I nodded.

“Do you ever worry about your place in history, Mr. Taylor?”

“How do you know my name?” I asked, trying hard not to sound surprised.

“Must have been from your credit card,” he teased. “Why else?”

“Do you take a personal interest in everyone who orders the prime rib?”

“How was it?”

“Average,” I told him.

He sniffed like he didn’t believe me.

“I figured I owe you for defusing what could have been an ugly situation upstairs,” he informed me and held up my credit card slip. He crumpled it into a ball with one hand and tossed it into the wastebasket ten feet away. “Dinner’s on us.”

“Thanks,” I said, waiting.

“Have a drink with me,” Stonetree said. He pulled open a desk drawer and removed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“I’ve always heard Indians can’t hold their firewater,” I told Stonetree as he filled two double-shot glasses.

“You believe all those movie myths?”

“No more than I believe Indians are afraid to fight at night.”

“Actually, that one is true.”

“Really?”

“I know I never liked it,” he said and raised his glass. “L’chayim.”

“H’gun,” I answered, reciting what I thought was the Dakota courage word.

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind,” I said. I took a sip of the liquid; it burned all the way down. I hadn’t used the hard stuff in quite awhile. “So, tell me, sir. What do you want of me?”

The chief smiled.

“You like to get right to it, don’t you?” he asked.

“Not necessarily,” I told him. “I’d be happy to just sit here and drink your booze and listen to a few more war stories if it’ll make you comfortable. We can pretend this isn’t a business meeting for quite a while, yet.”

The chief grimaced at the phrase business meeting.“I’m that obvious, huh?”

“You don’t strike me as a guy who spends a lot of time hobnobbing with the customers.”

“You got me there,” the chief said, sighing. ‘All right. I know who you are, and I know why you’re in Kreel County. I also know that Bobby Orman has given you a free hand in investigating the shooting of Michael Bettich—a development I find utterly amazing by the way.”

“His deputies agree with you,” I said.

“I know all these things because we operate a fairly elaborate security system here,” the chief added. “We run checks on everyone who touches our business. It’s a necessary precaution, I’m afraid. A lot of vultures would love to get their talons into the reservation casinos, rip us off, launder their money—you’d be amazed.…”

“I doubt it,” I told him.

Chief Stonetree used my interruption to drain the liquid in his glass and to pour himself a second healthy drink.

“If we don’t protect ourselves, the Bureau of Indian Affairs will do it for us,” he continued. “We’d be back to bad meat and trinkets within six months.”

He took another pull of his whiskey.

“Michael Bettich touched our business, so I had her checked out. But my security people came back with a most amazing discovery.”

“Oh?” I said.

“According to them, Michael Bettich didn’t even exist nine months ago. How is that possible, do you think?”

I shrugged.

“Please, Mr. Taylor,” Stonetree said. “Don’t obfuscate with me.”

Wow, there’s a word you don’t often hear in conversation. I took a long pull of the Jack to give me time to think about it. As the dark liquid warmed my stomach I decided obfuscation wasn’t a bad way to go.

“Perhaps Michael is not who she claims to be,” I told the chief.

Stonetree laughed at my answer. “No kidding.” He shook his head and added, all serious now, “Look, I don’t really care who Michael Bettich is or isn’t. That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as something else I don’t know. I don’t know where her money came from. My sources tell me she only had a few hundred bucks when she arrived in Deer Lake. But a few months later she suddenly has enough to buy The Harbor for one hundred and seventy thousand dollars and give it an eighty-grand renovation. Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know,” I answered quickly, cursing my own incompetence. Alison had left the Twin Cities with nothing, yet six months later she has enough money for a major investment and I hadn’t even asked where she got it. Dammit! The answer could help determine who’d shot her.…

Chief Stonetree must have seen the frustration on my face because he said, “You don’t know, do you?”

I shook my head. “Do you have any theories?” I asked.

“King Koehn,” Stonetree answered as if saying the name caused him pain.

“You think King and Michael are partners?”

Stonetree nodded.

“Could be,” I agreed. “But if they are, they’re doing a helluva job hiding it. Why does it matter?”

Stonetree sipped his drink.

“You don’t want them profiting off your casino,” I ventured.

“It’s not that,” he told me. “Obviously the more local residents that profit off our business, the better; the more tightly we are tied financially to the community, the stronger our situation becomes.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked.

The chief studied me over the rim of his glass. I had nothing else to look at, so I watched him. After we got tired of each other’s faces, Stonetree said, “We don’t believe the tribe can afford to gamble its future on gaming, if you’ll excuse the pun. The competition from the larger casinos—Hinckley, Mille Lacs, Turtle Lake—will cut deeper and deeper into our market share and our profits. So instead of expanding our gaming operation, we’ve been investing our proceeds in other businesses, diversifying our interests.

“We have a salmon farm now,” the chief continued. “We raise them, can them, the whole show. We recently purchased a construction-equipment manufacturing plant in North Dakota. Just the other day we initiated exploratory talks with a company that builds snowmobiles. And we’re also pursuing several other opportunities.”

I asked, “What has this to do with King and Michael?”

Stonetree smiled cryptically. “I just told you.”

I frowned at his answer. It seemed Chief Stonetree didn’t mind obfuscating, either.

“In five years time, we hope gaming will represent less than forty percent of our income,” the chief finally added, his voice growing in volume as if I had just challenged his logic. Perhaps others had.

“The tribe must be prepared for the day the gaming boom goes bust. My God, man, we have enrolled members; every month they cash their checks at the bank and walk out with the money in their pockets. They don’t even have checking accounts! They’re not saving, they’re not investing. Instead, they’re spending. They’re buying new homes and expensive furniture and stereo equipment and cars and Gold Wing Honda motorcycles. I can’t really blame them. After generations of poverty, it’s hard to get used to possessing large sums of money. Only what’s going to happen to them when the bubble bursts? Who says all this is going to last?”

“No one,” I answered just to be polite.

“Some tribal members don’t agree. They want what they want when they want it—like children.” Stonetree shook his head violently. “They’re wrong. That’s why we’re taking twenty percent out of each member’s check and putting it in retirement accounts for them. That’s why we’re investing in infrastructure—building a school, a water and sewer system, roads, a day-care center, a recreation center, new houses. We have chemical dependency programs and an alcohol treatment center. We’re encouraging the kids to go to college or at least a trade school, paying them to attend—”

Stonetree stopped abruptly.

“But I digress,” he said, embarrassed at his own oratory.

I don’t know why. It all sounded quite sensible to me, and I told him so.

“Sensible,” Stonetree repeated with disdain. “For a hundred years we’ve been a defeated people living off what the white government deigned to give us. Congress passes the 1988 Indian Gaming Act, and overnight we’ve become wealthy and arrogant. What’s sensible about that?”