Picture Perfect

  "And what's more," Ben Barrett, his father-in-law, sputtered, "I haven't heard from my little girl at all this year." Something had been edited here, so that when the camera cut back to Ben he was bleary-eyed. He nodded his head. "He's covering something up, ayuh."

  Alex took a deep breath and settled himself as deeply as possible into Michaela's office couch. Several feet in front of him Herb paced back and forth, riffling through every tabloid on the supermarket stand, all of which had different suggestions for what had happened to Cassie, ranging from kidnapping to murder at Alex's hand.

  It wouldn't have been a big deal--Alex had won slander suits before--but Cassiehad been gone for two months, and this was her own father. The more the rumors flew, the more the magazines questioned Alex's calm and Alex's silence. One of the tabloids had even gotten a statement from the latest private investigator Alex had hired--something noncommittal, but Alex had fired him immediately for talking.

  Cassie had called him that one time, but Alex hadn't told anyone. It had taken the edge off his fear for her safety, yet it had not altered his plan of action. He still had detectives digging for information. Cassie had said she would call again, and maybe she would, but if in the meantime Alex discovered her whereabouts, he'd be on his way. After all, if she had the right to leave, he had just as valid a right to convince her to come back.

  Michaela was the one who had initially spread the excuse of Cassie being with her sick father, and at the time, under the pressure of the Oscars, it had seemed like a good story. After the first couple of detectives couldn't turn up any clue to Cassie's whereabouts, Alex had even started to believe his own lie.

  The videotape of theHard Copy show fizzled to a series of black and white stripes, and Michaela heaved herself out of her chair and shut off the VCR. "Well," she said. "The proverbial shit has hit the fan."

  Alex rubbed his finger along his upper lip, trying not to feel as if he was on trial. Herb leaned toward him, so close that when he yelled Alex could see the spittle catch at the ends of his mustache. "Do you know what this could do to you?"

  "Herb," Alex said calmly, "I just won three Oscars. People aren't going to forget that so fast."

  Herb glared at Alex, shaking his head. "What they remember is the bad, the sensational. Like whether the Best Actor cut his wife up into little pieces and buried her in the basement."

  Alex stiffened. "Give me a break," he said. But his mind was already racing. Herb and Michaela would stand beside him, but they would demand the truth. They would want to know why they had been kept in the dark.

  He was going to have to give a flawless performance in front of the two people he'd trusted enough to see him with his guard down.

  Michaela settled into the wing chair across from him as if she had all the time in the world. Overhead, the ceiling fan whistled. "Okay," she said, drumming her fingers on her stomach. "What the fuck is going on?"

  Alex lowered his eyes, unwilling to give them the whole truth, but using instead the shock value of the statement they would never expect to hear. "Cassie left me," he murmured, and he let the ache he kept tight under wrap work its way to the surface all over again.

  THE BENT- WILLOW FRAMES OF THE SWEAT LODGE REMINDED CASSIE of a woolly mammoth. There was something about the curved bars of wood that made them look like ribs, as if a creature had sloughed its way to the middle of the plain to die. She sat down on the cold ground, opened the notebook she'd bought a month before, and pulled a pencil stub from her coat pocket. Flipping to a blank page, she surveyed the sketches she'd done to pass the time when she had first arrived: skull dimensions, 3-D images of the hand, a multilayered mock-up of an Australopithecine man she wanted to use as a handout in one of her courses. But in the weeks she'd spent on the reservation, her drawings had changed. She wasn't sketching skeletal figures from her research anymore. Here was a picture she'd done of Dorothea, asleep in the rocker; and one of a buffalo herd that she'd re-created from Cyrus's stories; and another, a memory left from a dream in which she'd seen the face of her baby.

  Maybe it was the stripped-down atmosphere of Pine Ridge that had changed her sketching style. In L.A., there was so much glitter surrounding you that cutting back to the basics was refreshing. But here, where there was little but the Spartan stretch of land and sky, every word you spoke and relationship you wove and picture you drew embellished itself into a thing of substance.

