Phantom Purloiners, page 4
“Baby cam. One of those cameras you put in a baby’s room to keep an eye on the child?”
“Yup. We’re low tech here because no one has the money to be high tech. It’s the best the coin shop could do. The jewelry store didn’t do much better. It installed a burglar alarm . . .”
“Which didn’t do diddly because the robberies were daylight.”
“You got it. Welcome to Wyoming thinking.” Standing Bear was working on a list of names on a sheet of yellow paper. “Who else do you want to speak with?”
“I’ll have some more names as I get deeper into this case but, off the top of my head, in addition to the names you already have, the coin- and jewelry-store owners, the state trooper or troopers who set up the roadblocks, any car-rental agency in town . . .”
“We don’t have one.”
“How about a bus-ticket agent?”
“I’ll do that as well.”
“Eventually I am going to want to talk to the suspect Harrison in Casper. Can you make arrangements?”
“Sure. But he’s not talking with us, so I doubt he’ll talk to you.”
“That’s OK. I’m a charming fellow.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I’d also like to speak with someone from the Nimerigar . . .”
That took Standing Bear by surprise. “Really! Why?”
“Just getting the lay of the land.”
Standing Bear gave kind of rolled his eyes. “Let me see if I can say this as politely and politically correct as possible. The Nimerigar people are in a different mind zone, so to speak. They are the kind of people who answer your question with a response that makes no sense. When you and I have a conversation, we exchange information. You ask me a question; I give you an answer. You ask another question; you get another answer. With the Nimerigar you ask a question like ‘What are you going to do with your land?’ and the response will be something along the lines of ‘We have fifty thousand acres of Arapahoe and Shoshone blood-drenched soil and the right to be sovereign on those lands’ and then finish with a ‘What’s it to you, white man?’”
“I’d still like to talk to one.”
“It won’t be hard finding someone who will talk with you, but you will find it hard to figure out what he or she said.”
“I have a lot of experience with people like that. I call them in-laws.”
Standing Bear thought that was a hoot and, as he was laughing, he pointed to his wedding ring with a gesture that said, “I hear you, brother.”
CHAPTER 4
Nathaniel Three Trees, known locally as Old Man Three Trees, was a survivor. A century earlier he would have been the single warrior who fought the cavalry and avoided the inevitable slaughter on the battlefield and the cross-country chase for stragglers. He had grown up in Wyoming when Indians were considered human garbage, served in Vietnam where he was called a Yankee, returned to Washakie where he was a labeled as a damned Indian activist, and stumbled toward the end of his life as a man fighting for remission from Agent Orange.
But Old Man Three Trees never quit. This was not an attribute he had learned from Vietnam; it was a philosophy he took to Vietnam. He would have made a great high-school football coach because he was never willing to admit defeat. Every Friday’s loss was just the excuse to work harder on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. In Vietnam, this attitude endeared him to his squad—but not his superiors. His superiors did not want victories; they were happy if the quagmire would continue seeping until they retired.
Back in Washakie he got his wake-up call. Into everyone’s life comes at least one epiphany, a moment when the tide of normality pulls back, and a pathway to the future is revealed through the rubble of reality. But, crudely stated, every epiphany has a shelf life. In the sands of time, it is only there for a heartbeat, and in that moment you must act. If not, the tide rolls back in, and the pathway is obscured.
His epiphany came in two parts: a synchrony of legislation. Rare in human history, when it occurs, the quick are able to profit far beyond their wildest imagination. Together, the sum of the parts far exceeds the value of the whole. Both occurred in 1972. The first was a statute, known generically as Affirmative Action. Basically, it established the principle—and reality—that white males were relegated to a secondary status when it came to any jobs where government dollars were involved. The states followed suit quickly, and suddenly, not being a white male was an asset. The upside was the breaking of the proverbial glass ceiling that had kept qualified minorities from moving up the occupational food chain. The downside of the upside was the broad-brush stroke of making every minority more employable than equally qualified or more qualified white males.
