Bad News

Quickly, before anybody could say anything (like the wrong thing, for instance), she added, “I told her how I called my old friend Jack Hall in Nevada, and how he sent me to Mr. Guilderpost in New York, and he’s the one who found me the DNA specialist lawyer. And I told her how you all are friends of Mr. Guilderpost, and how you took an interest in my case, and how you, John, just somehow knew that the tribes would try to cheat and switch bodies, so you all, just to help me out, switched the tombstones, never thinking for a second that those young Indians would get caught.”

Well, that was a nice-enough story, as far as it went. It got Marjorie Dawson aboard, and explained the presence of this mob here, sort of, and Little Feather had tap-danced it all out from a standing start. Not bad.

The Dawson woman, now that nobody had killed her, had gotten her lawyer’s confidence back, and she said, “I have to admit that your thinking was very imaginative, very good, uh . . . John, was it?”

“Yeah, John,” Dortmunder admitted. “Thanks.”

Little Feather said, “Oh, let me introduce everybody. That’s Mr. Fitzroy Guilderpost, and that’s Irwin Gabel, and that’s Andy Kelly, and that’s Tiny Bulcher, and that’s John. John, I’m sorry, but I don’t know your last name.”

He hadn’t expected that, suddenly out of left field and all. “Diddums,” he said, which was what he said every time he was abruptly asked his name. Somehow, that was the only name he could ever think of.

Marjorie Dawson frowned. “Diddums?”

“It’s Welsh,” he explained.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, Mr. Diddums—”

“John.”

“Very well. John. It was clever of you to guess what the tribes might do, but very dangerous to go into that cemetery and start moving gravestones around.”

“It didn’t work out too good,” Dortmunder admitted.

Dawson said, “Can any of you think of any way to reverse the procedure, to make it possible for Little Feather to be tested against her actual ancestor?”

Dortmunder said, “When? The DNA thing’s supposed to happen right now, isn’t it?”

Beaming, Little Feather said, “I was so lucky I talked to Marjorie! She’s on my side, John, she really is, and she did something right away to help.”

Guilderpost, who’d been looking flabbergasted since they’d come in here, said, “Help? How can she possibly help?”

“By buying you some time,” Dawson said.

Guilderpost said, “But, Ms. Dawson, you can’t request a delay, that puts suspicion squarely where we don’t want it. We have to pretend we want that test at once.”

“I realize that,” Dawson told him, acting like someone who didn’t need advice from amateurs. “Here’s what happened,” she explained. “Mr. Welles, the tribes’ main counsel, immediately appealed Judge Higbee’s ruling in the state appeals court in Albany. It’s a ridiculous argument, based on the idea that the grave robbers acted without the consent of the Tribal Council, it won’t hold up for a second.”

Kelp said, “Then what good does it do us?”

“As Little Feather’s primary counsel,” Dawson explained, “I received the notice of appeal in my office here in Plattsburgh. Mr. Schreck, though, would be the one to appear before the court in Albany. However, very stupidly, through an oversight, I neglected to pass the notice on to Mr. Schreck’s office in New York, so when Mr. Welles makes his argument to the appeals court, there will be no one there to make the counterargument.”

Tiny did his rumbling chuckle and said, “Nice, lady. Nice.”

Guilderpost said, “When is this appeal to take place?”

“Right now,” Dawson told him. “Mr. Schreck, of course, will find out about it tomorrow, and he’ll insist on another hearing, but that’s another delay. Today is Wednesday. I don’t see how it can all be sorted out this week. I believe you now have at least until Monday to solve the problem in the cemetery.”

Kelp said, “Aren’t you go

“Oh no,” she said. “Everybody thinks I’m a dimwit anyway, I’ll just be flustered and embarrassed, and apologize to everybody, and they’ll all shrug their shoulders and get on with it.”

Little Feather said, “So now we have five days to think of a solution. Surely one of you people can have an idea by then.”

Irwin said, “What if we use a knockout gas and spray the guards, and we wear gas masks? Then we go in before they wake up and switch the stones back, and nobody knows the difference.”

Kelp said, “One, they’ll know they’ve been asleep.”

Dortmunder said, “Two, the grave is open.”

Guilderpost said, “Three, we don’t have any knockout gas, and, Irwin, you don’t know where to get any.”

“It was just an idea,” Irwin said.

Dortmunder said, “No, it wasn’t. But we just might find one, somewhere, now that we got all this extra time. Thank you, Miss Dawson.”

She blushed with pleasure. “Call me Marjorie,” she said. “And I want you all to come over to my house for take-out pizza.”

34

Be

Be

A very junior partner of Otis Welles, the tribes’ high-powered, high-priced New York lawyer, came to see them Tuesday afternoon, following their first night of terror, to assure them they would be spending Tuesday night at Rikers Island as well. His name was O. Osgood Osborne, and he could not have been more indifferent. He didn’t see three terrorized country boys from the reservation in front of him, way out of their depth in the big city; all he saw was a case. You handle the case this way, and it comes out that way, and you charge for your time, which includes travel time. That was how he saw it, and he made no attempt to hide the fact.

Anyway, when Be

The other thing O.O.O. wanted to tell them, straight from Uncle Roger, was that this episode had been all their own idea; they’d done it because they were very religious and wanted to rescue Joseph Redcorn from nonsacred ground, and that’s why they chose someone not from the Three Tribes to take Redcorn’s place. DNA had had nothing to do with it, and, in fact, they’d never even thought about DNA and didn’t know what it was.