Tall Man in Ray-Bans (A John Tall Wolf Novel) Read online

  Everything was photographed. Traps were set for the coyote, should it return.

  The beast was never caught.

  The pediatrician brought in by the judge pronounced John to be in good health, though the child winced and cried when she shined a light on his eyes. The doctor said it was clear to her that the child was already bonding with the Wolfs. Once she finished with her official duties, she asked if she might have a sample of Haden’s baby formula.

  The judge decided it was in the best interest of the child that he remain with the Wolfs as they had declared their intention to adopt him. Their custody would be considered temporary for ninety days to give one or both biological parents the opportunity to reassert their parental rights to the child.

  The last thing the Wolfs wanted was for the fool or fools who had imperiled John to pop up at the last minute and stake their claim. So they took the initiative. They paid to have ads placed in Anglo, Native American and Latino publications that a baby boy had been found. They gave the details and asked anyone knowing anything about the child to come forward and contact the authorities. As more than a few people in the area weren’t the best readers, the announcement was also broadcast by radio stations serving all segments of the community.

  Haden and Serafina felt certain John’s birth mother wouldn’t come forward, but they weren’t sure what the biological father might do if he learned he had a son. Watching John thrive day by day, holding him, feeding him, reading stories to him, they felt the child take possession of their hearts. At some level, John knew that Haden and Serafina had saved his life, and he put his complete trust in them.

  Those first three months they spent together were the most joyous and the most anxious of the Wolfs’ lives.

  They were weak with relief when the deadline passed and no one had come forward to claim John. Pursuant to the judge’s order, Dr. and Mrs. Haden Wolf were allowed to adopt the male infant to be known as John Tall Wolf.

  The child’s biological mother, Bly Black Knife, a member of the Northern Apache nation, had heard the announcement about her son broadcast on the reservation’s radio station, but she didn’t dare bring shame on her parents. She was also not going to arouse Coyote’s wrath.

  Six years later, though, after her father had died, she changed her mind.

  A suit was filed to set aside the Wolfs’ adoption.

  Chapter 9

  Austin, Texas — July 11, the present

  John lowered himself onto the visitor’s chair next to Darton Blake’s desk in the bullpen of the homicide unit of the Austin Police Department.

  “Nice to see you again, Special Agent,” Darton said. “Take any scalps lately?”

  “Haven’t had the need. Your son turn up any more skeletal fugitives?”

  Blake laughed. “Not a one. I’ve strongly cautioned Amos about that.”

  John took out the eight-by-ten copy of the photograph of Randy Bear Heart and Lily White Bird doing their Bonnie and Clyde impressions. He slid it over to the detective.

  “Sorry about the fuzziness,” John said, “but that’s what we have to work with. What you see there is Mr. Bear Heart when he still had some flesh on him. The woman with him is Lily White Bird, aka Mrs. Daniel Red Hawk.”

  Darton looked up from the grainy image. “The woman Bear Heart kidnapped?”

  “We’ll have to revise our thinking on that. Annie Forger told me kidnapping wasn’t in Bear Heart’s criminal repertoire. What I heard, Lily was Randy’s favorite girlfriend, and her little boy, name of Jackson, was really Randy’s son, not the late Officer Red Hawk’s.”

  “Well, ain’t that a kick in the head?” Darton asked, looking at John.

  “Yeah. Especially if you were Red Hawk. Try looking past the beret and the blonde wig. See if you can recall ever seeing Lily around Austin. I don’t figure Randy for taking her off the rez only to leave her at a bus stop somewhere.”

  The detective put his eyes back on the photostat. “No, sir. You wouldn’t leave a looker like this behind even if …”

  John asked, “A thought cross your mind, Detective?”

  “I was gonna say you wouldn’t leave her even if she was poisoning your popcorn. Then it occurred to me maybe somebody slipped old Randy a mickey. Knocked him out long enough to get all those chains around him.”

