do, checking around, making sure everything was okay while I waited for the coffee. But I found …”
Thelma's mind went blank. Her lips continued to move, and vaguely, she heard her own voice. She could only trust that the sounds she made were intelligible to Elliott's attentive ear. Actually, the police station was only across the way. Instead of using the phone, all she really had to do was stick her head out the front door and yell. But yelling wasn't professional. Her brother-in-law was a very professional person. He used to be in marketing for IBM. Now he was the Tribal Chairman. Thelma basked in Perry's reflected glory and patterned her demeanor after his remote, businesslike manner.
“Thel?” Elliott Raven yelled in her ear.
Thelma snapped back into the moment. Realizing that she probably hadn't spoken for a while, she opened her mouth, but more words refused to come.
“Thel?”
Thelma Frenchette began to sob.
 
After receiving the call, Elliott Raven, tall, lanky, and hovering somewhere in his sixties, found himself too busy to dwell on incidentals. The percolator stood idle as he radioed
two patrol officers, managing to catch them just before they went for breakfast. Then he telephoned David's house and got no answer. Elliott then tried raising David on the com line.
David wasn't in the patrol car. As Elliott's voice squeaked through the radio receiver, David was standing inside Buffalo Bay Store, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, laughing and slapping with three morning regulars, all of them having a go at the store's owner about the iffy condition of the Baked Fresh bear claws.
“Well, of course they was baked fresh,” Ned Girard was saying. “What the hell kind of fool bakes stale?”
“If youse boys don't like my sign, youse can go screw yourselves.”
“Don't go all cranky.” David laughed. “We're not worried about how they were baked. We'd just like to know how long they've been sitting since then.”
“Well, that I forget,” the owner conceded. “Besides, I only make pastry signs. You want a goodies calendar, call Hugh Hefner. Now, you want a bear claw or not?”
“Yeah,” David said, rooting in his faded jeans pocket for additional change. Because he hadn't been to the Laundromat in a week, he was reduced to his last cop shirt. The shirt was tucked into fairly clean jeans. Because he was wearing jeans, he of course had on cowboy boots. On his head was his favorite baseball cap, emblazoned with the insignia of the Duluth Superior Dukes. A hard-core fan of the minor league, David wore the cap with
everything.
Even the black suit he'd worn to his cousin's funeral, at which he'd been a pallbearer. “Scrape off some of that fuzzy green stuff and give me one.”
“But, Davey,” Ned Girard joked, “the green fuzz is the best part.”
“You ought to know,” another regular hooted. “You've had two.”
 
David was feeling a bit better about the morning as he climbed into the car. That emotion bit the dust when he finally heard his dispatcher.
“David? You even got your radio on?”
Lifting the handset from the dashboard console, David keyed the mike. “I have now.”
“Where the hell are you? I've been callin' an' callin'.”
“Don't nag, Elliott,” David said. As he waited to pull out of the parking lot, two school buses went by on Highway 13, followed by five cars heading for the town of Bayfield. “I stopped in at Buffalo for coffee and now I'm waiting out the rush-minute traffic.”
Elliott went a tad nuts.
David keyed the mike again. “Elliott, if this is official, take a deep breath and do the numbers.”
Able to pull out now and going in the opposite direction of the former traffic, he listened as Elliott loudly paged through the lists of codes. Even though Elliott Raven had been a dispatcher for over two years, he still couldn't remember the call numbers. The dispatcher's pluses were that he'd never called in sick, was willing to work overtime without pay, and was the only human able to manage the department's old-fashioned percolator. David pressed his booted foot against the accelerator, and his patrol car picked up speed as it traveled along Blueberry Road. Elliott cursed as he fruitlessly searched the codebook. David knew
then that even though the storm had lessened and the sun was poking holes in the lowering clouds, the warming spring day would not be properly appreciated. Something had his dispatcher all aflutter. And whatever was fluttering the normally laid-back Elliott had to be a pure-o-tee doozy.
Ever calm, David keyed the radio mike. “Am I gonna find some coffee when I get there?”
Elliott blurted out a rush of Ojibway.
David keyed the mike again. “English, Elliott. You know the Bayfield County boys are listening. You're only suppose to speak English when you're on the air.”
Elliott Raven informed David in Ojibway that the Bayfield County deputies were all the sons of low-down stinky skunks.
Chuckling, David replied evenly, “Yeah, but your sister loves 'em.”
The dispatcher squawked irately. Over Elliott's noise, David asked a sensitive question. “Have you sent a car to the … incident?”
“Niji (Two).”
David winced. Two units meant something big. Before Elliott could tell both him and the Bayfield County sheriff's department just what that something was, David threw away his own rule about speaking only English over the airwaves.
Elliott quickly countered with
“Nin nissitawendan.
My lips is zipped. Over an' out, an' ten-four.”
A pained expression stealing over his handsome face, David replaced the mike.
 
