Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (11 page)

T
HE QUESTION NAGGING AT JIM Chee wasn’t the sort he wanted to explore on the Tribal Police radio band. He stopped at the Hogback trading post, dropped a quarter in the pay phone, and called the number Leaphorn had left. It proved to be the Anasazi Inn in Farmington, but the front desk said Leaphorn had checked out. Chee dropped in another quarter and called his own office. Jenifer answered. Yes, Leaphorn had called again. He said he was on his way back from Farmington to Window Rock and he would drop by and try to catch Chee at his office.

Chee got there about five minutes faster than the speed limit allowed. Leaphorn’s car was in the parking lot. The man himself was perched, ramrod straight, on a chair in the waiting room, reading yesterday’s copy of
Navajo Times
.

“If you have a couple of minutes, I want to pass on some information,” Leaphorn said. “Otherwise, I can catch you when you have some time.”

“I have time,” Chee said, and ushered him into his office.

Leaphorn sat. “I’ll be brief. I’ve taken retainer from the Breedlove Corporation. Actually, it’s really the family, I guess. They want me to sort of reinvestigate the disappearance of Hal Breedlove.” He paused, awaited a reaction. If he was reading Chee’s studiously blank expression properly, the young man didn’t like the arrangement.

“So it’s official business for you now,” Chee said. “At least unofficially official.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “I wanted you to know that because I may be bothering you now and then. With questions.” He paused again.

“Is that it?” Chee asked. If it was, he had some questions of his own.

“There’s something else I wanted to tell you I think it’s pretty clear the family thinks Hal was murdered. If they have any evidence of that they’re not telling me. Maybe it’s just that they want it to be murder. And they want to be able to prove it. They want to regain title to the ranch.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “Did they tell you that?”

Leaphorn hesitated, his expression quizzical. What the devil was bothering Chee? “I was thinking that would be the most likely motive,” he said. “What do you think?”

Chee nodded noncommittally.

“Can you tell me who you made the deal with?” he asked.

“You mean the individual?” Leaphorn said. “I think private detectives are supposed to have a thing about client confidentiality, but I haven’t learned to think like a private eye. Never will. This is my one and only venture. George Shaw handed me my check.” He laughed, and told Chee how he’d outsmarted himself, trying to learn how big a deal this was for the Breedlove Corporation.

“So Hal’s cousin signed the check, but the lawyer with him, you remember his name?”

“McDermott,” Leaphorn said. “John McDermott. He’s the lawyer handling it. He called me and arranged the meeting. Works for a Washington firm, but I think he used to have an office in Albuquerque. And—” He stopped, aware of Chee’s expression. “You know this guy?”

“Indirectly,” Chee said. “He was sort of an Indian affairs specialist for an Albuquerque firm. I think he represented Peabody Coal when they were negotiating one of the coal contracts with us, and a couple of pipeline companies dealing with the Jicarillas. Then he moved to Washington and is doing the same thing on that level. I think it’s with the same law firm.”

Leaphorn looked surprised. “You know a lot more about him than I do,” he said. “How’s his reputation? It okay?”

“As a lawyer? I guess so. He used to be a professor.”

“He struck me as arrogant. Is that your impression?”

Chee shrugged. “I don’t know him. I just know a little about him.”

“Well, he didn’t make a good first impression.”

“Could you tell me when he called you? I mean made the first contact.”

The question obviously surprised Leaphorn “Let’s see,” he said. “Two or three days ago.”

“Was it last Tuesday?”

“Tuesday? Let’s see. Yeah. It was a call on in answering machine. I returned it.”

“Morning or afternoon?”

“I don’t know. It could have been either one. But it’s still on the recording. I think I could find out.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Chee said.

“Will do,” Leaphorn said, and paused. “I’m trying to place the date. That would have been about the day after you got the skeleton identified. Right?”

Chee sighed. “Lieutenant Leaphorn,” he said “you already know just what I’m thinking, don’t you?”

“Well, I’d guess you’re wondering how that lawyer found out so quickly that the skeleton had turned out to be somebody so important to his client. No announcement had been made. Nothing in the papers until a day or so later and I don’t think it ever made the national news. Just a little story around here, and about three paragraphs in the
Albuquerque Journal
, and a little bit more in the
Rocky Mountain News”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Chee said.

“But you’re ahead of me on something else, I don’t know why it’s important.”

“You couldn’t guess,” Chee said. “It’s some thing personal.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said. He ducked his head, shook it, and said, “Oh,” again. Sad, now. And then he looked up. “You know, they could have had this thing staked out, though. An important client. Maybe they had some law firm out here retained to tip them off if anything turned up that would bear in any way at all on this son-and-heir being missing. They knew he was a mountain climber. So when an unidentified body turns up…” He shrugged. “Who knows how law firms operate?” he said, not believing it himself.

“Sure,” Chee said. “Anything’s possible.”

Leaphorn was leaving, hat in hand, but he stopped in the doorway and turned.

“One other thing that might bear on all this,” he said. He told Chee of Sergeant Deke’s account of the man with the binoculars and the rifle on the canyon rim. “Deke said he’s going up the canyon and warn Nez that somebody may still be trying to kill him. I hope we can figure this out before they do it.”

