The Deader the Better (35 page)

“Ah,” Floyd said. “The rare and elusive three-eyed dog.”

“THIS IS THE MAN WHO COME AND TOOK CLAUDIA AND the kids back to
their people,” Juanita said. The guy gestured to the chair at the
right of the desk. I took a seat. He wore his hair long. Parted down
the middle and braided. Broad pockmarked face stretching a pair of
bifocals to the max. Juanita said he was the tribe’s legal advisor.

“Leo Waterman,” I said.

“Paul Flowers. At least that’s the English version,” he
said. Juanita grabbed the doorknob. “I gotta go. The kids are
coming in for lunch.”

He folded his hands on the desk. “What can I do for you, Mr.
Waterman?”

“Can I tell you a story?”

“Storytelling is an important tradition among the Hoh people.”

I started all the way back on that Thanksgiving afternoon and ran
it up to the present. He never moved his hands, and as far as I could
tell, he never blinked. He sat there like a rock until I was
finished. “And then…about an hour ago,” I said, “I remembered
what Juanita said about the Lummi trying to throw money at the Hoh
and I realized that what she probably meant wasn’t Lummi but
Loomis.”

He turned his head and looked out toward the ocean. His braids
were held in place by blue rubber bands. “Like any organization,
the tribe has politics,” he said. “There are as many positions as
there are people. But…you know…for the sake of conversation,
let’s say that the points of view can be divided into the liberal
and conservative elements within the tribe.” He looked back my way.
“The conservative element—of which I would surely be said to be a
member—we look at doing business outside the tribe as a necessary
evil. I think it’s safe to say that we would prefer to be left
alone to live our lives and transmit our values in any way we see
fit.” He stuck out his lower lip. “Ideally, I suppose, without
any outside influences whatsoever.”

“Pretty tough here at the millennium,” I said.

“To be sure,” he said. “Which leads us to the more liberal
outlook.”

“Which says?”

“Which says that there’s a world of opportunity out there.
They look at tribal casinos and fireworks stands and cigarette
outlets and liquor stores and all they see is the money falling into
their pockets.”

“Hard to ignore.”

He sighed. “Impossible.”

“You seem to have stemmed the tide rather well,” I said. He
nodded solemnly. “We are still very conservative. The reservation
is dry. We don’t gamble or sell cigarettes or fireworks.” He took
off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s not
going to last,” he said. “We came within eight votes of leasing
nine hundred acres of our land for ninety-nine years.”

“To Loomis?”

He nodded. “Next time—and I have no doubt that there will be
others—next time, the temptation will be too great.”

“What did they want the property for?”

A wry smile bent his lips. “They don’t say. Loomis is merely
an acquisition firm. They specialize in putting together industrial
and commercial properties and then resell ing them to principals.
They claim not to have a customer, but to be buying purely on spec.”

“Claim?”

“Their motives were obvious.”

I waited; he didn’t disappoint. “Against the advice of their
elders, twice in the past five years members of the more liberal
elements of the tribe have insisted that we sue both the state and
federal governments over petty matters.”

“Over?”

He had to mull it over. “Ostensibly, the issues were such
gum-on-the-shoe things as the right to fish our tribal waters in any
way we saw fit. Or the right to locate the tribal landfill in the
area of our choice.”

“But really it was over…” I pressed.

“Sovereignty.”

“Of the tribe?”

“And its land.”

“And?”

“On both occasions, we won.”

“You don’t seemed pleased.”

He got to his feet and walked over to the window. “Like most
things, sovereignty is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it means
that we are no longer burdened by the vast majority of the rules and
regulations of the dominant culture.”

He sat down on the wide windowsill and picked at the twill of his
trousers. “Which of course means that the dominant culture is no
longer necessarily required to be burdened by ours.” He threw up a
hand. “A subtlety which escaped a great many of our more impetuous
members.”

I decided to lay my own burden down. “I’m lost,” I said. He
nodded. “What I’m saying, Mr. Waterman, is that someone in
Loomis’s legal department was quite shrewd. Somebody read about our
legal victories and quite cleverly reached the conclusion that any
piece of property which abutted only the Hoh reservation was not
subject to environmental regulation of any kind.”

