Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery (8 page)

ANNIE WAS AT
her desk when Vicky let herself into the office. Printer humming, smells of fresh coffee wafting through the air, and Roger Hurst, the lawyer she and Adam had hired to handle what Adam called the “little cases,” standing at Annie's shoulder, the invisible remnants of a conversation dangling between them. “Good morning.” Vicky headed toward the small table that held the coffeepot and stack of mugs.

She adjusted her bag over her shoulder and, gripping her briefcase with one hand, managed to pour a cup of coffee. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Annie scoot her chair backward and jump to her feet. The secretary's footsteps clacked behind Vicky as she went into her private office. She sat down behind her desk and let the briefcase and bag fall at her feet. Tiredness dragged at her. She had tossed and turned all night, a strange dream running through her head. She was walking across the plains, walking, walking toward some point on the horizon she could never reach.

“You okay?” Vicky realized Annie had been watching her.

“I'm fine. Got off to a late start this morning.”

“I thought maybe you'd heard the news.” When Vicky didn't say anything, Annie hurried on: “There's a rumor on the moccasin telegraph—nobody's confirmed it—that a white buffalo calf's been born.”

Vicky could feel her breath expanding in her throat. She forced herself to exhale. “Where?” she managed. She knew the answer, as if it were written in the air.

“On the rez. Like I said, it's only a rumor, but folks are really excited. Tribal cops are getting ready for a lot of visitors. I mean, thousands. There will be people everywhere. It will be a mess.” She stopped. “But if it's true, it will be quite wonderful. You have to wonder, why us? Why would we be blessed?”

“We don't know if it's true.” My God, Vicky was thinking. A white buffalo calf. The rarest of creatures, a sacred animal come to help the people in time of need. There was always a time of need, but the white buffalo had never come to the rez. Maybe the needs had accumulated, grown so great that the Creator decided the time was right. She tried to shrug away that line of thought. Rumors were always blowing about. Some turned out to be true, but most died away like the wind. “We'll have to wait and see,” she said. Still the image of a white buffalo calf on the rez, a sign that the Creator had not forgotten the people, sent a chill through her.

Annie nodded, but hope and excitement flared like firelight in her black eyes. “You're right. We'll just have to wait. You have an appointment in fifteen minutes. Lucy Murphy. She said she met you yesterday. She called first thing this morning. I was coming through the front door when the phone started ringing.”

Vicky took a sip of the black coffee. Lucy Murphy, the girl hovering around Arnie Walksfast in the parking lot outside the court building. White girl, blond hair. She wasn't sure she could pick the girl out of a police lineup. Annie had gone back into the outer office and closed the beveled-glass doors behind her. Through the glass, Vicky could see the distorted image of the secretary settling behind the distorted image of her desk, leaning into a computer that resembled a flying alien ship. She turned on her own computer and checked the day's calendar. Lucy Murphy, 9:00 a.m. Howard Black Cloud, 10:00 a.m. Howard wanting to sue the mechanic shop that had fired him. Nancy Savage, 11:00 a.m. Nancy sure this time she wants to file for a divorce from Fred. Vicky had no idea what Lucy Murphy wanted. The afternoon looked free, but things always popped up, clients called or strolled into the office.

Vicky brought up her e-mail. Thank-you notes from members of the women's club at the tribal college, an invitation to speak about Indian law from the Riverton Lions Club, an invitation to lunch from a woman she didn't know who was thinking about opening a law office in Lander. She closed the e-mail, took another drink of coffee, warm now and almost chewy, and allowed last night's dinner with Adam to work its way to the front of her thoughts, the place it had been demanding all the previous night. Adam, seated across from her, steak and baked potato in front of him, and she with her own steak, both of them talking around the subject, observing the polite preliminaries: the weather, next week's powwow.

Finally Adam had apologized for wanting to leave the murder scene. He had been worried about their safety, the two of them standing out in the highway, prime targets if the shooter had happened by, or if the killer had come back. Maybe the same man, who really knew? Not the fed or the tribal cops. A murder on a dark highway, it would probably never be solved.

