The Peaceful Valley Crime Wave Read online

  A dirt road rimmed the lagoon, and the flivver made so much noise rattling along it that kids and dogs ran and hid. Adult Indians didn’t much care for the machines, either. Called them “skunk wagons” on account of the smelly exhaust fumes.

  When I came up to Chief Victor’s house—a cabin built larger than most on the reservation, as befitted his station—Tom Black Wolf appeared in the doorway. He was a well set up youngster, his features regular and of a color halfway between copper and bronze, his black hair shorter than most Salish wore theirs. He watched me set the brake, climb out, and walk over to him. Usually he had a smile for me, but today he was pure Indian; there wasn’t any more expression on his face or in his eyes than there was on Bandelier’s wooden Indian.

  I didn’t smile, either. I said, “Morning, Tom. Taste of snow in the air, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, but there won’t be any for another week.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” You want to know what the weather’s going to be like, ask an Indian. They have a downright uncanny knack for predictions that more often than not turn out to be accurate.

  “Have you come to see me, Sheriff Monk?”

  “Some questions I need to ask. I don’t want to disturb your grandfather, though. We can talk out here.”

  “Chief Victor has been moved to the infirmary. The doctor requested it two days ago.”

  “He’s bad off, then?”

  “It is almost his time.”

  “I’m sorry, Tom.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “It is only a passage. Chief Victor has led a long and honorable life, and he will find his reward.” I nodded, and Tom said then, formal, “Please come inside where it’s warm.”

  We went in. Tom kept the place clean, and mostly neat except for books. He was quite a reader, Tom was—read anything and everything, on just about any subject you could name. Hungry for knowledge, that was Tom Black Wolf. There were books on the wood block tables and chairs and scattered in piles over the puncheon floor. Some belonged to him, bought through mail order; others were the property of the Peaceful Bend school system and Miss Mary Ellen Belknap, the school librarian and local historian. She liked Tom and allowed him to borrow as many as he wanted, despite the hidebound citizens who frowned on such generosity.

  I went over and stood by the stove to thaw myself out. Tom let me warm some before he said, “Questions, Sheriff Monk?”

  “On a law matter. Seems the wooden Indian that sets out in front of Henry Bandelier’s tobacco shop was stolen last night. He’s got a witness says you and Charlie Walks Far did the pilfering.”

  Tom didn’t say anything.

  “Did you, son? You and Charlie?”

  He just looked at me with his lips pressed together. That closed-off expression gave me another twinge, for it told me he was guilty, all right, and that he wasn’t going to own up to it. An Indian who respects you—and I knew Tom respected me—won’t lie to your face, the way a white man will. Instead he keeps his mouth shut and lets you think whatever you like.

  “Tom,” I said, “stealing’s a serious crime, you know that. Even if it is of a public nuisance. If you’ve got that wooden Indian around here somewhere, I’ll find it. Go easier on you and Charlie if you tell me where it is and your reason for making off with it.”

  “You’re welcome to search, Sheriff Monk.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  He nodded. Once.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll just go ahead and see what’s what around here.”

  There was no sign of the wooden Indian inside the shack, nor outside neither. Tom’s wagon was parked out back, and I poked around some in the bed without turning up anything in the way of evidence. Finding that eight-foot chunk of wood wasn’t going to be easy.

  When I was done looking, Tom walked with me to the flivver. I cranked her up—motor caught right away now that it was warmed up from the drive out from town—but I wasn’t ready to climb in just yet.

  I said, “Been doing some saw work this morning, have you?”

  The question didn’t faze him. Takes a better white man than me to surprise an Indian. He said, bland as you please, “Saw work?”

  “Got some specks of sawdust on your shoes. Noticed it while I was warming up at the stove.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Doesn’t look like cottonwood or jack pine or any other tree grows on or off the reservation. Matter of fact, it looks like that tobacco-spit brown wood Henry Bandelier’s statue is carved out of.”