While Old Man Three Trees had always viewed himself as American first and Shoshone second, now there was a financial reason to reverse the word order. There was profit in the exchange. Federal and state dollars were available for opportunities that had never before existed. Suddenly being an aboriginal was profitable if—and it was a very big if—there were opportunities that matched federal and state grant guidelines. This was a significant stumbling block in the tri-county area. Combining the populations of Washakie, Bridger, and Colter, the Native population was barely in the triple digits. Worse, the Native population was oxymoronic. There were ten major tribes—Arapahoe, Shoshone, Sioux, Bannock, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kowa, Pawnee, and Ute—whose members had intermarried among themselves along with whites, blacks, Filipinos, Italians, and Hispanics. Complicating the equation, a portion of the so-called Native population was doing financially well and had no desire to upset the applecart of opportunity. Affirmative Action was providing them and their children with a gold-plated opportunity, so they saw no reason to change the dynamics. Third, even if the first two blockades could be leaped, there was no unifying plan of action. A plane in the jungle has no value unless there is landing strip.
Then came the second gift of Esa, Isa, Issa, Ysa, Esha, Eesha, and Isha translated to English as Wolf, the god of creation of the Shoshone, Bannock, and Northern Paiutes: the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act. For the rest of America, it was just a deal.
In the building hysteria of an oil shortage brought about by allegedly greedy Arab oil countries in the early 1970s, the United States took an activist role to increase domestic oil production. Translated, this meant opening the largest, isolated, undeveloped oil field in the United States: Prudhoe Bay. This was not going to be easy. Prudhoe Bay was 850 miles north of the proposed export port on the Gulf of Alaska, which necessitated an 850-mile pipeline to be built.
This was a problem.
A big one.
In 1971, the US government had passed the Alaska Land Claims Settlement Act, which gave the Natives of Alaska $963 million cash and forty-four million acres of land. The $963 million was given in the form of proxies to every human on the planet who could show a blood quantum of at least 25 percent Alaska Native. The Natives would then form village corporations that, in turn, would establish Native Regional Corporations. The Regional Corporations would get the money, and the individual Natives who had authorized the proxies would be shareholders. To receive the moneys, the Alaska Natives agreed not to stop the route of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.
The money was easy to distribute—the land, not so much. In 1971, no one knew which acres in Alaska belonged to the Natives because such lands had not been selected and conveyed. Further, to quote Alaskan humorist Warren Sitka, the only thing that moves slower than a dog sled in deep snow is a bureaucrat. While the US government agreed to turn over forty-four million acres of land to the Alaska Natives, very few of those acres had been conveyed. But what was of specific interest to Old Man Three Trees was not the act itself but the repercussions. A deleterious downside to the act was the extinguishing of “all aboriginal rights” of the Alaska Native. Then, instantaneously, the federal government allowed the Alaska Natives to have recognized-tribe status, which made them eligible for federal funding. Most specifically, one Native group was able to recreate themselves from scratch.
Suddenly Old Man Three Trees saw opportunity. If an Alaskan Native group could create themselves and get federal land and money, why couldn’t a collection of tribal members in Wyoming do the same thing? All it would take would be a lawyer who didn’t have a problem pushing the envelope. And, as a matter of fact, he knew one—a one-sixteenth Cherokee lawyer in Philadelphia. He had served with Old Man Three Trees in Vietnam. Even better, he needed the work.
CHAPTER 5
Noonan did not expect to get very much out of the hotel personnel.
He was not disappointed.
He didn’t get much.
But it was enjoyable.
The staff knew he was coming, so they were assembled in the lobby of the Frank M. Canton Hotel when he got there. Everyone, that is, except for the woman who had actually checked Harrison Day One into the hotel. She was not at the Frank M. Canton Hotel when Noonan arrived because she was, in the words of the man who had discovered the blood, “up to her eyebrows in manure.” Noonan expressed mild shock at the statement until it was made clear that Harriet, the night clerk, was also a “vet midwife”—an occupation Noonan did not know existed.
