“Because I’m trying to convince Detective Slinger to reopen the investigation.”
She blew out a ring of smoke and watched it dissolve into the rain. “I don’t get it. A white man that gives a shit about some Indian? Slinger and the coroner already made up their minds that Duncan killed himself.”
He leaned toward her. “I’m trying to change their minds.”
“Yeah, you’d do that. You being a priest.” She took another drag from the cigarette and looked away.
“Maybe,” he said. He liked to believe that even if he weren’t a priest, if he’d never come to St. Francis Mission, he would still care about justice. “A man doesn’t look for a job, go on a vision quest, then kill himself.”
Slowly she brought her eyes back to his, and he realized that she did have the answers. He only had to ask the right questions. “Tell me about Duncan,” he said.
“Paranoid. Crazy.” She threw her head back, her gaze following the smoke. “What else you want to know?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“The beginning? My break’s only fifteen minutes.”
“You met him in Denver?”
“Yeah.” She flipped the ash at the end of the cigarette and gazed at the parking lot, summoning the memory. “Six months ago at a bar. We got together, you could say.”
“Where did he work?”
“Construction jobs, different places.” She looked back. “When he worked, that is. Duncan’s real work was ripping off the construction sites. Helped himself to a lot of power tools. Always after the big score, that was Duncan.” A half smile faded into a blank look of acceptance. “He’d make a couple hundred bucks, get drunk, go broke again. So he’d go back to the temp agency, and they’d find him another job. The thing was, Duncan was a damn good worker when he wanted to work.”
She stared at the cigarette. “A real con man, Duncan. Sure as hell conned me. Lived at my apartment, took my money. God, what a fool I was.”
“You said he was paranoid,” Father John prodded.
“Yeah, well, I guess he had reason, didn’t he? Somebody offed him.”
“Who do you think killed him?” Father John felt the sense of anticipation that often came over him during counseling sessions, in the confessional, in the archives, researching history—the sense that the truth was about to announce itself.
Ali Burris tossed the cigarette butt into a puddle. It made a sizzling noise. “The guys he was stiffing got onto him,” she said. “Bunch of lowlifes, stealing stuff and cheating each other.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying somebody killed Duncan because he held out on them? What are we talking about? A few hundred dollars?”
“You don’t know these guys, Father. They’d kill you for a pack of cigarettes. I said to Duncan, we gotta get outta Denver, but he didn’t want to leave. So I said, I’m gone.” She kept her eyes on his. “I was scared of those creeps.”
“Did they threaten you?”
“Did they threaten me?” Her voice rose in astonishment. “They didn’t have to threaten me. I knew they’d beat the hell outta me if I ever opened my mouth about ’em.” She threw a nervous glance at the parking lot. “I took off and came here. I got an aunt on the res. Figured I could lay low for a while.”
“How’d Duncan find you?”
She looked away, smoothed back the black hair, reclasped the beaded barrette. After a moment she said, “I called him after a couple weeks. I mean, it wasn’t exactly Duncan I was trying to get away from. It was the other guys. He said he was ready to get away, too, and start over. So he come up here.”
“Did he come alone?”
She nodded, then let her gaze roam over the parking lot. “I thought things was gonna be different . . .” she began, her voice quiet. “They was as bad as before.”
“Why, Ali? Did someone follow him?” He was close now. The truth was here.
She lifted her head. There was a smudge of mascara on her cheek. “Yeah, they came after him. I never should’ve let him stay with me. Crazy fuckhead. All the time keeping the shutters closed, living in the dark like some kinda animal. Peering through the slats. ‘There goes Eddie,’ he’d say. ‘There goes Jimmie.’ I’d run over to the window, but nobody was there. Just the empty street.”
The rain was coming harder, and the wind blew sprays of water that carried the odors of wet asphalt and garbage. The girl went on: she’d told Duncan to get himself straightened out. Get a job. Go on a vision quest. The tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks in thin black lines. “One of them creeps got him up there at Bear Lake.”