I returned to my own table, brushing at the champagne that soaked my new sports coat, wondering what the hell I was doing helping King Koehn. The waitress was standing there. Next to her was the tall Native-American manager in the tailored suit and tie. His eyes were quiet and sure, a take-your-time kind of guy. He said, “Follow me.” I followed.
He led me down a flight of steps to the casino floor and then to the door of a closed office tucked beneath the restaurant. We passed a man and woman loitering at a blackjack table as we went.
“Give me ten dollars,” the man demanded.
“I just gave you ten dollars,” the woman replied.
“So? Give me some more.”
“No.”
“Bitch.”
The manager opened the door and held it for me to enter. I did. The office inside was large and neat to the point where I was uncomfortable to be in it. Even the personal items were arranged with meticulous care and consideration. On the wall behind the desk was an ancient photograph of a naval destroyer mounted in a wood frame. A small gold plate attached to the bottom of the frame identified it as the USS Johnston. I was familiar with the name but couldn’t place it. Sitting beneath the photograph was an elderly Native-American with the sun-drenched face of an outdoorsman. He looked as though he had been through a scrape or two in his time. He nodded at my companion, who nodded back and left the office, shutting the door behind him.
“My name is Carroll Stonetree,” the man behind the desk said without offering his hand. “I sorta run things around here.”
“Carroll?” I asked. The name seemed as inappropriate as his voice. He looked like the warrior who had lifted Custer’s baby finger for a souvenir following the Little Big Horn massacre, but he spoke with a high-pitched reedy voice that made you think he was putting you on.
“Call me Chief,” he said. “That’s a naval title, not tribal. I served some years in the USN.”
“She seems familiar to me,” I said, pointing at the photograph.
“The Johnston? She was lost October 25, 1944.”
“Now I remember. The Battle of Leyte Gulf …”
“Halsey was suckered out into the North Pacific by the Japs,” Stonetree added quickly, as if he was anxious to recite the tale. “He thought he was chasing the entire Imperial Fleet. As it turned out, the entire Imperial Fleet was sneaking through the San Bernardino Strait on its way to launch a surprise attack against MacArthur’s forces on Leyte in the Philippines. Five battleships including the Yamato, ten heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, twelve destroyers.
“The Johnston was part of a small task force that was supporting the landings, three destroyers and four escorts. It was ordered to intercept the Japanese. We engaged three heavy cruisers in succession: the Kumano, Chikuma, and Yahagi. We hurt them. Hurt them bad enough to scatter their ships and buy time for Halsey to regroup. Except they killed us. Fourteen-inch shells, six inchers— they fell on us like heavy rain. One officer said, ‘It was like a puppy being smacked by a truck.’ We fought until every gun was silenced. We lasted two hours. Of a compliment of three hundred twenty-seven, only one hundred and forty-one crewmen survived. But we did the job, we saved MacArthur’s ass; his and Halsey’s. I was seventeen at the time.”
“Lied about your age?”
“I had to get into the war.”
“For three generations the men in my family have been either too young or too old to fight in our nation’s wars,” I told him.
“How lucky for you.”
“I’ve always thought so,” I admitted. “The Johnston, she lost her skipper.”
“Commander Ernest E. Evans. He was a Cherokee. Finest man I ever knew. He shook my hand the day I came aboard the Johnston. He told me, us Indians—we were Indians back then, not Native-Americans—us Indians he said, we had to be twice as good as everyone else. He was ten times as good. History doesn’t even remember him.”
I nodded.
“Do you ever worry about your place in history, Mr. Taylor?”
“How do you know my name?” I asked, trying hard not to sound surprised.
“Must have been from your credit card,” he teased. “Why else?”
“Do you take a personal interest in everyone who orders the prime rib?”
“How was it?”
“Average,” I told him.
He sniffed like he didn’t believe me.
“I figured I owe you for defusing what could have been an ugly situation upstairs,” he informed me and held up my credit card slip. He crumpled it into a ball with one hand and tossed it into the wastebasket ten feet away. “Dinner’s on us.”
“Thanks,” I said, waiting.
“Have a drink with me,” Stonetree said. He pulled open a desk drawer and removed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“I’ve always heard Indians can’t hold their firewater,” I told Stonetree as he filled two double-shot glasses.
“You believe all those movie myths?”
“No more than I believe Indians are afraid to fight at night.”
“Actually, that one is true.”
“Really?”
“I know I never liked it,” he said and raised his glass. “L’chayim.”
“H’gun,” I answered, reciting what I thought was the Dakota courage word.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind,” I said. I took a sip of the liquid; it burned all the way down. I hadn’t used the hard stuff in quite awhile. “So, tell me, sir. What do you want of me?”
The chief smiled.
“You like to get right to it, don’t you?” he asked.
“Not necessarily,” I told him. “I’d be happy to just sit here and drink your booze and listen to a few more war stories if it’ll make you comfortable. We can pretend this isn’t a business meeting for quite a while, yet.”
The chief grimaced at the phrase business meeting.“I’m that obvious, huh?”
“You don’t strike me as a guy who spends a lot of time hobnobbing with the customers.”
“You got me there,” the chief said, sighing. ‘All right. I know who you are, and I know why you’re in Kreel County. I also know that Bobby Orman has given you a free hand in investigating the shooting of Michael Bettich—a development I find utterly amazing by the way.”
“His deputies agree with you,” I said.
“I know all these things because we operate a fairly elaborate security system here,” the chief added. “We run checks on everyone who touches our business. It’s a necessary precaution, I’m afraid. A lot of vultures would love to get their talons into the reservation casinos, rip us off, launder their money—you’d be amazed.…”
“I doubt it,” I told him.
Chief Stonetree used my interruption to drain the liquid in his glass and to pour himself a second healthy drink.
“If we don’t protect ourselves, the Bureau of Indian Affairs will do it for us,” he continued. “We’d be back to bad meat and trinkets within six months.”
He took another pull of his whiskey.
“Michael Bettich touched our business, so I had her checked out. But my security people came back with a most amazing discovery.”
“Oh?” I said.
“According to them, Michael Bettich didn’t even exist nine months ago. How is that possible, do you think?”
I shrugged.
“Please, Mr. Taylor,” Stonetree said. “Don’t obfuscate with me.”
Wow, there’s a word you don’t often hear in conversation. I took a long pull of the Jack to give me time to think about it. As the dark liquid warmed my stomach I decided obfuscation wasn’t a bad way to go.
“Perhaps Michael is not who she claims to be,” I told the chief.
Stonetree laughed at my answer. “No kidding.” He shook his head and added, all serious now, “Look, I don’t really care who Michael Bettich is or isn’t. That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as something else I don’t know. I don’t know where her money came from. My sources tell me she only had a few hundred bucks when she arrived in Deer Lake. But a few months later she suddenly has enough to buy The Harbor for one hundred and seventy thousand dollars and give it an eighty-grand renovation. Where did it come from?”