  Cassie tucked the pencil behind her ear and critically assessed her mammoth, then glanced at the rough willow frame that had inspired it. How strange it felt to look at things and--instead of reducing them to their skeletal elements, as she'd been trained--to see so much more than what had been laid before her.

  She was so engrossed in her mammoth sketch that she did not hear the footsteps behind her. "If that's ata-ta*ka ," Cyrus said, "you've got it all wrong."

  Cassie glanced up at him. "It's a mammoth," she explained. "Not a buffalo."

  Cyrus squinted. "Mammoth," he muttered. "Whatever you say." He waved his book of crosswords in front of her. "You gonna give me back my pencil?"

  Cassie flushed. "I didn't mean to steal it. I couldn't find any others."

  Cyrus made an indeterminate noise and held out a hand to Cassie. "Get up," he sighed. "You're going to freeze that baby."

  She waved him away. "Let me do the tusks. I'm almost finished." She sketched for a moment. "There," Cassie said, tilting her pad up to Cyrus. He looked at a picture of a sweat lodge that had a trunk and tusks growing out of its flap door. "What do you think?" she asked.

  Cyrus rubbed his hand down over his face to hide a smile. "I think it looks like a sweat lodge," he said. He reached for Cassie's hand and pulled her to her feet.

  "No imagination," Cassie pronounced.

  "It's not that," Cyrus said. "How come white people look at a puddle and try to tell us it's the ocean?"

  Cassie fell into step beside him. "Maybe I should watch a sweat," she suggested, offhand, thinking if she sounded nonchalant Cyrus would be more inclined to agree. Being an anthropologist, she had convinced herself that her interest was purely natural. She would have loved to know what went on inside the frames, which stood as testaments to the young boys who fasted under the tutelage of medicine men in an effort to understand themselves. She had seen the reverence with which Linda Laughing Dog's oldest son had prepared himself for the ritual. He had come back drained and exhausted, but glowing from the inside as if he now knew how to fit together the pieces that made up his life.

  If only it could be that easy.

  "Ecu*picasni yelo," Cyrus said. "It's impossible."

  "It would be an intriguing piece of research--"

  "No," Cyrus said.

  "I could sit--"

  "No."

  Cassie tossed him a smile, and for a moment, Cyrus forgot that she saw prehistoric beasts in the frames of sweat lodges, that she was using every trick in the book to be admitted to the inner circle of a Lakota rite of passage. He considered--not for the first time--how odd it was that Cassie, who had carved her place in his family, had come to them through Will, who had always wanted out.

  Shaking his head, Cyrus stretched his arms over his head. He laid the book of crosswords on the frame of the sweat lodge and started to walk over the ridge that swelled farther east of the house. "Leci u wo," he said. "Come here." When he reached a small copse of trees that rested at the base of a larger hill, he stopped. "This was where Will built his sweat lodge," he said.

  "Will?" Cassie said, surprised. "I didn't think he'd be into that sort of thing."

  Cyrus shrugged. "He was young at the time."

  "He never told me," Cassie said, realizing as the words were spoken that although Will knew the intimate details of her private life, there was a great wealth of information about Will Flying Horse that she did not know. She tried to imagine Will at the same age as Linda Laughing Dog's son, with his thick black hair long down his back and his muscles just starting to take a man's shape. "Did it work?"
r />   Cyrus nodded. "Not that he'll ever admit to it," he said. "In my grandson's mind, being one of the People is something you can discard, like an old jacket." He was standing with his face to the wind, and Cassie watched him cup his hands around the air as if he needed to keep it all from rushing by so quickly.

  "Is that why he left?"

  Cyrus turned to her, his black eyes sharp and measuring. "Don't you think that's something Will ought to tell you?"

  "I think it's something Will would go out of his waynot to tell me," she said carefully.

  Cyrus nodded, admitting the truth of Cassie's statement. "You know that Will's mother waswasicu*winyan , like you," he said. "You know that Will worked on the tribal police force before he moved." He took a step forward, willing to tell Cassie his grandson's secrets but unable to look her in the eye while doing it. "The tribal police are like any other small police force, I guess. They do the usual--breaking up domestic spats, taking home drunks, keeping the kids from drinking beer down at the lake. And they pretty much turn their heads if it makes sense--you know, they don't want to get one of their own in trouble, so they're likely to give a warning instead of a fine.