“We all do double duty here in Washakie,” Noonan was told by Ezra, a lanky fellow who looked part Mexican and part sort of a blended European with the visual accent on Portuguese or Greek. “We’re a small town, and there is not that much money running around. So we all have more than one job.”
“So you all have two part-time jobs?”
“That’s city talk,” snapped Melinda, the bookkeeper. “In a big city, you have what you call full- and part-time jobs. Out here we’ve got jobs we call makin’ a living. It’s not like we clock in and clock out. There’s a job to do, and we do it. We get paid for it. Sometimes it’s regular; other times it’s just availability. Slow times, we watch our pennies. Then when the rodeo comes to town, we don’t have time to spend those pennies, but we sure make the dollars. Harriet’s lucky ’cause she’s got a degree in something, so she can help the vet. Pays by the animal, and if there’s any one thing we’ve got plenty of around here, it’s animals.”
“And raw land,” Noonan added.
“You’ve been listening around town about the Nimerigar.” Melinda shook her head. “Some people. Yeah, we’ve got plenty of badlands. More than enough to go around. They got fifty thousand acres; so be it. Can’t do nothing with that land, so I don’t know why they want it.”
“Anyone else getting that kind of land from the government?” Noonan asked as he jotted down comments in his notebook.
“Why would anyone want that kind of land?” Ezra said. “It’s only good for rattlesnakes and wolf spiders.”
“Good point,” Noonan said and then changed the subject. “Ezra, it is Ezra, right?”
“Same name my mother gave me.”
“Ezra, you found the bloody room, correct?”
“And it was a sight. I mean there was blood everywheres. On the floor, the walls. There was even some on the ceiling. A lot of blood. So much blood, it made me sick, if you know what I mean.”
“I can guess,” Noonan said. “Other than blood what else was in the room?”
“Heck, I don’t know. I just opened to door and looked in. That’s all it took.”
“So, you don’t know if there was a suitcase or clothes or anything else in the room.”
“There wasn’t,” cut in Melinda. “Nothing. That’s what made it so strange. Bed was messed up in the morning, so we did the usual cleaning. Whoever was in there left early. Some wet towels in the shower and toilet paper hangin’ from the roll. But no other sign someone had been there. No toiletries. No suitcase. No clothes hung up. Real spooky, if you ask me. Usually it’s the other way around. Rodeo comes to town, and you never know what you’re gonna find in a room. Muddy spurs in the sink, hair grease on the bedsheets, saddles in the center of the room.”
“No rodeo when Mr. Harrison checked in?”
“Nothing happening,” Ezra interjected. “Three weeks from the next rodeo and a month from the Fourth of July. We was quiet as a mouse in barn with a herd of cats.”
Noonan smiled. “I’ve never heard that before.”
“Made it up myself,” Ezra said smiling.
“Good.” Noonan allowed a corner of his mouth to pull up in a half grin. “One last question. When you found the bloody room, you just closed the door and stepped back. Correct?”
“Yes, sir. Just pulled the door shut and had Melinda”—he pointed to the elderly woman standing next to him—“call Leonard, er, Chief Standing Bear.”
“But you didn’t enter the room again?”
“Nope.”
“Was there any blood on the outside of the door or on the floor outside the door?”
“You mean on the floor?”
“Yes, on the floor.”
“Nope. Just inside the room. The forensic folk asked the same question and sprayed some kind of liquid on the outside of the door and then used a black light to see if there was any blood.”
“Was there?”
“Clean as a whistle. We keep the Frank M. Canton that way.”
“While this Mr. Harrison was here,” Noonan said and looked from Ezra to Melinda, “did anything strange or unusual happen? Loud noises? Arguments?”
“The only thing unusual was that this guy was quiet. Most folks are rowdy. You don’t come to Washakie to be quiet. You come to party. Not this guy.”
“No phone calls? No cable channel? No room service?”
“Nothing. Just checked in, and that was the last time we saw him.”
