She shook her head. “He’d say, ‘Can you feel them? Our ancestors? They’re still here. They’re all around us.’”
She glanced at me. A nod seemed to be expected. I nodded.
“And he’d tell us about that place,” she said.
She pointed to Alcatraz. With its ugly crust of abandoned buildings, it looked like one of those mysterious misshapen sea-creatures that fishermen occasionally drag up from the deep and no one can identify.
“He’d say how, when he was a kid back in the seventies, Indian people came from all over and occupied it, to protest the way they been treated. And he said, ‘They were warriors, those guys. Warriors for their people. And I want to be like them. One day, I’m going to quit everything, and I’m going to fight the government, get them to recognize us as a tribe. And then we can get a bit of land, that’ll be ours forever. And then’—and he’d open his arms, like this—‘And then we can start to take care of all this again.’”
Her voice was phlegmy with emotion. If it was a performance, it was a tour-de-force. After a moment she went on,
“But yeah, sure, he made mistakes. When he was drinking, he’d hit us, hit my mom.” She pulled back her sleeve and showed me a white welt on her brown arm. “He did this to me. When I was ten. With a bottle. That’s how mean he could be.” She pulled the sleeve down again, covering up the evidence. “And yeah, I guess when he was younger his friends stole cars and stuff, so he did the same.”
“Wasn’t it a bit more than that? That he was supposed to have had links to organized crime?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t have no links to organized crime.”
“Someone just made that up?”
“He did something stupid, OK? And didn’t realize it till it was too late, and he was way in over his head.” She took a deep breath. This was something she’d had to explain before, and she was getting tired of it. “What it was,” she said, “was that when Dad started the campaign for federal recognition, this guy in Florida called Ronnie Ronaldo wrote him, said he was in real estate, he’d made big bucks developing new resorts, now he wanted to give something back. So he offered to help with the legal expenses. Make sure Dad had the best firm of lawyers around.”
“And your father accepted?”
She grimaced. “Yeah, I know. You must think he was pretty dumb. But what he said was, you can’t go through life thinking everyone’s just out for themselves. There have to be some good people in the world, don’t there? And this guy’s one of them. See? Finally we got lucky. The ancestors are looking out for us.” She paused. Her face was stiff with pain. “Only later we figured out the real reason he was helping us. And Evan Bone said Dad must have known about it all along. But he didn’t. He was just naïve, I guess.”
I nodded.
“You know about Indian casinos?” she said. “You know why there are so many of them? Because if you’re a recognized tribe, you can build a casino on your reservation and the government can’t tax you. So that’s what a lot of tribes done.”
“Ah. And Ronnie Ronaldo thought that if your tribe succeeded—”
“Yeah. He was just sitting there”—tapping the keys on an invisible calculator—“working out how much he could make. But you know what? Dad may have been dumb, but he wasn’t that dumb. By the time he figured what Ronaldo was doing, he was into him for millions of dollars, I don’t know how many, a lot. He couldn’t get out, but, you know, he was careful. They never talked about this stuff on the phone, just in emails. So the Global Village guys, the only way they could have found out about it was by breaking into his Gmail account.”
The echo of Anne’s experience must have registered in my expression.
“Don’t you believe me?”
“No, I’ve every reason to believe you.”
“And I still don’t get why they did that,” she said. “Why they wanted to hurt him so bad. You know how much money Evan Bone has? If he’d given Dad what he asked for, he wouldn’t even have noticed it going out of his bank account. Plus, it would have made him look good, wouldn’t it? Helping the little guy. But he fought dirty instead. Like it was a grudge match. Like he really hates Indian people.”
“Maybe he thought it would set a precedent. If he helped your father, then every other good cause in the country would expect him to help them, too.”
“So why didn’t he just say that?” She shook her head. “I’m telling you, he was out to get us. And anyone stood up for us.”
Perhaps, I thought suddenly, that’s why Anne had pointed me in Carter Ramirez’s direction: because Evan Bone’s attitude towards him seemed anomalous. A modish progressive—as she had put it—like Bone should surely be sympathetic to Native Americans? So why, in this case, hadn’t he been?
“You know about Hazel Voss?” said Corinne.
“Who’s Hazel Voss?”
“Was. She was another one.”
“Another Native American?”
“No, she was a white kid. A student. Kind of up here, you know.” She scribbled a cloud in the air above her head. “But she wanted to help us. Posted stuff online. Wrote Evan Bone. And they got her, too.”
“Got her?”
“I never heard the details. You’d have to ask her mom. All I know is, Bone’s goons went after her. Just like they did my dad. Trolling, calling her names, I don’t know what all. Till finally she couldn’t take it anymore, and she killed herself.” She paused. “You look into it, I bet you’ll find that’s why it was. Because she stood up for the Indians.”
I gazed out at San Francisco Bay, watching the brilliant pinpoints of sun dancing on the waves until they made my eyes hurt. Anne Grainger hadn’t stood up for the Indians. But she had been driven to suicide by Evan Bone. And so, probably, had Carter Ramirez. And so had Hazel Voss. And that was striking. Anne’s instinct, even in her final days, hadn’t deserted her. This wasn’t just her parting shot, a final eruption of professional sour grapes. She’d caught a whiff of something more. Something—it wasn’t even an idea yet, but just a tingle in my belly—that might turn out to be Evan Bone’s Achilles’s heel.
“So you going to write about it?” said Ms. Ramirez.
I shrugged. “How would I reach her? Hazel Voss’s mother?”
She shook her head. “She lives up in Riddick. I know that.”
“Where’s Riddick?”
“Couple hours.”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll try to speak to her.”
“That it?”
“I’ll let you know how I get on.”
We both stood up. As she slung the satchel over her shoulder, her eye caught the play of light on my tie. She leaned forward and touched it.
“That’s pretty. Looks like a dragonfly wing.”
4
THERE WAS ONLY ONE LISTING for Voss in the Riddick white pages: Michael G. & Virginia M., 2216 Middlefield Way. When I dialed the number a woman answered after just one ring, as if she’d been waiting for someone to call. She sounded shell-shocked but not unfriendly. I explained who I was, and said I’d like to ask her a few questions about her daughter. That would be fine,