Homicide My Own Page 3

  “Not a good idea,” said Charles.

  “Just to let her know everything’s okay.”

  “You think everything’s okay?”

  “You know....”

  “It is okay. Everything is fine. We’re together. I’ll take care of you.”

  “I love you so much.”

  “I love you too, Stacey. I’m crazy for you, like literally. I’m insane.”

  “Me too! I’m out of my mind.”

  “There’s no turning back now.”

  They held hands again, but with the free hand they kept on feeding. They were in love, but it had been some time since they’d last eaten.

  “I’m going to have to get a job somewhere,” said Charles.

  “I can get a job too.”

  “What doing?”

  “Anything. At a MacDonald’s, or in a store or something. Let’s go to Hawaii!”

  “All right.”

  “Really?”

  “Whatever you want, sweetie. Only first, we have to get jobs and save enough to get there.”

  “We can put it on your credit card.”

  “I can’t use that anymore. They can trace you through your credit card, map your whereabouts day by day.”

  King George by then had heard quite enough to get the picture and to wonder what role he and his tribe should play, if any, in this little drama. His options? He could finish his coffee, go about his business, and keep one eye on them until they left, which he assumed would be shortly after they had eaten all they could hold. If something unfolded afterwards, however, something untoward... if he killed her or she killed him, or if they held up the cafe or mugged an old Indian, or maybe killed themselves in a lovers’ suicide pact, which was not all that remote an idea since their conversation had turned to the eventual movie of their lives and who should play each of them in the major production, which she decided ought to be Leonardo de Caprio and Drew Barrymore and he countered with the argument that he was too young and she was too old, Leonardo and Drew, that is...if anything like that happened and it was later revealed they had spent some time in the casino, it would all come back to what was an underaged girl doing in a tribal casino and where was security? Or he could go over there and invite them both to follow him to the room where they talk to people, away from the action, which always runs the risk of a public relations faux pas, embarrassing but not really all that dangerous since you can’t sue Indians.

  For the moment, King George just nursed his coffee and listened in on what the couple imagined might be the true happy ending to their scenario.

  “We could get married,” mused Charles.

  The young girl leapt to her feet, danced around the table, and planted a kiss on his lips.

  Some midnight snackers looked up from their macaroni and meat sauce, thinking some lucky bastard had hit a Keno combo.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” she trilled, though to King George’s ears it sounded like something less than an actual proposal of marriage. Charles smiled, entertained by her youthful enthusiasm, as was King George, in his way, but he never smiled. Stoicism was his birthright.

  “We could leave the country,” she said, still on her feet, “we could get married in Hawaii. That’d prove to everybody we were seriously in love, that would show the whole world the power of love over cops.”

  “It’s a thought,” said Houser.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” she accepted for the sixth time.

  “If we even could get legally married...” Charles mused.

  “If? Why can’t we? Legally married? Can’t we?”

  “Maybe. For sure we’d need your mother’s permission, though. Hawaii’s, you know, a state.”

  “Shit.... There’s always something shooting down a cool idea. Wait. You know what? She might go for it. She might be glad to get rid of me. She always calls me a real handful. She gets all drama queeny and goes, ‘You are the revenge of my own youth.’ She might be thrilled to have you take me off her hands!”

  He talked to her in a soft and loving way, trying to calm her down. “Things have to cool down a bit, honey. Before we can bring up that subject with you mother. We have to get her on our side, after everything cools to a simmer.”

  King George made up his mind that some action was necessary. Casino security, indeed, the tribal police, had long suffered disrespect from the sheriff’s department and the white population of the island. Though sovereign, the tribal efforts at law enforcement, especially as it applied to non-tribal members, were for the most part ignored. Traffic tickets, for example, were routinely torn up and scattered in the wind. It was embarrassing.

  King George was surprised that when they finished their food, the lovers went in two different directions. He chose to follow the girl to the bank of three public phones where she placed a collect call. King George picked up one of the other phones, turned his back to her, and listened.

  “Hi, Mom, how’re you? Look, I’m okay, okay? I’m with a friend, okay? No, a girlfriend...you don’t know her, okay? I have lots of friends you don’t know. Nancy, all right? Her name is fucking Nancy, and we’re in California, okay? I’m not sure...between San Francisco and Los Angeles.”

  Seems she got busted on that because the operator must have told the mother where the call was coming from. There was a little bit of controlled screaming, from both ends of the line. The girl turned it back on her mother, blaming her for always making her lie. There was hissing and half-said rebuttals and counter-accusations before the mother said something that stopped the daughter and changed her tone of voice. “They are? The cops? It’s none of their business! I don’t know where he is, okay? I thought he was back there. Tell the cops I’m all right and I don’t know where he is, okay? How do you know? You think you know everything. All right, all right, yeah, we’re together, but nobody is ever gonna separate us. Mom? Listen, Mom? You ought to give us permission to get married.”

