Little Feather shook her head. “The only time I ever saw my birth certificate,” she said, “my mother had to show it when I started school. I remember it said ‘Baby Elkhorn, female, father unknown.’ My Little Feather story is, I’ve never seen a birth certificate, wouldn’t know whom to ask. Investigators can look for a birth certificate under Farraff and never find one.”
“And under Redcorn and never find one,” John pointed out.
Guilderpost said, “John, if people start looking into Little Feather’s past, they can’t get further back than Shirley Ann Farraff. It’s clear she was born under some other name, but no one will ever prove that name wasn’t Little Feather Redcorn.”
“But,” John objected, “she can’t prove it was Redcorn.”
“DNA,” said Irwin.
John nodded, absorbing that, then apparently grew tired at last of sitting on half his ass, squeezed in beside Tiny. Standing, shaking himself all over a little like a dog, he said, “Fitzroy, what I want to know is, how come you know all this? How come you can set it up?”
“I’ve been setting it up,” Fitzroy told him, “off and on for six years. I was first putting together some Dutch land grants along the Hudson River, very nice paper, clouding the ownership of any number of valuable properties, and the owners were always relieved, even grateful, at the modest price I would ask to sell them the grants, ending all likelihood of later dispute and making it possible for them to sell their properties if they were ever of a mind to—a very nice enterprise, if I say so myself—when some collateral research led me to the Silver Chasm Casino and the died-off Pottaknobbees. I asked myself, Could one find a Pottaknobbee who could be tweaked into just one more living relative?” He gestured theatrically at Little Feather. “The result, you see before you.”
John and Andy and Tiny looked at one another. Tiny shrugged, and the bed groaned, and apparently bounced Andy to his feet, where he turned and said, “Well, Fitzroy, it sounds pretty good.”
“Thank you.”
John said, “And tomorrow’s the day.”
“It all depends on Little Feather,” Fitzroy said.
“Thanks, I needed that,” Little Feather said.
John said to her, “You’ll be okay. What time you gonna call them?”
“Two in the afternoon.”
“So whatever’s gonna happen,” John said, “we should all know about it by six, huh?”
Fitzroy said, “We could meet here again tomorrow at six, if that’s your suggestion.”
“Good,” John said.
Fitzroy said, “And, if we’re not back yet when you arrive—”
“That’s okay,” Andy assured him, “we’ll just let ourselves in.”
“That isn’t what I was going to say.”
Andy said, “You want us to stand out there in the cold, attracting attention?”
Little Feather said, “No, he doesn’t.” Rising, she said, “If you three also think we got a shot, that’s good. Fitzroy, drive me back now, will you?”
“Of course, my dear.”
The two trios parted outside the door, with expressions of warmth and mutual respect, and then Little Feather reversed the process homeward: car to supermarket, shop, cab to Whispering Pines.
Little Feather spent a quiet evening with her exercise tapes and her reading—she particularly liked biographies of famous women, like Messalina and Catherine the Great—and the next afternoon at two, she left the Winnebago to go to the Whispering Pines office to call the casino. She shut the motor home door, turned, and saw two men wearing dark suits under their overcoats walking toward her. One said, “Miss Redcorn?”
Little Feather looked at them. Trouble, she thought. “Yes?”
The man showed a badge. “Police, Miss Redcorn. Would you come with us?”
Bad trouble, she thought. “Why?”
“Well,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”
14
Once again, they got to the Four Winds first. Kelp opened the door to Guilderpost’s room and they seated themselves the same as last time, Dortmunder settling himself in to operate the remote, except now what they watched was the local six o’clock news.
Guilderpost and Irwin and Little Feather were really very late, so they still hadn’t returned, and Dortmunder and Kelp and Tiny were still watching the local news, at 6:16, when Little Feather walked across the screen, in handcuffs, with hard-eyed guys flanking her, each holding an elbow. Little Feather didn’t look at all happy with her situation, and Dortmunder sympathized, a lot.
“Holy shit!” Kelp cried, and Tiny said, “Sharrap.”
“Arrested at Whispering Pines Campground on Route Fourteen this afternoon,” the voice of the newsperson said, while the perp walk continued, the camera panning to show an official-looking old building, a pile of stone and brick that had probably been moldering there since the twenties, “was a woman claiming to be Little Feather Redcorn, last member of the Pottaknobbee tribe, one of the three tribal owners of Silver Chasm Casino.”
Little Feather and her escort, moving amid many newscasters and newspersons, were engulfed by the pile of stone and brick. The news gatherers remained clustered outside.
“Charged with extortion, the woman, one of whose names is Shirley Ann Farrell, is being held in the Clinton County House of Detention.”
Another shot of the pile of stone and brick, apparently taken later in the afternoon, had a newsperson in the foreground, with a microphone, speaking directly to the camera: “News Eight has learned that Ms. Farrell has been a gambler and showgirl in Las Vegas until very recently. Why she is making this claim at this time, police hope to determine.”
Now there was a shot of some kind of office, with dark-paneled walls, glass shelves with trophies, head-shot photos of smiling people in frames on the walls, green glass table lamps, and two sleek, smooth guys in their fifties, one seated at an elaborate dark wood desk with a black stone top, the other in a comfortable dark red leather chair just beside him. One of the men was talking, because his lips were moving, but his words couldn’t be heard. Off-camera, the newsperson could be heard saying, “Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda, who received the letter of extortion from Ms. Farrell in their position as co-managers of Silver Chasm Casino, and turned it over to the police, say they’ve never been faced with a matter like this before but are not surprised.”
Now the talking man’s words became audible: “We’ve always known it was a possibility that someone would try some fraud like this, and we’ve guarded against it and we’re ready for it, and I want to assure our tribespeople, Mr. Oglanda’s Kiota and my own Oshkawa, that their investments in our tribal property are safe from all the flimflam artists in the world.”
The other man, Oglanda, said, “Years ago, both our tribes made an exhaustive search for any surviving Pottaknobbees, and we have the results of that search, every bloodline followed right down to the end, and although it’s sad, I’m afraid it’s also true, and it must be said, there are no surviving Pottaknobbees. None.”
“I feel sorry for this misguided young woman,” Fox said, and smiled in an unpleasant way.
Then they were back in the studio with the primary newsperson: “The search for the black box—”
“Off,” Tiny said, and Dortmunder offed the set.
In the silence, they looked at one another, until Dortmunder said, “The only question is, do we have time to go back to the Tea Cosy for our stuff, or do we just drive south straight from here?”
Kelp said, “John, don’t be such a pessimist.”
“Why not?”
Tiny said, “Because Little Feather won’t flip.”
Kelp said, “If she was going to, the cops would come here, not the Tea Cosy. And anyway, Tiny’s right. Little Feather’s stand-up, we can count on her.”
“More than the other two,” Tiny said.
“You’re probably right,” Dortmunder agreed, and sighed, only partially in relief.