Dead Meat Page 3

  He smiled at me. “Imagine that was some of the stuff you came to find out. Checking up on me. Tiny Wheeler wants you to corroborate his judgment, way I figure it.”

  “Something like that,” I admitted.

  Kirk, a dark young man in an expensive-looking suit, brought in a tray with two cups of coffee on it. He set it before us and stood back expectantly.

  “That’s just fine, Kirk. Thank you,” dismissed Smith. When Kirk had left the room, Smith said, “You want someone to fetch the coffee, you sure as hell can’t hire a woman. Know what I mean?”

  I grinned and nodded. “I certainly do.”

  He stirred some cream and sugar into his coffee. I sipped mine black.

  Smith settled back in his chair. “Portland’s a good city for lawyering lately. Getting all citified, in its own small way. Yuppieized. We got the most architects and orthodontists per capita in the state. That kind of city.”

  I lit a cigarette. Behind Seelye Smith’s gap-toothed grin and country-boy chatter, I detected a shrewdness that made me cautious. Charlie McDevitt had reported that Smith was honest and able. I felt confident about the able part.

  He had the habit of touching his hearing aid with his left forefinger and cocking his head sideways at me when he expected me to speak. I found myself raising my voice a notch when I talked to him.

  “So what can you tell me about the offer for Raven Lake?” I said.

  He scratched his scarred hand absentmindedly. “Right now, probably not any more than you already know. The offer came from an Indian law firm, acting for a partnership in Bangor. What they’re saying is they want to make some kind of retreat out of Raven Lake, a kind of memorial. Place where Indians can go to find their roots. Some damn thing like that.”

  “They’re claiming it’s sacred old Indian ground, I understand.”

  He nodded. “Well, there is a certifiable burial ground on the property. They’re right about that. But it’s way the hell across the lake and into the woods from where the lodge sits.”

  “So the question is, how can they claim the whole place?” I asked.

  Smith touched his hearing aid and nodded. “What they’re saying is that to the Indians the whole place was sacred. It was like a great big Mecca. They made pilgrimages there. To the lake. One of their gods resided there. They never hunted or fished there. The burial ground is all that’s physically left of it. If we go to discovery, we’ll see what sort of evidence they’ve got. In the meantime, they’re only hinting at a lawsuit. No lawsuit, of course, no discovery—and no access to their evidence. They’d rather make a straight purchase, avoid litigation.”

  “Meaning they haven’t got the evidence to back up their claim,” I said.

  “Maybe. Or maybe it just means they’d rather avoid the hassle.” Smith shrugged. “We call them on it, we gamble they haven’t got it. Meantime, they’ve tendered an offer. One million, seven hundred thousand for the whole operation. Shorefront, buildings, docks, the works.”

  “Is that a good offer?”

  He shrugged. “It’s on the low side of fair. As you’d expect. They’d assume we’d dicker around some. One point seven million is in the ballpark. It’s a serious offer.”

  “My clients, the Wheeler brothers, don’t want to sell, as you know. At any price. They’re worried what happens next.”

  “And they’re wondering how Seelye Smith is going to handle it,” Smith added. “Fair enough. If the Wheeler boys don’t want to sell, the Indians are saying they’ll take it to court. My job is to figure out if they can win. I understand that.”

  “And that means deciding if they’ve got a case.”

  “Tell you one thing,” he said, downing the last of his coffee. “Potentially, at least, they’ve got a case. The government has been very receptive to claims based on religious factors. It’s case by case, of course, but there is this burial ground up there on Raven Lake. Whether that entitles them to a claim of the entire lake is another question.”

  “I thought,” I said slowly, “that they forfeited all future claims in 1980.”

  Smith cocked his head at me. “What do you know about the Maine Indian land grab, Mr. Coyne?” He fingered his hearing aid.

  I lifted my hands, palms up, and let them fall back onto the table. “Just the outline of it, I guess. The Indians claimed the entire state of Maine originally belonged to them and that the white man took it illegally. They filed suit, and their claim was upheld in federal court. Congress settled by buying big chunks and turning it over to the Indians, along with lots of cash. The Indians agreed to abandon future claims.”