She remembered hardly listening. His voice blended into the background noise in the restaurant, the clinking of dishes and swooshing of the steel door to the kitchen. She wondered who he was, the Lakota across from her with black hair streaked with silver, the little scar that ran across his cheek, the black eyes and intelligent face, and something about him—the confidence, like that of a warrior in the Old Time—so handsome that the two women at the adjacent table kept glancing his way, trying to catch his eye. So many years they had been lovers, with occasional breaks while he handled natural-resource cases for other tribes, but always he had come back. Always saying he wanted her, when he could have practically any other woman. Always finding a way to let her know that was the case, slyly, not reluctantly. Always hinting to the secret life she knew nothing about.

It was sometime during the night, she guessed, wrestling with the sheets and pillow, half dreaming she was walking across the plains, that it had come to her: Adam Lone Eagle was who he was. The problem with their relationship was hers.

The sound of the ringing phone cut like a knife through her thoughts. She picked up the receiver. Lucy Murphy was here.

A blur, like that of a child in a funhouse mirror, the small, blond-haired girl was seated on the other side of the beveled-glass doors. Vicky opened the doors and smiled at the girl curled like a snail across from Annie's desk. She looked up, an eager, frightened expression in her pale blue eyes. “Come in,” Vicky said.

She waited until Lucy Murphy had resettled herself into one of the visitor's chairs, then she said, “How can I help you?”

“I couldn't sleep all night.” The girl had a halting, singsong voice. “I decided you were the one I should talk to. You'd know what to do.”

The girl took in a shuddering breath. She kept her hands, slim and pink, clasped together on the thighs of her blue jeans. A silvery ring with a big white stone that looked as if it had come out of a vending machine sparkled in the light from the desk lamp. “I mean, you are Arnie's lawyer.”

“Is this about Arnie?”

“You could say so. I'm worried about him. I mean, I love the guy. I know he's Arapaho and I'm Polish, but so what? We love each other. So I don't want him in any more trouble, but I don't want to get myself into trouble. It's just that, well, there's something he didn't tell anybody. I got to thinking, if the cops find out, and they know that I knew and didn't say anything, it could go bad for both of us.”

“If you are asking me to represent you, I must tell you . . .”

“No.” The word came as a shout. “I want to do what's best for Arnie, put everything out on the table so there won't be any surprises.”

“You had better tell me what you're talking about.”

Another shuddering breath. Lucy Murphy stared into the center of the desk, as if what she wanted to say was laid out between a folder and the legal notepad Vicky had started making notes on. “That night at the bar in Riverton, me and Arnie was having a few beers, minding our own business, not paying any attention to the cowboys over at the booths. Music was playing real loud, lights were swirling over the dance floor that isn't any dance floor like I've ever seen, nothing but a little space between the booths and tables. A cowboy and some girl was dancing, and lights were swirling, and I thought, Jesus, this place thinks it's a club in LA when it's nothing but a two-bit cowboy bar. I mean, I been to real clubs.”

“What happened?”

“Arnie grabs me by the hand and practically drags me out to the so-called dance floor even though I kept saying I didn't feel like dancing, thank you very much, 'cause the beer was sloshing around inside me and what I really needed was to go to the ladies' room. You don't say no to Arnie. Maybe that's why I love him because, you know, he knows what he wants and he goes after it. It's very—how do you say?—powerful, takes your breath away. Sweeps you along and you're glad to go because, I mean, where else you gonna go? So we started dancing and this cowboy cuts in.”

“Did you know him?”

Lucy gave a quick nod. “Rick Tomlin.” She hesitated. “He wasn't just any cowboy.”

And here it was. Vicky looked up from the name she had just jotted onto the pad. She waited for the girl to go on, but the words seemed to have stacked themselves inside her throat. She was coughing, clasping the hand with the big ring over her mouth, coughing and shuddering. Finally she said, “We used to be together, me and Rick. He was okay. I liked him, except he wasn't like Arnie, powerful and knowing where he was going and taking me along. Soon's I met Arnie . . .”

“Where did you meet?”

“At the same bar. Ironic, huh? I guess that's what set Arnie off. Rick cutting in just like Arnie had cut in before. I mean, when Arnie cut in, I seen my destiny. We started dancing and, let's just say, when I left I didn't go home with Rick.”

“What did Arnie do when Rick cut in?”

The girl sucked in a long breath. For a moment, Vicky thought the girl would jump to her feet and run out of the office.

