Death Where the Bad Rocks Live Read online

  “Grandfather?”

  “Clayton Charles. The senator from South Dakota.”

  “Of course. Died in office at the tail end of World War II. A pleasure to meet you, Judge High Elk.” Manny cursed himself. He wasn’t used to being caught so flat-footed. I’ll be up on High Elk family history the next time I talk with the judge. “I didn’t connect your grandfather with Moses Ten Bears.”

  Judge High Elk smiled easily. “Most folks don’t remember that part of local history. And I’m not so certain I do either. Grandfather died long before I was born.”

  “Folks will remember seeing a Ten Bears original, I’ll wager.”

  The judge chin-pointed to the painting. “People would ask Moses for a vision and he would go into the hills—he favored the Stronghold—and pray. Sweat. Have his vision and paint it when he returned to his cabin. But most people weren’t strong enough to accept their fate. People didn’t want to be reminded it might come true. After all, an Oglala holy man painted it.” He turned away from the painting. “You must be Senior Special Agent Tanno.”

  Manny nodded and accepted Judge High Elk’s hand, rough, chapped, not soft as Manny expected an attorney and judge’s to be. To his chagrin, Manny realized that his own hand was soft enough to be in a Palmolive commercial.

  “My secretary didn’t say what the nature of your interview was, only that it was important. I speculated there’s something the FBI needs to clarify prior to the Senate confirmation hearings.”

  “It’s important for the family of a man murdered forty years ago.”

  Judge High Elk’s eyes darted to the crowd closing in around him, wanting to be close to the next Supreme Court justice. “Perhaps we can adjourn to the balcony. I’m assuming this is something I won’t want others hearing.”

  The judge took the steps to the second floor two at a time and waited for Manny to catch up. Though fifteen years his senior, the judge wasn’t the least out of breath as he motioned to a pair of occasional chairs overlooking the balcony. Manny dropped into one that was twin brother to the strong, protective chair that had comforted him earlier in the lobby.

  The chairs were close enough to the balcony railing that sitters were rewarded with a panoramic view of everything happening below. A leather-garbed biker, squat and bald with a connected look to him that matched his menacing air, stopped two couples starting up the wide staircase. He whispered something and both couples retreated back down the staircase as they shot looks over their shoulders at the man.

  “So tell me about this victim.”

  Manny turned in his seat and took out his notebook, not for reference, but because people expected it, as if he had to finger it to listen to them. “Judge High Elk, we…”

  “Ham. Call me Judge High Elk if you ever argue a case in front of me or testify in my court. Out here, it’s just Ham. Now about a murdered man…”

  Manny nodded. “Gunnar Janssen.”

  Ham drew in a quick breath. “Gunnar’s finally surfaced?”

  “He was found murdered in the Stronghold.”

  “Murdered?”

  “In that area of the Badlands the Army Air Corps used as a bombing range during World War II.”

  “Gunnar,” Ham breathed again, sitting back in his seat and covering his eyes with his hand. The bald man started up the steps, and Ham caught his movement. “It’s all right,” he called to the man. “We’re just discussing some sad news.”

  Baldy sat back on the steps and surveyed the crowd below him. He was the oddest Secret Service agent Manny had ever seen. If he were Secret Service.

  “This is bizarre—Gunnar found after all this time. How did he escape capture after all these years?”

  “Capture?”

  “Draft dodger. I wonder how he hid out this long.”

  “Nature’s hideaway—he’s been dead all this time.”

  “All this time?” Ham slumped in his chair. “Please tell me how he died.”

  Manny flipped a page and pretended to read from it. “Small caliber gunshot to the head. I thought you might shed some light on his disappearance, since you reported him missing in 1969.”

  “So long ago. Let me think a moment.” Ham closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. When he opened them after several minutes, he spoke in that same soft, composed voice. “Gunnar and Joe Dozi and I were roommates at Black Hills State back in the day. To say we were all inseparable would be to slight our relationship. We did everything together. Scouted around the Black Hills together. Hiked the Badlands together. Partied together.” He smiled. “So when Gunnar disappeared, I filed a missing person report with the Spearfish Police Department.”