  He nodded. “All true. It was the biggest settlement the Indians ever got. The United States Congress gave them three hundred thousand acres, which we taxpayers bought from governments and corporations. Lumber companies, mainly. Uncle Sammy paid fifty-four point five million for that land. Plus, just to make sure they were happy, Congress set aside another twenty-seven million in a trust fund for them.”

  “I’ve never entirely understood the legal aspects of the case,” I said. “The whole deal. Will those principles be applied to Raven Lake, or what?”

  He touched the button in his ear. “I can summarize it for you. The thing is, nobody took it serious at the beginning. Except me. I visualized the whole thing. It all started when this illiterate old Passamaquoddy lady by the name of Lena Brooks came across an old treaty in a cardboard box up in the attic of an old house at the Pleasant Point Reservation. This was the 1794 treaty between the Passamaquoddies and the state of Massachusetts. Massachusetts, as you remember, included Maine back then. This treaty ceded all Indian lands to the state except for a few thousand acres and a couple islands. Some smart Indian got ahold of it and said, ‘Aha! Those acres and islands belong to us, and we ain’t got them anymore.’ An even smarter Indian remembered the Indian Non-Intercourse Act, which was about the first thing the United States Congress ever did back in 1790. This Non-Intercourse Act set up a trust relationship between the federal government and all the Indian tribes. Specifically, it said that Congress had to supervise and ratify all land transactions between the Indians and the non-Indians. The idea was to protect the ignorant heathens, you understand. White man’s burden, all that shit.”

  I nodded. “Obviously,” I said, “the 1790 act of Congress superseded the 1794 treaty with the state of Massachusetts.”

  Smith grinned. “Why, sure. Simple law. And on that basis, the Indians filed a relatively small claim in the Federal District Court of Maine. Claimed the 1794 treaty was null and void. Laid claim on a relatively small hunk of land.”

  “That was Passamaquoddy v. Morton, right?”

  “Good for you, Mr. Coyne. June 22, 1972. Very important date for the good folks in Maine. Morton settled for the Indians. Gave them one hundred and fifty million bucks.” Smith rubbed his scarred hand. “I worked for Morton on that one.”

  “For the state,” I said.

  “Right. The state’s attorney general. I told them we were going to lose. I recommended we settle. The law was against us. So was the temper of the times, if you understand me.”

  “Those were good days for minorities,” I said.

  “They sure as hell were. Flushed with victory, as the fella says, the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies filed another suit in 1976. This was the blockbuster. They figured, what the hell, if that 1794 treaty ain’t any good and if that was the one that cost us the state of Maine, let’s get that sucker back. Their claim was for a mere twelve point five million acres. That’s nearly sixty percent of the state, Mr. Coyne.”

  He paused, and I nodded appreciatively. “As an afterthought,” continued Smith, “they claimed an additional twenty-five billion in what they called back rents and damages. And they had the backing of the United States Departments of Interior and Justice. Now, the thing was, the tribes were perfectly willing to negotiate. They expected to bargain. No dummies, those Indian lawyers. They knew how it worked. Give a little, take a little. Right, Mr. Coyne?
Ain’t that the way they do law in Boston?”

  I smiled. “Exactly.”

  “It was my position right along,” said Smith, “that we should bargain with them. Play the damn game. Give them some respect. After all, they clearly had legal precedent in Morton.” He paused and cocked his head at me. “You familiar with the concept of laches, Mr. Coyne?”

  I hastily flipped through the musty, dog-eared law book I kept in my head. “Long-neglected rights lose their standing, I think. Something like that.”

  Smith nodded. “Close enough. Rights that have been consistently and uniformly neglected cease to be rights and cannot later be invoked. That was the position of the state. If you rest on that principle, you can’t turn around and negotiate. Fact is, even after Morton, folks figured the claim was just too outrageous to take seriously. So they refused to bargain. The state litigated. Congress finally settled it.”

  “I see,” I said. “But the Indians did give up their prerogative for further suits.”