  John nodded, liked the idea. “Weigh him down then wake him up when he’s in the boat. Let him see what he’s got coming.”

  “Sure,” Darton agreed. “The fun part is where he begs for mercy or just plain soils himself. I’ll have to ask the lab boys if poison might linger in the bone marrow or somewhere else.”

  “I know it shows up in hair follicles, but I don’t remember seeing any hair on the skull.”

  “Me either, but maybe on the part in back that was stuck in the mud. I’ll ask.”

  “Try to jog your memory about Lily, too,” John said.

  “I’m working on that already. Thing is, it’s not likely she’s blonde and she’s got to be, what, twenty-some years older. She might look a whole lot different.”

  John said, “Some women hardly age at all. Others do it very well.”

  His mother for one.

  Darton looked like he had something to add, but he was beaten to the punch.

  “What an enlightened attitude,” a female voice said.

  The two men turned their heads and saw a woman in a business suit. Tall, sleek and striking. A streak of white running through long black hair. Darton turned back to John.

  “Gotta be one of yours,” he said. “We don’t have any like her.”

  “My boss,” John said.

  Chapter 10

  Mercy Ridge Reservation, South Dakota — August 20, 1986

  Randy “Clyde” Bear Heart’s favorite “Bonnie” was Lily White Bird. Not only was she the prettiest girl on the rez, she had moments when she was damn near as crazy as he was. Not that Randy thought of himself as a loon; he fashioned himself as a social activist who made the most of the second amendment. An entrepreneur who believed in taking from the rich and investing in himself. Young people with ambition were natural self-publicists.

  Lily had not only posed with Randy’s Tommy gun, she’d fired it. At her insistence, the two of them and little Jackson had gone off to a remote area of the rez and, after stopping up the baby’s ears with cotton, Lily had fired off a whole drum of ammo. The experience got her so worked up that she and Randy lay down on the blanket they’d brought with them and had at it not two feet from the still smoking weapon.

  Lily was the only girl Randy had sex with when he wasn’t wearing protection.

  That decision carried with it more than the usual risks, as Lily was married to a reservation cop. If word got out what Randy was doing, it wouldn’t be only Daniel Red Hawk who came looking for him. All the cop’s friends with badges would be in the posse. Randy had cut a wide swath through the women on the rez, and most of the men thought none too highly of him.

  He was too smart, too good looking and too much competition for their girlfriends and, as with Lily White Bird, sometimes their wives. If Red Hawk and his friends found proof that Randy had gone too far with Lily, he might die resisting arrest. With plenty of corroborating testimony that Randy had been reaching for an officer’s weapon.

  It turned out that the father, not a husband or boyfriend, of one of Randy’s lesser Bonnies almost did him in. He’d found a picture of his daughter and Randy in costume. He knew about Randy’s reputation as a ladies’ man from all the stories going around the rez. It wasn’t hard to imagine the prick was doing more than playing dress up with his daughter. So after the second bank robbery, the one in North Dakota, the angry father had no trouble identifying the culprit after hearing the bank robber’s description: a dude with a big fucking gun.

  Actually, he’d heard the unedited description.

  A fucking Indian dude with a big fucking gun.

  Someone else might have fingered Randy sooner if the need to be politically cor
rect hadn’t rendered the media description less specific. As it was, the father saw the opportunity to rid his daughter of a boyfriend he didn’t want around. He called the reservation cops and ratted out Randy.

  That might have been the end of the story if the lesser Bonnie hadn’t overheard her father’s call to the cops and ratted him out to Randy, giving the outlaw just enough time to avoid arrest. The smart thing for Randy to do would have been simply to run, but he stopped at the Red Hawk house to pick up his best Bonnie and his son.

  He had no intention of killing Daniel Red Hawk. The only reason he’d shot the two cops outside the banks he’d robbed was they had shot at him first. They had died and he’d lived because small-town cops carried .38s not Tommy guns. The way Randy saw it, he’d acted in self-defense, and you couldn’t blame him for being better prepared.