  Manny studied Ham, but detected no deception, no faltering in his voice. But then, Ham had suffered more pressure as a sitting federal judge than Manny could ever put on him. “I’ve read the missing person report. What did you think happened to Gunnar?”

  “Gunnar lost his school deferment when his grades went south. Joe and I always figured he fled to Canada rather than be drafted.”

  “Was he afraid of service?”

  “He was anti–Vietnam War; organized protests here, and across the state. We knew that he’d never allow himself to be drafted and risk fighting in ’Nam. Besides, he had an aversion to killing. Loathed the thought of killing anything.”

  Manny jotted notes in his book. “We know now that didn’t happen. Tell me, what reason would he have to go into the Stronghold? He could have picked other places in the Badlands easier to travel around in.”

  Ham took a long-stemmed red clay pipe from his pocket and filled it with tobacco from a pouch. Stalling? “There’s no smoking here, but I suspect no one will say anything if I do.”

  Manny smiled. “I suspect you’re right.”

  Ham blew smoke rings upward. When they neared the ceiling fan, they were sucked upward to the coppered ceiling. “Gunnar had just come back from Pine Ridge the week before. He said he missed a trophy buck, and we figured he went back the next weekend to fill his tag. That was the only other thing I thought might have happened to him—a hunting accident.”

  “I thought he had an aversion to killing anything?”

  “That was the odd part of his story to me.” Ham held the smoke before releasing it. “Seems like Gunnar acquired a taste for hunting somewhere along his road.”

  “He knew Pine Ridge well enough to hunt there?”

  “Few people know the Badlands well enough to get in and out in one piece. He hired a guide.”

  “His name?”

  Ham leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “I never knew his name, but Joe might. I’m sorry, Agent Tanno, but it was thirty years ago.”

  “Understood. Perhaps the name will come to you. Did you try to find out what happened to Gunnar after he disappeared?”

  “Heavens, yes. The other place we thought he might be hiding out besides Canada was the Badlands. He was into geology and he’d been there numerous times. I knew the Stronghold area well enough we traipsed around the reservation for a week after he left trying to locate him. When we failed to find him, we assumed he fled north across the border. Or someone got to him.”

  “For what reason?”

  “As antiwar as Gunnar was, there were pro-Vietnam students on campus as well. They were as vocal for the war as Gunnar was against. We thought maybe someone decided to shut him up.”

  “No proof to that, either?”

  Ham shook his head. “Not a shred. We just racked our brains figuring out where Gunnar may have gone and concluded dodging the draft was the most plausible.”

  “Can anyone verify you were on the reservation?”

  Ham looked sideways at Manny. “Am I a suspect?”

  “A person of interest.”

  “I hate that term. A person of interest is Cindy Crawford in a G-string.”

  Manny smiled. “Either I verify your week on the reservation in 1969, or the pit bulls your Washington opposition send to root out dirt about you find it.”
r />   Ham nodded. “I stayed with my mother for that week.”

  “I have to ask this, is she…”

  “Alive?” Ham laughed. “Still alive and mean and independent as always.” Ham wrote her address on the back of a business card and handed it to Manny. “Knock hard, she’s half deaf. And you’re right—I’d rather have you question me than whomever my enemies sic on me.”

  Manny pocketed the card. “Let’s get back to Gunnar’s deferment. You certain he lost it?”

  Ham nodded. “He was failing every class except geology— his only passion. When I found out he was failing his other classes, I offered to tutor him, but he was too busy with a new girlfriend and being the Geology Club president to take time out for his studies. When I suggested he could avoid losing his deferment if he picked up his grades, he just laughed. Said he knew enough people who would hide him out until he could cross into Canada. But we still looked in the Badlands for him.”

  “We?”

  “Joe Dozi and I.” Ham watched the smoke rings dissipating near the ceiling as if gathering his thoughts from the hazy cloud. “Joe got his notice the same week as Gunnar to report to the Induction Center in Omaha. But Gunnar was so frail, he didn’t want anything to do with the military, not like Joe, who took to it naturally. Joe and I were both hurt when Gunnar left without even saying good-bye. Hadn’t even contacted us after the war ended. Now I know why.”

