At that, Dawson blinked and said, “Are you trying to make fun—”
“He was working on it, when they were building it, he was up on top with a bunch of Mohawks. My mama told me the family always believed the Mohawks pushed him, so I believe it, too.”
Dawson stared hard at her, thinking. “You believe the claims in this letter.”
“They aren’t claims, they’re facts,” Little Feather told her. She felt indignant at the way these clowns were treating her, not even giving her a civil conversation, and indignation gave her as much self-assurance as innocence would have done. She said, “I never extorted anybody. I never demanded anything. I just said I want to be back with my own people, and since I don’t know any other Pottaknobbees, I wanted to get back with the Kiota and the Oshkawa. And this is the way they treat me, their long-lost cousin. Like I was an Iroquois!”
Dawson looked less and less sure of herself. She said, “The tribes are certain there are no more Pottaknobbees.”
“The tribes are wrong.”
“Well . . .” Dawson was floundering now, looking at her documents for help, finding no help there.
“If you’re my lawyer,” Little Feather said, “you’ll get me out of here.”
“Well . . . tomorrow . . .”
“Tomorrow!”
“There’s nothing further can be done tonight,” Dawson said. “You can’t post bail—”
“I thought about that,” Little Feather said, “and I can put up property. I can put up my motor home, I’ve got the title to it. That’s worth more than five thousand dollars.”
“But that would also have to be tomorrow,” Dawson said. She looked and sounded worried, as she should. “Shirley Ann, if you—”
Little Feather pointed a very stern finger at her. “My name,” she said slowly and distinctly, “is Little Feather, but I think you should call me Ms. Redcorn.”
“Whoever you are,” Dawson said, trying to rally, “of course if you were willing to sign the statement, you could leave immediately—”
“And forever.”
“Well, yes. But, as things stand, and I can see you are adamant about this, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done now until tomorrow.”
“And what are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Speak with Judge Higbee, ask the judge to speak with you in chambers, see what’s best to be done.”
“But I spend tonight in here.”
“Well, it’s not possible to—”
“Not charged with anything, didn’t do anything, but I spend the night in here.”
“Tomorrow—”
Little Feather rose. She felt very angry, and didn’t see any reason to hide it. “I’ve been in here for hours,” she said. “My real lawyer would have spent that time getting me out of here and not trying to get me to confess to things I didn’t do.”
“Tomorrow, we’ll—”
“There’s still one thing you can do for me tonight,” Little Feather told her.
Dawson looked ready, even eager. “Yes? If I can.”
“Call the deputy to take me back to my cell,” Little Feather said. “I have to make up my bunk.”
16
Judge T. Wallace Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in this life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity.
Joe Doakes steals a car, drives it to his girlfriend’s house, leaves the engine running while he goes inside to have a loud argument with his girlfriend, causing a neighbor to call the police, who arrive to quiet a domestic dispute but then leave with a car thief, who eventually appears before Judge T. Wallace Higbee, who gives him two to five in Dannemora. For what? Car theft? No; stupidity.
Bobby Doakes, high on various illegal substances, decides he’s thirsty and needs a beer, but it’s four in the morning and the convenience store is closed, so he breaks in the back door, drinks several beers, falls asleep in the storeroom, is found there in the morning, and Judge Higbee gives him four to eight for stupidity.
Jane Doakes steals a neighbor’s checkbook, kites checks at a supermarket and a drugstore, doesn’t think about putting the checkbook back until two days later, by which time the neighbor has discovered the theft and reported it and is on watch, and catches Jane in the act. Two to five for stupidity.
Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake their heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only true crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.
Which made the people like Marjorie Dawson so useful. Not the brightest bulb on the legal marquee, she was nevertheless marginally smarter than the clients she accompanied into Judge Higbee’s court. She knew the proceedings, she knew the drill, she knew how to move the defendants through the routine without letting them make excess trouble through even greater displays of stupidity, and she did it all without complaint and with the acceptance of the rather miserable stipend offered court-appointed attorneys by the state. She did not make trouble. She did not herself perform overt acts of stupidity.
So why was she in Judge Higbee’s chambers this morning, saying this Farraff woman required a hearing? Required? A hearing? Shirley Ann Farraff, an over-the-hill showgirl from Las Vegas, tries an old scam on the proprietors of the Silver Chasm Casino, presenting herself as a nuisance to be bought off, and instead is turned in. It being a first offense, and the proprietors of the casino not wishing to be unduly harsh—nor to receive undue publicity—Judge Higbee acknowledges this particular stupidity with a pass, so long as the defendant agrees to perform all her future acts of stupidity in some other jurisdiction.
So what’s the problem? “Tell me, Marjorie,” the judge said, lowering his several pounds of white eyebrows in Marjorie’s direction, where she sat on the opposite side of the crowded desk, “tell me, what’s the problem?”
“She insists,” Marjorie said, “that what she said in the letter is true.”
“Marjorie, Marjorie,” the judge said, “they all insist their fantasies are true. After a while, they come to believe they actually were afraid they were coming down with appendicitis and needed desperately to get to the hospital, and that’s why they were driving at one hundred miles an hour in an uninsured vehicle with an expired driver’s license at two in the morning.”
Marjorie nodded. “Yes, I remember that one,” she said. “But Your Honor, this one’s different. I’m afraid she really is.”
“Do you believe her story, Marjorie?”
“I don’t believe anybody’s story, Judge,” Marjorie told him, “that’s not my job. My job is to get them the best deal I can and make them understand it really is the best deal they can get and make them agree to it.”
“And?”
“This one won’t agree to it.”
“You mean she won’t sign the quitclaim,” the judge said.
“That’s right, Your Honor.”
Judge Higbee was a large man, large all over, getting a little larger every decade. When he frowned, as now, whole great reaches of him bunched and puckered, and his eyes became twin blue sunrises over a mountain range in winter. “I don’t like this, Marjorie,” he said.