What they were waiting for was Guilderpost and Irwin, who were supposedly off finding some safe, quiet, unnoticeable location for them all to meet, and a way to get in touch with Little Feather that wouldn’t queer the deal even further than it already was, which wasn’t possible, but they would try anyway. In the meantime, Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny had settled more or less into their rooms, and visited one another anytime they had something to say, and otherwise watched the ski-toters plod around in the snowy wind. And what Dortmunder missed even more than the Tea Cosy was home.
A little before three, his phone rang in his room, where he was alone at the moment, looking out the window at the ski-haulers. He crossed to the phone and demanded, “Hello.”
It was Guilderpost, who said, “Hello, John. Does your room face the front of the motel?”
Dortmunder frowned at the window. “I got wind with snow in it, and cars with ski racks, and a road, and way over there is a frozen lake. Everything is gray.”
“That’s the front,” Guilderpost said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll have Andy come wait with you in your room, because his is at the back.”
“Wait for what?”
“Little Feather. She’s coming over, in the motor home.”
“That sounds real secure,” Dortmunder said.
“Apparently,” Guilderpost said, “the situation has changed. We can all come out of hiding now.”
“Because it’s all over,” Dortmunder said.
“I don’t think that’s why,” Guilderpost said. “She should be here in fifteen minutes or so.”
She was. The motor home made a big sweep around the parking lot, so everybody in the group would get a chance to see it, and then it parked way over in the far corner of the lot, away from the other vehicles and as close as possible to the frozen lake.
Dortmunder and Kelp put on a lot of outdoor clothes and headed out over the parking lot, the wind with the snow in it rushing at them from across the lake, trying to push them back into the room, and Dortmunder was almost ready to go along with that idea. But from the right, here came Guilderpost and Irwin, and from the left, here came Tiny, so Dortmunder, too, kept slogging forward.
The motor home was rocking slightly in the wind. It didn’t like being out here in all this weather any more than Dortmunder did. As they all arrived, Little Feather opened the door and stood hugging her arms, saying, “Come on in. Come in, come in, it’s freezing out there.”
“You’re right,” Dortmunder said.
As they all climbed into the motor home, Little Feather said, low voiced, to each of them, “We got a guest. Follow my lead.”
A guest? They trooped into the living room, peeling off their coats, dropping them on the floor, and a woman stood there, tension in her face as though she’d agreed to sit in a poker game with a bunch of people she’d just met and only now remembered she didn’t know how to play poker. She stared at each of them in turn but didn’t say anything, nor did any of them. Dortmunder didn’t know about the others, but the reason he kept quiet was, he figured that if anybody said anything to this woman right now, she was likely to explode all over the room, like Tiny’s hand grenade.
Little Feather followed them into the living room, which was more crowded than ever, and with a bright smile she said, “This is Marjorie Dawson. My lawyer. My first lawyer.”
Her lawyer? Dortmunder tried very hard not to stare at Little Feather, but what was going on here? She was showing her coconspirators, every last one of them, to a local lawyer?
This lawyer looked to be in her thirties, but just as Little Feather embraced a kind of flashy beauty, this woman obviously recoiled from any concept of beauty at all. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun, her face was pale and plain, and her clothing was all bulky and shapeless, sort of the indoor version of what the ski-carriers wore outside.
“Everybody sit,” Little Feather said, “and I’ll tell you what happened.”
The way to make it possible for everybody to sit, this time around, was that the two women got the sofa, while Tiny perched like a performing elephant on the chair Little Feather had used last time. Once they were all uncomfortable, Little Feather dealt out a round of her bright, perky, untrustworthy smile, and said, “When Judge Higbee said yesterday we should go right ahead with the DNA test, no more delays, I just didn’t know what to do, so finally I told Marjorie the whole story.”
Quickly, before anybody could say anything (like the wrong thing, for instance), she added, “I told her how I called my old friend Jack Hall in Nevada, and how he sent me to Mr. Guilderpost in New York, and he’s the one who found me the DNA specialist lawyer. And I told her how you all are friends of Mr. Guilderpost, and how you took an interest in my case, and how you, John, just somehow knew that the tribes would try to cheat and switch bodies, so you all, just to help me out, switched the tombstones, never thinking for a second that those young Indians would get caught.”
Well, that was a nice-enough story, as far as it went. It got Marjorie Dawson aboard, and explained the presence of this mob here, sort of, and Little Feather had tap-danced it all out from a standing start. Not bad.
The Dawson woman, now that nobody had killed her, had gotten her lawyer’s confidence back, and she said, “I have to admit that your thinking was very imaginative, very good, uh . . . John, was it?”
“Yeah, John,” Dortmunder admitted. “Thanks.”
Little Feather said, “Oh, let me introduce everybody. That’s Mr. Fitzroy Guilderpost, and that’s Irwin Gabel, and that’s Andy Kelly, and that’s Tiny Bulcher, and that’s John. John, I’m sorry, but I don’t know your last name.”
He hadn’t expected that, suddenly out of left field and all. “Diddums,” he said, which was what he said every time he was abruptly asked his name. Somehow, that was the only name he could ever think of.
Marjorie Dawson frowned. “Diddums?”
“It’s Welsh,” he explained.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, Mr. Diddums—”
“John.”
“Very well. John. It was clever of you to guess what the tribes might do, but very dangerous to go into that cemetery and start moving gravestones around.”
“It didn’t work out too good,” Dortmunder admitted.
Dawson said, “Can any of you think of any way to reverse the procedure, to make it possible for Little Feather to be tested against her actual ancestor?”
Dortmunder said, “When? The DNA thing’s supposed to happen right now, isn’t it?”
Beaming, Little Feather said, “I was so lucky I talked to Marjorie! She’s on my side, John, she really is, and she did something right away to help.”
Guilderpost, who’d been looking flabbergasted since they’d come in here, said, “Help? How can she possibly help?”
“By buying you some time,” Dawson said.
Guilderpost said, “But, Ms. Dawson, you can’t request a delay, that puts suspicion squarely where we don’t want it. We have to pretend we want that test at once.”
“I realize that,” Dawson told him, acting like someone who didn’t need advice from amateurs. “Here’s what happened,” she explained. “Mr. Welles, the tribes’ main counsel, immediately appealed Judge Higbee’s ruling in the state appeals court in Albany. It’s a ridiculous argument, based on the idea that the grave robbers acted without the consent of the Tribal Council, it won’t hold up for a second.”