  Apparently the mother thought that was a terrible idea, because the girl kept repeating the words why not with growing intensity until she split them with the word fucking.

  King George hung up his phone and walked slowly toward the man, who was at the craps table, and, coincidentally, winning. He paused halfway there and spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Sidney? King. Craps table. The man with the dice. He’s with an under-aged girl. Get Bobby, just in case.”

  . The girl slammed down the phone and went to the craps table.

  King George took his time, then stood behind the croupier for a moment.

  The girl squeezed in next to the man and draped an arm over his shoulder. The man said, “I’m winning, sweetie! Blow on these puppies.” She blew on the dice and he tossed them. Seven, a winner.

  “I asked my mom. She went ballistic.”

  “Huh?”

  “About getting married and stuff.”

  “Stacey, didn’t I tell you...?”

  “I think maybe we’d better go to Canada or somewhere. That’s a different country, right? We can do stuff there we can’t do here, right?”

  King George nodded to Sidney Everybodytalksabout, who approached the table, and to Bobby Young Elk, who was drawing toward them. Before Charles could make another pass, King George asked him to hold up. “Is this young lady with you?”

  Charles and Stacey looked at each other. She quickly withdrew her arm. “No,” they said simultaneously.

  “I know that’s a lie, so I’ll ask another question. Young lady, are you eighteen?”

  “Eighteen? I wish,” said Stacey. “I’m twenty-two.”

  “Please pick up your chips and leave the floor with me.”

  The thrill of the gamble, what thrill there is in watching your money raked away, was put on hold as everyone observed the unfolding of this encounter. Charles, in no rush, gathered up his chips in two handfuls.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked, in a pleasant, unconcerned voice.

  “We’d like to talk to you, maybe make a phone call.”

  Stacey brought h
er foot down hard on King George’s instep, and though she weighed only 98 pounds with a Discman hanging around her neck, he felt every ounce of it. They ran for the door, where Sidney Everybodytalksabout swept up Stacey in a bear hug, her feet kicking in the air.

  Charles had already dropped most of the chips in his left hand. What he had in his right hand, he threw into Bobby Young Elk’s face.

  He was on his way to the rear entrance with a good lead,.

  He made the parking lot. He would have made the car, might have even made the ferry, had a sherbet’s chance in hell of making the mainland, no chance in hell of living happily ever after.

  He dropped his last few chips into the shirt pocket of the valet parking attendant and waited to be put in handcuffs.

  Odd and I ate up there all the while, listening to the story, and then we went off to pick up Houser.

  5.

  The Tribal Police Headquarters was a double-wide trailer behind a B.P. station, closed for the night. It was two a.m. by the time we found it. We had already burned the hour the lieutenant had allotted us for the pick-up. I knew that would happen, but what’s another hour on a detail like this?

  The young Indian behind the desk had the dull embarrassed patina of the lowest dangling link on the chain of command.

  I gave him the paperwork the lieutenant had given us. “We’re here to get Charles Houser.”

  He studied the paperwork earnestly. He was about eighteen.

  “I have to call the chief,” he said.

  “The Indian chief?”

  “The chief of police,” he said. I knew that with the best intentions, and I’m not claiming those were the kind I always had, I was helpless to keep from making offensive remarks. I was actually surprised it had taken so long.

  The kid picked up the phone, dialed and said, “There’s cops from Spokane here.” He listened for a beat, then handed the phone to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Quinn speaking.”

  “They sent a woman?”

  “The name is Officer Quinn. Good morning.”

  “Seth Shining Pony. I’m head of the police here. I called Spokane, but unfortunately you had already left.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this, Chief. This is sounding like a problem.”

  “A small problem, yes.”

  “Let me have it.”

  “You won’t be able to take the man back with you, at least not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll be right down. Tell Robert to make you coffee.”

  He hung up before I could say anything more. I gave the phone back to Robert and turned to Odd. “There’s a problem.”

  “Sure there is. There always is.”

  “He’s on his way to fill us in. Hey, Robert, you wouldn’t happen to know, would you? What the problem is?”

  Robert was like every nurse in every hospital I’ve ever been in. She knows the whole scoop, but the doctor will have to talk to you about that.