“So whoever owned it could do whatever they wanted with the
land.”

“Precisely.”

“A copper smelter.”

He nodded.

“A nuclear landfill.”

And again.

“A maximum-security prison.”

“As the law stands now, not only are we hardly in a position to
litigate, but the local dominant culture would welcome virtually any
enterprise that provided jobs and added to the local tax base.”

Flowers was right. The locals would line up for galley slave
positions.

“How much did they offer?”

“Ten thousand dollars an acre.”

“Nine million dollars.”

“Divided by two hundred thirty-five members of the tribe.”

“Which comes to…”

“Just under thirty-nine thousand dollars per person.”

He read my mind. “That figure was for land to which there is no
access. No road. No services of any kind. The parcel to which Mr.
Springer’s property was joined, having such amenities, would be
worth, say…half again that much.”

A shiver ran down my spine as I did the math. I’d walked in
knowing who and how; now I knew why. If Flowers was right, that made
the thousand acres next door worth at least fifteen million dollars.
And the cut wasn’t by two hundred or so. No…now the cut was down
to four or five. And all of a sudden murder became a viable option.
All you had to do was get rid of one pesky fisherman whose sin was to
show up in the wrong place at the wrong time with a dream he wasn’t
willing to compromise.

FLOYD CAUGHT THE BOW LINE AND TIED IT OFF. “YOU got a call,”
he said.

I stepped out of the boat onto the floating dock. “Who?”

“The very put together Miss Haynes. Said last she heard you was
staying here. Wants to have a word with you. I told her to come on
by. That I was a much more charming fellow than the likes of you, but
she insisted.”

“She leave a number?”

He handed me a scrap of paper. “Thanks,” I said and stepped
off the dock onto the boat ramp. We walked up the incline together.
“Where’s everybody else?”

“All that rock moving gave the Booze Brothers a thirst.”

“Sunrise gives those guys a thirst.”

“They ran out of beer. Started making a pain of themselves. I
sent them to town with Boris. They promised to stay in the car. It
was either that or kick some ass.”

“I’ll get them out of here as soon as I can,” I promised.

“You get what you wanted from the Indians?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Problem is, I don’t know if it’s going
to do us any good.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because we’ve only got till Friday to get somebody to break.”

I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and dialed.

“Chamber of Commerce, Ramona Haynes.”

“I understand you were looking for me.”

“Indeed I was,” she said. “You’re hard to find.”

“I’m told that good men are always hard to find.”

“Or vice versa,” she said quickly.

Suddenly I seemed to be fresh out of snappy rejoinders. Good thing
she picked up the slack. “I’ve thought it over and decided you
owe me lunch for keeping you out of jail the other day.”

“It is the least I could do, isn’t it?”

“We’ll call it a down payment,” she said. We settled on the
Stevens Falls Bar and Grille at one.

“Glad to see you’ve regained your sanity,” Floyd said.

“I just want to thank her for saving our bacon the other day,”
I said.

Somehow, Floyd didn’t look convinced.

I cleaned up. Brushed my teeth. Put on a clean shirt and a fresh
pair of jeans and made it downtown with three minutes to spare.

The place was packed. Maybe a dozen people were milling around the
lobby waiting for tables. I excused my way into the dining room and
found her sitting at a window table to the right of the door. She
wore an emerald-green silk blouse tucked into a pair of blue jeans.
Cowboy boots and a silvertrimmed western belt. Earrings matched the
blouse.

“Hey,” she said. We shook hands as I took a seat. Her hair had
more red highlights than I remembered. She made a face. “I really
need to use the little girls’ room,” she said. “I was afraid
we’d lose the table.” She got to her feet. “Be right back.”

She was back before I worked my way to the bottom of the menu.

“Thanks for holding down the fort,” she said.

“My pleasure.”

“How’s fishing?”

I told her about Boris catching the salmon. Left out the gunfire.
Poor ambience.

She ordered a chicken Caesar salad and an iced tea. I opted for a
Reuben sandwich and a root beer. “You didn’t tell me your family
owned the mill,” I said. She held her glass in two hands and looked
at me over the tea. “It’s not the kind of story that brightens
anybody’s day.” She put the glass on the table in front of her.
“So I imagine you heard about my father shooting himself.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry” sounded stupid, but I said
it anyway.