  “Well, yes and no. They can’t litigate on the basis of the 1790 treaty, or Morton, anymore. But there’s nothing to stop them from finding new approaches.”

  “Like the special status of sacred land.”

  “Exactly.” Smith stared out the window at the deepwater harbor in the distance. There was very little maritime activity on the water that I could see except for the brightly colored sails of pleasure craft. “There are some precedents for this. Other tribes in other states have made some headway based on similar claims. That’s why it’s my job to try to find out just what kind of evidence there is that this claim falls outside the Morton settlement.”

  “You think there’s some other agenda?” I said. “Some other reason they want Raven Lake?”

  “Well, the obvious thing is they just want it and they’re gambling that the Wheeler brothers won’t risk going to court.”

  “Is that likely?”

  Smith shrugged. “Probably that’s the most likely. Straightforward real estate deal, with just the hint of a threat tossed in for bargaining purposes. Also likely is just what they’re saying. They want to set up some kind of shrine or park or reservation. A memorial to their heritage. The Indians aren’t all cynics, Mr. Coyne.”

  “And third?”

  He flapped his one-and-a-half hands in the air. “Third is one of those things I’ve got to check out. Third is they want the place for something else. I don’t know what.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was eleven-thirty, and I faced close to a five-hour drive to Greenville at the foot of Moosehead Lake. I pushed myself back from the table. Seelye Smith stood up.

  “I’ve got a plane that’ll be taking off at five this afternoon in Greenville,” I told him. The extra loudness in my voice by now had become habit. “I appreciate the information, Mr. Smith. We’ll keep in touch. I hope you can find out just what’s behind this thing.”

  He came around the table and began to walk me toward the door. “Sorry I can’t buy you some lunch, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Next time.”

  We paused at the door. He looked up at me, his eyes twinkling. “Well, tell me.”

  “What?” I said, frowning.

  “Did I pass?”

  I laughed. “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Smith, you sure as hell have fooled me. Takes a good lawyer to fool me. So I guess either way, you pass.”

  He chuckled. “I fooled you on one thing, I reckon. You noticed my hearing aid.”

  I nodded.

  “Best damn hearing aid there is. This wire here—you probably think I got it hooked into a battery, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “Look.” He pulled the end of the wire out of his pocket. It wasn’t hooked into anything.

  I frowned. “What good does that do?”

  “Well, I had no trouble hearing what you had to say to me, Mr. Coyne.” He grinned. “People see this thing in my ear, they just naturally talk louder. So I hear them fine. Helluva hearing aid.”

  Seelye Smith accompanied me through the reception area. I nodded to Kirk, the receptionist, and turned to Smith. I held out my hand, and he stuck his own mangled appendage into it.

  “Good fishing, Mr. Coyne,” he said.

  “And good hunting to you. I’ll be in touch soon. I hope you can scare up some answers.”

  “I expect I will,” he drawled.

  I walked out into the crisp June sunshine, climbed into my BMW, and pointed it at Greenville, nearly two hundred miles to the north and west. I was heading into the vast, still largely untracked Maine wilderness. I couldn’t wait to get there.

  Three

  “PRETTY, AIN’T IT?” BAILEY Gibbons grinned sideways at me and then banked the Cessna so that I could peer down at Moosehead Lake two thousand feet below us. I swallowed back the bile that suddenly tried to squeeze up into my throat and nodded. “Pretty. Yes,” I said through clenched teeth.

  He frowned at me. “You okay there, man?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Oh, sure. Fine.”

  “You feel like blowin’ lunch, I got a bag somewhere.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “That’s Lily Bay down there. Elephant Mountain off to your right. You can see Mount Kineo up ahead.” He leveled the floatplane off. We were following the ragged eastern shoreline of Moosehead, heading north. Raven Lake was a half hour’s flight away. Barring air pockets or unnecessary acrobatics by my pilot, I thought I might make it without embarrassing myself.

