Two Medicine (26 page)

“
Yeah, we had just met.
But in knew her, yeah.” I watched the wheels of the tape recorder
turning. Alarm bells starting going off in my mind – I was probably
the only one they knew of that was with her the night of her death,
and we had had sex, and whatever I said would be written in
stone.

He asked me when we met,
and how and where. I told him about her coming into the store that
day, me taking her on a canoe ride, showing her around the place,
and that we had hung out until late in the evening. I kept it a
little vague. I was struggling between wanting to tell this cop all
of it, the sex, my feelings for her, my desire, because I wanted to
somehow relate to him what she meant to me, and to get him off his
ass to find this killer who had destroyed a precious work of art.
But I was also struggling with the desire to distance myself from
the cop and his investigation. Yet as I spoke, I slowly felt a
releasing of my hesitancy and a resigning myself to my fate,
whatever fate would bring; it was like he had some subtle cop power
to get me to talk into this machine on his desk. I glanced at its
moving wheels again. It was still a relief to tell what I knew
about Alia to this cop, like releasing the pressure in a tire that
was overfilled, but I was still cautious, and I decided not to tell
him we had had sex.

Officer Olsterman mostly
sat still as a stone as I spoke. As I talked, he interjected a few
brief questions to clarify some facts, but basically he let me
ramble. After I had finished telling him about Greg visiting me at
the store and telling me about Alia’s death, he picked up the line
of questioning.

“
So you said the last time
you saw her was when she left your room late that night, but I
don’t think you said when that was exactly,” he said.

Because I had no idea...
But what could I actually say? Even I thought it strange that I had
not heard or felt Alia leave the bed and my room that night, nor
had I heard her on the stairs when she left – and I was a very
light sleeper. Somehow, she had snuck out of the place without a
sound, as if she had just floated out of the window like a
ghost.

I wondered how I appeared
to this cop as I sat before him – a fool, a possible killer, or
just a nobody to be crossed off a list? One thing I was sure of,
was that my story sounded too vague; a suspect would be that vague,
that incomplete.

Officer Olsterman’s long
years on the job and his cop’s sixth sense noted my uneasiness,
smelled it, probably, and he now watched me with a new interest in
his eyes.

As I sat
before him, I sweated under the reality that one
misstatement could mushroom this “fact finding” conversation (as
Olsterman had called it at one point) into something much more
serious, and divert the police off the proper trail, wherever the
proper trail was…

“
I don’t really know when
she left me,” I said again, shrugging quickly. “She just left in
the night.”

“
You didn’t hear her
leave?” he asked again.

“
No.”

He glanced over at some
notes on a legal pad beside his arm, then back at me. “Did you two
quarrel before she left?”

I should my head.
“No.”

He just sat in silence. I
felt a strain develop in the air.

“
Any reason why she would
just leave in the middle of the night like that, Mr. Benton?” His
tone had changed ever so slightly and had a new edge.

“
Could have been
anything,” I said. “I really didn’t keep track of time, but she may
have left early morning – I don’t know.”

“
Early morning? What were
you two doing in your room that night?” He asked, watching
me.

“
Playing
guitar.”

Why didn’t I hear her
leave, goddamn it? I thought. Her disappearing like she did cast a
different like on the whole night, and a different light on me. The
more we talked, the more I felt like Officer Olsterman’s interest
in me was growing – despite my whole intention to avoid that. And
whatever happened to me aside, any attention spent on looking at my
involvement was wasting what little powers the small police force
in Browning had available to apply to this case.

Olsterman scribbled
something on his pad. “Did she ever talk to you about anyone who
wanted to hurt her?”

“
No, nothing like that.” I
heard frustration edging into my voice. “She had a troubled past,
you know, and I was told she recently broke up with this guy
Clayton, a drug dealer in town...” I paused and watched the
officer’s face for a reaction, but he didn’t give away anything –
just the same passive but steady gaze at me and at his legal
pad.

“
What kind of ‘troubled
past’?” he asked.

I told him about her
foster care experience, what little I knew; but I left out the
story about the bathtub and I just said she had been abused
physically. It seemed like a violation of her trust in me, somehow,
even now, to expose that dark secret she had entrusted to me – at
least to a cop I had just met.

He took a few notes on the
legal pad. He then asked me if I had any kind of criminal record,
and asked me about Ronnie and the rest of them at the store, if
they knew Alia and similar questions. I told him they didn’t know
her. The officer made a final couple of notes on the pad as I
talked and then he slowly looked at his watch.

“
Well I think that about
does it.” He stretched his beefy arms back over his head, popping
some vertebra in his neck and rolling his large head around slowly,
and then he reached over and switched off the recorder.

The whole thing had gotten
us nowhere. What had he gained from anything I had said? What had I
gained? Now, despite my misgivings and apprehension in coming there
at all, now that I was actually there, I didn’t want it to end so
briefly without anything of substance being learned by either of us
that afternoon.

“
So how’s the
investigation going?” I asked him.

The officer shrugged.
“There’s not much to go on. We don’t have a lot of information at
this point.”

He looked at me with the
hint of a smile, or at least I thought I detected one. “Nobody
seems to have heard or seen anything.”

I waited a moment,
searching his face for a sign as to what he may be thinking; but he
kept his face a mask of tired, grudging duty.

“
Who found her body?” I
asked.

He shook his head slowly,
“I’m sorry – can’t tell you that.”

“
Why not?”

