James Burke: In the Moon of Red Ponies

“No. They’re just talking to me,” he replied.

“Cops don’t just talk. As of this moment you answer no questions unless I’m present.”

“Amber’s with me,” he said.

“Did you hear me?”

At the courthouse a deputy escorted me to an interview room, where two plainclothes cops were sitting with Johnny at a wood table on which there was a can of Coca-Cola and a Styrofoam cup, a video camera mounted high on the wall. Johnny could not have looked worse. He had washed his skin clean, but blood splatter had dried in his hair and horsetails of it were all over his clothes.

“This ends now, gentlemen,” I said.

One of the detectives was a towering, bull-shouldered man named Darrel McComb, whose clothes always seemed to exude a scent of testosterone. “We were talking about baseball. Think those Cubbies are cursed?” He grinned.

I sent Amber and Johnny across the street to my office and went downstairs to see the district attorney. “Put Darrel McComb back in his kennel,” I said.

“Treated unfairly, are we?” she said, looking up from some papers on her desk.

“McComb questioned Johnny without Mirandizing him. He also ignored Johnny’s request for a lawyer.”

“Your client is not under arrest. So get lost on the Miranda. Also quit pretending Johnny’s an innocent man.”

“These guys tried to kill him, in his own house. What’s the matter with you?”

“He lay in wait for them with a tomahawk and a knife. Why didn’t he dial 911, like other people?”

“The Second Amendment says something about telephones?”

“Don’t drag that right-wing crap into my office.”

“I don’t want Darrel McComb anywhere near my client.”

“What’s wrong with McComb?”

“For some reason the words ‘racist’ and ‘thug’ come to mind.”

“Get out of here, Billy Bob.”

Twenty minutes later, after Amber Finley had driven Johnny back to the res, I glanced out the window and saw her father cross the intersection and enter my building, his face effusive, his hand raised in greeting to street people who probably had no idea who he was. Romulus Finley’s political detractors characterized him as an ignorant peckerwood, a Missouri livestock auctioneer who fell off a hog truck and stumbled into the role of United States senator. But I believed Romulus was far more intelligent than they gave him credit for.

He sat down in front of my desk, pulling a wastebasket between his feet, and began coring out the bowl of his briar pipe with a gold penknife. The indirect lighting reflected off the pinkness of his scalp.

“My daughter has already retained you?” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.

“Yes, sir, she has.”

“I wish she’d called me. It’s hard to keep them down on the reservation sometimes.”

“Sir?” I said.

“Can’t keep them down on the farm is what I mean. Or at least I can’t keep my daughter there. Damn if that gal isn’t a pistol.”

His language and use of allusion, as always, were almost impossible to follow. “What can I do for you?” I said.

“I just want to pay her fees and take her off your hands.”

“If she wants to discharge me as her attorney, that’s up to her,” I replied.

He cleaned the blade of his penknife on a crumpled piece of paper and put the knife away. He smiled. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sanguine-faced man, with manners that struck me as genuine. He clucked his tongue. “My daughter is a source of endless worry to me, Mr. Holland. Will you let me know if there’s anything I can do?” he said.

“I will.”

“Thank you,” he said, rising to shake hands. His grip was meaty and powerful, his eyes direct. “Did she leave with that Indian boy?”

“Excuse me?”

“Take exception to my vocabulary if you want. But that fellow American Horse is trouble. Not because he’s an Indian. His kind tear things down, not build them up. You know I’m right, too.”

“I don’t know that,” I said, nonsensically.

“Each to his own. Thanks for your time,” he said. “Tell that daughter of mine she’s fixing to drive her old man to the cemetery or the crazy house.”

By that afternoon no charges had been filed in the invasion of Johnny American Horse’s home, not against him, nor against the surviving member of the assassination team that had obviously been sent there to kill him.

Long ago, even before I fell in love with her, I had come to think of Temple Carrol as one of the best people I had ever met, certainly the most fun, perhaps the most beautiful, too. Her social attitudes were blue-collar, in the best sense, her personal loyalty unrelenting. She loved animals and hated those who would abuse them, thought all politicians worthless, and carried a nine millimeter in her purse. Bad guys messed with her once.

That evening she showed her P.I. badge to the deputy sheriff standing guard in front of Michael Charles Ruggles’s hospital room.

“You can’t come in,” he said.

“Really?” she said, flipping open her cell phone. “Let’s call the sheriff so you can tell him you’re countermanding his permission. He’s at the county commissioners’ meeting now.”

The nurse had left the blinds open inside the room so the man in bed could see the blue light in the evening sky and the rooftops of the town and the chimney swifts that swooped and darted above the trees. His head was propped up on the pillow, one cheek heavily bandaged; an IV was clipped to an index finger. When Temple entered the room, he tried to push himself higher up in the bed in order to look at her more directly. His face winced peculiarly at the effort, as though the tissue were dead and had been touched alive by electrical shock.

“Looks like you’re doing pretty good for a guy who has forty stitches in his cheek and two stab wounds in the chest,” she said.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Gal who doesn’t want to see it put on the wrong guy. You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”

“Answer the question, bitch.”

Temple held a capped ballpoint and a yellow legal pad in her hands, the cover folded back as though she were about to start taking notes. She sat down in a chair by the bed, placed the ballpoint in her shirt pocket, and closed the legal pad. She looked idly into space a moment.

“Let me line it out for you,” she said. “You tried to whack out a Native American political leader. You tried to do it in the middle of a United States government reservation, which shows how smart you are. You also managed to do these things in the geographical center of all political correctness, Missoula, Montana.

“So what does that mean? you hurriedly ask yourself. It means either the FBI is going to prove it’s an equal opportunity law enforcement agency by jamming a mile-long freight train up your ass, or you’ll do state time in Deer Lodge, where the bucks will take turns shoving something else up your ass.”

“That’s an entertaining rap you do. I like it,” he said.

“You’re going down for an attempted contract hit, Michael. That’s probably worth twenty years here. You want to take that kind of bounce to protect some rich guy?”

“Michael’s my first name. I use my middle name. Everybody calls me Charlie. Charlie Ruggles.”

“You’re looking at double-digit time, Charlie. Your bud gave you up in the O.R. They didn’t tell you?”

He looked at the light in the sky, then turned his head toward the nightstand, where a glass of ice water sat with a straw in it. “I can’t reach over to pick it up,” he said.

Temple lifted the glass to his mouth and held it there while he drew through the straw. She could feel his breath on the back of her wrist, his eyes examining her face.