Phantom Purloiners, page 2
Washakie Police Chief Leonard Standing Bear was more than pleased to see Noonan but a little apologetic. “Thanks for coming, and I hope you don’t take offense for the call for assistance coming down the chain of command. I only mentioned the case to the commissioner of homeland security here, and suddenly, you’re on your way west.”
Noonan flinched slightly when Standing Bear got to the word west. “Politics is the same the world over. I’ll bet your commissioner said something about making this newsworthy.”
“Oh yeah. She wants to see her name in the paper.”
“Do you have a paper here in Washakie?”
“It’s online, but yeah, we have one. But—and I’m sure your commissioner is the same—she wants the story to break statewide. More homeland security money that way.”
“It’s the same the whole world over.”
Standing Bear looked exactly as his name implied. He was built like a bear, albeit a small one. He might have been all of five feet six inches tall, but it was the same all around. Whether or not he was a weightlifter, he gave the appearance of someone who was a regular at the gym. He might have been all of thirty-five. His hair was jet black—no surprise there with a name like Standing Bear—but his eyes were a steel blue, not so common among Native people anywhere in America. His uniform fit reasonably well for his endomorphic frame. He was wearing those cursed cowboy boots, Noonan noted, but sported neither a tie nor a bolo.
Standing Bear handed Noonan a file as the “Bearded Holmes” settled into a leather chair beside Standing Bear’s desk. “OK, give me an overview before I go through this.” Noonan shook the file as he opened his briefcase and took out a new notebook and pen.
Standing Bear sighed. “We don’t have a lot. This is an unusual case. I’d say it would be unusual for a big city much less for a town as small as Washakie. We don’t get murders here, rustling, shoplifting, disturbing the peace, n’nat, yes. Murders, no.”
“N’nat?”
“Local expression. Means and that stuff.”
“Neat term. I’ll remember that. Murders are rare?”
“First one in fifteen years. We get dead bodies, now and again, but not murdered ones.”
“You sure this was a murder?”
“That, I have to say, is what I’m hoping you can tell me.”
“Tell me in a nutshell whacheva you got.”
“Whacheva? Local term out of North Carolina?”
“It works.”
“Basically, we had a transient check into the Frank M. Canton Hotel, where you’re staying. Not a derelict but maybe a salesman or cross-country traveler. Checked into the hotel for three nights. Paid cash. Gave a name, address, and phone number, which turned out to be false.”
“No surprise there.”
“Morning of the second day, the maid goes into room, and it is drenched in blood. And I do mean drenched. I have never seen that kind of blood, and I worked in slaughterhouse in Cheyenne when I was in college. I mean, there was blood even on the ceiling. “High-velocity blood spatter,” that’s what the forensic expert from Casper wrote in his report.”
“No body?” Noonan asked.
“No body.” Standing Bear shook his head. “Then things got really complicated. Mr. George Harrison, that was the name he used when he signed in, appeared. Wanted the key to his room. But he was not the same Mr. George Harrison who had checked in two days earlier.”
“Not the same Harrison?”
“Different man. Not even close. Mr. Harrison on Day One was short, maybe five two. Mr. Harrison on Day Three was a foot taller.”
“And you know this because?”
“I checked with all the clerks. The one who checked Mr. Harrison Day One remembered he asked if room service would send up a case of diet soda.”
“Hmm,” Noonan mused. “Sounds like he wanted to be remembered.”
“I agree. Particularly since there is a standing billboard in the lobby of the hotel saying, ‘No Room Service’ because the restaurant next door is open twenty-four seven. We’re not big-city folk.”
“Did Mr. Harrison Day Three seem surprised when you brought him here?”
“Not so much surprised as irritated. Had a whatta-m-I-doin’-here? attitude.”
“Did he have an explanation for the blood?”
“Nope. Clammed up and said he wanted a loyer.”
“I’m guessing loyer is your local term for an attorney.”
“Yup. And that’s our term for yeah.”
“I love the West. Did he get a loyer?” Noonan asked, mimicking the word with a Wyoming accent.
“Nope. We don’t have that kind of a loyer here in town. So we took him to the nearest psychiatric facility. In Casper.”
“Did he get a loyer in Casper?”
“Public defender.”
“What did he tell the public defender?”
“In between his stories of the FBI watching him and going to the Vatican to live with the Pope—and I am not making those stories up—he claimed he had been in Casper at the time of the demise of Mr. Harrison Day One. It checked out. Sort of.”
“What does sort of mean?”
“It means we can place him in Casper for most of the two days between day one and day three but not all forty-eight hours.”
“Did he say he was the Mr. Harrison of day one?”
“Hasn’t said zip other than he had been in Casper at such and such a time. Other than that, he’s been like a clam.”
“You checked out his claim?”
“The police in Casper did. He checked out, sort of.”
“Not every hour, I’m guessing.”
“Not every hour, so he could have come back.”
“Did he have a car?”
“Not that we could find.”
“Didn’t take the bus?”
“Nope. We know that for sure. We checked with the ticket agent in Casper and looked at security tapes in Casper.”
