Bad News Read online

  But was it an excuse for living? That was the question, and that was why, seated in the sitting room after yet another anchor-sized breakfast, digesting slowly and rather noisily while “Frère Jacques” was sung in counterpoint upstairs, waiting for the moment to go over to the Four Winds motel and read the letter Little Feather had yesterday sent to the casino, Dortmunder had professed his discontent: “What’s in it for me?”

  “Well, if money isn’t what you mean,” Kelp said, “then what do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Dortmunder said, “why am I in this place? I’m not a con artist. I’m not a grafter. I’m a thief. There’s nothing here to steal. We’re just riding Little Feather’s coattails—never mind, Tiny, you know what I mean—and we’re horning in on somebody else’s scam, and if they don’t manage to kill us—and you know, Tiny, that’s still Plan A they’ve got over there in their minds, and you can’t walk around with a hand grenade strapped on forever, for instance, you’re not even wearing it now—what do we get out of it?”

  “A hundred K,” Kelp said.

  “For what? Now, Andy, Tiny, listen to me. I think of myself as a person with a certain dignity and a certain professional ability and a certain standing, but what’s happening here is, I’m looking for crumbs from somebody else’s table, so why am I here?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Tiny rumbled, and Kelp said, “To be perfectly honest, John—”

  “Don’t strain yourself.”

  “No, no, no, in this issue only,” Kelp assured him, then said, “The reason you’re here, and Tiny’s here, and I’m here, is because I screwed up. I misjudged Fitzroy, and essentially you didn’t get the gee you were supposed to get to make up for the other gee you didn’t get, and—”

  “What are these gees?” Tiny demanded. “You two all of a sudden astronauts?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dortmunder told him. He did not want to get into a description with Tiny of his shopping experience at Speedshop.

  “What it is,” Kelp said, “one thing leads to another, and that’s what happened here, and one thing led to another, and this is the other.”

  They both looked at him, but Kelp was done. Dortmunder finally said, “That’s it? One thing led to another?”

  “That’s the way it looks from here,” Kelp said. “Also, if you remember, we both wanted to know what Fitzroy and them were up to, and see maybe there’s a little something in it for us—”

  “There’s always something in it for me,” Tiny grumbled.

  “That’s right, Tiny, thank you,” Kelp said, and to Dortmunder, he said, “Then we got Tiny, and when Tiny’s aboard, you know, we always gotta come up with something.”

  “Though sometimes,” Tiny said, “the something’s been kinda thinner than I’m used to. But I forgive you, Dortmunder. I always forgive you—”

  “Thank you, Tiny.”

  “—because you make me laugh,” Tiny said, and laughed, and the Tea Cosy rocked a little. “So here’s what it is,” he said. “We got these people gonna pull a scam. It looks like it could maybe work, and that’s a lotta money. And wherever there’s a lotta money, Dortmunder, there’s always sooner or later some use for the guy who does the thinking, which is you, and the guy who does the heavy lifting, which is me.”

  “And don’t forget transportation,” Kelp pointed out.

  “I was gonna mention transportation,” Tiny said, “on account it’s time to go over to the Four Winds and see how the windbags are coming along.”

  “Fine,” Dortmunder said, rising. “Let’s see do we have a use for my talents.”

  Tiny heaved himself to his feet, and the sofa sighed in gratitude. “And mine,” he said.

  It hadn’t snowed during the night, but the wind had dusted the Jeep with fine cold sparkles of blown snowflake, which was very attractive on its new color. It was now a gleaming black, and sported Massachusetts license plates, with no medical degree but with enough plausibility to survive a trooper’s computer check. Now, as they wiped snow off the windows with their gloves, Tiny said, “You know, Dortmunder, time hangs heavy on your hands, why not steal the whole county?”

  “And do what with it?”

  “Move it farther south,” Tiny suggested.

