Stone Butterfly (25 page)

Without knowing how she had gotten there, Marilee Attatochee found herself inside a long, shadowy space. The chamber was enclosed by gray stone walls that were set with tall stained-glass windows; pink-eyed bats flitted about a darkly beamed loft. A new red carpet had been rolled out along a narrow aisle that separated an assortment of rough-hewn benches. The altar (if it was an altar) was illuminated by dozens of black tapers. The priest (if there was a priest) was nowhere to be seen, but illuminated by the flickering light of the candles, a pale, eight-year-old version of Al Harper was picking a five-string banjo, singing “If You've Got the Money, Papago Gal—I've Got the Time.”

One moment, Marilee was seated on a bench—the next she was standing at the end of the line of mourners, which numbered precisely three. When the singer-musician began to pick a few licks of “Bluegrass Breakdown,” Marilee began to tap her foot.

The man in front of her turned to present a long, horse-like face. “Please, madam—do not disturb the solemn nature of the ceremony!”

“Sorry—I guess I got carried away.” She added: “I'm kinda mixed up.”

He looked down a beak-like nose, cleared his throat. “Mixed up, you say?”

She explained: “I don't know where I am.”

A broad smile. “Why you're at the Tonapah Flats Hi-Tone Funeral Home, Community Crematory, and Small Engine Repair Shop.”

“But what am I doing here?”

He sighed, shook his head: “You are attending a jim-dandy memorial service—the jim-dandiest one we've had all year!” Long fingers clicking like castanets, he performed a quick little three-step jig, finishing with: “Cha-cha-cha!”

“Who died?”

After doing an expert backflip, the dancer-acrobat replied: “That barbarous little Indian girl, of course—the one who murdered pooooor old Mr. Silver.” A thin brow arched to a suspicious height. “Are you a relative of the youthful criminal or otherwise responsible for the felony?”

The dreamer's eyes opened wide—she could still hear the telephone ringing from the other side. No, not
that
other side—the other side of the bed.

Marilee Attatochee blinked at an alarm clock's illuminated face.
Nobody in their right mind would call me after two
A.M
. It'll be some slobbering drunk who thinks I'm his best friend. Or it'll be Al, wanting me to bail him out of jail.
She listened to another ring.
No, it can't be Al, because I let him come back—which was really a stupid thing to do because he's such a jerk—but I was so lonesome.
She closed her eyes.
Maybe I didn't let him back in the house. Maybe that was just a bad dream too.
A groan.
I wish I hadn't but I know I did because he's here in the bed beside me. I can hear the half-wit snoring.
The annoyed Papago woman gave her live-in boyfriend a sharp elbow in the ribs. “Wake up!”

“Arrrgh…Eeeunngh…” Alphonse Harper also made a gargling sound.

She applied another elbow-dig.

“Wha…What?”

“Answer the phone.”

He scowled at the plump lump beside him. “Why don't you answer it?”

“Because it's on your side of the bed, dipstick!”

“Oh. Awright, then.” Al scrambled around until he got a hand on the noisy instrument, pressed it against his ear. Immediately he heard the whisper from somewhere faraway:

“
Marilee…Marilee?”

I knew it'd be for her.
“Whozis?”

Silence.

He switched on a light. “Dammit, who's woke me up in the middle a the night?”

Dead
silence.

“Dammit!” Al banged the instrument down. “I hate it when people do that!” He turned his scowl on the telephone. “Ain't there some kind of law—”

“Shut up, Alphonse.”

He switched off the light, muttered a vulgar curse at the caller, whined a lament to his girlfriend. “Now I won't be able to go back to sleep.” The wide-awake complainant was talking to a woman who had already drifted off. Back to the funeral.

As he had predicted, Alphonse Harper did not go back to sleep. For ever so long, he lay flat on his back, staring at a dark place where the ceiling surely was. After ever-so-long plus a minute or two, a light came on. In his head. Figuratively speaking. This was quite a new experience for Mr. Harper—one that startled him.
I bet I know who that was on the phone!

