“What story?”
He took a deep breath, calming himself, and then looked at the photo on his grandfather’s desk. His fingers came up and covered his mouth, and his eyes narrowed to black slits. “Maybe you should hear it from somebody else. I’m kind of biased.”
I waited, but then Henry stood and rested his hand on Joey’s arm. “Then could you tell us, Sam?”
Sam looked at the man in the photo again and weighed whether he was going to share. “Hookuuhulu, don’t you have basketball practice?” The young man made a face, pushed off the doorjamb, and retreated without a word. “C’mon, I’ve got another appointment, but I’ll tell you the story on the way to the parking lot.”
He gathered up a battered briefcase and a coat, and we followed him through the hallways and out an exterior door, where a vintage blue import sat behind the main building.
Henry was the first to ask. “You have still got this thing?”
The large man placed a hand on the fender. “This is my baby.”
I studied the car. “What is it?”
His hand glided up and down the fender. “This is the very first Japanese import into the United States market, the Toyopet Crown. It’s actually a Toyota.”
“It is actually a piece of crap.”
“Like you’re a judge.” The heavyset man frowned at us. “Not to change the subject, but back to the stories—you ever heard of the 1888-O ‘Hot Lips’ Morgan silver dollar?”
“I’ve heard of the Morgan silver dollar.”
He leaned against the very compact car. “Back in the early sixties there were stashes of the Morgan, the most famous coin of the Old West, that got released from some long-forgotten government vaults, and the Treasury ran onto a bunch from the New Orleans mint that had been double-struck in error, which resulted in a doubling up of Lady Liberty’s lips, nose, and chin—hence the moniker ‘Hot Lips Morgan.’”
I fished out the coin that Rosey had flipped to me in the cruiser and tossed it on the hood of the car in front of him, where it landed flat but vibrated in a circle on the metal, finally coming to rest. “Look like that?”
He pulled out his reading glasses, guiding them onto his face, reached out with his free hand, and peered at the silver dollar. “Where did you get this?”
“Rosey Wayman gave it to me.”
He smiled. “They went up for auction, and a portion of the find ended up in storage at the Central Bank & Trust here in Riverton, headed for some collector in Helena.”
“I’m assuming they never got there.”
“No. There were a couple of fellas who worked for the Wyoming Department of Transportation and one of them part time as a janitor at the bank, and he figured a way to get into the basement and steal the damn things, ferreting them out little by little until they had more than a thousand.”
“Wow.”
He picked up the coin and stared at me. “The bank was getting wise to them, so they lit out north and got as far as the canyon, but when they were pulled over, both of them got killed, and the bag of Hot Lips Morgans was gone.”
“Who pulled them over?”
He rested a hand on the car. “Who do you think?”
“Bobby Womack.”
Flipping his ponytail back and resting his hand against the side of his face, Sam studied the coin. “There was a big to-do, and a lot of suspicion fell on Bobby from both sides.”
“Why?”
“The two WYDOT guys who stole the Hot Lips Morgans were Indians and known to Bobby.” He shrugged and as he climbed in the clown car, its suspension crouched down on one side. “Everybody figured it had been some kind of inside deal with Bobby in on it, and when things went bad Bobby decided to divest himself of his two partners.”
“Did he have any history of that kind of thing?”
Sam slammed the door of the car, barely getting it closed, and began cranking the starter a few times before it caught. He started to back away, but the import stalled. “Not once.”
“Then why would anybody suspect him?”
Sam Little Soldier continued to study the silver dollar in his hand before tossing it back to me. He cranked the uncommunicative engine of the Toyopet Crown again and then sighed in the silence. “Because he was an Indian.”
? ? ?
Static. “I’ve never heard that story.”
I keyed the mic with the radio preset to Jim Thomas on the HPs frequency. “Probably before your time, you pup.”
Static. “That’s Captain Pup.”
“Right.” I glanced at Henry, who was staring through the windshield of my truck as Trooper Wayman had a conversation on the side of the Wind River Canyon Scenic Highway with a motorist in an aged Diamond Rio tanker truck that she had pulled over. “Right. Anyway, can you get me the reports on the incident so I can check it out?”
Static. “Happy to. So, you guys are settled in for the night?”
“Yep.”