  “Did he get his draft notice before or after you two were arrested in Spearfish?”

  Ham dropped his eyes. “You know about that?”

  “Public record.”

  Ham sighed. “It is, and I might as well practice my response. It’ll come up in the hearings anyway.”

  “It will.”

  “You’re right, so here goes. Gunnar’s girlfriend—Agenta Summer—was a beautiful girl, and she had needs, shall we say.”

  “She was horny?”

  Ham laughed. “Very much so. When Gunnar started failing classes, he hung around campus less and less, and Agenta became more and more frustrated. She told Gunnar she wanted him to stick around more, tend the fire, so to speak. But he didn’t.”

  “That’s when you started tending that fire?”

  Ham nodded. “That’s when I started stoking it. Agenta and I started spending time together. We were an odd couple, the Indian and the Swede, odd enough that other students commented how opposites attract, that we’d get hitched before the end of the semester. One night when Agenta and I shared a pizza and pitcher of beer at the Bon Ton, Gunnar came in and jumped me.”

  “That was the fight that you were arrested for?”

  “Wasn’t much of a fight.” The sides of Ham’s mouth downturned and he shook his head. “Like I said, Gunnar was frail. Even when he planted a pool cue across my back, I was willing to let it go. But when he went after Agenta…”

  “The cops were called.”

  “In force. Every one of them. I even held Gunnar so the officer could get the cuffs on without hurting him. The officer had the one set of handcuffs, but I went along peaceably.” Ham stood and leaned over the balcony. “The fight wasn’t what it seemed, like many things aren’t what they first appear. Take those swastikas down there.”

  Manny joined Ham at the railing. Out of his periphery, Manny saw the bald biker stand from his seat on the staircase. Ham nodded to him, and Baldy sat. Ham pointed to the Hawaiian-garbed man he’d seen earlier, now joined by an equally gaudily dressed, portly woman with two cameras draped around her wattled neck. They pointed to the bricks embedded in the floor. “Did you know some native craftsman painted that symbol in the brick when they built this hotel?”

  “My uncle Marion told me that once when we came to Rapid City to see Bigfoot.”

  Ham’s eyebrows raised. “Bigfoot? Here in town?”

  Manny laughed. “Not quite. Uncle Marion thought there were Bigfoot creatures living on Pine Ridge.”

  Now it was Ham’s turn to laugh. “I remember those local legends.”

  “That’s all they are, legend, but Unc thought otherwise. When he heard the Diamond Theater would be showing Bigfoot, he just had to see it. For three months he saved the money he got for selling baskets he’d woven so we could come here. The flick was so bad we left ten minutes into the film and wandered around Rapid. We ended up sightseeing here, Unc showing me the swastikas on the bricks, which was far more interesting than John Carradine and that awful film.”

  “I imagine it was terrible moviemaking.” Ham clasped his hands behind his back and turned to Manny. He stood a full head taller, but didn’t appear to be looking down on him as he spoke softly, slowly, as the judge and educator Alexander Hamilton High Elk, and Manny felt as if Unc were there teaching him. “The painting on the brick is the Whirling Log of the Navajo. Another legend— more credible than the Bigfoot rumor—has one of the Navajo outcasts hiding in a hollow log floating down a river to a safe place. Four deities had sealed him in the log, and only when he’d suffered through the ordeal of a mighty whirlpool did they rescue him. Am I boring you?”

  “Not at all.” Manny had to remind himself why he was interviewing Judge High Elk, mesmerized by his tale.

  “The deities gave our wayward brave some corn,” he continued, “which he planted, and eventually harvested. And he was taught to paint with the sand, to return to his tribe and tell of his fortune. So the Whirling Log represents prosperity, not death as many White men associate it with. I guess you can say I am much like the Navajo Whirling Log.”

  “How so?”

  “I represent the best in jurisprudence, not some nominee that will say anything to win the appointment. Not at all like the newspapers have been reporting.”

  “They haven’t been very supportive of you.”

