Kelp said, “Well, at least now we know why they’re so late. How much longer do you suppose they’ll hang out at the supermarket and wait for her?”
“Well, however long, we gotta wait for them,” Dortmunder said, and the door opened, and in came Guilderpost and Irwin, both looking very worried, Irwin saying, “She didn’t show up.”
“We know,” Dortmunder told him, but before he could add any more, Guilderpost said, “I don’t understand it. We all agreed on the time, but we got there and we looked and we waited, and we never saw her.”
“We did,” Dortmunder told him, and pointed at the television set. “On the six o’clock news.”
Guilderpost stared at the blank television set as though expecting to see Little Feather show up on its screen, while Irwin stared more usefully at Dortmunder, saying, “On television? Why?”
“She was arrested,” Kelp said.
Tiny said, “Extortion.” From him, it sounded like a suggestion.
Dortmunder said, “Not the way we expected to see her on TV.”
Guilderpost was having trouble catching up. “But—What went wrong?”
“The casino guys did a preemptive strike,” Dortmunder explained. “Turned the letter over to the local cops, let them deal with it. They’ll all be buddies here, the casino a big employer, brings in lots of money, it doesn’t all stay on the reservation.”
“Bum’s rush,” Tiny commented.
“Oh, I see it,” Guilderpost said, calming down. With a sage nod, he said, “In fact, truth to tell, I’ve seen it in the past. Find a grifter in your territory, pull him in, shake him up a little, convince him to move on elsewhere, to greener pastures.”
“The casino guys,” Dortmunder said, “don’t want to have to deal with Little Feather, so the local cops lean on her.”
“They even gave her the perp walk,” Kelp said. “That’s how come we got to see her on TV.”
“Intimidation,” Irwin said.
Guilderpost cocked an eyebrow at his partner. “Intimidate Little Feather?” His smile was almost as unpleasant as the casino guy’s. “Anyone who tries to intimidate Little Feather,” he said, “is in for an unpleasant surprise.”
15
The room was somehow both cluttered and bare. A lot of folding chairs in messy rows on the left faced a raised platform behind a wooden rail on the right, with a long table and more folding chairs on the platform. Straight ahead, opposite the door from the hall, windows showed a nearby stone wall, probably some other official building. The walls of the room were covered with posters to do with fire fighting, drugs, AIDS, the Heimlich maneuver, and the implications of school being open. One man and one woman sat behind the long table, and a few more people were scattered among the scattered folding chairs.
“Sit there,” said one of the detectives to Little Feather, pointing at the nearest folding chair, and before she could tell him where he could sit, he went off to confer with people at the long table. So she sat.
What Little Feather mostly was was furious. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, just hustled off like some penny-ante crook. There was supposed to be a conversation, a dialogue, an unfolding of events. It was as though the world had suddenly jumped to the last chapter.
They’d taken her bag with her ID in it, and now the detectives and the people at the table studied all that for a while, then studied some other papers, and then the detective turned to crook a finger at Little Feather, who mostly by this point wanted to kick him in the shin. But she would contain herself, because sooner or later somebody would have to stop this folderol and pay attention.
Or maybe not. She went over to the long table, and saw on it a three-sided brass plaque in front of the man, reading:
MAGISTRATE
R. G. GOODY IV
R.G. himself didn’t much live up to the billing, being a spindly little balding man in a rumpled brown suit and crooked eyeglasses, who had no interest in meeting Little Feather’s eye. The woman beside him, schoolmarmish, was a steno or something, with pad and paper at the ready.
“Shirley Ann Farraff,” Goody began, and Little Feather nearly corrected him, but why bother? This was clearly a flunky. “You have been charged,” Goody went on, and then, not looking up, concentrating on the papers in front of him, he reeled off a list of numbers and sections and subparagraphs, after which he said, “How do you plead?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Little Feather said.
Goody looked at the steno. “Was that a not guilty plea?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“So noted.” Still not looking directly at Little Feather, he said, “Your Miranda rights were read to you.”
“In the car,” she agreed. Mumbled to her, really.
“Have you an attorney?”
“No. I don’t see—”
“Can you afford an attorney?”
“What? No!”
“Would you like the court to appoint an attorney?”
“Well, uh . . .” Not at all what she’d expected. “Maybe I should,” she said.
Goody nodded, then beckoned somebody from the spectators, and Little Feather turned to see moving toward her, lugging a big heavy old black battered briefcase, a woman of Little Feather’s age, but pretending to be her own grandma, with narrow reading glasses tipped forward on her face, black hair pulled severely back into a bun, and makeup so slight as to be almost not worth the effort. She wore a bulky black sweater, shapeless brown wool slacks, and black hiking shoes, and she gave Little Feather a quick impersonal nod before saying to Goody, “Your Honor, I need time to consult with my client.”
“She pleads not guilty,” Goody said. “She claims to be indigent. Did you want to seek bail?”
“Your Honor,” the woman said, “as I understand it, Miss Farraff has no previous criminal record, and would not be a danger to the community, so her own recognizance would—”
“The defendant,” Goody pointed out, “lives in a motor home, which would make the prospect of flight, I should think, very appealing. Five thousand dollars bail.”
Five thousand dollars! While Little Feather tried to think where she’d get hold of money like that—Fitzroy? Forget it—more words were handed back and forth by the woman attorney and the magistrate, remand and calendar and other words not part of her normal vocabulary, and then the woman turned and extended a card to Little Feather, saying, “I’ll speak with Judge Higbee.”
The card said she actually was an attorney-at-law and her name was Marjorie Dawson. Little Feather said, “Isn’t this the judge?”
“This is the arraignment,” Marjorie Dawson explained. “Judge Higbee will hear the actual trial. I’ll report to you after I talk to him.”
“But—” Little Feather said, and a hand closed on her elbow and she was taken away from there.
After the arraignment, Little Feather was run through a process that was handled so easily and so calmly that it was clearly routine for these people, and probably routine for most of the arrestees as well, but it wasn’t routine for Little Feather, and it shook her confidence. She’d never been arrested, had never had a conversation with a suspicious or hostile cop, had never even had a traffic ticket. Sure, she’d been involved in a number of low-level scams in Nevada, mostly as decoration, but nothing that had ever drawn her to the attention of the law. The world these people lived in inside here contained a lot of assumptions about guilt and innocence, good guys and bad guys, freedom and obedience, that she didn’t like at all.
But she had no choice, did she? They just walked her through it, the mug shots and the fingerprinting and the writing down on a long form all the personal effects they were taking away from her. Then a hefty woman deputy sheriff took her in a small bare room for a strip search she didn’t care for in the least, after which, her own clothing was taken away, replaced by denim shirt and blue jeans; not the best fit, either one.