“He felt responsible,” she said. “For everyone. For the
town.” She told me the whole story. How the auctioneers took
everything. The mill, the equipment, the family home, his cars, the
cabin on San Juan Island, twenty thousand acres of replanted timber.
How they even took the clothes in her mother’s closet, where they’d
hung untouched since her death five years before. How it was just too
much for her father to bear. Before I could say something inane, a
phone began to ring. We had one of those “is it mine or is it
yours?”

moments.

“It’s you,” she said.

I plucked the phone from my belt and put it to my ear. The voice
was a shrill tenor. Familiar. Ragged. On the edge of control. “This
Waterman?”

I said it was. “This is Emmett Polster,” he said. He made a
noise like a whimper. I could hear his ragged breathing.

“You want to know what happened to Springer, you meet me. I’ll
tell you.” He seemed to gag on the words. “I can’t take any
chances,” he said. “You meet me up at the history marker. On top
of Linden Hill.” It sounded like he was having trouble breathing.
As he gave me directions, he repeatedly stopped to catch his breath.
“Two o’clock,” he wheezed. “It’ll take you an hour.” He
hung up. I checked my watch. Onefifteen. I hated it. She read my
face. “Trouble?”

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Sorry.” I got to my feet,
pulled a twenty from my pocket and dropped it on the table.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I finally get you
cornered, and—”

“I’ll make it up to you,” I said.

She narrowed her blue eyes. “You promise?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” she said.

“I’ll look forward to it,” I said. “’Bye.”

On my way to the door, I passed the waitress with our order. She
stopped and watched, openmouthed, as I trotted out the door.

I knew Polster was squirrelly, but I hadn’t figured he’d break
this soon. And while I didn’t like the idea of going way out in the
boonies by myself, it couldn’t be helped. Going back to the
homestead for a bodyguard would take the better part of a half hour I
didn’t have. I’d been picking at the scabs of people’s lives,
trying to get somebody to bleed, and now that I had my candidate,
there was no way I could let it slide. I started the car and pulled
out into traffic. I followed Polster’s directions. Out of town
toward the east. Couple miles past the Chamber of Commerce A-frame.
State Road . Linden Hill Road. Two lanes. Oil over gravel. Potholes
big enough to swallow the car. I moved in a zigzag pattern as I
avoided the worst of the craters. For the first ten miles or so,
rustic homes, some little more than shacks, dotted the sides of the
road. After that, as I began to wind up the side of the mountain, all
signs of habitation ceased. I pulled the car to the side of the road,
got out and opened the trunk. I took off my jacket and slipped into
the shoulder holster. The weight of the .-caliber automatic felt
reassuring against my side. I covered the gun with my jacket and
continued bouncing up the road. Polster was right. It took me a
little more than fifty minutes from the time I left the highway until
I spotted the stone marker at the top of the mountain. In all that
time, I only passed one dwelling, a ramshackle family farm nestled in
a break between the hills. A series of gray, leaning buildings that
would have been every bit as at home in some Appalachian “holler”
as it was among the stumps and scrub oak of the Pacific Northwest.
Chickens darted about the front yard and a pair of goats danced on
hind legs as they plucked the last withered apples from a tree by the
side of the house. Satellite dish.

The bronze plaque on the marker read, “On this spot in , Captain
Horace Framer and a detachment of the Ninth Cavalry from Fort
Dungeness, although vastly outnumbered, defeated and dispersed a
hostile band of Makaw Indians, thus insuring the safety of settlers
on the Northern Olympic Peninsula.” No Polster.

By two-thirty, I had the plaque memorized, and Polster was yet to
show. By three, a thick fog was beginning to settle off the
mountaintop and I was fresh out of patience. I backed the car out
into the road, managed a three-point turn and started back down,
suppressing a chill, hoping that Polster was just late and that maybe
I’d see him on my way down. As I passed the farm, I rolled down the
window. Suddenly the front door banged open. An old woman carried an
oldfashioned washtub out into the front yard, where she threw the
gray water to the ground with a slap. She stood for a moment gazing
at me as I drove slowly by, then turned and hurried back inside.