“You’re kidding.”
She sipped what she called coffee and raised one of those samurai-sword eyebrows. “I take my comforts where I can.” She handed me the envelope. “Here are the photos from Henry’s camera that you guys took. There’s not much there, but one thing jumped out at me.”
I pulled out the prints and looked at them one at a time, finally looking up at her. “She wasn’t facing forward when she went over.”
“No.” She sighed. “And as far as I know, nobody does a suicide holding their child and attempting a back flip.” She waited a few moments. “There’s nothing else that I can tell.”
“Me either.” I placed the photos back in the envelope, careful to close the metal tabs.
Long glanced at the still-snoring man in the holding cell. “You caught Artie.”
“Henry caught Artie.” I sipped my regular black coffee and watched as she made the same face she always did whenever I mentioned the Cheyenne Nation. “How come the cavalry hasn’t shown up?”
“The Feds?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t think they know-no access to the moccasin telegraph.”
I thought about it. “Let’s keep it that way for a while, shall we?”
After I’d given her the rundown on last night’s events, she stood and walked over to the bars. “Strange behavior for a guilty man.”
“I was thinking the same thing. I mean if he was guilty, why would he care what I thought?” I stretched the remnants of my back. “We played the recording for him.”
“What’d he say?”
“That he didn’t do it.”
She turned to look at me. “What do you think?”
“That he didn’t do it.”
She nodded her head in a defeated fashion. “Well, our only other suspect is dead.”
“Inconvenient, isn’t it?” I strained a little more coffee through my teeth. “Have you listened to the recording?”
“Your buddy, Cliff Cly, played it for me yesterday, but the sound isn’t so good.”
“You didn’t happen to hear a woman in the background, did you?”
She turned her full attention to me, placing her broad back against the bars of the holding cell. “No. I mean, we were listening to Clarence and Artie; I don’t think anybody paid much attention to anything else.”
“Did you hear music in the background?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, fortunately, I’ve got an expert in the field who says he can help us out.”
“Who?”
“The jail breaker.”
She looked dubious. “Nate?”
I gestured toward the snoring man. “He’s got a vested interest.”
“I can call my mother and have her bring in food and Artie-sit.” She nodded and continued chewing her coffee. “As you know, we’ve got a shower here; would you like to use it?”
I ruffled my hand through my hat hair, I’m sure causing it to stand up at all angles. “Is that a hint?”
She did her best to suppress the grin caused by my appearance but failed miserably. “Could be.”
I didn’t have any clean clothes to change into, but Chief Long was kind enough to loan me a shirt from Tribal Police supplies with a nifty little patch set like hers but with the name PRETTY WEASEL printed on the pocket. “Is this my undercover name?”
She drove south on the gravel road leading to the radio station, the tail end of the Yukon swinging around behind us like a flat-track racer. “What?”
I braced a hand against the dash. “Nothing.”
KRZZ’s was not the most inspiring of buildings, but then most everything concerning radio rarely is. I’d done a brief semester as a freshman at KUSC, University of Southern California’s student radio station, where I had been the worst DJ they’d ever heard. The programming in the early sixties was almost exclusively classical and didn’t require a great deal of talk between the twenty minute tracks, but even I had to admit that I was horrible.
It looked to be a utilitarian building from the sixties with a slab roof and a wall of small-pane windows overlooking what there was of downtown Lame Deer. The white paint was peeling off the concrete block, and the front screen door was propped open with a cardboard box full of CDs that had been marked on the side with the plea, TAKE ME, I’M FREE! There was a battered Honda Civic in the parking lot as well as Artie’s truck.
Lolo parked and we got out. I could hear music drifting through the open door, John Trudell’s Bone Days, a stream of consciousness blues opus I recognized from hanging around Henry.
In the tubular-style font of the seventies were the words KRZZ, LOW POWER-HIGH REZ, the lettering also peeling like a second-day sunburn.
“Looks like Native radio’s seen better days.”
Inside there was a green carpet that showed the fiber grid underneath, and a surplus steel government desk where a pretty-enough young woman, who was a friend of Melissa Little Bird’s, was working on a book full of Sudoku. She raised her head as we entered. “Can I help you?”
Lolo looked at the large poster behind the girl’s head-it was a badly done offset print of four men dressed in period western costume with the words REGGAE COWBOYS, I SHOT THE SHERIFF in red. She glanced at me. “No offense.”
“None taken.” I thumbed my Tribal Police patch. “Anyway, Poppa’s got a brand new bag.”
The young woman was uncertain, looked at the two of us, and decided the only course was to repeat her request. “Can I help you?”
I smiled. “I’m sorry. Is Nate here?”
She rolled her eyes toward the inner sanctum and immediately went back to the puzzles as we turned and made our way into another room with a few more desks and a glass wall that gave a view of the “on-air studio,” principally discerned by the large red light with white lettering that read ON AIR. Nate was standing in the middle, swaying to the Native beat-poet’s words and the searing guitar accompaniment.
I stepped forward and knocked on the thick glass. The young man couldn’t hear us with the headphones on, so I knocked a little louder, afraid that if I applied much more pressure the glass would most certainly fall out of the frame onto the floor.
Nate finally swayed around so that he was looking at us and immediately motioned that we should join him through the door he pointed to at the left.
KRZZ’s studio was a world apart from the tawdry outer office where the receptionist sat-there were multiple computer screens, sound boards with about a hundred slide controls, and banks of CD and computer inputs. The inside of the room was covered in acoustical foam and at the center was a stylish, air-cushioned chair. There was another window to the outside, but it was so plastered with Indian Power, AIM, Thunderchild, and New Day Four Dances Drum Group stickers that I doubted you could tell the weather by looking out of it.
“Welcome to the nerve center. Federal grants can go only to actual transmission equipment. Say what you want about Herbert His Good Horse, he knows how to write grants.”
It was an impressive setup. “I guess.”
“Hold on just a second.” He reached up and, just as the song finished, swung the elevated mic in front of his face. “John Trudell, my brothers and sisters, just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human. It’s ten o’clock in the AM, daytime for you Indians, and you’re listening to KRZZ 94.7, Low Power-High Rez, the voice of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Nestaevahosevoomatse! ”
He touched another button on the computer and a strong drum beat filled the studio with background singers chanting something I vaguely recognized. “Are they singing about Mighty Mouse?”
Nate smiled. “Yeah, a group called Black Lodge. It’s a favorite of the kids down at the elementary school.”
I pulled the CD out of my pocket, slipped it from the paper envelope, and handed it to him. “This isn’t likely to make it on your top-ten list.”
Lolo added, “Even with a bullet.”
Nate put the CD in one of the players, punched a few buttons, and we listened to the beginning of the recording before realizing we were hearing it over the same speakers as the Mighty Mouse powwow song.