Homicide My Own (5 page)

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.”

“Fine by me, but what kind of shape is he in?”

“He didn’t lose all that much blood. It’s an uglyass wound but it’s superficial. Problem is, now he’s got a fever, chills, and the shakes. I’m guessing he might have poisoned himself with his own bite.”

“When are we gonna know?”

“By tomorrow. If he did poison himself, then the cat is pretty much out of the bag and I’ll have to turn him over to the sheriff.”

“I better call Spokane.”

“Like I told you, I already did. Your lieutenant says to spend the night and bring him back tomorrow.”

“Did he say where we’re supposed to sleep?”

“You can have the cell there.”

I took another look at the blood splatters. “I don’t think so.”

“There’s the davenport in here,” said the chief.

Child rapist gets the spare bedroom, cop gets the flea-bitten davvy.

“And Odd?”

“What’s odd?”

“I’m Odd,” he said. “It’s a Scandinavian name.”

“Sorry. Does sound a little funny, though.”

“Not like Shining Pony,” I put in.

“I can sleep in the car,” Odd said, “but I’m not tired. In fact, if you’re up, Chief, I wouldn’t mind talking to you.”

“Leave it,” I said, and I realized how bad it sounded. It is, after all, a recommended command in training your dog to avoid distractions. But I was pissed off and exhausted and I didn’t want to take on any more than we had, which was already enough to get us into trouble.

“Go to sleep, Quinn. I’m on my own time here.”

“Just stay out of what don’t concern us, is all I’m saying.”

“I don’t mind talking,” said the chief. “I’ll just get a blanket and a pillow for your boss here.”

I think that Indian was rubbing it in. “I’m not his boss,” I said, before Odd could. “We’re partners.”

He gave me a blanket and pillow, nothing you’d want to put on your own bed, but in a pinch would be willing to use for a few hours on a borrowed davvy. They went outside together.

6.

I slept for about four hours and could have slept longer but for the smell of the coffee Odd was holding under my nose. I pulled my legs off the davvy and took the coffee.

“You don’t look the worse for wear,” I said. In fact, he looked rested, bright, and clear eyed. I didn’t know whether he found a way of shaving or just didn’t need to every day. He was fair and his beard was soft and light. Anyway, he didn’t look like a man who had been on the road and up all night.

“What have you been up to?”

“Talking to the chief.”

“That guy hates me.”

“He didn’t say. I went with him up to the crime scene.”

“There’s been a crime?”

“Their old murder case. It happened at a lover’s lane. Two shots, out of a shotgun. Two kids. That’s where we were, up there, me and the chief.”

“In the middle of the night? When you could have been sleeping?”

“I was curious.”

“You see, I’m not. It was long ago, in another place.”

“It was in this place.”

“Long ago.”

“And nobody knows what happened.”

“So you’re at the scene of the crime, you and Chief Shining Pony.”

“The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I got a little dizzy.”

“We all get dizzy. It passes.”

“The place was spooky, I’m saying.”

“It was late at night. The wind was blowing.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“So what was so spooky?”

“A feeling…a sense in the air. There wasn’t much to see, but you could feel it, that something terrible had happened there.”

“Would you have felt it if nobody had told you somebody was murdered there?”

“How the hell do I know? All I know is I felt it then. I walked around with the chief and you could feel it in the air. Quinn, I have an idea why those two kids were killed.”

“Oh, yeah? I think I do too.” I pressed my finger to my temple, as though I were the swami, conjuring hard. “The Mighty Quinn says…one of them was an Indian, and one of them was white, and that’s why they were murdered.”

“Right! Absolutely right! That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

The kid was adorable. You could say he was animated, but anyone who knew Odd wouldn’t believe you.

“I think they’ve probably figured that much out for themselves,” I said. “The racial thing.”

“Yeah, maybe, but the whole case was so badly managed. The night was rainy, no good for prints in the mud, and no spent shells on the ground, but from the sound of it they didn’t do much with the vehicle or even go after the racial end of it. This thing’s been on my mind all night.”

“Then it’s time to think of something else. Like why we are here. Like our prisoner. What’s the word on him?”

“We’re supposed to go over there, to the chief’s house. We’ve been promised breakfast.”

“Very nice. I’d rather be promised the prisoner. Why do I have this growing sense of dread, like things are going to go, oh, so wrong and someone’s gonna have to be blamed and a turd will find its way into my folder?”

“Eat a banana. You’re probably low on potassium.”

Low on estrogen, more like it. As cool and as crisp as Odd looked, that’s how hot and sticky I felt. I wanted to rip off my shirt. I’m sure I was smelling ripe. I went into their little bathroom and took a standing bath with wet paper towels. All I had was lipstick, so I did my lips and let the rest go to hell.

Odd talked to me through the closed door.

“Seventy percent of this island is tribal land, all but the northeastern part, which is unincorporated county, with a sheriff’s station.”

That would be the top part of the Chevy logo that the island looked like on the map.

“The tribe runs the ferry and the casino and six weeks out of the year, right now, as a matter of fact, they can sell fireworks. They also sell cigarettes, tax-free, but they’re supposed to be smoked on Indian land. Right. The school, K through 12, is on the white part of the island, but kids have been going there for generations, white and Indian, without any problems.”