  "Will was a good officer. He'd been working there for five years or so. Everyone liked him, and that kind of thing was important to Will." Cassie nodded; she understood. "About five months ago there was a big accident right in Pine Ridge town. Drunk driver. Some guy drove another car off the road, killed a family of four, and then wrapped his own jeep around the telephone pole in front of the general store. Course, he walked out of his car without a scratch."

  Cyrus closed his eyes, remembering the sirens of the beat-up police cars that he'd heard even in his sleep; the dark blood on the front of his grandson's regulation shirt when he'd come home that night. "A long time ago Will's parents were killed in a car accident by some crazy drunkwasicu* salesman; that's how come he grew up with us. So I suppose something just snapped in him when he saw that man get out of his car. He walked over and beat him within an inch of his life. Took three other tribal officers to get him away. Will was fired about a week after that."

  Indignant, Cassie turned to Cyrus. "That's ridiculous. He could have sued them."

  Cyrus shook his head. "Too many people wanted Will gone. See, the family that was killed belonged to the visiting brother of one of the elementary school teachers. White. And the drunk driver Will nearly murdered was Lakota." Cyrus whistled through his front teeth. "A white family getting killed was a tragedy, to be sure, and there was no question in anyone's mind that the drunk driver, red or white or whatever, was going to go to trial. But what Will did--flying off the handle like that--was a mistake. Will didn't seem to have his priorities straight. All of a sudden everyone was remembering that he wasiyeska , half white, and that seemed to be the half that was in control, since a fullblood Indian would've cut the guy some slack."

  "How could they possibly see that as a racial issue?" Cassie said, folding her arms across her chest. "What must your neighbors think of me?"

  "They like you," Cyrus said. "You blend in with the People. Not because you try to, but because you don't trynot to. Will--well, Will was always building walls, standing a little ways apart."

  Cassie thought about Will in Los Angeles, standing out just as sorely as he had at Pine Ridge. She thought about the beautiful quilled moccasins and the deerskin mural packed in boxes in his Reseda apartment. She thought of him beating a drunk driver until his knuckles were scraped and bruised, until blood covered his uniform, until it became impossible to tell if the man was Lakota or white. She thought of what she might have said to him if she'd known all this earlier: that she now knew, from personal experience, you just couldn't shut your eyes and pretend a part of your life didn't exist.

  Mindlessly, Cassie bent down and picked up a branch of a young willow sapling that had broken off during a storm. She flexed the stick in her hands, bending it in half, testing its endurance, considering what Cyrus had told her. And when the willow snapped, tried to its limit, she was not surprised at all.

  WILL COULDN'T GET AWAY FROM ALEX RIVERS. HIS NAME WAS IN every newspaper, every magazine, splayed across the racks at the supermarket. He'd seen his picture so many times he was willing to bet he knew Alex's features better than Cassie did. He was even starting to feel sorry for the guy. In the wake of some statement made by Cassie's father, rumors had flown. Cassie had become some kind of Jimmy Hoffa mystery, and Alex was suffering the consequences.

  The article he was reading said that the Japanese firms backingMacbeth had withdrawn their support, leaving Alex as the sole creditor for a forty-million-dollar flop. Supposedly his Malibu apartment was up for sale. His next two film deals had disintegrated; his silence regarding Cassie's disappearance was universally damning, traced to either his culpability or a sick obsession with his career that obliterated everything else. There was even a nasty hint that the reason an Oscar winner like Alex Rivers had nothing else in the works was because he couldn't keep his head out of the bottle long enough to find a decent script.

  Will folded the magazine in half and stuck it behind the sun visor of the squad car. "How much longer?" he asked, turning to Ramon, still his partner.

  Ramon stuffed the rest of his fried egg sandwich in his mouth and checked his watch. "Ten minutes," he said. "Then it's showtime."