“But you arrested him in Washakie on day three when he tried to check into the Frank M. Canton Hotel?”
“We’re not big-city folk, so we’re not sure of terms. But we didn’t arrest him. We couldn’t arrest him. That’s what the public defender said. We couldn’t detain him either. So we advised the PD to have him checked into a mental facility. He did, and that’s where he is now. As far as the case here in Washakie is concerned, Mr. Harrison wasn’t checking into the Frank M. Canton Hotel. He was asking for the key to his room. He said he was already checked in.”
“Did he have any ID on him?”
“Fake. Matched the name and address the other Mr. Harrison gave when he checked in.”
“Anything in his wallet other than the ID?”
“Not much. A paper with some phone numbers and some business cards with the fake name, address, and phone number.”
“Any of the phone numbers check out?”
“Not a single one. Then we did the usual,” Standing Bear told Noonan. “Not that murder crime scenes are usual around here. We fingerprinted Mr. Harrison and sent the prints to the state troopers in Cheyenne. We had the State of Wyoming crime lab do the forensics. They took blood samples, found some shoe prints, and dusted where they could. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a DNA match on the blood.”
“Anything pop?”
“Not yet.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Murder, if it was a murder, was a week and a day ago. So far, we’ve got zip. What we have is a person of interest who is in Casper and in a psychiatric facility. But, and this is a big but, he’s not there under court order. Whenever he wants to go, well, we can’t legally stop him. He’s not under arrest. The best we can do is keep him cool and fed and hope he’ll stay put. Other than that, zip.”
“Any idea who he is?”
“Not a clue. If we’re lucky, his fingerprints will match some on file. We took a DNA sample, but it will take a few weeks to get a match—if there is one to make.”
“Shoe size?”
“Too big for the crime scene, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I was.”
“How did the two get to town? No rented car in the parking lot?”
“We did a sweep for out-of-city cars the day after the murder and got nothing. We don’t have an airport, ’course, you know that, and no bus came through town the day the supposed deceased checked in. There was a bus three days later, the day the suspect showed up to claim his room, but no one got off the bus in Washakie. Twenty-eight passengers got on in Casper, and all are accounted for.”
“How much highway traffic do you get here?”
“That,” Standing Bear said with a smile, “takes some explaining. Come over here.” He got up and led Noonan to the office window. He pointed to a string of mountains in the distance. “Those are the Grand Tetons in the distance. They’re hundreds of miles from here, the fata morgana just makes them look close. Those lower mountains looking like foothills below the Grand Tetons are actually only fifteen miles from here. On the other side of those foothills, the Laramie Mountains, is the interstate. It’s packed with cars twenty-four seven. There’s a rugged road running the fifteen miles through Cannibal Pass . . .”
“Cannibal Pass?”
“Yeah, sort of. It used to be Washakie Pass in honor of . . .”
“Oh, I know who Washakie was. I read history. But where did the cannibal come from?”
Standing Bear gave a shrug of his shoulders. “About ten years ago, a group of activist Natives pressured the government to become a federally recognized tribe. It is a polyglot collection of Natives, in the sense they came from many different tribes but who settled in this area: sort of.”
“What do you mean by sort of?”
“The answer gets very complicated very fast. There is a lot of federal money for federally recognized tribes, but there are quite a few hoops the Natives must jump through. First, you must have land. There is only one group of Native people who have no land. It’s the 13th Native Regional Corporation out of Alaska. It was established by the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act. The federal government basically bought out the Natives in Alaska to get the Trans-Alaska Pipeline built. The Native people of Alaska got about a billion dollars in cash and more than a hundred million acres of land. The money and land were divided up among the Native people of Alaska. Then the Native people formed village and regional corporations.”
“Is there a Wyoming point to this story?”
“Absolutely. In 1972, there were a lot of Alaska Natives of all ethnic peoples who were not living in Alaska. You know, Natives married to servicemen. Or servicewomen. Or in the service. Students, adopted children. So they could not get a share of the land in Alaska—land, as in acreage—in the Settlement Act. But they were entitled to the money, so they formed what is called the 13th Regional Corporation. Its shareholders got money but no land. As far as Wyoming is concerned—and this area in particular—a group of Native people in this area applied to be a federally recognized tribe enough though they were not all from the same tribe and had no land. They call themselves the Nimerigar, and their members include Sioux, Arapahoe, Shoshone, and Cheyenne. When the feds balked at recognizing them, they pointed to the 13th Regional Corporation as an example of a polyglot tribe. The feds bought it and recognized them. Then the Nimerigar claimed about one million acres of land,” Standing Bear pointed off in the general direction of the mountains, “out there. The feds said no but ended up giving them fifty thousand acres. About three years ago. That’s not a lot of land in Wyoming. Maybe fifteen miles by twenty miles.”
“Sounds like a lot of land to me.”
“Well, no offense, but you are from North Carolina. Coastal North Carolina at that. Most of your homes are on, what, a half acre? And those homes have access to water and sewer and electricity and even natural gas in pipes or by delivery. Out here, we’ve got one hundred thousand square miles of state with six people per square mile. What Wyoming has a lot of is land. The Nimerigar got a piece of land, and that’s it. No water, no access roads, no electricity, no sewer lines, no natural gas. They got a load of nothing, just a lot of lizards, rattlesnakes, squirrels, voles, wasps, fleas, and bedbugs.”
