FOURTEEN
Lucas lay on his own bed now in his own small apartment, feeling foolish and harebrained and thinking now just how small his place was compared to how the rich lived, and he stared the whole while across the room at the two crystal goblets still in their cellophane sheaths. He'd placed them on his dresser, where they were busy catching and reflecting the light, the colors bouncing off the mirror in a variegated, miniature world of crazy mazes, dancing about the walls as if some spectral campfire from an ancient time had invaded Lucas's room.
The goblets' jewel-like multifaceted cuts were like fire in more ways than one. They would fetch a few good bucks at any of the hundreds of pawnshops in the city or in nearby Galveston. They could also bring him suspension, sanctions, possible other disciplinary action. He was angry with himself for having gotten sucked into this by Sanger, and even angrier at himself for having foolishly lifted these glasses from a taped crime scene. It was enough, alongside striking another officer, to get him thrown off the force.
He momentarily wondered if subconsciously the shining fire glass had symbolized for him his former self, his burning flame-lost for some years now; it also represented his old idiocy. Perhaps it was an idiocy handed down from former generations, an idiocy of the genetic kind, one he could never truly hope to escape. He had heard stories all his life of Indian ancestors who “counted coup,” men who dared death, flaunted their prowess as warriors, even brave Cherokee women of the Wolf clan and other clans, known as War Women, who fought alongside their men in battles lost to time and oblivion. But the Cherokee did not make war for territorial or political reasons; they made war for one reason only, to restore the natural order of the universe when one of their brothers was killed. They made war only in retaliation for murder, in order to avenge fallen brothers of the same fire. This thought, as always, made him curious about a missing people who called themselves the
Ani-yun-wiya, the Principal People who were at the known center of the world, and about Kana'ti and Selu, the first man and woman, who most certainly faced enormous obstacles in their lifetimes.
As with all life, change came, sometimes violently, with the clash of cultures, and so came war and reasons for war with it, along with the Cherokee idea of what constituted bravery. As Cherokees were pushed westward, first to Oklahoma Territory on the Trail of Tears, some later migrating from there to Texas, they adapted many of the Plains Indians ideas of war and bravery, learning that bravery could mean making a fool of a white man, sometimes simply by stepping into an enemy camp, slapping an enemy's face, and escaping with his horses to return to a village as a hero.
Stonecoat's very name had come about on one such foray into the camp of a sleeping band of conquistadors. His ancient ancestor had led a band of Cherokee into an enemy stronghold, surprising the “stone coated” one in his sleep, attacking and wiping out the Spanish detachment in retaliation for earlier wrongs. When his renowned ancestor had killed the leader of these men, he had taken the man's breastplate and henceforth worn it in battle, and so his followers came to call him Stonecoat. The first Stonecoat survived many battles and died in old age, probably forty or forty-five, and was buried with his silver breastplate as a warrior. Lucas had always wondered if the man, like Lucas, might not have simply been crazy.
Lucas wondered now if Meredyth Sanger was, in a sense, a War Woman, if she wouldn't fit right in with the Wolf clan. He admired her tenacity, but he also wished now he had never met the woman. He recalled at the same time their stroll through the Houston city zoo, what a wonderful time he had had with her, and how lovely a person she actually was, and how he had liked having her sitting across from him in his apartment, and how that was likely something he'd never see again. At the same time his mind raced with the question of how he was going to find an independent lab in this town that could discreetly analyze the fire glasses for fingerprints and chemical residue. At the same instant, another voice in his head told him not to bother, that no prints would be found on the glasses, that he killer was too damned smart for that, that he would have wiped them clean of prints before putting them into the dishwasher, and he'd have cleansed them of any chemical residue.
“Then why didn't he put them up with the other twenty-two goblets on the shelf?” Lucas asked the room.
“He couldn't find the others. He was in a rush, so he shoved them into the machine just to get them out of sight,” he answered himself.
He nodded to his own inner counsel and replied, “You know something, Indian man? You're probably right.”
So, if there wasn't so much as a damned trace of a print on the goblets, why'd / steal them? he wondered. Am I that hard up for trouble?
He got up, went to the mirror, and stared at his reflection before answering himself.
“I borrowed them as evidence,” he tried to convince himself, “because… if they are thoroughly an absolutely clean, then the glasses were wiped clean and shoved into the dishwasher. Why? This means the killer was careful to clean up after himself.”
Stonecoat paced the floor until someone below banged on the ceiling, sending him back to his bed where he placed his hands behind his head and resumed thinking and talking to himself. “After he drank wine with the judge, he killed the old man and then took great pains to clean up the evidence. He knew his victim. If that's the case, the old man went to bed with the killer, slept with him or her? Or allowed the killer to take a bed just down the hall from him, likely in one of his guest rooms, where the killer patiently waited for the old man to nod off, as in Poe's story The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Like The Tell-Tale Heart, this crime involved hearts, but unlike Poe's story of guilt and anxiety and stress overcoming the murderer, Lucas didn't expect to hear of anyone's claiming responsibility for Judge Charles D. Mootry's murder-save the habitual lunatic confessors found in every major metropolitan city. No… no sociopath who might be psychotic enough to drive a steel stake through the heart of the judge was likely to unburden himself at having killed old Uncle Charlie.
This thought brought him back around full circle to himself and self-protection and a concern for self-preservation. What kind of fool-or rather, how many kinds of fools-had he played tonight? He hadn't taken such risks since… since before the death of Wallace Jackson, since before the accident nearly costing him his own life as well as Jackson's. The night had been great, uplifting, filled with risks. It had rejuvenated him in many ways, and he had Sanger to curse or to thank for his troubles now.
Had Dr. Sanger known of his buried need for a life of risk-taking? Had she read him so thoroughly and easily?
But perhaps the risks were too great, too gaping huge should he tumble. He had so much to lose, and what was in it for him if he went out of his way to solve the Mootry case, anyway?
Certainly there were no guarantees. The department, once they learned of how he had approached this case, how he had circumvented the law, would not look kindly on his intervention, despite a favorable outcome. He knew this all too clearly. Even if he did succeed, there would be sanctions.
So what's in it for me? he silently asked himself, his room, the goblets, the dead judge, his own ancestors.
At near two A.M., he closed his eyes on the madness he'd become a part of. He was only certain of one thing at the moment of sleep. He did not wish to get any more involved with either the Mootry case or Dr. Meredyth Sanger.