  Still nothing.

  “Cutting it up for winter firewood, were you?”

  Silence.

  “Or maybe it offended you boys somehow. That it?”

  Silence.

  I sighed, though not so he could hear me do it. “Reckon I’ll be back, Tom,” I said, and got into the flivver then and left him standing there.

  I found Charlie Walks Far tending sheep on the hardscrabble land north of the lagoon. I had to leave the Ford on the road; if I’d tried to drive up to where Charlie was, I’d have busted an axle or bruised my liver or both. But I was just wasting my time. Charlie was as closemouthed as Tom. No lies, no admissions, just civility and nothing more.

  So then I went to see Abe Fetters, the Indian agent who also runs the reservation store. He didn’t know anything about the wooden Indian—not that I expected him to—and was as surprised as I’d been that Tom Black Wolf and Charlie Walks Far would resort to common thievery.

  “Particularly now,” Abe said, “with Chief Victor so close to dying. Why, it’d be an act of disrespect, and you know how Tom idolizes his grandfather.”

  “I do, but it sure seems like they did it.”

  “They must’ve had a good reason, if so. But what?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Some ceremonial reason, maybe?”

  Abe laughed without humor. “Take my word for it,” he said, “there’s no Salish ceremony involving a wooden Indian.”

  Wasn’t any purpose in asking him to help me comb the village and see could we find any sign of it. Just be another waste of time. Whatever Tom and Charlie had done with it, it or what was left of it, wasn’t hidden hereabouts. You’d think, big and heavy as that bugger was, they couldn’t have taken it far by wagon, and you’d be right enough up to a point. But Indians are plenty resourceful when they set their minds to it. The statue could also be carried a fair distance on a travois hauled by horses or mules over one of several old trails. There’s miles of reservation land, some of it rough country—the hilly sections studded with ragged outcrops and stands of lodgepole and jack pine, cut up with coulees and such. It’d take a dozen men two weeks or better to comb all of it, and even then they’d be bound to overlook any number of possible hidey-holes.

  I did go to the infirmary with Abe, for I thought it proper to pay my respects, likely my last respects, to Chief Victor. But the old man was asleep, and the half-breed doctor, Joshua Teel, wouldn’t let me in to see him. Chief Victor likely wouldn’t recognize me anyway, Teel said. The old warrior was mostly delirious now and had been for a couple of days.

  So it was a morning of frustrations all around.

  Wasn’t anything for me to do then but drive on back to Peaceful Bend. It was well past noon by that time, and I was almost as hungry as I was baffled. If anything, the theft made even less sense now than it had before I’d visited the reservation. Not only did it seem like a motiveless crime, but now there was the added puzzlement of why in tarnation the two young Indians would take a saw to that worthless monstrosity once they had it.

  THREE

  BACK IN TOWN I put the Model T away in the courthouse garage and went into the sheriff’s office. Carse was there, pretending to be busy looking through a stack of wanted posters; he’d heard me coming, else he’d have been sitting tilted back in his desk chair reading the latest issue of Adventure to while away the time. He’s not exactly lazy, but he doesn’t go out of his way to stir himself,
neither. Tall and so beanpole thin, Carse, he looks as though a good strong wind or an open-hand slap might knock him over. But that appearance is deceptive. More than one lawbreaker has found out to their sorrow that there’s plenty of grit and gristle in his bony frame. He can be plenty tough when he needs to be.

  “Didn’t arrest Tom Black Wolf and Charlie Walks Far, I see,” he said.

  “No cause yet. Henry Bandelier been blabbing about that wooden Indian of his?”

  “All over town to anybody who’ll listen. I take it you didn’t find any sign of it on the reservation?”

  I told him about the sawdust on Tom’s shoes. “But that’s all so far, except for what Lloyd Cooper saw and it’s not enough.”

  “Be a shame if those boys did saw it up for firewood.”