  13

  * * *

  Little Feather didn’t want to be associated with any of those people, not in anyone else’s mind, just in case sometime in the future she might want to be able to deny them, so she’d made Fitzroy sign over the motor home’s title to her, making herself more or less legal. She also wouldn’t travel from Whispering Pines Campground to the Four Winds motel and back by cab, nor would she permit Irwin and Fitzroy—it was always the two of them, that’s how much they trusted each other—to pick her up at the motor home. First, they would agree on a time, and then she would call a cab to take her for the inexpensive run into Plattsburgh, to a big supermarket there, where Irwin and Fitzroy would be waiting for her. They’d meet, discuss, do what they had to do, and then they’d return her to the supermarket, where she’d buy some grapefruit and Swedish flat bread and other necessities, and then call another cab to return her to the campground.

  And that’s the way it happened today. Cab number one dropped her off at the supermarket. She went in the automatic in door, U-turned, went out the automatic out door, and there were Irwin and Fitzroy in the Voyager, which had never really worked well since the night Irwin had started it without benefit of key. (Which she hadn’t learned about, of course, until much later.)

  Irwin always drove, Fitzroy beside him, and she traveled in back. Getting aboard, sliding the door shut, she said, “You mailed it?”

  As Irwin drove them away across Plattsburgh toward Route 9 southward to the Four Winds, Fitzroy said, “They’ll be reading it today.”

  “And then changing their pants,” Irwin commented.

  “Good,” Little Feather said, meaning the letter having been delivered, not the casino managers changing their pants. But in fact, now that it had begun, she herself was feeling just the least bit nervous.

  She wasn’t used to anxiety attacks, they didn’t suit her lifestyle. Little Feather had made her own way since she was fifteen and still known as Shirley Ann Farraff, when she’d left home and Cher first had become her ideal. She’d been a pony in Vegas shows, she’d gone through dealer’s school to become an accredited blackjack dealer, she’d waitressed or worked in department stores when times were bad, and she’d always come out okay. She’d never hooked, she’d never made the mistake of counting on a man instead of herself, and she’d never been proved wrong. When you count on yourself, you know whether or not you’re counting on somebody you can trust, and Little Feather was somebody that Little Feather could trust absolutely, so what was there ever to get nervous about?

  Well. It wasn’t that she was counting on Fitzroy and Irwin, but she sure was tied in with them, and she no longer shared their high opinion of themselves, not after this new trio had showed up.

  At first, Fitzroy had seemed like the genuine article. He’d met up with her in Reno, where she was dealing at one of the smaller casinos—family trade, crappy tips—and after a few verbal dance steps, during which she hadn’t been able to figure out what he was up to, he finally introduced her to Irwin, and together they told her the scheme.

  Well, who ever knew being an American Indian could be worth that much money? It was almost worth putting up with Native American (one of the more redundant of redundancies) from the same clowns who talk about flight attendants and daytime dramas and the height-impaired.

  Little Feather had understood from the beginning that although they needed a full-blooded American Indian to work their scheme, one with the right background, they didn’t necessarily need her. The plains were full of Navajo and Hopi and Apache with dead grandpas. So she’d concentrated her attention on being just the right little squaw for their needs, until now, when the game had actually started.

  It had started. The letter had gone out, over her
signature, giving her whereabouts, telling her story. Would it fly? Or was there something Fitzroy and Irwin had forgotten that would come sneaking up behind her to bite her on the ass?

  It was Andy and John and Tiny that had shaken her faith in Fitzroy and Irwin. Until then, she’d thought she was safe in their hands, she’d thought they were brilliant and brutal, and she’d thought nothing could stand in their way. For instance, they’d known the scheme couldn’t work if even one extraneous person knew about it, and so they’d made sure the extraneous people along the way, meaning the grave diggers in Nevada, didn’t survive their knowledge. Little Feather had never killed anybody, and she hadn’t killed those two, or been around when it was happening, but she didn’t mind it as a fact. A couple of loser winos; they were better off. So long as she didn’t have to watch, no big deal.

