He looked around as if his office might be bugged. “She would come in with marks on her arms and face sometimes, nothing big, just bruises. I tried to get her to talk about it, and she said that he hurt her, sometimes. I mean, I assume it was Clarence.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see Lolo’s jaw muscles tighten. “How often?”
He thought about it. “Once a month, I guess.”
“Once a month?”
“Yes.”
She spit out the next words. “Why didn’t anybody report it?”
Herbert His Good Horse leaned across his desk and spoke in a slightly more aggressive tone, dashing some ashes off his cigar into the ceramic ashtray on his desk. “You know how hard it is to get these things investigated or to press charges when the victim refuses.” He looked at me, imploring. “She didn’t even want to talk to me about it.”
I glanced at the chief. “We understand.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’m not accusing anybody, but…”
“Right.” I waited a moment. “Is there anybody else you can think of?”
He gestured helplessly.
“Anybody who might have seemed particularly angry with Audrey-any kind of odd behavior on her part when somebody might’ve come in?” He didn’t say anything, but I could tell my soundings had touched something. “Anybody?”
He sighed. “There were a few, now that I think about it-I mean, I don’t know if this means anything…”
Long produced a small notepad and pen. “Please.”
Herbert stared at the journal and then slowly spoke. “There’s an individual from the eastern part of the Rez, a man by the name of Small Song.”
For the second time today, I completed the man’s name. “ Artie Small Song?”
“I hate to bring it up because his nephew, Nate, works with me up at KRZZ, but yes, that’s him.” The social worker nodded. “Artie was in here last week about his mother’s Elder support checks-we would give them to him to give to her. She’s a medicine woman out that way-big medicine. We were worried that she wasn’t really getting her checks and discovered she hasn’t for the last three months-so, this time we refused to give him her check. He was very angry.”
Chief Long was attempting to catch my eye, but I ignored her. “I bet he was.”
“I just remember him because Audrey read him the riot act and told him that he should be ashamed of himself.” His eyes went to Lolo. “Your brother had to throw him out. I thought he was going to kill Barrett.”
Chief Long started to close her notepad and stand. “Thank you, Herb.”
I placed a hand on her arm and reseated her. “Are there any others you can think of?”
His eyes, once again, went back and forth between us. “There are a few others.”
“Who?”
“Kelly Joe Burns down in Birney.”
I assumed it was Red Birney, which was not too far from the incident.
“Birney Day.” He quickly added.
Evidently political correctness was making headway on the Rez.
“Is that that white asshole meth-head Houdini who can run a hundred miles an hour I’ve been chasing for a month now?”
Herbert nodded his head. “There was also Louise Griffin, who got in a shouting match with her a couple of weeks back.” He thought. “You know? No, none of these people would ever…”
“Not even Artie Small Song?” He glanced up at me but didn’t say anything. “It’s not your responsibility to make those choices, Herb; we’re just relying on you to provide us with some names. It’s up to us to move forward with the investigation.”
He didn’t seem completely comfortable with my assurances. “You’re not going to mention my name; I mean, I have a small and deeply disturbed following on the radio.”
“Not to worry.” I glanced at the door. “Is there anybody here in the building, people she might’ve worked with?” I paused. “I noticed Loraine Two Two out there.”
“Well, considering what happened, they weren’t the best of friends.” He laughed. “No, God no. Audrey was a saint around here; everyone loved her. Everyone. She came in on her day off to do extra work, baked cookies on Fridays-that’s what makes this so hard to believe.” He glanced up at the poster behind him. “She ran and worked out with Karl, getting him ready for his races.” His words caught in his throat, and he placed a hand over his face. “Excuse me for just a moment.”
Lolo tapped my arm. “I think we’ve taken up enough of your time here, Herb.”
We stood, and I nodded to him in appreciation of his help. “Thank you.”
His eyes shone like puddles in his face. “Hey, there was this Indian woman hitchhiking back to the Rez in the middle of the night and this white woman picks her up. The Indian woman says, ‘Hey, thanks for picking me up. What are you doing out on the road this late?’ The white woman points to a bottle in a brown paper bag sitting on the seat between them and says, ‘I got this bottle of wine for my husband.’ The Indian woman nodded, ‘Good trade.’”
Lolo Long smiled and placed a hand on his shoulder as we turned and left.
In the hallway, Barrett and Karl were chatting up who I assumed was one of the girls from accounting, who beat a hasty retreat when she saw Lolo coming. “You had a wrestling match with Artie Small Song last week?”
Barrett crossed his arms-it must have been a family trait. “Huh?”
Chief Long flipped through the register and then turned the book around on the desk and shoved it toward her brother, a finger pinning the personage on the page. “Him.”
The young man leaned forward and read the name as Karl nodded a hello to me and backed his chair out of the line of fire.
“Oh, yeah, that guy.” Barrett looked up at his sister. “He had a screaming fit down the hall. Said he was going to come back in here with an atomic bomb and blow the place up.”
“Did he threaten Audrey Plain Feather?”
“He threatened everybody on the planet.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Does that mean I can have a gun now?”
She turned and leafed through the rest of the book in a disinterested fashion. “No.”
“If he comes back, I could shoot the nuke out of his hand.”
The chief looked at me and then returned her eyes to the register. “Why don’t you tell my little brother about the 50 percent of cops that get shot?”
I shrugged.
Karl continued to study me and then spoke. “If you’re going after Artie Small Song, you better take an army with you.”
“That’s what I had in mind.”
He grinned at the floor. “Back before I lost my legs, some friends and me, we were out hunting one time and shot this whitetail deer up near Kelly Creek. When we got to it, that dude Small Song was already butchering it. This buddy of mine steps up and says, ‘That’s my deer.’ He didn’t even look at us, four of us, but stood there with that skinning knife just moving back and forth.” He looked up at me for the first time. “Swaying, you know, like a snake before it strikes.”
I smiled. “You let him keep the deer?”
Karl nodded with the self-assurance of someone who has barely escaped death, perhaps numerous times, and is wiser for it. “You bet your ass we did; the guy’s a psycho.” He shuddered dramatically.
It was dark, but from my vantage point I could still see the old woman lift the planks and check the pit- roasted elk underneath. The shower of sparks rose like a constellation of orange celestial bodies reaching out for their brethren above, lighting the face of the woman as though she was onstage.
I was lodged at the base of a Y-shaped pine, the fallen branches making for a pretty good hiding place, or so I thought until the medicine woman looked up the hillside and directly at me-even from this distance I could feel the weight of those opaque eyes.
She had pulled a rumpled CPO jacket around her shoulders and the shawl she had been wearing earlier was