  Still, there were some things you just couldn’t anticipate. Like a rez cop who always stopped off after his shift to get shitfaced deciding that he would come straight home that day and try to get his marriage back on the rails. It had finally occurred to Daniel Red Hawk that maybe the reason he couldn’t perform in bed with his beautiful wife was that he always got lubed before he got home.

  That day, Red Hawk thought things might be a lot more interesting if he could get a few drinks in both of them.

  For Lily’s part, the only reason she’d married Red Hawk was that she’d had a big argument with Randy. About him screwing other girls, of course. She hadn’t seen the humor when he told her she was the only Bonnie who got his best efforts. She scratched his cheek bloody.

  In return, he raised a hand to her, but as angry as he was he couldn’t follow through with the blow. He just turned and walked out without saying a word. Many were the times Lily wished he had hit her. For one thing, she deserved it. For another, it might have saved her from a moment of true madness. Deciding to marry Daniel Red Hawk.

  She’d thought marrying such an oaf would wound Randy’s ego.

  That she could even pretend to love Red Hawk, and to live with him, would be an insult unlike any other Randy had ever suffered. All the other Bonnies would think Lily was crazy, but if she had thrown Randy over for Red Hawk … maybe it was possible she knew something about him that they didn’t.

  What they didn’t know was how much she loathed living with her husband. How she made him wear a condom any time — and there weren’t many — she let him have her. Daniel Red Hawk couldn’t help but see his wife’s disdain for him, but there was no way he wanted to let so beautiful a woman go. So he adapted to prevailing conditions. Never a teetotaler before he married Lily, Red Hawk’s drinking increased steadily afterward.

  Lily made her own adjustments. Her anger at Randy changed to regret. How could she have damaged that perfect face? If she had scarred him, she would have to kill herself. There was no other suitable punishment for destroying such beauty. Then again, troubled eighteen year old girls tended to make dramatic judgments.

  Much to Lily’s surprise, Randy sent her a note of apology.

  Paid an old illiterate woman to deliver it, so their secret would be safe.

  Randy said, “I am who I am, but I shouldn’t have made fun about us. Sorry.”

  Illiterate courier or not, Randy had neither addressed the note to Lily nor signed it. He’d typed it, too. Had the reservation’s cops possessed the wherewithal to match the note to the typewriter, they would have found the machine belonged to them. As part of his job for the Mercy Ridge Times, Randy picked up items from the cops for the police blotter column.

  The officer responsible for delivering the content of the column had been in the john when Randy arrived. Making himself at home, sitting at the officer’s desk, Randy looked at the typewriter in front of him and was inspired to write his apology. He knew how to touch type, but he used only two fingers. Anybody hearing rapid-fire clickety-click typing would have gotten suspicious. Peck, peck, peck was the usual order of things.

  As it was, nobody ever found out.

  The apology was all Lily needed to forgive Randy.

  He hadn’t promised to reform anything but his manners, but that was enough.

  After Lily found out she was pregnant with Randy’s child, she let Daniel Red Hawk have her one time unsheathed. She told him she wanted to have a child, but he would get only one chance so he better make it good. That night, Lily did have a couple of drinks in her.

  Three years later, when Randy finally came to take her away from the rez, he was sitting on her old suitcase so she could snap it shut when Daniel Red Hawk came home. Randy was looking the wrong way when the man of the house entered his bedroom. But Lily knew just what to do.

  She took the house gun that Red Hawk kept on the table next to the bed and shot him with it.

  Jackson, who’d been asleep on the bed woke up crying.

  Randy took the gun from her hand and said, “Anyone asks, chalk this one up to me.”

  What the hell? He had two dead cops to his name already.

  Before absconding with Lily and Jackson, Randy had paid a call on the tribal cultural center, the back room where they kept the good stuff white eyes never got to see. Tying up and gagging the elderly couple who oversaw the maintenance of historical relics, he stole a ghost shirt and two peace pipes. There was a war lance he wanted to take, but it was too big to hide.

