“Are you lying?”
“No,” Wilson said. “I promise. I looked it up. Well, my dad used to say he’d heard of a relative named Joe Wilson, who was a crazy old man. But that must be Red Fox, don’t you think?”
Twelve years later, in 1977, when he was a rookie police officer in the Fourth Precinct of the Seattle Police Department, Jack Wilson still believed that Red Fox was a relative. He walked a beat downtown and knew the names of most of the homeless Indians who crowded together beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct and in Pioneer Square. Lester, Old Joe, and Little Joe always together, Agnes and her old man, who was simply known as Old Man, the Android Brothers, who’d come here from Spokane years earlier and were collecting spare change for bus tickets back home. Beautiful Mary, who was still beautiful, even though a keloid scar ran from the corner of her left eye to her chin. She thought Wilson was handsome and called him by some word in her tribal language. She told him that it meant First Son, but it actually meant Shadow.
One evening, Beautiful Mary pushed Wilson into a dark doorway, unzipped his pants, pushed her hand inside, and stroked his penis. Wilson’s knees went weak. He leaned against the door for support. He tried to kiss Mary but, still stroking him, she turned her face away. Then, without warning, she released Wilson and stepped back.
“What’s wrong?” Wilson asked, his face red and sweaty.
Beautiful Mary shook her head. Wilson grabbed her arm with more force than he’d planned. He could see the pain in Mary’s eyes. She twisted away from him and ran away.
Beautiful Mary was almost forty years old when she was murdered. Wedged between a Dumpster and the back wall of a parking garage beneath the Viaduct, she had been raped, then stabbed repeatedly with a broken bottle. Wilson had immediately emptied his stomach on the pavement. Then he had found a stray newspaper and covered her face. Her eyes were still open. He had called in quickly, but it took an hour for the ambulance to show up. While the attendants were loading Mary into the ambulance, one homicide detective arrived to investigate.
“You found her body, correct?” the detective asked Wilson.
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
“And what, sir?”
“And what did you notice? Any suspicious people? Witnesses? Evidence?”
“I didn’t notice, sir. I, I knew her. Her name is Mary, sir. Beautiful Mary.”
“She isn’t so beautiful anymore,” said the detective. He took a few notes, closed his book, and walked away. Wilson had assumed they would solve the case quickly. Beautiful Mary was a very visible member of the homeless community. Somebody must have seen something. Wilson read the newspaper the next day, looking for a story about Beautiful Mary. Nothing. No story the next morning, or during the next two weeks, either. He asked a few questions around the station house. Nothing. Three weeks after Mary’s death, Wilson bumped into the police detective who was supposed to be investigating her murder.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Wilson. “Have you learned anything more about Mary?”
“Mary?” asked the detective. “Who’s Mary?”
“Don’t you remember? Mary? Beautiful Mary? The Indian woman who was killed downtown? I found her body. A few weeks ago?”
“Oh, shit, of course. I remember you. The rookie. Lost your breakfast.” Wilson blushed. “Shit, that case is low priority, rook. One dead Indian don’t add up to much. Some other Indian guy killed her, you know. Happens all the time. Those people are like that. You ask me, it’s pest control.”
“Sir, I don’t think so.” Wilson fought the urge to punch the detective.
“You don’t think what, rook?”
“I know those people, sir. The Indians. They’re my people. They wouldn’t hurt each other. We’re not like that.”
“How the hell are they your people?”
“I’m Indian, sir.”
The detective looked at Wilson’s blue eyes and blond hair. Wilson was tall, six foot, but slight of build. The detective laughed. Indian, my ass, he thought.
“Okay, Sitting Bull,” said the detective, “I’m happy you’re so proud of your people. But it’s still low priority. You want to look into it, be my guest.”
“I just might do that, sir.”
The detective patted Wilson on the head, as if he were a dog, and walked away, laughing to himself. “Indian,” he said and laughed some more.
Wilson tried to talk to the Pioneer Square Indians, Old Joe and Little Joe, Agnes and Old Man, the Android Brothers, but they refused to give him any answers about Beautiful Mary’s murder.
Wilson eventually arrested a homeless white man named Stink and brought him in. The detective who had dismissed Wilson took over the case, led Stink into an interrogation room, and obtained a confession.
Stink hung himself in his cell that night, before he ever had a chance to go to trial, and Wilson was issued a small, vaguely insulting commendation for his “valuable assistance” in solving the crime. But Wilson had earned some respect, and he made detective in 1980. Working homicide, he quickly learned that monsters are real. He also knew that most of the monsters were white men. Plain, quiet men who raped and murdered children. Plain, quiet men who cut women into pieces. Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer. Famous killers, obscure killers. The white man who grabbed his infant son by the ankles and smashed his head against the wall. The white man who doused his sleeping girlfriend with gasoline and then dropped a lit match on her face. While black and brown men were at war with each other, their automatic gunfire filling the urban night, the white men were hunting their own mothers, lovers, and daughters. Wilson never grew numb to any of it. Every Sunday, he knelt at a pew and confessed the sins of others. He worked hard, helped solve more than half of his cases, and slept poorly at night. His record was distinguished only by the small number of days he called in sick. While the other detectives had families and outside interests, Wilson had only his tribe of monsters. Wilson worked homicide for eight years before he injured his knee while on duty. He stepped out of his car near the end of his shift, slipped on oily pavement, and tore a couple of ligaments all to hell. He was desk-bound for a year, all the while in fruitless rehabilitation of his knee. Finally, he retired on a full disability pension. Since he had never married, or even been in love, he wound up alone in his little apartment on Capitol Hill.
A year into his retirement, after another boring Monday Night Football game, he was forced to weigh his options as a middle-aged, lonely ex-cop. Somehow, he found himself missing the monsters. He had no idea how that happened, but he knew he needed something to fill the hole that had opened inside himself. He could become a drunk, spend all his time in one of the cop bars, and get free beer and pity from active officers. He could sink into a deep depression, swallow the barrel of his revolver, and be buried with full honors. Or he could do something. He could, for example, sit down and write. Now, he had never written before, but he had always been good with a story, had always loved books. So he bought the most expensive typewriter he could find, because real writers didn’t work on computers. He brought the typewriter back to his apartment and began to type.
His first book, titled Little Hawk, was published by a small local press. It received fairly decent reviews and sold a few thousand copies, so Wilson was hooked. Wilson’s second book, Rain Dance, based on the murder of Beautiful Mary, was released a year later and became a regional best-seller. Both of Wilson’s books starred Aristotle Little Hawk, the very last Shilshomish Indian, who was a practicing medicine man and private detective in Seattle. He was tall, so tall, according to the first paragraph of Little Hawk, that his long, black hair was taller than most people all by itself. Little Hawk was brutally handsome, of course, with a hawkish nose, walnut skin, and dark eyes.