Three game wardens were standing in the parking lot that fronted the plain single-storied station shared by the police
department and the tribal game wardens. The rez cops and the wardens were not happy office-mates. The wardens' main complaint was that the cops habitually parked anywhere they wanted to, only rarely in designated areas. The game wardens were fussy guys. Just for spite David rolled between the white lines, came to a stop in the slot marked CHIEF WARDEN, and shut off the engine. The furious wardens were on him the second he climbed out of the car. He was head and shoulders taller than any of them, but this was one morning when his superior height failed to intimidate.
“What are you doing here?” one of them asked, his tone incredulous. “Ain't you supposed to be over at the Tribal Courthouse?”
With practiced calm, David checked his wristwatch, a Christmas gift from one of his nephews. Peter Pan's stubbier arm was pointing to the eight while the longer one was pointing at the two. Eight-ten.
The Moccasin Telegraph was scary. If the game wardens already knew the strictly official police business, they'd likely already spread said strictly official business. Then too there was the problem of privately owned scanners. Every family on the rez owned one. They might not be able to afford TV, but man, they had a scanner. It had to be a nosy Indian thing. David didn't know any white people who even wanted a scanner. Adjusting the baseball cap on his head, David ambled by the game wardens, felt three pairs of eyes glaring at him. He refused to appear rushed, keeping his long-legged stride even.
Elliott met him at the door, pulling it open with such force that David found himself being hurtled inside. The first sight visitors saw was the battered wooden reception
counter, where the public met the police. Behind the counter was an open squad room furnished with five gray metal desks. The windows on the wall directly behind the desks were covered by partially opened Venetian blinds, the weak morning sun filtering through the slats onto the gritty linoleum floor. To the extreme left of the room stood a long cabinet and desk, Elliott Raven's domain. The cabinet contained the bulky radio and telephones that comprised the woefully out-of-date com line. The desktop was a mare's nest of thick books and papers.
The wall to the right of the counter had no windows, as on the other side of the wall was the game wardens' haunt. This dividing wall was decorated with the obligatory Chippewa Nation Seal, framed photographs of Tribal Chairman Perry Frenchette and Vice Chairman Amos Baptiste, a group photo of the current ruling council members, and a shot of David dressed in a suit, white shirt, and tie.
Appropriately, next to David's framed photo was a huge cork bulletin board littered with Wanted posters. The entire room was illuminated twenty-four hours a day by ceilinghung fluorescent lights concealed under aged opaque plastic squares. To the extreme right was the door to David's cramped office, which also doubled—when needs must—as an interrogation room.
“Man, am I glad you're here!” Elliott exclaimed. “Frenchette's screamin' his guts out. He's been callin' here every five seconds.” The phone began to ring. Elliott glared at the phone.
“I just know that's him. You get it. I don't think he likes me. And unlike some …”—he eyed David meaningfully—“I voted for him.”
David went for the telephone on the counter while Elliott
checked on the progress of the coffeepot. As he lifted the receiver David heard the voice of the Tribal Chairman. The man sounded as if he were on the verge of a stroke.
“Would you mind explaining just what you're doing over there when I specifically told that chucklehead to direct you straight to the courthouse?”
“Uhh, officers were dispatched—”
“Yes!” the chairman snapped. “They're here right now. What I'm calling to find out is just where the hell my personally appointed police chief might be!” In a lowered, menacing tone, he said, “You're making me look like a fool, David. And as you well know, I'm not the sort to forget anyone who makes me look like a fool.”
What David wanted to say was “It's not even eightthirty. What the hell are you doing at the courthouse this early?” What he said was “I'll be right over.”

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