  Having been betrayed already by his aunt and uncle and one of his Bonnies’ father, he wanted to leave the tribe with something to think about.

  He told the old couple, “Nobody from the tribe rats me out, all this stuff will be returned in perfect condition … but only after I die a natural death.”

  Chapter 11

  Santa Fe, New Mexico — September 9, 1981

  The suit to determine who should have custody of the child known as John T. Wolf was heard in the Children’s Division of the Circuit Court of Santa Fe County. It pitted two families and two communities against each other. The Anglo and Native American residents divided neatly along ethnic lines — even though Serafina, an American by birth, had parentage that was both Mexican and indio.

  The families represented by two of the most prominent names in their constituencies, the Wolfs and the Black Knifes. Haden and Serafina were prominent professionals. The Wolfs also contributed to the commonweal with Haden providing free medical care to the indigent three days per week, while Serafina taught adult literacy classes. The Black Knifes were the family of the late Cesar Black Knife, the senior member of the tribal council and the top advisor to the tribal president. The family was active as advocates for the civil rights of Native Americans.

  All this was in the mind of the judge hearing the case, Emilio Marquez. He drew the case as each side had Hispanic heritage and he was thought likely to be the most impartial jurist available.

  When Perico Fuentes, the lawyer for the biological mother, Bly Black Knife, asked to have a psychologist hired by the tribe talk to the child without the Wolfs being present, Angeline Legget, the Wolfs lawyer, objected. But Haden and Serafina agreed, if Ms. Legget and the judge were also present and the conversation was recorded on video.

  By the judge’s decision, six-year-old John would have to answer only four of the several dozen questions the plaintiff’s psychologist, Dr. Naomi Winsted, had wanted to ask, and he would be the one to direct the questions to the child. Only the judge, the two lawyers, Dr.Winsted and the video camera operator would be allowed in the room with John.

  The judge would be the only one to speak to the child.

  If either lawyer had a point to make, he or she would address the judge.

  Briefly. After raising his or her hand.

  With the ground rules set and everyone in place, Judge Marquez asked that John be brought into his chambers. The boy appeared dressed in a suit, his tie neatly knotted, his shoes shined. He wore tinted glasses. He walked directly over to the judge, sat in the chair to which the judge gestured and ignored the others.

  “Good morning, young man,” Judge Marquez s
aid.

  “Good morning, sir,” John replied.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes, sir. I was told. You’re the judge.”

  “That’s right.” Marquez took note of John’s glasses. “Do you have trouble with your eyes, John?”

  “Bright lights make me squint. Real bright lights make my eyes sting. Unless I wear my glasses.”

  “But you can see things clearly?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The judge moved on to the matter at hand. “John, I’m going to ask you four questions. I think they should all be easy for you to answer. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “John, who is your mother?”

  “Serafina Wolf y Padilla,” the boy answered.

  Emilio Marquez kept a straight face but it warmed his heart that the child included his mother’s Hispanic surname, and used the proper form of address. Kid’s accent wasn’t bad either.

  “Who is your father, John?”

  “Haden Erik Wolf.”

  John had delivered the first answer seriously. Now, he began to get suspicious. These questions were too easy. There had to be a trick coming.

  “Do you love your mother and father, John?”

  “Yes.”

  Another easy one. Now, John was sure a trap was being set.

  Judge Marquez asked the fourth question. “Other than being with your mother and father, is there anywhere else you would rather live?”

  There it was, the trap. John jumped out of his seat and yelled, “No!”

  Marquez remained calm. “Thank you, John. You may —”

  Perico Fuentes raised his hand; the Native American lawyer wanted to prolong the matter.

  “Yes, Mr. Fuentes?” the judge asked.

  “Your Honor, may I please ask John just one question?”

  John stood his ground and looked at the man. He shook off the hand Angeline Legget put on his shoulder. The judge noticed the child’s courage. He beckoned Fuentes.