“Look, Lucy,” she said. “You were there when the fight started. You had better tell me what really happened.” Odd, she thought, that Lucy Murphy's name was nowhere on the prosecutor's witness list.

The pale blue eyes darted about the office and finally settled on a space behind Vicky's shoulder. She still didn't say anything, was just breathing hard, as if she had run up a mountain trail. Finally, in a little voice, a child's voice: “Arnie told Rick to back off, 'cause he didn't want to fight. The cops get called and who goes to jail? The Indian. I seen it happen before. Trouble was, Rick didn't back off. ‘Looks to me like you got the wrong gal,' Rick says. ‘You got a gal that belongs to me.'”

“Well, I started shouting how I don't belong to nobody except, well, Arnie, and that was my choice. Next thing I know, Rick punches Arnie in the jaw. I mean, he was roaring like a bull. Arnie picked up a chair and hit him over the head. Then he grabbed me and pushed me out the door. He throws the keys at me, and says, ‘Get out of here. Don't come back.' I drove to my place. A trailer I been renting south of Riverton. Hour later, one of Arnie's buddies shows up. ‘Stay here,' he tells me. ‘Don't talk to anybody.' I asked him what happened, but he said it wasn't my business. Just stay out of it. I heard later that the fight moved out to the parking lot and Rick was claiming that Arnie assaulted him. The tribal cops went to Arnie's place, handcuffed him, and dragged him off to jail, wouldn't even let him put on his shoes.”

Vicky leaned over the desk. She knew what had happened, a bar fight between two drunken cowboys, white and Indian, the details spelled out in Rick Tomlin's complaint. What was new was that the fight had been over Lucy Murphy, and the girl could have corroborated Arnie's claim of self-defense. Rick had attacked Arnie. “Why didn't you tell the police the truth?”

The girl had gone back to studying the pale hands clasped in her lap. “You don't know Rick,” she said. “We was together a really long time, six months at least. We was gonna get married soon as he collected his pay at the ranch. It was gonna be our stake. We were gonna head up to Montana, get out of Indian country. He was gonna work on another ranch close to some town so I could get me a waitress job like I got here at the Diamond Bar and Grill.”

“There are tribes in Montana.”

“Well, we was going where they weren't.”

“You were scared of Rick?”

“Like I say, you don't know him. He's got a big temper. I been staying out of his way ever since the night I took up with Arnie. It was okay long as Arnie was around, but with Arnie in jail I'd be on my own. I had to talk to the cops when they came looking for me over at the grill. I didn't have a choice. I told them I didn't see anything. I told them I ran out the minute I saw Rick coming toward me and Arnie. I never told them about the fight or what it was about. I never told them Rick started it. What if Rick came looking for me? Besides, there was other witnesses. Arnie's Arapaho buddies and all those cowboys with Rick. Let them sort it out. Trouble is, the cops believed the cowboys.”

Vicky sat back, trying to fill in the blank spaces, the things the girl hadn't said. Rick Tomlin, cowboy with no love for Indians, had succeeded in getting Arnie Walksfast charged with assault in a bar fight. Arnie had been looking at time in Rawlins. And the witness whose statement might have kept Arnie from being charged had kept quiet. What didn't make sense was the idea of Rick Tomlin backing off and disappearing when he had every chance of putting Arnie into prison.

The girl was shaking her head. A piece of blond hair fell across her eyes and she yanked it backward, as if she could pull it out. “All I know is Rick hated Arnie 'cause I took up with him. He could never let things go. He held on and held on until he could get even. I think he came to the bar looking for Arnie and me. You ask me, Rick and those other cowboys were planning to beat up Arnie, put him in the hospital.”

“Do you know the other cowboys?” Witnesses on the prosecutor's list, she was thinking.

“Just cowboys that work on the ranches around here. None of them looked familiar, but I wasn't looking real hard. I seen Rick walking over—the way he walks, real cocky like he's the king of the cowboys, and I started shaking, and Arnie says, ‘Don't pay him no mind. Just stay calm.' Then hell broke out and I ran out of there. Next thing I know Arnie's the one in jail charged with assault. That would've made Rick real happy. Something else I know. Rick never would have taken off right before he was gonna get even with Arnie.”