He slipped out of bed, taking considerable care not to waken Marilee. Which, if she had noticed, would have made her suspicious that Al was up to no good. Which he was. In the parlor, he switched on a lamp on a corner table, examined a second telephone. “Ah-ha,” he said. This was a big “Ah-ha.” It was, in fact—for the first and last time in Al's mostly inconsequential life—a true moment of discovery. And one that the small-time entrepreneur figured he might turn a tidy profit by.

Raymond Oates gazed across his granite-top desk at the pathetic-looking character who had knocked on his office door a moment earlier.
Wonder what he's doing here?

Slouch hat in hand, Al Harper was hunched slightly forward—like a bullfrog about to jump. This amphibian-metaphoric appearance was misleading; Marilee Attatochee's boyfriend was merely leaning toward his hope for a taste of prosperity, which was embodied in the physical person of this wealthy man.

The corpulent attorney pulled a six-hundred-dollar lighter from a tight vest pocket, touched it to the tip of a tightly wrapped
Arturo Fuente.
“Take a load off, Al.”

Harper selected a fatly padded leather armchair. “Thanks, boss.”

“I wish you wouldn't call me ‘boss.'” Oates clenched his capped teeth on the cigar. “You are not in my employ.”

“Uh, sorry.” The sycophant grinned obsequiously, shifted his pelvis around until he found the optimum spot for comfort. “Didn't mean no harm, Mr. Oates. When I say ‘boss,' it's just my way of showing respect.”

Somewhat mollified by this clumsy flattery, Oates leaned back in his throne-like chair, eyeballed the clock on the wall. “It's just a few minutes past ten.” He allowed himself a sardonic grin. “I can't figure out what brings you out so early in the morning, but I'll make two guesses. Either Marilee kicked you out again, or Marilee kicked you out again. Which one is it?”

The most cowardly of men can finally have enough, and turn on his persecutor with all the fury of a cornered rabbit. Al Harper twitched his nose, waited for the grin to slip off Oates's pudgy face. When it did, he said: “I've been wide awake since two
A.M
.”

Oates saw something new glinting in Harper's working eye. Something that made him feel uneasy. He shifted to a conciliatory tone: “You must be tired.”

“Yes, I am.” Al Harper looked longingly at the cigar. “I could sure do with a smoke.”

Oates opened a desk drawer, withdrew a box that still had a dozen of the original twenty-five cigars. He shoved it across the polished granite. “Help yourself.”

Al took a cigar, stuffed it into his mouth.

“Take another one for the road.”

The nicotine-deprived fellow accepted the generous offer, carefully placed the second cigar over his left ear. As he searched his pockets for the ninety-eight-cent plastic butane lighter, Oates leaned across the desk, flicked the golden instrument under the tip of the Curly Head Deluxe. Harper took a long draw on the aromatic cylinder of Dominican Republic tobacco.

His curiosity whetted, Oates moved to the edge of his chair.

The visitor puffed out a tiny cumulous cloud, idly watched it waft toward an open window, to be sieved by the screen. “I'm here on important business.”

Oates took a puff on his own stogie. “Thought you might be.”

Al removed the cigar from his mouth, twaddled it between his fingers. “I got something you'll be interested in.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Damn right.” He restored the cigar to its rightful position; it jiggled as he talked around it. “I know you're lookin' for Sarah.”

“Cops and bounty hunters in six states are looking for that little Indian gal. But not me—searching for fugitives is not in my line of business.” Oates tapped his cigar on a massive granite ashtray that matched the slab on the desk. “But on behalf of my murdered half brother, I am naturally interested in seeing justice done.”

“Naturally.” Al Harper's good eye sparkled with a greedy glint. “And gettin' back what the kid stole from Ben Silver.”

Oates's eyes narrowed. “What do you know about that?”

Harper shrugged. “Only what I hear—that after Sarah clubbed old Ben with that baseball bat, she stole some stuff.”