  Evergreen and water. That’s the northwest quarter of Maine. Red, white, and black spruce. Balsam and hemlock, white pine and cedar and tamarack (which the natives call “hackmatack.”) From the air it looks like a lumpy green velvet cloth onto which someone has spilled handfuls of glittering gems—big odd-shaped diamonds, tiny round emeralds—all linked up with serpentine silver chains. Maine’s waterways make a complex circulatory system. Moosehead is the big heart at the center of it. The Kennebec and the Penobscot rivers, the St. John and the Allagash, are the main arteries. The thousands of feeder streams are the veins and minor arteries and capillaries, which bulge into hundreds of ponds and lakes, many of them still nameless and uncharted.

  I was not deceived by the tranquillity of the scene from two thousand feet. I had spent time in the Maine woods, and I knew just how treacherous they were. Those gentle lumps on the velvety surface were, from ground level, sheer mountainsides interlaced with blowdown and brier and surrounded by blackfly-infested bogs where a man could wander for weeks and never find a sign of human existence.

  Wolves used to prowl those woods. They’re virtually extinct here, now. Mountain lions, too. Natives called them “catamounts.” The Indians thought they were devils and called them “Lunk Soos.” The last catamount was killed in 1891, although from time to time a possibly sober woodsman or trapper claims to have seen one. The last caribou in Maine was killed in 1908.

  There are black bear, still, and whitetail deer. Sportsmen and other sorts of men armed with guns trek from all over the northeast to the Maine woods hoping to slay a deer or bear. There are moose and beaver, porcupines and muskrats (“musquash” to the Indians). These creatures, sublime and lowly alike, get shot by gunners now and then, sometimes perfectly legally.

  Winter fur trappers, those hardiest of all souls, prize the sable and the weasel in its winter white, which is called an ermine.

  In the Maine woods, too, lurk lynx and bobcat, red and gray fox. There are skunks, squirrels, hares, rabbits, and chipmunks. Mice, moles, shrews, and voles. Mosquitoes, deerflies, blackflies, and no-seeums.

  A man might be lost in those vast woods. But he’d never be alone.

  “Don’t really look that much like the head of a moose, does it?” remarked the pilot. “I reckon that’s how she got her name, though.”

  Neither, I thought, did Raven Lake look like a raven’s beak, which is how, according to Tiny Wheeler, that little body of water acquired its name. From the air, Raven Lake looked like a banana. “Lake Banana
,” I once told Tiny. “That’s what you should call it.”

  “I was thinkin’ more along the lines of Penis Pond,” he had said, his gold incisor flashing with his grin.

  “Spencer Bay down there,” announced Gib, as the pilot told me he preferred to be called. “We’ll be passing over the North East Carry in a minute. Follow the West Branch up to Chesuncook. Then we come to Umbazookeus, Mud Pond, Chamberlain, Eagle, Allagash, and Chemquasabamticook. We’ll cut west over the St. John, and then it’s a short way to Raven.” The names rolled easily off his tongue. I was impressed.

  “You must know these parts like the back of your hand,” I said.

  “Nobody knows these parts, man,” Gib answered quickly. “Except maybe some old Indians. I know it from the air. I recognize the lakes, the landmarks. It’s like a map to me. I can read it pretty good from up here. But, hell, no, I don’t know it. Not like the old boys used to, when you had to paddle the length of the lake from Greenville to the Carry and portage over to the West Branch. Hell, Thoreau made the trip three times. Took him twenty-four hours just to get to Greenville. All-night steamer from Boston to Bangor, then all day by stage overland, before he even stepped into a bark canoe. He spent weeks out in those woods, just him and his friends and their Indian guides. And Thoreau didn’t even pretend to know this land.”

  I had initially pegged Gib as a Maine woodsman, wise, perhaps, in the ways of whitetail deer and landlocked salmon. No inconsequential wisdom, that, but I figured him for crude and unschooled and not the sort of man who had read Thoreau. I knew better than to share my misperception with him.

  “You watch close, now, man,” he said as we climbed a little and sailed smoothly through the clear afternoon sky. “This little doodad here, you move it this way and she banks left.” He demonstrated, a little too abruptly for the serenity of my gastric system. “This way here and she banks right.” We banked. “When you pull on her, she goes up. Push forward, she goes down.” Gib put the machine through some paces. It responded instantly.