Lizardskin (39 page)

Oh, but they were good to each other, to the other members of the set, provided it didn’t cost too much in nondeductible expenses or billable time. Bonnie had met Doc Hogeland’s wife Julia during a fund-raiser for the Hogeland Oncology Wing. Julia was beautiful and genuine, and her grace, her
reality
, had drawn Bonnie as it drew some of the other wives, women who had surrendered themselves to the venality and the sterility of their lives but who wished sometimes to warm their bloodless hearts by the glow of a living person, like vampires at a birthday party.

Doc Hogeland’s memory of Bonnie Ballard’s kindness toward his dying wife was slightly roseate, a trick of light and distance. Bonnie had visited Julia several times, but each visit had been shorter than the one before it as Julia’s color changed and the sickroom smells became less and less polite.

Boots and Bonnie.… Well, in the fullness of—and arguably in the nick of—time, God, proceeding ex machina, gathered Augustus Sewell Ballard into the bosom of Eternal Forgiveness with the aid of a bar of ninety-nine-and-forty-four-one-hundredths-percent-pure Ivory Soap and a slickened tile floor in the master suite of the Absaroke, the family residence precariously balanced on a rocky outcropping of Red Lodge Mountain overlooking the Beartooth Highway, down by the Wyoming border. Boots was found, erection still firmly in a death-grip, on the flooded floor of the bathroom, the mighty oak fallen, with his noggin neatly punctuated by a solid-gold tap handle and a look of intense concentration furrowing his Hyperion brow. Vanessa liked to say, around the
bar or over lunch with friends, that at least the Great Con had died hard. He would have wanted to be remembered that way.

Bonnie Ballard, now a truncated noun well on her way to becoming a metonymy—as in “she did a Bonnie Ballard ”—wore black with an undertone of sourmash bourbon. Several hundred aggrieved creditors and a few delighted debtors saw Boots safely underground, positioned a large ornately carved marble rock and a couple tons of red dirt and sod on his chest to keep him there, and went back to the eagle’s nest to divvy up the remainder of his estate while Bonnie sat out on the sweeping wooden deck with the magnificent vista of southern Montana and the Beartooth Range to gladden her heavy heart and drank herself into a sodden stupor. She died of a heart attack shortly afterward, in roughly the same location, after choking on a manzanilla olive.

Vanessa Ballard, now the heir and chatelaine of the Absaroke, arranged for her mother’s requested cremation in spite of her private fears that it would take the undertakers three days to beat out the pale blue flames in Bonnie’s bourbon-saturated liver.

Bonnie had requested that her ashes be scattered along the banks of the Yellowstone River, and Vanessa had done her best to comply, driving all the way over to the Paradise Valley in western Montana to do it, the silver box bouncing around in the seat of her rusting Buick Le Sabre. Unfortunately, just as Vanessa launched her mother’s ashes into the quicksilver waters, in a lazy bend by a stand of greening cottonwoods, a sudden wind came up and blew most of the gray powder back into her face and all over her favorite cream linen suit.

So, as she later told it at Fogarty’s, in a circle of her cronies, prosecutors, a few privileged street cops, and some grizzled old circuit judges, it came to pass that Bonnie Ballard’s final resting place turned out to be Ziggy’s Kwikky-Kleeners over on the Frontage Line, near the I-90 overpass, just to the south of the Cenex tankyard.

While she actually came to miss her mother, Vanessa Ballard considered the circumstances of Boots Ballard’s death quite condign, in the sense that she herself had always found
her father to be ninety-nine-and-forty-four-one-hundredths-percent bullshit. The fact that he had died in a steaming bathroom, in the nude, falling in his red marble shower stall, engaged in God-only-knew what onanistic contortion, so intent upon his Special Purpose that he wouldn’t even let go of it to break his fall, well, it all seemed to argue for a universal code of justice.

That falseness in her father, combined with the self-reliance that sometimes comes to children with unhappy childhoods, gave her a profound affection for truth and consequences.

She put herself through Dartmouth and Harvard Law, came back to Montana, and, in a move that stunned the locals and unsettled those who expected her to join private practice, joined the district attorney’s office, where she took a deep breath and settled down to straighten the moral furniture in Yellowstone County.

One of the few vestiges left to her from the explosion and dissolution of Ballard Holdings was the crumbling edifice of the Absaroke. She put everything she had into maintaining it and spent as much time in the old redstone monstrosity as she could. She lived alone, except for a Crow woman named Mary Bright Water and a couple of mongrel mutts named Wittgenstein and Buster.