  I sat on a tattered easy chair they had there. This place was unlike any police headquarters I had ever seen. Nothing to read, nothing to do, so I just sat there, much like Odd suggested a sensible adult ought to do, watching one's impulses until they faded away. In my case, I wouldn’t mind some kind of impulse falling upon me so that I could let it take me wherever the hell it was going. Impulses can be good things too.

  Odd was going over the bulletin board, your basic notices of what’s happening in the jurisdiction and who’s on the arfy-darfy.

  A corner of a faded photograph, a five-by-seven, showed beneath a sheet of thermal fax paper. Odd lifted the paper to see the photo in its entirety, then like he owned the place he reposted the fax somewhere else on the board, letting the light shine on a photo of a couple, a teen-age couple, whose names were printed below the photo, but from where I sat I couldn’t read them, if I cared, which I didn’t.

  Odd, though, couldn’t take his eyes off the thing.

  “Who are those people?” I asked. And when Odd didn’t answer, I said, “Robert?”

  “Huh?”

  “That picture, who are those people?”

  Robert looked up from his Street Rods magazine and over at the object of Odd’s fascination. “That’s Jimmy Coyote and his girlfriend, Jeannie Olson.”

  “They’re dead,” said Odd, sadly, which I suppose was not a great feat of detection, considering where we were, and the picture was so old.

  “Yeah, long time past,” said Robert. “Shotgunned, both of them, off at Point Despair in Jimmy’s pick-up truck. It was a Ford.”

  “Who did that?” I asked.

  “They never caught the killer,” said Odd, transfixed before the photo of the young doomed couple.

  “Nope. That’s why their picture is still up there. Oldest unsolved crime on the island. The only murder unsolved.”

  “You have lots of murder out here?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Mostly from drunk fights or domestic squabbles, though. Jimmie ‘n Jeannie was the last real murder.”

  “C’mere and have a look, Quinn.”

  “That’s all right.” I didn’t need to have a look.

  “She was a real heartbreaker.”

  “The old-timers say she was the most beautiful girl on the island,” Robert said. “Most beautiful girl there ever was on the island. That’s what they all say.”

  “No good suspects?” I asked.

  “Lots of suspects. Nearly a thousand. Everybody who lived on the island. Only they could never figure out which one done it. Check it out, I have the only iron-clad alibi.”

  “You weren’t born yet.”

  “Right.”

  Odd continued to stare at the photo. He was into it. Everybody loves a mystery, right? Wrong. I don’t love a mystery. People get killed, other people either get caught for it or get away with it.

  “Quinn, when were you born?”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you ever answer a simple question?”

  “One-eleven. Okay?”

  “What year?”

  “None of your business.”

  “This girl was born on January 11...1951.”

  My birthday. Did I make anything out of this? I put my head back and fell asleep, that’s what I made out of it. It is a statistical fact that at any random gathering of twelve people, two of them will be found to have the same birthday. I don’t know how that can be, but they say it is. Coincidences in life abound. People accept them.

  The chief took his own sweet time. I had most of an hour’s nap before Odd woke me saying, “This must be him.”

  “That’s him,” said Robert.

  Chief Shining Pony was a serious man in his mid-forties, putting on a little weight. His long black hair, tied in two braids, was already turning silver at the temples. He was not in uniform. He wore jeans and cowboy boots and a fringed leather jacket over an Ex-Officio shirt. He led us into his tiny office in a corner of the back half of the double-wide and asked us to sit down.

  “Did you lose him?” I asked, right out, which apparently was strike two on me.

  “No, ma’am, we didn’t lose him.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “He tried to commit suicide.”

  “Aw, shit. How close did he get?”

  “Not very. If you open up that door...”

  Odd opened the door he indicated and we saw a ratty cell, just a cot, no sink or toilet, with the cell door now swung open. Blood all over the floor.

  “That door was open, and I was here,” said Seth Shining Pony, “so I caught him at it before he could finish. But if he was only makin’ a gesture, it was one fine dramatic gesture.”

  “How so?”

  “He tried to chew open a vein in his wrist.”

  “Woi Yesus.”

  “That’s how he was going to remove the stain,” said Odd. “With his own teeth.”

  “What stain?” asked the chief.

  “Of his actions.”

 
“We’re no strangers to suicide around here,” said the chief. “I’ve seen Drano drinkers and plastic bag heads, but your boy takes the cake.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Laid up in bed, in my house. Some might say we should have ferried him or airlifted him to the hospital in Bellingham, and some might say we shouldn’t have had him here in the first place. I was doing your boss a favor, and we did, after all, make the arrest. If I have to, I can debate it. But I’m hoping I won’t have to. I’m hoping you two can carry him home tomorrow and when the time is right give us a little credit for a job well done.”