  “At least the Rapid City Journal wants to do a spread of my accomplishments. I’m to meet a Sonja Myers for an interview this afternoon.”

  Manny frowned. “A word of advice—be cautious what you say to Ms. Myers. She has a way of twisting the truth around.”

  “I’ll remember that. Now if we’re finished, I really do have to meet her.”

  “Will you be in the area for a few days, if I have any more questions?”

  Ham smoothed his jeans. “I have a cabin in view of Roughlock Falls in Spearfish Canyon.” He jotted the address on another business card and handed it to Manny. “I’ll be there for most of the week prepping for the hearings.”

  Ham had started down the steps when Manny stopped him. “One last thing—where could I find Joe Dozi?”

  “The business card,” Ham said. “That’s his shop address.”

  Manny turned the card over. A drawing of a biker on a lowrider engulfed by smoke proclaimed VINTAGE IRON.

  “Joe’s there most of the time when he’s not helping me prepare for the confirmation hearings.”

  Manny followed Ham down the steps, and Baldy stood and walked beside Ham. People in the lobby stared, and a couple close to the door stepped aside to allow them to pass. Ham nodded to Baldy. “This is Joe, by the way.”

  Baldy gave Manny a menacing stare and went back to studying the crowd. “Call him anytime, except tonight. We’re rehearsing questions over a pitcher of Moose Drool at a local watering hole.”

  Manny followed them out the door ahead of the crowd that watched as Ham and Joe Dozi straddled their motorcycles that were parked in front of Willie’s Durango. Dozi swung his leg over a Harley Panhead, restored to perfection, while Ham sat astride a bright red Indian Chief. Naturally. Just as he kick-started his bike, he turned to Dozi. “You remember that hunting guide Gunnar hired on the reservation the week before he went missing?”

  “Marshal Ten Bears.”

  Ham paused putting on his helmet and turned to Dozi. “You sure? That was Moses Ten Bears’s grandson?”

  “I ought to know.” Dozi rotated the kick lever to stop dead center in preparation to kicking the bike to life. “I talked with him while you hiked around Red Shirt Table back in ’69.”


  Before Manny could ask more questions, vintage motorcycles roaring to life drowned him out, rapping up as they rode east on Sixth Street. He got out his notebook and wrote the name of the hunting guide, not because he would forget, but to remind him how coincidences rarely happen in real life. Marshal Ten Bears.

  “I thought you wanted to sit in when I interviewed Judge High Elk. Last we spoke, you were going to finagle a parking spot close to the hotel.”

  “Fat chance.” Willie turned onto Main Street on his way to Clara’s house. “As soon as I started up the stairs, that Secret Service guy blocked my way. Told me the stairs were now closed and to take a hike.”

  “The one in leathers looking like a squat Mr. Clean or a bald fireplug?”

  Willie nodded.

  Manny laughed. “He’s not Secret Service—he’s Judge High Elk’s personal friend. I made the same mistake myself.”

  “You? Make a mistake?”

  Manny ignored him. “Doesn’t answer where you were.”

  “Well, the biker got a little personal there. Wouldn’t let me come any farther into the lobby. Said the judge was in a special meeting upstairs. If I’d known he wasn’t government, I’d have put a boot in his rectum.”

  “He would have planted one back. Remember what Micah Crowder said: three tours in ’Nam with Special Forces.”

  Willie nodded in recognition. “Either way, I wish I would have stayed with the vehicle and not hung out in the lobby. Some SOB keyed the side of this outfit.”

  “What SOB?”

  Willie shrugged. “Don’t know, but I’d bet money it was that bald-headed SOB.”

  Willie turned into Clara’s driveway. “Where’s Norman?”

  “Who?”

  “That psycho Norman Bates of the feline world.”

  Manny looked from the garage to Willie to the garage. “If he’s still in the garage I’m going to make friends with him today.”

  Manny climbed out of the Durango and punched in the code for the garage door. It whined as if protesting the door opening, protesting Manny’s access to Norman. Manny squatted on his heels and looked under Clara’s car. “Kitty. Kitty.”