A few people, Eustace Meagher among them, knew that Vanessa Ballard had no intention of ever joining a private practice, but had set her heart on a job with the Department of Justice, in particular the position of special prosecutor with a brief to investigate corruption and antitrust violations throughout the Southwest.

She lived her professional life solidly in the here and now, even if the now part meant that Maya BlueStones of the Society for the Protection of Ethno-American Rights had drawn her deepest breath yet and seemed on the point of delivering a sulphurous polemic against Beau McAllister and Eustace Meagher of the Montana Highway Patrol.

Ballard looked away around the richly paneled room, at the portraits of The Great Men Who Made Montana What It Is Today, and spied the aged waiter sagging in a corner. She
lifted her empty crystal glass and raised one delicately curved eyebrow while Maya BlueStones heated up her grievances to a cherry-red glow.

“We were told that we’d have a chance to cross—to question this sergeant personally. So where is he? I want him available, and I want that to happen
today
!”

She was zeroing in on Frank Duffy, who was leaning forward, his pale hands on his knees, his head down, turning his glass in his hands. BlueStones’s voice was carrying, and full of raspy subharmonics. Around the lounge, old men in fine suits shook their papers and harrumphed their harrumphs.

“Ms. BlueStones”—Duffy managed to interrupt her with a sudden sharp movement of his head—“the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Yellowstone County District Attorney’s office
asked
for this meeting with you, and with your associates here.” He nodded toward Dwight Hogeland and the other ACLU lawyer, Joel Sherman, who were sitting by in pained resignation, hoping Maya BlueStones would cool her jets a bit.

“With Mr. Hogeland and Mr. Sherman
exactly
because we
share
your concerns about these …”

Don’t hesitate, thought Ballard.

Too late.

“Assassinations, Agent Duffy!” BlueStones finished for him.

See?

“Ma’am, these men came into Yellowstone County armed and dangerous. They showed every—”

“Stop! I drove in here from Sheridan, and I saw so many pickups with those gun-racks in the back, with white men driving and all those guns showing, and I did not see one sheriff or state trooper try to kill
them!
I see that when it is a Native American who has a weapon, then suddenly it is a threat and you people bring out every means to hunt them down and kill them like dogs in a ditch. We have compiled—”

She sent a hot look over at Joel Sherman, who began to scramble through his briefcase. He extracted a red file folder and handed it across to her. She plucked it from his hand and waved it under Duffy’s nose.

“Compiled a
list
of the atrocities committed by this one cop you have here on the force.” She lowered her voice and began to read from the papers. “Beauregard McAllister. Involved in twenty-seven incidents of violence involving firearms in only nineteen years on the force! Involved in literally
hundreds
of incidents of physical abuse of prisoners! A known racist, prejudiced against Native—”

That was too much for Vanessa Ballard.

“Ms. BlueStones, Sergeant McAllister was once married to a Native American woman, a Crow woman named Alice Manyberries.”

“The fact that he once shacked up with some poor native girl and then deserted her is hardly a basis for—”

“He didn’t desert her! She—”

“I heard you say ‘once,’ Ms. Ballard.”

“She was killed in a road accident. As a matter of fact, an accident very much like the one Sergeant McAllister was trying to prevent when Joe Bell—and I stress that it was Joe Bell—shot Edward Gall.”

BlueStones shook her head, her short shock of black hair flaring, her voice cutting through.

“
If
you’ll
let
me
finish!
” she snapped, in a tone all too familiar to Ballard; the syncopated cadence of the true believer.

“
For
example, we
find
that on the
fifteenth
of August in 1979, this man without cause stopped and detained a car filled with young Native American males and used excessive force, as per a civilian complaint filed by—”

“Every cop gets complaints. And if you’re talking about the Roan Horse boys, two of them are currently serving time in Deer Lodge for deliberate homicide and cocaine importation. So it seems to me that—”

“
Not
my point,
if
you can give me a moment! You said you were here to
listen
to our legitimate grievances, and as officials of this state you are
required
to answer for these actions of one of your employees, as I am sure I don’t have to remind you. I want an answer to my basic question—”

“Then
ask
it, goddamn it!”

Everyone froze and stared at her. Ballard tried to get her temper under control, the effort as visible as her anger.