Standing Bear sang a verse:
How happy I am when I crawl into bed,
And the rattlesnake rattles his tail at my head,
And the gay little centipede void of all fear
Crawls over my pillow and into my ear.
“That’s from ‘Starving to Death on my Government Claim.’ A lot of homesteaders came to Wyoming—and almost all of them left. What the Nimerigar are trying to do is nothing new. They are just repeating the failure of the homesteader. It was close to impossible to make a living on government land a century and a half ago. It’s just the same today. Nothing has changed since the 1870s.”
“They can’t drill for water?” Noonan was interested, but the expression on his face showed he already knew the answer.
“Oh, they can drill, but there’s no water there. The nearest water is Buckle Bunny Lake. But it’s quite a ways from the Nimerigar land, maybe fifteen miles. Running a road across someone else’s land is legal because it’s access. Sucking up water from lake is legal because all water bodies are federal. But it’s getting the water from the lake to the property that’s the bugaboo. You’ve got to own that land; you can’t just drop a waterline along the ground on someone else’s property.”
“Buckle Bunny. Nice name.”
“You know what a Buckle Bunny is?”
Noonan smiled. “I do my research. It may not have been on the plane coming here, but I did read up on Wyoming. Knew about the Johnson County War before I came here because Frank M. Canton was a US marshal in Alaska, and my wife is Alaskan. I know about the Fetterman Massacre, jackalope, the two-headed calf in Upton, Death Ship of the Platte River, and, of course, Mother Featherlegs.”
“Well, you know a lot more about Wyoming than most of our high-school graduates.”
“Is your story going somewhere?”
“You asked about the possibility our victim and the suspect could have come in from the highway. The answer is a strong yes if you mean the interstate. Locally, we don’t get much traffic. But I need to explain the reasonable possibility that the two Harrisons came from the highway even though the highway is on the other side of those rugged mountains,” Standing Bear said pointing into the distance.
“I’m all ears.”
“Well, the feds gave the Nimerigar the land, all right. About three years ago. Everyone is just waiting for the actual paperwork to go through. The land is out there.” He pointed toward Cannibal Pass again. “At the foot of those mountains. On this side of the mountain range. Only problem: there’s nothing there. No water, no road, nothing but badlands. But the Native people—they demand to be called Native people, not Indians—took the land and started talking ’bout a casino.”
“So they started building a road from the highway.”
“Yup. Sort of. That’s when things got complicated. Crossing federal property was not a problem. You just do it. It’s not illegal. But a lot of the land the road crossed was owned by some corporation back east, which got the land a century ago. Stole it, actually, with a treaty they never honored with a tribe that no longer exists.”
“Do I detect a bit of animosity?
“Oh yeah. That treaty was with my ancestors. But that was a long time ago. Half of me is sympathetic to the Nimerigar because they are fighting for their rights even if it’s a century late. The other half of me, and particularly the law-and-order half”—Standing Bear pointed to his badge—“knows that it’s just a scam. The promise of jobs at a casino is the bait. When the casino gets built, a few Natives are going to make a lot of money, but most of the Nimerigar are going to get nothing.”
“That’s the way of the world. Nothing unique to Natives,” Noonan said. “It’s happening every day in the non-Native world.”
“It’s called progress; you can’t stop it.” Standing Bear shook his head sadly.
“What did the corporation owing the land say about the road?”
“This is Wyoming, and nothing is simple here, particularly when it comes to land. As soon as word leaked that a casino might be coming in, a foreign company, the Stupinigi Corporation, bought the land from the eastern conglomerate or whatever it was called. But land ownership is complicated. Not all the roadway the Nimerigar claim is on Stupinigi land. At least that’s what we think. No one knows for sure because the land-title documents are based on a-century-and-half-old landmarks that are long gone. So, no one is really sure who owns which acres out there. Like I said, a road on federal land is no problem. As long as you don’t cross any critical wildlife habitat or cut through an historical area, the feds don’t care. For the land owned by Stupinigi, there was nothing the feds could say. First of all, the road that Nimerigar are calling their own now used to be a wagon trail. The road was already there, so to speak.
Second, the Nimerigar had the land, and you cannot block access to someone else’s land. If you mean did the Stupinigi Corporation ‘yell and scream’? Nope. Not a peep. Anyway, a road went through, from the interstate over Cannibal Pass all the way into Washakie. It’s a typical badlands road, but it is passable. Has snow during the winter, but we’re three months from any snow. So, yes, there is a way for someone to get here from the interstate, and I’m guessing that’s how our two unknown gentlemen got here. No other reasonable way for them to arrive.”
“What about the Cannibal Pass you mentioned?”
“As soon as the Nimerigar got their land, they started renaming things. The passage over the mountains used to be called Washakie Pass. That was the first change. The Nimerigar said Washakie had been a sellout to the white man, so they renamed the pass.”
