The Last Annual Slugfest (14 page)

I passed the near end of the W on the river. It was a popular spot with canoeists, one of the few that called for any semblance of skill. Occasionally, at the center hump of the W, the paddlers swerved too fast and their craft overturned. But since the river in summer was rarely more than two feet deep, the biggest danger they faced was exposing their bare bottoms when they swept downriver au naturel.

Coming to that point, I slowed down. The last two Warriors were visible from the road. I pulled my pickup off the road and got out.

Hooper was already there.

“W
HAT ARE YOU DOING
here?” There was a proprietary quality in Hooper’s stance and his voice. He was not a tall man, but he was solid. One day that solidity would spread to fat. Whenever I saw him as I read his meter on my H-2 route, his long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail. And his clothes—plaid wool shirt, thick brown sweater, and jeans—had, as always, the look of Salvation Army issue. It had struck me more than once that, in spite of his garb, he bore what seemed an internal resemblance to Edwina Henderson. Perhaps it was the suggestion of pent-up energy, or the very tobacco brownness of the hair and eyes, that warned you to be on guard. With Edwina, you had a good idea what causes she would be pushing or what groups she’d be protecting, and her nicotine- and caffeine-spurred intensity had followed fairly set lines. With Hooper there were no such boundaries. It was impossible to tell from a glance what extreme of mood he might be in. Now, as he stood under the branches of the two giant redwoods, he looked at home—and ready to fight for that home.

His attitude was understandable. Hooper lived in a tiny rented cabin on an unpaved road above town. He had no phone, probably no indoor plumbing, and his electricity usage was so minute that Mr. Bobbs questioned my read every single month. In contrast, the rancheria was magnificent. The river curved in toward it, and now, in spring, the water lapped at the bank. The deep green of the ground ferns was broken by the tiny blue oxalis flowers. And above it all, standing like Olympian sentries, were the two huge redwoods. The two Warriors stood a mere fifty feet apart, so close that their branches intertwined. On foggy days the heavy sky seemed to hang between them. On days as densely overcast as today, their topmost branches pricked through the clouds to the hidden sunlight beyond. There was no softness about these coastal redwoods, no gently sloping branches, no thick, pendulous leaves. They were aptly named Warriors. Their strong branches thrust out firmly from the massive trunks. And those trunks led up to the sky straight and sure. I had sometimes brought guests here, to stand between the soaring trees and let their gazes climb to infinity. There was something so primevally commanding about these trees, which were growing tall when Europe was still in the Dark Ages, that even the most cynical of my guests had stood silent.

But the fact that I could sympathize with Hooper made his fiercely possessive stance no less unnerving.

Hooper had worked in the tobacco shop since before I moved to Henderson. I had heard tales of a few flare-ups between him and Edwina. But unlike the reciprocal grumbling Bert had carried on with Edwina, which was nothing more than the natural result of their personalities, the amiable-appearing tolerance that had existed between Hooper and his employer seemed to be solely the product of his own determination.

Now, as he stood between the two giant redwoods, he looked at me.

“Hooper,” I said, “how do you know about this land—the rancheria?”

“How do
you
know about it?”

“You first.”

His face was completely still. He neither pursed his lips in thought nor narrowed his eyes in suspicion. But that completely blank expression suggested not emptiness but a careful shielding of emotion behind it. “Edwina knew about the treaty for a long time,” he said. “She first got word of it maybe six months ago.”

“How did she find it?” I waited, but he didn’t answer. “Was it with the treaties in the Senate’s secret files?”

He shrugged. Behind him, I could hear the river splashing on the bank. Its dampness seemed to have been caught under the interlaced branches of the trees. Even in boots and wool socks, I could feel the penetrating cold.

“Hooper,” I said, “you
know.
As concerned as Edwina was about Henderson and the Pomos who lived here, she had to be excited when she got ahold of this treaty. I can’t picture her keeping totally silent about it. And if there was anyone she would tell, it would have been you.”

Slowly, he nodded. But he didn’t speak.

“She obviously told you when she heard about it six months ago.”

Again, he nodded.