  But now, these new three. They came on kind of goofy, but underneath they were pros in some way Little Feather didn’t know about. She’d never quite met their like before, and it seemed to her the most significant thing about them was how they refused to get worried. Well, John, he always looked worried—that was obvious—but worry didn’t interfere with them, that was the point.

  And the picture of Tiny, casually holding the live grenade, was pretty well guaranteed to stick in the memory.

  Riding along, thinking it over, watching Lake Champlain’s cold, pebbly gray surface off to the left of the road, she said, “Be interesting to know what they think of the letter. Andy and so on.”

  Irwin kept his concentration on his driving, but Fitzroy half-turned to look back at her. Pretending surprise, he said, “Little Feather? Don’t you trust your own judgment?”

  “My judgment, fine,” she told him. “It’s your judgment and Irwin’s where I’d like a second opinion.”

  After that, there wasn’t much conversation in the car. And then, when they got to the Four Winds, there stood the recently black Jeep, parked in front of Irwin’s room, empty. Pulling in beside it, Irwin said, “That is the same Jeep, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t imagine,” Fitzroy said, “we’re looking at its final color change. But where do you suppose they are?”

  They all got out of the Voyager, looking this way and that, and Irwin said, “Suppose they got cold and they’re waiting in the office?”

  “Wouldn’t they see us drive in?”

  Little Feather said, “Fitzroy, why don’t you look in your room?”

  They stared at her, then at the closed door of Fitzroy’s room. Fitzroy bustled to it, pulling out his key, muttering something about “Can’t possibly” or some such, and when he got the door open, there they were, watching a soap, Andy in one of the two chairs, John in the other, Tiny a kind of profane Buddha on the bed, back against the headboard.

  “There you are,” Andy said, cheerful as ever, getting to his feet as John offed the TV with the remote. “Little Feather, here, have my chair.”

  Fitzroy seemed to have lost some of his self-assurance. “Did you,” he asked, “did you ask the maid to let you in?”

  “Oh, why bother people when they’re working?” Andy said. “Come on, Little Feather, take a load off. We all wanna see this letter of yours.”

  I’m enjoying these clowns, Little Feather thought as she crossed to say, “Thank you, Andy, you’re a gentleman,” and take the chair that had lately been his.

  Fitzroy, sounding put out, said, “I’m surprised you haven’t read the letter already. It’s in the drawer over there.”

  Andy affected hurt surprise. “We wouldn’t poke around in your personal possessions, Fitzroy. We all respect one another, don’t we?”

  From the bed, Tiny said, “Yeah, we’re all gonna get along now, that’s the idea.”

  John said, “We’re all kinda anxious to see this famous letter.”

  “Show it to them, Fitzroy,” Little Feather said. “Let’s see how it plays.”

  Fitzroy could be seen to decide not to make a federal case out of a simple breaking and entering. They’d been invited, and here they were. “Of course,” he said, crossing to the room’s flimsy little desk. “I’m quite proud of it, in fact,” he said, opening the drawer and taking out the copy they’d made at the nearby drugstore. “Only one copy, I’m afraid.”

  So the way they worked it, Tiny stayed where he was on the double bed, holding the letter, and Andy and John sat to either side of him, scrunched on the edges of the mattress, and all three read it at once. And Irwin took the opportunity to sidle into John’s chair.

  They finished, and Tiny handed the letter to Andy, who stayed where he was but leaned forward to hand it to Fitzroy, saying, “Has a nice naïve quality to it.”

  “Thank you,” Fitzroy said.

  Tiny rumbled, “United at last with my own people.”

  Irwin grinned. “Heart-tugging, that part.”

  John said, “How much of it is true?”

  “Almost all of it,” Fitzroy assured him.

  The three stayed where they were. Crowded together on the bed, the wide man in the middle, the other two bracing themselves with feet out to the side, they looked like an altarpiece from some very strange religion, but none of them seemed ready or willing to move.

  John said, “All those named in the letter, that family tree?”

  Holding the letter, Fitzroy went down the names: “Joseph Redcorn, he’s real. You know that, you met him.”

  Andy said, “You mean, we unburied him.”

