Flight of Death - Richard Hoyt Page 0,17
on, man.”
The woman on the bed nodded again. Obviously she agreed with him. Did I want to embarrass myself?
I didn’t say anything.
“Please don’t embarrass yourself, Denson. I don’t want to see it.”
The woman shook her head. She didn’t want to see that either.
“What is it Owl wants you to do, exactly?”
“Us, Deputy Denson. He wants us to find the truth.”
The woman nodded with approval.
“The truth, well, no problem there.”
“Owl says once the truth is known, justice will follow. One of the first things you’ll have to do is figure a reason to have a chat with Bosley Ellin.”
“Do you suspect Ellin of murdering the spotted?”
“I think he had something to do with it.”
“Based on what, Willie?”
“A feel.”
“The famous Prettybird intuition. Who’s supposed to be my client? Don’t tell me Owl, for Christ’s sake.” I was going to help Willie out, and we both knew it, but it wasn’t fun if I caved in without any resistance.
Finally, in order to please the woman on the bed as much as Willie, I said, “Okay, I’ll come up with a way to talk to Bosley Ellin. It might take me a couple of days to come up with something, and you have to appreciate that I have to take care of my work for Boogie.”
“It’s done, then. Thank you, Chief. I appreciate it. By the way, Saturday at noon the Committee for Loggers’ Solidarity is holding a protest parade over at Sixkiller.”
“You’re going to put me right to work?”
“Bosley Ellin is the grand marshal of the parade. Might as well get on the case.”
The woman on the bed was extraordinarily small, certainly five feet or under, and I would bet not more than eighty or ninety pounds.
Willie had described her to me often enough. This was Donna Cowapoo. Had to be.
Finally, I’d had enough. “Damn it, Willie, knock off your jabbering for a minute and introduce me to the pretty girl.” I walked across the sagging floor and shook her hand. She had dark hair done up in two pigtails that fell to the small of her back. “I’m laying ten to one your name is Donna Cowapoo.”
Willie looked around and blinked. “Oh, hell, yes, I forgot. Donna Cowapoo, this worthless piece of shit is John Denson.”
She said, “Thank you for helping us out, John.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Willie said, “Let’s face it. When you’re down to John Denson, you’re down to the bottom of the private-eye barrel.”
Donna ignored him. “You knew my name?” She looked somehow surprised and pleased at the same time. “How did you know?”
“Willie has been pushing your case for months, if not years. ‘Denson, Denson, Denson, you have to listen,’ he says. Donna Cowapoo this; Donna Cowapoo that. Hey, let’s face it, he lobbied so hard I began to get a little suspicious, if you know what I mean.”
“Willie!” She gave Prettybird a look.
“I thought maybe you were damaged goods of some kind. How was I supposed to know?”
Willie said, “Aw, for Christ’s sake, Denson. He’s making this all up, Donna.”
I said, “Had to be something wrong, is the way I figured it.” I tried to imagine what she looked like with those pigtails of hers combed out and spread over her breasts and down over her naked body.
I thought it must be perfectly grand to be the man so honored to lie back and use Donna’s wonderful butt for a pillow.
*
Willie didn’t mind that I thought these trips of his were hallucinogenic, these trances likely self-induced. He regarded this conclusion as evidence of a limit to my imagination, but by no means fatal to my character. I had to have a physical cause or reason for everything; he understood that. Again and again, I told him, all chance has a cause. Magic is entertaining, but I believe in explanations. Give me logic.
What was important to Willie was that I understood: however illogical his travels and communications with the animal people might seem to me, they were real to him. The predicaments he sometimes got into were equally real to him.
The world of the animal people had its joys and terrors, but it was not a place without understandable rules of conduct. Its sense of history was circular, according to Willie. For example, he said, if a man shits in the middle of the trail and keeps on walking with his eye on the sun, he will one day step square in the middle of his own waste.
Little by little over the six years I had known Willie, I