“Will was a good officer. He’d been working there for five years or so. Everyone liked him, and that kind of thing was important to Will.”
Cassie nodded; she understood. “About five months ago there was a big accident right in Pine Ridge town. Drunk driver. Some guy drove another car off the road, killed a family of four, and then wrapped his own jeep around the telephone pole in front of the general store. Course, he walked out of his car without a scratch.”
Cyrus closed his eyes, remembering the sirens of the beat-up police cars that he’d heard even in his sleep; the dark blood on the front of his grandson’s regulation shirt when he’d come home that night. “A long time ago Will’s parents were killed in a car accident by some crazy drunkwasicuη salesman; that’s how come he grew up with us. So I suppose something just snapped in him when he saw that man get out of his car. He walked over and beat him within an inch of his life. Took three other tribal officers to get him away. Will was fired about a week after that.”
Indignant, Cassie turned to Cyrus. “That’s ridiculous. He could have sued them.”
Cyrus shook his head. “Too many people wanted Will gone. See, the family that was killed belonged to the visiting brother of one of the elementary school teachers. White. And the drunk driver Will nearly murdered was Lakota.” Cyrus whistled through his front teeth. “A white family getting killed was a tragedy, to be sure, and there was no question in anyone’s mind that the drunk driver, red or white or whatever, was going to go to trial. But what Will did—flying off the handle like that—was a mistake. Will didn’t seem to have his priorities straight.
All of a sudden everyone was remembering that he wasiyeska, half white, and that seemed to be the half that was in control, since a fullblood Indian would’ve cut the guy some slack.”
“How could they possibly see that as a racial issue?” Cassie said, folding her arms across her chest. “What must your neighbors think of me?”
“They like you,” Cyrus said. “You blend in with the People. Not because you try to, but because you don’t trynotto. Will—well, Will was always building walls, standing a little ways apart.”
Cassie thought about Will in Los Angeles, standing out just as sorely as he had at Pine Ridge. She thought about the beautiful quilled moccasins and the deerskin mural packed in boxes in his Reseda apartment. She thought of him beating a drunk driver until his knuckles were scraped and bruised, until blood covered his uniform, until it became impossible to tell if the man was Lakota or white. She thought of what she might have said to him if she’d known all this earlier: that she now knew, from personal experience, you just couldn’t shut your eyes and pretend a part of your life didn’t exist.
Mindlessly, Cassie bent down and picked up a branch of a young willow sapling that had broken off during a storm. She flexed the stick in her hands, bending it in half, testing its endurance, considering what Cyrus had told her. And when the willow snapped, tried to its limit, she was not surprised at all.
WILL COULDN’T GET AWAY FROM ALEX RIVERS. HIS NAME WAS IN every newspaper, every magazine, splayed across the racks at the supermarket. He’d seen his picture so many times he was willing to bet he knew Alex’s features better than Cassie did. He was even starting to feel sorry for the guy. In the wake of some statement made by Cassie’s father, rumors had flown. Cassie had become some kind of Jimmy Hoffa mystery, and Alex was suffering the consequences.
The article he was reading said that the Japanese firms backingMac-
bethhad withdrawn their support, leaving Alex as the sole creditor for a forty-million-dollar flop. Supposedly his Malibu apartment was up for sale. His next two film deals had disintegrated; his silence regarding Cassie’s disappearance was universally damning, traced to either his culpability or a sick obsession with his career that obliterated everything else. There was even a nasty hint that the reason an Oscar winner like Alex Rivers had nothing else in the works was because he couldn’t keep his head out of the bottle long enough to find a decent script.
Will folded the magazine in half and stuck it behind the sun visor of the squad car. “How much longer?” he asked, turning to Ramo´n, still his partner.
Ramo´ n stuffed the rest of his fried egg sandwich in his mouth and checked his watch. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Then it’s showtime.”
Tonight he’d been assigned to a charity ball. It was given by some organization whose name he’d forgotten, and it sponsored a very worthy cause—some handicapped children’s ranch in Southern California. Still, Will couldn’t believe this was the way he had to earn a living.
The highlight of the evening involved seven sagging society matrons wearing beaded evening gowns and five-foot-tall floral headdresses concocted by a variety of florists from the Tournament of Roses parade. The women staggered down a runway, smiled in spite of the steel back braces supporting their necks, and supposedly raised a shitload of cash.
Will and Ramo´n were there to keep a semblance of order.
What was even more shocking was the fact that they wereneeded.
Three hours before the shindig even started, some skinny little twit with a nametag that readMauricehad accused another florist of stealing his birds-of-paradise. Will had to pry him off the thief’s back, after he’d already stomped on a once-white string of lilies.
“Let’s go,” Ramo´ n said, pulling himself out of the car.
Will set his cap low over his eyes and walked toward the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He told himself this was not just a security guard’s job. He told himself he’d make detective soon.
Ramo´ n took one side of the runway and Will took the other. There was a dimming of lights, a flurry of thick percussed music, and then the first model appeared.
Her headdress was made of carnations and spelled out the year 1993.
You could see how hard it was for her simply to walk. Behind her, on a huge screen, were the gap-toothed grins of bald children on horses;
sickly adolescents floating in inner tubes.
A woman, the emcee, sauntered up beside Will, handing him a shopping bag stuffed with tiny wrapped packages. “Here’s your goody bag,” she trilled. She beamed up at the stage. “I keep hoping that next year I’ll be chosen. As a mannequin, you know.” A second model appeared on the runway. She was singing “Hooray for Hollywood,” and the violets growing out of her hair were fashioned into a Panavision camera, with an ivy-woven roll of film sprocketing over her shoulders.
Will thought about Cassie. He wondered if she had gone to functions like this with Alex; if she had felt as out of place as he did. Quietly, under the hum of the music, he unwrapped three of the little presents.
A bottle of designer perfume, a pair of aviator sunglasses, edible massage oil.
Across the way, Ramo´ n was clapping to the beat. Will glanced around at the faces bobbing over the satin gowns and the tight-necked tuxedos. They had been pulled and tucked and sculpted and shaped, primped and posed and colored. They were artfully wrapped packages without any of the messy tape showing; they were working unnaturally hard to look natural.