“Forgive me, Ms. BlueStones, but you really seem to be more interested in making political speeches than in listening to our findings. Heat is not light, Ms. BlueStones, nor is oratorical brilliance necessarily illuminating. You have the written report of our shooting board. It includes the depositions of all the officers involved in the shootings, as well as civilian witnesses and my own assessment. We considered carefully whether charges ought to be laid against any of the officers—”

“And decided not to. What a shock!”

“Based on the information at hand, and on our experienced assessment of the matter, not just my own but two trained investigators from the Criminal Bureau—”

“More cops! Cops investigating cops! Bullshit! As a
woman
, Ms. Ballard, as a
sister
, you might have been expected to have more insight into the
mechanics
of male oppression! I find it
regrettable
that you seem to have mislaid your spiritual obligations—”

“Ahh, Ms. BlueStones, if I can speak?” said Dwight, breaking into the conversation. His nose was covered with a stretch of surgical tape and his left eye was raw-looking, but he seemed to have recovered his consonants.

“Go ahead, Dwight.”

“Yes, well. Joel and I—and Ms. BlueStones—speaking for the American Civil Liberties Union, we strongly feel that only an independent civilian review board, composed of—correct me on this, Joel, if I go wrong—composed of qualified lawyers, defense lawyers in order to ameliorate the natural bias of the prosecutorial function—and a representative from SPEAR—perhaps Ms. BlueStones—and a person from the Justice Department—not the local FBI people, but someone from Washington who has skills in these kinds of issues and inquiries … and someone from the Civil Liberties Union—Joel has provided some names … and the whole sitting under a retired jurist perhaps, charged with powers of subpoena—”

“Charming. Under a tricolor flag, perhaps? With a front row full of old crones knitting? Haywains packed with manacled
coppers, trundling toward the guillotine while somebody tootles
La Marseillaise
on a tin flute? That’s an ACLU wet dream!”

Sherman blanched and immediately reddened, glanced fearfully at Maya BlueStones. Dwight raised his voice.

“After all, Vanessa, surely we here, all of us, are united in our desire to see justice done and to prevent any possible repetition of the dynamics that lead to such terrible consequences. We are all of us here—and in this I intend no slight to you, Agent Duffy”—here Dwight nodded indulgently toward Frank Duffy, who, like many members of the FBI, had a law degree of his own, a fact that had eluded Dwight completely—“but we are all of us lawyers, members of the bar and dedicated to pursue clearly, without let or hindrance, to let slip the hounds of justice, so to speak—”

“And the bitches,” added Vanessa, sweetly smiling.

“Sexist!” snorted Maya BlueStones.

“We
are
sworn to uphold the law as something higher and cleaner and—”

“Christ, Dwight. Stop before you blow a metaphor.”

Dwight blushed under his bandage. His unblackened eye was bright with anger. “Oliver Wendell Holmes said that it is a lesser evil that some lives should be damaged than that the state should play an ignoble part! All we are trying to get you to do is make damn sure that your particular state, that Yellowstone County, hasn’t allowed murders to be committed by men wearing the shield and carrying the name of justice.”

“All you want to do, Dwight, is to fuck over a good cop.”

Maya BlueStones took a deep breath and started to say something, but Vanessa rode over that, angry now, her voice low and steady but resonant and compelling.

“No, you look. You arrived here with your minds set in concrete and your ears stuffed with dried bullshit. All you’re interested in is making political points with this issue. I don’t think you, Ms. BlueStones, Ojibway or no, I don’t think you give one high-pitched rat-fart what really caused these deaths. If you were successful in getting this review board set up, all you’d use it for is to grab some headlines and spout divisive
jargon about the plight of the red man. You’re as much of a racist pig as any Ku Kluxer, Ms. BlueStones, and perhaps more dangerous, because everybody
knows
what they are, while
you
walk around wrapped in your self-righteousness and use your obvious talents and intelligence to spread hatred and reduce everything to considerations of pigment and racial origin. If you’re up on your
Rise and Fall
, lady, you’ll remember that the last crowd of thugs who saw life only in those terms were the goddamned Nazis.” Ballard stood up, shook her blond hair out, and smoothed her skirt. “As for Joel here, and you too Dwight, all you want is a ticket to glory on her skirts. So if you don’t mind, I’m going into the bar there to drink a toast to absent friends and I’ll remind you that this is a private club and none of you are members. Come along, Frank. The air’s better in there, anyway.”