  He was being ironical; he didn’t like the eyesore any more than I did. I said, “Doesn’t matter what they did with the dang thing. They’ll still have to pay for stealing it.”

  “Hard to believe they’d do something like that.”

  “My thinking exactly.”

  “So what’re you planning to do?”

  “Have a talk with Lloyd Cooper, find out just how much he saw or didn’t see last night. After that … I don’t know yet.”

  “Two people been looking for you,” Carse said. “Lester Smithfield, for one.”

  “Uh-huh. Wants to interview me about the robbery, I suppose.” Lester was editor and publisher of the Peaceful Valley Sentinel.

  “Yep. Henry Bandelier already talked to him.”

  “I’ll just bet he did. Who else?”

  “Reba Purvis telephoned. Sounded all het up. Said for you to come to her house soon as you got back.”

  “Het up about what?”

  “Wouldn’t tell me. Just said it was urgent. Said it three times.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He grinned. “You know how she can be, Lucas.”

  I knew how the widow Purvis could be, all right. Nosy, bossy, full of gossip, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, more than a little determined to make me her third husband. She’d outlived the other two, both of whom had surely been hastened on to their rewards by her sharp tongue and meddling ways. She was a handsome woman with some good qualities—she was president of the Ladies Aid Society and had been responsible for bringing Jeannette Rankin to Peaceful Bend to speak on woman’s suffrage—and I’d had my share of lonely nights since my wife, Tess, God rest her soul, passed on four years ago. But I had no intention of being hauled off to the altar again, and then harassed into an early grave. Some other poor fellow could and probably would end up as Reba’s third victim, just not me.

  Had an “urgent” need to see me, did she? Either more of her female wiles or more of her gossip. The last time I’d seen her, two days ago, she’d hammered my ears with a spicy tale of young Charity Axthelm running off with an itinerant knife-carver and peddler named Rainey. How she came by all this back-fence stuff was a marvel and a mystery, the more so on account of she always seemed to ferret it out before anyone else. About half of it turned out to be false or exaggerated, but enough was credible so that when she flapped her gums, most folks paid at least some attention.

  “Well, I’ll go see her,” I said. “But not until after I wrap myself around some grub.”

  “Anything you want me to do?” Carse asked.

  “You eaten yet?”

  “Big breakfast that’ll do me until supper.”

  “Stay put here, then, and keep pretending to study on those wanted posters.”

  The land office where Lloyd Cooper works is on the way to the Elite Café, so I stopped in and had a little talk with him. Then I took my sore bones into the café for some nourishment. But before I could eat, Henry Bandelier came prancing in. He must’ve seen me drive past his store earlier, and that I was alone in the flivver—no Tom Black Wolf, no Charlie Walks Far, and no wooden Indian.

  He sat down uninvited at my table and demanded, “Why didn’t you arrest those two bucks, Sheriff?”

  “On account of I got no evidence they’re the guilty parties.”

  “No evidence? Hogwash! I told you Lloyd Cooper saw them making off with my Indian.”

  “That’s not exactly what Lloyd saw,” I said. “I talked to him myself a few minutes ago. He saw Tom and Charlie, all right, on board Tom’s wagon with something in the bed under canvas, but he couldn’t say for sure what it was.”

  “It was my Indian. You know it was!”

  “I know no such thing. I didn’t find that statue out at the reservation, nor anybody who knew anything about it.” I wasn’t about to mention the sawdust I’d spotted on Tom’s shoes. It would only have made Bandelier madder and more cantankerous than he already was.

  He shaped his lips like a man about to spit. “Just how carefully did you search?”

  “Careful enough.” I fixed him with a hard eye. “And I don’t like your tone, Henry. You implying that I haven’t done my duty?”

  “If the shoe fits,” he said, prissy.

  “Well, it don’t fit,” I said. “Now suppose you take yourself back behind your store counter and let me eat my meal in peace.”

  “I’m warning you, Sheriff Monk…”

  “You’re doing what?”