Exasperated, I said, “This is important. Edwina’s dead. She was probably killed over this treaty. You can’t keep what you know to yourself. You don’t
have
to tell me, but the sheriff isn’t going to accept your silence.”

“And since I’ll have to tell him, I might as well let you in on it?” Hooper was grinning.

“Yes.”

It was a moment before he said, “Okay. She told me her niece gave it to her.”

“Her niece? You mean Leila?”

“No. Not Leila. Edwina said it was a niece who had worked in Washington, D.C.”

“Are you sure she said niece, not nephew?”

Hooper’s mouth tightened, then went slack after a moment. “Edwina talked about her
niece.
Her name is Meg.”

I recalled Rosa telling me that Edwina had had two sisters. One was Leila’s mother. Leila was an only child. Rosa told me the other sister had come to the river once with her
son.
Perhaps the sister had a daughter Rosa had forgotten—unlikely as Rosa’s forgetting a person was—or maybe she hadn’t brought the little girl with her. Or perhaps she was older than the son and working, and couldn’t get time off to travel around visiting an eccentric aunt in the country. I would have to ask Leila about her cousin. “What did Edwina say about Meg?”

“Sit down,” he said, indicating a large stone beneath the trees. He settled on another, and said, “The impression I got was that her niece used to work for some government agency, or some concern connected with the government, like a lobbyist or a consulting firm. From what Edwina said, I don’t think she was still working there at the time she first talked about the treaty.”

“So they talked. In person?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, did the niece come here to visit, or did she call Edwina?”

“I said I don’t know. I’m really just assuming they talked, because Edwina never mentioned a letter.” His round face revealed nothing, but his fingers tightened against his leg.

“So what did the niece say?”

“At first I think she was pretty vague. Edwina said her niece thought a Pomo treaty existed. At that point Edwina didn’t sound as if her niece herself had actually seen it. But, maybe a month later, Edwina came in all excited. Her niece knew where it was, and she thought she could get access to it. It sounded like the treaty would be in Edwina’s hands in a couple of weeks. But then there were holdups, a series of them—her niece couldn’t get access, and once she’d missed an opportunity, the next one didn’t come up for a while. I don’t think she got to Washington, or at least to wherever the treaty was kept, all that often. I didn’t think Edwina could stand the strain much longer.”

“But then, finally, the niece did get it to Edwina?” I prodded.

“Right. Edwina brought it to the shop in a manila folder. She was almost dancing off the floor.” His mouth widened into a smile. “But, you know, after all that build-up, I was expecting something fancier. I mean, the treaty is just a few sheets and a map. It doesn’t look like anything special. And frankly, I’d given the idea of our own local Pomo land a lot of thought, and I was expecting more than this.”

I nodded. Although as beautiful as any land in the area, this parcel was small, in part because it was divided by the river. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd,” I asked, “that the niece would steal this treaty to give to Edwina?”

Hooper’s smile vanished. “Odd? I’ll tell you what’s odd—that this treaty has been around for over a hundred years, that I—my people—have been entitled to this land all that time, and that the government—your government—has hidden the treaty away somewhere in Washington so they could keep our land. That’s what’s odd. Or maybe if you knew as much about Native American history as I do, and as Edwina did, you wouldn’t find it that unusual.”

I hesitated to press Hooper any further. Still, I said, “But the niece presumably didn’t care about the Pomos. From what you say, she just knew that Edwina did.”

“Edwina didn’t question that. What difference does it make whether her niece gave it to Edwina because they both cared about justice, or simply because she knew Edwina did? This much I’ll tell you, if her niece wanted to put that treaty in the hands of someone who would make sure it got attention, and would fight till we Pomos got our land, then she did the right thing.”

“True. There was no one like Edwina in that regard.” I shifted on the cold rock. The river dampness had penetrated my jeans and sweater. I felt a shiver start up from the base of my spine. “Hooper, where is Edwina’s niece now? Do you have an address or a phone number?”

