Restaurant and Casino. Henry took the left at the overpass toward the Texaco station and the venerable cafe. “I have to get gas; is anybody else hungry?”
I smiled at Ray Bartlett, who was behind the counter, and he seated us by the window so the Bear could keep an eye on Lola and so we could enjoy the day. Wanda Pretty On Top came over and took our orders, and about a minute later, Cady excused herself.
Lena Moretti placed her hand on me this time, and I had to admit that it was a nice hand that I remembered from my adventures in Philadelphia no more than a year ago. “She’ll be all right.”
I nodded.
“She’s just nervous.”
I nodded some more.
“Christ, she’s marrying my son-that’s enough to throw a scare into any woman.”
I laughed. “How’s the family?”
The little curve came up at the corner of her lipsticked lips, sly and dangerous, just like her daughter’s. “Mean as snakes, and they’ll all be here in less than a week and a half.” She crossed her legs and thanked Wanda for the collective iced teas she’d brought over. “How’s the Terror?”
I thought about Vic. “Doing a public relations seminar in Omaha.”
“Public relations? You’ve got to be kidding.” She laughed. “So, she escaped?”
“Something like that.”
Lena glanced at Henry. “This reservation thing: big case?”
“Well, maybe not the crime of the century, but it sure looks like a homicide.”
“Aren’t there Reservation police?”
Henry finally smiled. “Tons of them, federal, BIA, and tribal.”
Her buckskin eyes shifted back to mine.
“Can’t they take care of this?”
“It’s complicated.”
Her turn to smile. “It always is, isn’t it?”
I explained about Chief Lolo Long in all its three-part harmony and found myself studying Lena Moretti more and more as I spoke.
“But there’s a suspect?”
I nodded and tried to not get distracted by the shape of her neck. “A couple of them, but one has some truly antisocial tendencies.”
“Such as?”
“A closet full of guns, and he pretty much threatens to kill everyone he comes in contact with.”
“Sounds like wild, wild Westmoreland Street in Philadelphia.”
Henry and I both laughed, and my eyes wandered toward the alcove where the bathrooms were located.
“Would you like me to go check on her?”
I scooted my chair out and stood. “I think that’s my job-I’ll just knock on the door and see if she’s okay.” I sipped my tea in preparation for the conversation to come and glanced at the Cheyenne Nation. “But, madam, I leave you in expert hands.”
I walked toward the bathrooms, but Ray caught my eye and jerked his head toward the casino portion of the establishment. I nodded and walked into the windowless area where the electronic sounds of the numerous one- armed amputee machines drowned out everything else.
Cady was sitting at one of them, dropping quarters in and pulling the lever as if she were working on an assembly line. I watched her dispatch a good two dollars and two bits before crossing and sitting on the seat next to her.
She paused for a second and then went on playing, if you could call it that.
“I remember when your mother and I got married.” I sighed. “Her parents didn’t care for me all that much. She was kind of their princess, and I guess I wasn’t their idea of prince charming. Then I lost my deferment. After the war, I got back and looked her up and we got in a whirl again. She wanted a big church wedding, but her father said he wasn’t going to invest a big bunch of money in failure and that we’d be divorced in a year. I was working odd jobs, just trying to pay the rent on a little apartment south of town and have a little gas money. I’d heard Miles City was nice, so I threw your mother in a ’66 Plymouth Belvedere and drove her up there for a long weekend. We got married by the justice of the peace and his wife played the wedding march on an accordion. It snowed like a bastard the whole time.” I cleared my throat and laughed at the thought of it. “After a day, we were running out of food so your mother went off to the grocery store down the street with five dollars-all the money we had. She came back with two bottles of Coca-Cola, a package of bologna, a loaf of bread, and little jar of mustard-and change from a twenty.”
Cady’s hand paused on the lever.
“The man at the grocery store had mistaken the five for a twenty, and when he gave your mother the change, I guess she just nodded her head, stuffed that money down in her pocket as quick as she could, gathered up her things, and went out of that place like a shot.”
I watched her swallow, and her hand slipped from the handle.
“For the rest of the weekend, she wouldn’t walk on the same side of the street as that grocery store. I did, and I’d call over to her-Hey, Martha, Mrs. Longmire? How come you won’t come over here and walk with me?”
There was a tiny sob of a laugh.
“When I got my first paycheck from the sheriff’s department, she made me drive her up to Miles City so that she could pay that man back at the grocery store.”
Her face turned toward me, and the tears were flowing freely, and I guess mine were, too.
“To my knowledge, that was the only illegal act your mother ever committed in her life.”
We both laughed, and the greatest legal mind of our time launched from her stool and into my chest.
I held her there, wrapping my arms around her, and felt my hat flip off and fall to the floor as I rested my chin on the top of her red head. “I promised her that someday we’d have some kind of big wedding celebration, but we never got around to it; there was always something else that came up. About six months later the transmission went out in that Plymouth, the plumbing in the apartment froze up and the landlord wouldn’t fix it, so we had to move; then she went and got herself pregnant.”
Cady pulled her head away and looked up at me. “She did, huh?”
“Yep, and she had a girl so they could gang up on me.” I pulled her back in and placed my chin back on the top of her head. “This daughter, she cried a lot at first, then she quieted down and didn’t speak until she was two- no practice words, nothing-and began talking in full sentences, paragraphs, and pages; she has yet to stop.” She tried to pull away, but I held her fast. “She kind of grew on me, and now she’s the most important thing in my life, and I’m going to make sure that there will be a wedding here the likes of which she’s never seen, in a little more than a week.”
She sniffed again and grabbed my shirt. “It’s okay.”
“Hush.”
She pulled away, and this time I let her. She clutched her hands in her lap and looked to me to be about ten, but maybe that was the way I would always see her. I was consistently surprised whenever she got off a plane and reentered my life. I always expected her to look like she did whenever she came back from the HF-Bar dude ranch where she would disappear from us each summer, and she would hit our cramped, little rental with the force of a teenage hurricane, generally with a retinue of broken adolescent male hearts in tow.
I looked into those gray eyes and could see the reflection of myself, a man who had mislaid some of the most prized moments in his daughter’s life. I was ashamed of myself.
Pulling my handkerchief from my pocket, I handed it to her. “We’ll get everything squared away. It’s not like we haven’t done anything, and we’ll get all the details worked out.”
She nodded and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ve got Lena with me, and she’s a wonder.”
“Yep, I know.”
Her hand went self-consciously to her head and the scar along her hairline where the surgeons in Philadelphia had opened her skull to allow her brain enough room to swell, and I was momentarily reminded of Lolo Long’s scar close to the same location. Cady’s eyes drifted past me and over my shoulder, and I turned to find Lena Moretti