Oates was growing weary of the game. “I've got a ten-thirty appointment with a real estate developer out of Salt Lake. What've you got that I might be interested in?”

“A phone number.”

The chubby businessman smirked. “That's it—a phone number?”

The visitor mirrored the smirk. “Marilee got a call last night, and I picked it up.”

The cigar went limp in Oates's liver-tinted lips. “So who was it?”

“Somebody who wanted to talk to Marilee.” A pause while he took a long pull on the cigar. “She was whisperin', but I'm sure it was Sarah. And when the brat heard my voice, she wouldn't say another word.”

“That's interesting, Al. But I don't see how—”

“You ain't heard the good part.”

“Okay. Tell me the ‘good part.'”

“After Marilee went back to sleep, I laid there in bed and thought about it. Then I remembered Marilee had got herself one of them caller-ID gadgets, which comes in handy in her taxi business. I went into the living room and read the number off it, and wrote it down.” He inhaled again. “And you know what?”

“No, Al—I don't know what.”

“That phone call was from an area code that's in Colorado.”

It was Oates's turn to shrug. “I expect there's three or four million people in Colorado that's got telephones. Might have been any one of them. A wrong number, most likely.”

“We both know Sarah Frank's daddy was a Southern Ute Indian. And his tribe has got a reservation in Colorado, right on the border with New Mexico.” Al Harper got up from the overstuffed chair. “But if you're not interested, maybe I should just find the kid myself.” He put out the cigar in Oates's spiffy ashtray, stuck the stub over his spare ear. “Then I could collect that big re-ward you put on her.” He turned toward the door.

Oates managed an oafish smile. “Look, since you took the trouble to come and see me about it, tell you what I'll do. You leave the number with me, I'll check it out when I get the time and if it turns out to be interesting—”

Marilee's boyfriend reached for the doorknob. “You can have it for five hundred bucks.”

Oates's eyes bulged. “You've got to be kidding!”

“Okay, you want to bargain—that's okey doke with me.” He looked over his shoulder. “Make it seven-fifty.”

“Now see here, Al—”

“A thousand.”

Caught off guard by the man's unexpected show of grit, Oates raised both palms in surrender. “Done.”

“Make it U.S. greenback dollars. Twenties'll do nicely.”

Oates snorted. “I use twenties to light my cigars.” He pulled a thick wallet from his hip pocket, riffled through a wad of greenbacks. “I got nothing smaller than a hundred.”

“Then I guess that'll hafta do.” He held out a hand that trembled, warily watched Oates count off ten hundreds, then passed him a scrap of paper.

After Al Harper had departed, Raymond Oates took a moment to fume, and finally to fulminate. Having vented his wrath, he began to mumble to himself. “That no-good piece of trash—coming in here, holding me up like some common robber!” He took a long look at the scrawl on the piece of paper.
It's a Colorado telephone number, all right—but probably one Al made up. If he's swindled me, I'll get somebody to break both his legs.
The president of Oates Enterprises, Inc. pressed the red button on his telephone pad, counted off six seconds until the door to his personal secretary's office opened and the big-boned, craggy-faced woman appeared. Rosey O'Riley wore her hair in a short, mannish cut, and she always dressed in black. Oates's face split in an oafish grin.
This woman always makes me think of Johnny Cash.
He began to strum an invisible guitar, hum “I Walk the Line.”

The annoying man did this two or three times a week.

Mrs. O'Riley—who wore black because she had been mourning the death of her husband for some thirty-odd years—clasped her hands and waited with a pained expression until the strumming and humming had subsided.

The Woman don't have no sense of humor.
“Crank up that confounded computer, see if you can find out whose telephone number this is.”

She inspected the scrap of paper, memorized the ten digits. “Yes sir. It should only take a few minutes.”