  He didn’t like what he saw in my face. He scraped back his chair, not meeting my eyes now, and said to my left shoulder, “If you don’t do anything about those two thieving Flatheads, then I will.”

  “Such as what?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Not if it involves breaking the law. Not if you don’t want me to cloud up and rain all over you.”

  I spoke loud, so that the five other citizens in the Elite could also hear my words plain. Bandelier’s face got even redder. But he didn’t sling any more words of his own; he put his back to me and walked out stiff and righteous, like a sinner leaving a tent meeting.

  Well, hell, I thought. Now I’d lost my appetite.

  * * *

  REBA PURVIS’S TWO-STORY, scalloped and furbelowed house was on Tamarack Street, a block off the river. She lived there with her cousin, Hannah Mead, a meek little spinster whom Reba had convinced to move up from Denver after husband number two gave up the ghost, and whom she treated more like a servant than a relative. Hannah did all the cooking and cleaning and so far as I know never complained to anybody about the chores. Hardly ever said a word in Reba’s company, for that matter, struck half mute by the woman’s sharp tongue and bullying.

  Reba opened the door right away to my ring. “Well, it’s about time, Lucas,” she said in exasperated tones. “Where have you been all day?”

  “Out to the reservation. Didn’t Carse tell you?”

  “Yes, he told me, but that wooden Indian business isn’t half as important as what has happened here. Not half.”

  “What happened?”

  “You won’t believe such a terrible thing could happen in our community. I hardly believe it myself.”

  “I can’t believe or disbelieve until you tell me what it is.”

  “Come inside.”

  I went in. She was het up, for a fact, her face tight-set and an angry red flush on her cheeks. There was even a worked-loose strand of her coiled sandy brown hair hanging down over her forehead. Reba was about the most fastidious woman in Peaceful Bend, always groomed neat as though she was about to attend a prayer meeting or a church social. Whatever had her in a dither must be pretty serious.

  “Upstairs,” she said then.

  “How’s that?”

  “I want you to come upstairs with me.”

  Now I knew for sure that it was serious. Reba may have been third husband hunting, but she was too prim and proper to resort to pre-marital relations to land me or any other candidate. The few times I’d been here before, I hadn’t set foot anywhere other than the front parlor and the dining room.

  Up on the second floor, she said, “We must be very quiet,” and when I nodded, she marched along to a closed door, eased it o
pen about a third of the way, and stood aside so I could look in.

  It was a small and frilly bedroom, her cousin’s judging from the fact that the large-boned, brown-haired woman lying in the bed was Hannah Mead. She was asleep but restless, her breathing uneven, her round face pale as a grub.

  When I’d had my look, Reba closed the door and led me back downstairs and into the parlor. I said, “What’s this all about, Reba? Why’d you want me to look in on your cousin?”

  “To see for yourself how ill she is.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  “She was poisoned, that’s what.”

  That took me aback. “Poisoned?”

  “That’s right. Doctor Olsen doesn’t believe her life is in jeopardy, though if she had drunk any more of that buttermilk than she did it would be. The poor woman might well be dead this very minute.”

  “Poisoned buttermilk? I never heard of such a thing.”

  “The poison was put into the bottle after the dairyman’s delivery early this morning. It almost makes a body wish buttermilk came in cans.”

  Canned buttermilk. Now there was a notion. For no good reason it put me in mind of the rhyme some cowboy wag came up with when canned milk was invented.

  No teats to pull,

  No hay to pitch.

  Just punch a hole

  In the son of a bitch.

  Say that to Reba and get a smack in the eye. Hers were narrowed at me as it was. I said, “How do you mean, it was put in the bottle?”

  “How do you think I mean?” she said, ominous. “The poisoning was deliberate, not accidental.”

  “Oh, now…”

  “Deliberate, I tell you. Potassium cyanide. The doctor confirmed it. All that saved Hannah was the bitter almond odor.”