He paused a moment.
“Because I said so; and because it’s an ongoing investigation.” He
reached down and brought up his coffee mug and took a
sip.

“
A ranger in Two Med told
me that there was no sign on her of sexual assault. Is that
true?”

The officer sighed for a
second, and placed the mug back down and shook his head in
exaggerated frustration. “Greg, I assume. You need to tell Greg
that he should stay in the park and take care of park business –
he’s not a part of any investigation.”

I considered that for a
second. “Is there any?”

“
Is there any what?” he
asked.

“
Is there any
investigation? I mean, you said yourself you don’t have enough
information, so where do you go from here?”

He looked at me with a face
that said
I don’t need some young punk
questioning how I do my job.
He cocked his
big round head sideways a little and said, “What are you trying to
say, young man?” He leveled his gaze at me a little lower, probably
an expression he used regularly on young punks who back-talked
him.

“
I mean she’s been dead
for a while and I don’t think the BIA has even been out to Two Med
at all to ask around about her – at least not that I’ve heard. What
about the campers and tourists who were around when she died?
They’re long gone now.”

I felt my face was getting
red as I rambled, and I felt a new rush of irritation with the
feeling that nothing would probably be accomplished by this
meeting. I wanted to vent all the frustration and impatience that
had been pent up in me since I had been told Alia was dead, onto
this bald cop. Someone so good and passionate in my life had been
ripped right out of my hands, and it was beginning to look like the
cause, and the killer, would remain a mystery. And I could not take
that... I would
not
take that.

“
It just
seems like everyone is just shrugging it off,” I said. “There’s
this clown Thunderbird supposedly elected by the Blackfoot tribe to
find out what happened – which is a joke. At least Greg seems to
give a damn – and she
was
killed in the park. I mean this wasn’t a bear
attack – how many violent murders like this could there be in Two
Medicine? And is anyone looking into this Clayton person – she
lived with him for Christ’s sake…”

I stopped and took a deep
breath and looked out of Olsterman’s office window, shaking my
head, trying to calm down. Officer Olsterman didn’t say a word, but
just stared at me, his mouth a firm frown and his eyelids
half-lowered.

I knew Alia
deserved better; she barely had had a chance in
life and now barely had a chance in death. I decided, right then
and there, that I would find out what happened to her. I would
recruit Greg, the only person who seemed to care besides myself,
and find out what happened no matter what happened. If it cost me
my two-bit job, so what? If it got me in trouble with some crazy
drug dealers? Whatever. If I got hurt? So be it. Thrown in jail?
Fine.

“
You may think I don’t
care about this girl, Will,” Olsterman said as if reading my
thoughts, “but we take our job seriously, and we do our jobs
seriously. You think this is the only crime we have to investigate?
It’s not – not even the only murder. But make no mistake we are
taking it very seriously.”

I looked back at the
officer; he just seemed more tired than motivated, and his words
didn’t convince me. At this point, I just wanted to get out of his
office and go find Greg. I saw the sun was going down in the
distance out past the buildings in town. I told the officer that I
had to get back to the store and I asked if we were
finished.

Olsterman nodded slowly at
me, and then picked up a card from his desk and handed it to me. As
I grabbed it he held it for a second before releasing it into my
hand, and said, “I have to say this in these situations, of course,
but don’t leave town without checking in with me first – we may
have some more questions for ya – might need a DNA sample from ya
too.”

I nodded vaguely, and
walked out of his office and towards the front door. His parting
request haunted me as I left, but I realized that it was just a
part of the whole, ridiculous mess. I reflected again that I was
mostly likely the last person to see Alia alive (in their minds)
and that made me either the killer or an important witness, so of
course they were going to be keeping an eye on me. But DNA would
only complicate things for me, and it left me with a bad
feeling.

All in all
though
, I thought as I started up Ronnie’s
car and backed out of the building,
could
have been worse
…
At least they didn’t arrest me.

Twenty-One

I called Greg
that night, but only got Dee. She told me Greg
would be out of town for a couple of days assisting with some park
business on the other side of Glacier, but that she’d give him the
message to call me when he got back. Disappointed, I hung up the
phone and hoped I could convince him to look into what happened
with me.

The next few days at the
store passed uneventfully, my thoughts about Alia’s murder drowned
out at times by the steady pace of the job – up front and in the
kitchen cooking up peoples’ meals. More new faces from the
campsites came and went, buying this and that, ordering meals,
telling us about themselves, their travels over the park, asking us
where we were from, and what it was like to live in the store…
asking about the grizzlies, the bald eagles, the lake and
mountains, and the ancient log store itself.

I fell into a routine
pretty quickly as we got into late June – up at seven in the
morning to shower and eat a small breakfast, usually with Ronnie
and Katie even when one of them was off for the day, then to either
prep the kitchen with Phyllis who remained a constant presence in
the kitchen, or I’d be prepping the gift shop cash register and
restocking the stuff on the shelves. Larry’s truck had been gone a
while and Larry told me when I asked about it that it was in the
shop; and when the truck was returned it had a new coat of
paint.

After breakfast and
restocking each morning, we’d open the main front door and side
doors, propping them open with wooden wedges, letting the sunlight
and breeze flow in through screens, then ringing up the buys on the
registers, or in the back grilling burgers and making shakes in the
kitchen. Ronnie still kept me entertained when we’d be paired up,
telling me stories about his feats of debauchery with women in
Detroit and in college, and his exploits when it came to consuming
spectacular amounts of booze and drugs – of all kinds and
varieties, at this party or that festival.