It did, in fact, require the efficient secretary precisely fifty-two seconds on the Internet to identify the Mountain West Telecommunications subscriber who held that number. But this was not a lady who was satisfied with half measures. It took another minute to determine the physical location of the telephone.
Now that's quite interesting. I wonder if there could be a connection to that Indian who arrived with the FBI agent to visit Sheriff Popper.
It took approximately three additional minutes to check out her hunch, another thirty seconds for her state-of-the-art color printer to disgorge several sheets of paper. If Mrs. O'Riley had been the sort of high-spirited exuberant who has a tendency to shout “Eureka” or “Wa-hoo,” she certainly would have. As it was, the undemonstrative woman contented herself with a self-satisfied smile and a congratulatory thought:
This is really quite gratifying.

Raymond Oates stared at the name, then furrowed his brows at his employee. “That's nobody I ever heard of.”

She offered him a single sheet of paper.

Oates had a knack for stating the obvious. “Looks like a map.”

“It is, sir.” She pointed a perfectly manicured fingernail. “The residence where the telephone is located is indicated by the star in the center.”

The cigar smoker studied the layout. “Looks like it's plunk out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yes, sir.” Mrs. O'Riley, who savored the big punch line, had saved the best for last. “I did some cross-referencing. You may be interested to know that the person to whom the telephone is registered has a connection to that Ute Indian—Mr. Charles Moon.”

“This is good stuff, Rosey.” He rubbed his hands together. “Tell me more.”

The secretary explained the relationship. She also provided her employer with an additional two pages from the printer. “One of these is a topographic map with twenty-foot contour intervals, the other is a satellite photograph of the same four-square-mile area. On each, I have inked in a small arrow to indicate the structure—presumably a private residence—where the telephone is located.”

Oates was nodding faster than one of his oil-well pumps.
This could be where that Papago girl's hiding.

The secretary prepared to withdraw. “Will that be all, sir?”

Her voice broke the spell. “No, it won't.” He propped the heels of his fourteen-hundred-dollar ostrich-skin cowboy boots onto the immaculate desk, took a couple of aggressive chews on the cigar stub. “Give yourself a nice bonus, Rosey. Let's say…twenty bucks.”
Don't want to spoil the woman.
He glanced at his wristwatch. “And take an early lunch.”

“Very good, sir.” The remarkable employee seemed to evaporate.

Mrs. O'Riley pulled her black Volvo up to the Sybil's Tea & Pastry Shop, switched off the ignition, removed a black cell phone from an equally black leather purse, pressed a programmed button. “Hello, cousin—how are you getting along?” She listened to the expected response, then: “Oh, I'm just fine.” Ray Oates's secretary nodded. “Yes, I've been keeping my eyes open and ears pricked.” She lowered her voice to a gossipy murmur: “Matter of fact, I have something that will interest you.”

She provided a terse account of Al Harper's visit—it was hard not to hear
every word
when the door to Mr. Oates's office happened to be cracked a quarter-inch. The person on the other end of the line was silent as Rosey described the mysterious late-night call for Marilee Attatochee which was intercepted by her odious boyfriend, and the location in Colorado where the call had originated. She read the telephone subscriber's name to her relative, explained the connection to Charlie Moon. There was a brief pause in the conversation as a cattle truck rumbled by. “I have two computer-generated maps and a satellite composite photograph that pinpoints the dwelling where the caller's telephone is located. I'll leave a sealed manila envelope in the usual place.”

Her cousin said that would be just fine, then brought up the old, familiar issue that mildly annoyed the efficient secretary.

“No, I still don't have any idea who Mr. Oates talks to on his private phone or what he says.” She reminded her relative for the umpteenth time: “For one thing, the line isn't connected to the console on my desk. And when Mr. Oates intends to make a really hush-hush call, he always sends me out of the building on an errand—or like today, for an early lunch.”

Cousin finally got down to the matter of payment.

“Oh, you know how I hate to talk about money.” Rosey examined an immaculate set of fingernails.
This Sonoran Sunset tint is just a shade too light.
“But let's say twenty dollars.”