CHAPTER 6
Nothing in Wyoming is ever as it seems. What you see is not necessarily what you actually see. Many times living in Wyoming is like watching a magic show. What you see is not what is actually happening. The mild-mannered avuncular grandpa next door is not always what he seems, and, in Wyoming, he may be substantially different in reality than in what you see.
As an historical example, a lauded Wyoming mountain man in his day was John Johnson. In fact, he was such a notable character he was photographed with a pantheon of Western heroes in 1883, a group which included—in the same photograph taken in Hunters Hot Springs, Montana, in 1883—Wyatt Earp, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Judge Leroy Bean, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday along with yet-to-be-president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. No one believes the photo to be authentic, but it has been raising historical eyebrows for more than a century and a half.
Johnson was living a routine life as a mountain man, such as things were in those days, when tragedy struck. In 1847, his Flathead Indian wife was killed by a Crow brave. This enraged Johnson to the point he declared a one-man war against the Crow. Over the next two decades, he hunted down and killed about three hundred Crow warriors and ate their livers. Thus he acquired the sobriquet John “Liver-Eating” Johnson. Johnson was as tough as they come. Once he was selling liquor to his Flathead in-laws, which was illegal, alone in the dead of winter—a foolhardy trip of five hundred miles that would have been exhausting in midsummer. Midway through his journey, he was captured by a party of Blackfeet braves who, undoubtedly ecstatic to get free liquor, decided to double their loot by selling Johnson to the Crow. Johnson was tied with rawhide bonds and dumped in a tepee while the band went to contact the Crow. They left one inexperienced Blackfoot to guard Johnson.
This turned out to be a bad idea.
Johnson slipped free of his rawhide bonds, kicked the guard unconscious, killed the guard with the guard’s own knife, scalped the guard, and then cut off the guard’s leg.
Why did Johnson cut off the guard’s leg?
So he would have something to eat on his two-hundred-mile trek across the frozen badlands to a trapping partner.
Unlike Alferd Packer who was convicted of cannibalism in 1874, Johnson was never charged with a crime. Apparently, whites eating Natives was legal. But not the other way around. Today Alferd Packer lives on as the name of the cafeteria at the University of Colorado Boulder, which offers, among other fares, “El Canibal Mexican Specialties.”
Darby O’Reilly looked exactly like what someone in his profession should look like. He was a State of Wyoming clerk. Worse, he had to be a documents jack-of-all-trades because Wyoming did not have a lot of money, so O’Reilly had to represent positions that, in a larger state, would be filled by four or five people. He was the land-title clerk, historical-archive-intake interface, Affirmative Action officer, State of Wyoming Education Grant monitor, and State of Wyoming Environmental Protection Officer as well as State of Wyoming land-egress officer for the three counties that lay west of the Laramie Range.
His had been a good job.
For a century.
It was one of paper shuffling. Paperwork came in. It was filed. Someone asked for it. He found it. He copied it. He sent it out. But things were changing. Now the State of Wyoming wanted everything on computer. That meant formalizing 150 years of convoluted legal paperwork into a cohesive collection that was user friendly. Hey! That was his job! To be user friendly. That had been the job of the man before him and the man before him all the way to statehood—and territoryhood before that. This progression of men had been friendly, knowledgeable, and, to use a newfangled term, user friendly. Now some computer was going to come along and spoil it all. Why, if everything was easy to find online, another newfangled term, why did anyone need him?
His had been a routine State of Wyoming position for years. Nothing had really changed over the years. This was, after all, Wyoming, and things just pretty much stayed the same. People and businesses came and went, but the problems were all the same, just different faces on the same difficulties. Ownership of the gold mines changed, but it was still gold coming out of the Laramie Mountains. Wyoming was the largest coal producer in the United States—not West Virginia as many Americans believe—and there were a myriad of EPA regulations to learn and follow. Then there were the proposed and actual land-use plans; permission to cross state land; joint State of Wyoming and Corps of Engineers wetlands permits to be monitored; and now, the most hair-pulling-out, the transfer of fifty thousand acres of land to a recently formed polyglot Native association/corporation/nonprofit, which spread across three county lines.