  Tonight he'd been assigned to a charity ball. It was given by some organization whose name he'd forgotten, and it sponsored a very worthy cause--some handicapped children's ranch in Southern California. Still, Will couldn't believe this was the way he had to earn a living.

  The highlight of the evening involved seven sagging society matrons wearing beaded evening gowns and five-foot-tall floral headdresses concocted by a variety of florists from the Tournament of Roses parade. The women staggered down a runway, smiled in spite of the steel back braces supporting their necks, and supposedly raised a shitload of cash.

  Will and Ramon were there to keep a semblance of order.

  What was even more shocking was the fact that they wereneeded . Three hours before the shindig even started, some skinny little twit with a nametag that readMaurice had accused another florist of stealing his birds-of-paradise. Will had to pry him off the thief's back, after he'd already stomped on a once-white string of lilies.

  "Let's go," Ramon said, pulling himself out of the car.

  Will set his cap low over his eyes and walked toward the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He told himself this was not just a security guard's job. He told himself he'd make detective soon.

  Ramon took one side of the runway and Will took the other. There was a dimming of lights, a flurry of thick percussed music, and then the first model appeared.

  Her headdress was made of carnations and spelled out the year 1993. You could see how hard it was for her simply to walk. Behind her, on a huge screen, were the gap-toothed grins of bald children on horses; sickly adolescents floating in inner tubes.

  A woman, the emcee, sauntered up beside Will, handing him a shopping bag stuffed with tiny wrapped packages. "Here's your goody bag," she trilled. She beamed up at the stage. "I keep hoping that next year I'll be chosen. As a mannequin, you know." A second model appeared on the runway. She was singing "Hooray for Hollywood," and the violets growing out of her hair were fashioned into a Panavision camera, with an ivy-woven roll of film sprocketing over her shoulders.

  Will thought about Cassie. He wondered if she had gone to functions like this with Alex; if she had felt as out of place as he did. Quietly, under the hum of the music, he unwrapped three of the little presents. A bottle of designer perfume, a pair of aviator sunglasses, edible massage oil.

  Across the way, Ramon was clapping to the beat. Will glanced around at the faces bobbing over the satin gowns and the tight-necked tuxedos. They had been pulled and tucked and sculpted and shaped, primped and posed and colored. They were artfully wrapped packages without any of the messy tape showing; they were working unnaturally hard to look natural.

&
nbsp; They looked like everyone else in L.A.

  In that quick clarity which comes once or twice during one's life, Will understood that he was not supposed to be here at all. He remembered his days on the tribal police, where he'd arrested deadbeat husbands and confiscated six-packs from teenagers, all the while thinking there was more to life than that. And maybe there was--but he wasn't any closer to finding it now than he had been in South Dakota.

  He was so busy watching the audience that he didn't know what hit him. But the fourth model had caught her heel on a divot in the runway and had inadvertently swung her head, loosening the pins and the glue that secured a fountain of flowers to her scalp. Will was buried in a heap of tea roses and tiger lilies, huge hothouse poppies, stephanotis. He slipped on the shimmering petals and fell backward on the floor.

  A crew of doctors who staffed the Southern California ranch rushed up from their table to make sure that he was all right, but not before the model herself, leaning over in mortification, pitched from the high runway on top of Will. She was sprawled across him, a fiftysomething grand dame with tears of failure in her eyes and a dress cut too low.

  "Ma'am," Will said politely, "are you all right?"

  The woman sniffed delicately, and then seemed to notice him. She smiled seductively, stretching the skin of her face-lifted cheeks to its limit. "Well, hello there," she said, deliberately slipping her thigh between his legs.

  And that was how Will knew he'd be going home.

  THREE--TWO--ONE--WHITE. THE FILM PROJECTING INTO ALEX'S private screening room ran through to the end, leaving him to stare at absolutely nothing. He pushed a button on his remote control and sighed as the room sank blessedly into black. Better this way; easier.

  He picked up the bottle of J&B sitting next to him and tilted it up, only to remember it was empty. He'd finished it sometime during Act III ofMacbeth , when he had realized that the critics were right: the movie was horrible. They wouldn't even be able to give away video copies to high school English teachers.