  “Exactly. His daughter-in-law Harriet Littlefoot Redcorn, she’s real, or she was. She’s dead, but there are records.”

  John said, “And Doeface?”

  “Harriet’s daughter,” Fitzroy said, nodding. “Completely real. All trace of her is lost.”

  “And her daughter.”

  “You mean Little Feather here,” Fitzroy said.

  “Not yet I don’t,” John said. “You’re telling me what’s true in there.”

  “Very well,” Fitzroy said. “Doeface did marry one Henry Track-Of-Skunk, a full-blooded Choctee, and lived with him on the reservation. They did have a daughter in 1970 named Little Feather, and shortly after that the marriage ended.”

  John said, “Then what?”

  Fitzroy shrugged. “They left the reservation, mother and daughter.”

  “And she took back her maiden name, like it says in the letter?”

  “Unlikely,” Fitzroy said. “She didn’t keep the name Track-Of-Skunk, but I can find no telephone listing for a Doeface Redcorn anywhere in the West throughout the seventies.” Turning to Andy, he said, “The Internet is very good on things like that, you know. If there’s a list, the Internet will find it, and old phone books are nothing but lists.”

  John apparently didn’t care much about the wonders of the Internet. He said, “So Doeface disappeared, and you don’t know what name she used.”

  “I would guess she married again,” Fitzroy said. “And, once they left the reservation, I would imagine the mother changed Little Feather Track-Of-Skunk’s name, too. The child would have been less than a year old, and it’s unlikely she has any idea she was ever called by that name.”

  John said, “But you don’t know where she is, and you don’t know what her name is, but she’ll be about the same age as this Little Feather here.”

  “Yes,” Fitzroy said.

  “So, when this gets into the news,” John said, “and it will, this casino, all this money, inherited all of a sudden by this pretty girl here—”

  “Thank you, John.”

  “Anytime,” he said, then said to Fitzroy, “So she’s on the news, and the real Little Feather says, ‘Hey, that’s me.’ Then what?”

  Irwin said, “Why then, the way to prove out the competing claims is, let’s do a DNA test on the only known relative of Little Feather we can find, which is Joseph Redcorn, and guess what?”

  Andy said, “What about baby prints?”

  Most of the others looked blank, but Irwin said, “You mean footprints of babies taken shortly a
fter birth, for later ID. They didn’t do that in a very poor reservation infirmary in 1970.”

  Tiny said, “What about Skunkface?”

  “Track-Of-Skunk,” Irwin corrected, and Fitzroy said, “What about him?”

  “What if he shows up? And says, ‘There’s my baby girl.’”

  Little Feather knew the answer to that one. “So what?” she asked. “I’m inheriting a third of a casino through my mother, nothing to do with him. Maybe I can get him a job driving the parking lot bus.”

  Andy said, “What if he says, ‘There isn’t my baby girl’?”

  Little Feather said, “Why would he? The last time he saw me, I was ten months old.”

  Andy said, “Identifying marks? Strawberry birthmarks, stuff like that?”

  Fitzroy said, “From what I’ve learned about Track-Of-Skunk, I doubt his eyes ever focused quite that clearly on his baby daughter. If he’s alive, he probably doesn’t remember her at all.”

  John said, “Social Security number.”

  “Under the name of Shirley Ann Farraff,” Little Feather said.

  John looked at her. “I have the feeling that’s the name you started with.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So?”

  Fitzroy said, “Tell him the story, Little Feather.”

  “Sure.” She gave him her most honest look, which wasn’t particularly honest, and said, “My mother, Doeface Redcorn, had me on a reservation somewhere, father unknown, named me Little Feather Redcorn. When I was two, my mother moved in with Frank Farraff. I don’t think they ever married, but my mother renamed me Shirley Ann Farraff, because we weren’t living on the reservation. When I was fourteen, Frank tried to rape me, and my mom wouldn’t stand up for me, so I left. But by that time, I already had my Social Security card, so I went on being Shirley Ann Farraff.”

  John said, “How much of that is true?”