“No,” he said quickly. “Believe me, I’ve thought about that since Edwina died. As old as that treaty is, and as mysterious as its arrival here was, someone is bound to claim it’s a phony. And what they’ll say is that I’m behind it. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Can you be certain it’s not a phony?”

“I can’t think why it would be.
I
didn’t create it.” He smiled suddenly. “There’s never been an instance in the history of Native Americans where the white man’s gone to the trouble of forging a document to
give
us land.”

We sat in silence a minute or so. The wind from the Pacific fluttered the fern fronds, but the branches of the redwoods hung still. I said, “Hooper, as long as Edwina’s murder is unsolved, this treaty is going to be in doubt. You’ve got a real stake in finding her murderer.”

“Dammit”—he slammed his fists into his thighs—“the woman was my friend. She gave me a job. She taught me about my heritage. Don’t you think I want to find the guy who did that to her?”

“Then tell me who came near the food on the table at the Slugfest. You were watching it.”

“No one.”

“Not even Bert?”

“Well, of course Bert did.”

“And the cooks?”

“Oh yeah. And the judges. They all circled around eyeballing each dish. Curry and Father Calloway were making cracks and laughing. Edwina looked preoccupied. I figured her mind was on the treaty. She’d been so excited about it for days that by the afternoon of the Slugfest she couldn’t even wait on customers without spilling the blends all over. I tried to catch her eye, you know, to show my support, but she never even looked over.”

“All the judges were there. They did the Grand Promenade around the table, right?”

“Yes. Even that Bobbs wimp. I was afraid he was going to faint away right into one of the plates. Hey, he’s your boss, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“Bet you’ll have something to say to him, come Monday.”

I smiled. “He’s probably the only person, besides the murderer, who will benefit by Edwina’s dying. If she hadn’t been killed, Mr. Bobbs would never have heard the end of the Slugfest. But let me be clear about what happened at that table. Are you saying that at some point every one of the judges had his back to you?”

“Right. So you think one of them could have poisoned the food then?”

“It makes sense. Did you notice anything suspicious?”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees. I had the impression he was rerunning the film of that time in its entirety. It was fully two minutes before he said, “There’s nothing I can recall. The best I can say is that one of those little pizzas looked darker than the others, the one in the corner.”

“Which corner?”

“If you stood, facing the tray, it would be on your near left.”

Edwina’s pizza. Hardly a surprise. But it did suggest that the poison was sprinkled on, or dropped on, at that table. While that was interesting, what it did was to put the administering of the poison at the one time and place where every suspect had an opportunity.

The wind was picking up. It felt thick, sodden. The branches of the redwoods quivered. The rain could start again any time. I pulled the sleeves of my sweater farther down over my wrists. “You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“No.”

My mouth was already open, ready to ask my next question. I closed it instead and sat silently a moment. Hooper had been a fixture on the Henderson scene when I moved here. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be a slightly less recent arrival than I was. “How long have you been here?”

He shrugged again. “Four years? Twenty years? Take your pick.”

“That’s a pretty sizable range.”

“Well, I’ve lived here on my own the last four years. But when I was a kid we moved around a lot and a couple of times it was here.”

“How come?”

“My stepfather kept needing to move on.” Hooper smiled and shook his head. “He was pretty small time as a lawbreaker, so in a couple of years the sheriffs had forgotten about him and it was safe to come back.”

“Did you ever live at Stewart’s Point?”

“The reservation?” He looked down, brushing the leaves aside with his foot. “No. My stepfather was too grand to be a reservation Indian, as if racing out of town an hour before the sheriff came was a freer way to live.” He didn’t look up. And from the anger in his voice, I was glad.

I wanted to leave, but I asked, “When did you live here? When you were in grade school?”

“No, later. My mother didn’t acquire George till I was fourteen.”

“Did you know Leila Katz then?”

“In high school? Sure. She was two years ahead of me. But she was a rebel, kind of an outsider. I liked that. For her it was a choice; for me it wasn’t.”

“So you were friends then?”

“No. I was too much younger. I wasn’t her friend. I just knew who she was.”

Leila lived across the street from Hooper now. But I didn’t know if they were friends now. “Did she ever mention an old lover to you?”