Chee sat for a moment looking at the closed door, thinking of Leaphorn, thinking of Janet Pete, of John McDermott back in New Mexico. Was he back in her life? Apparently he was. For the first time, the Fallen Man became more than an abstract tragedy in Chee’s mind. He buzzed Jenifer.

“I’m taking off now for Gallup,” he said. “If Largo needs me—if anybody calls—tell them I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Jenifer said, “you have two meetings on the calendar for this afternoon. The security man from the community college and Captain Largo was—”

“Call them and tell them I had to cancel,” Chee said, forgetting to say please, and forgetting to say thanks when he hung up. Captain Largo wouldn’t like this. But then he didn’t particularly like Captain Largo and he sure as hell didn’t like being an acting lieutenant.

L
OUISE GUARD’S FORD ESCORT was not in the driveway of the little house she shared with Janet Pete in Gallup. Good news, but not as good as it would have seemed when Jim Chee was feeling better about life. This evening his mood had been swinging back and forth between a sort of grim anger at the world that Janet occupied and self-contempt for his own immature attitude. It hadn’t taken long for Chee, who was good at self-analysis, to determine that his problem was mostly jealousy. Maybe it was 90 percent jealousy. But even so, that left 10 percent or so that seemed legitimate.

He gave the door of his pickup the hard slam required to shut it and walked up the pathway with the videotape of the traditional wedding clutched in one hand and the other holding a pot of some sort of autumn-blooming flowers he’d bought for her at Gallup Best Blossoms. It wasn’t a very impressive floral display, but what could you expect in November?

“Ah, Jim,” Janet said, and greeted him with such a huge and enthusiastic hug that it left him helpless—tape in one hand and flowerpot in the other. It also left him feeling guilty. What the devil was wrong with him? Janet was beautiful Janet was sweet. She loved him. She was wearing a set of designer jeans that fit her perfectly and a blouse of something that shimmered. Her black hair was done in a new fashion he’d been observing on the nighttime soap opera shows, made her look young and jaunty and like someone the muscular actor in the tank top would be laughing with at the fancy party in a Coca-Cola commercial.

“I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are,” Chee said. “Just back from Washington, you should be looking tired.”

Janet was in the kitchen by then, watering whatever it was he’d brought her, opening the refrigerator and fixing something for them.

“It wasn’t tiresome,” she shouted. “It was lots of fun. The people in the BIA were on their very best behavior, and the people over at Justice were reasonable for a change. And there was time to see a show some German artist had going in the National Gallery. It was really interesting stuff. Partly sculpture and partly drawings. And then there was the concert I told you about. The one in the Library of Congress hall, was partly Mozart. Really great.”

Yes. The concert. He’d thought about this before. Maybe too much. In Washington and in the Library of Congress it wouldn’t be a public event. It would be exclusive. Some sort of high-society fund-raiser. Shaking down the social set for some worthy literacy cause, probably. Almost certainly it would be by invitation only. Or just members and guests for the big-money patrons of library projects. She’d mentioned some ambassador being there. He had thought, once, that John McDermott might have taken her. But that was crazy. She detested the man. He had taken advantage of the leverage a distinguished professor has over his students. He’d seduced Janet. He’d taken her to Albuquerque as his live-in intern, had taken her to Washington as his token Indian. She had come back to New Mexico ashamed and brokenhearted when she realized what he was doing. There were a dozen ways McDermott could have learned the Fallen Man had been identified. Leaphorn, as usual, was right. McDermott’s firm probably had connections with lawyers in New Mexico. Of course they would. They would be working with Arizona and New Mexico law firms on Indian business. Anyway, he damn sure wasn’t going to bring it up. It would be insulting.

From the kitchen the sound of something clattering, the smell of coffee. Chee inspected the room around him. Nothing different that he could see except for something or other on the mantle over the gas-log fireplace. It was made of thin stainless steel tubing combined with shaped Plexiglas in three or four colors held together by what seemed to be a mixture of aluminum wiring and thread. Most peculiar. In fact, weird.

Chee grinned at it. Something Louise had found somewhere. A conversation piece. Louise haunted garage sales, and in Gallup, garage sales were always offering odd harvests.

Janet emerged with a cup of coffee for him— fragile china on a thin-as-paper saucer—and a crystal goblet of wine for herself. She snuggled onto the sofa beside him, clicked glass against cup, smiled at him, and said, “To your capture of a whole squadron of cattle rustlers, your promotion to commander in chief of the Navajo police, chief honcho of the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, and international boss of Interpol.”

“You forgot my busting up the Shiprock graffiti vandals and election as sheriff of San Juan County and bureaucrat in chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency.”

“All that, too,” Janet said, raised her glass again, and sipped. She picked up the videocassette and inspected it. “What’s this?”

“Remember?” Chee said. “My paternal uncle’s niece was having a traditional wedding at their place north of Little Water. I got him to get me a copy of the videotape they had made.”

Janet turned it over and inspected the back which was just as black and blank as the other side. “You want me to look at it?”

“Sure,” Chee said, his good feelings fading fast. “Remember? We talked about that.” They had argued a little, actually. About cultures, and traditions, and all that. It wasn’t that Janet was opposed, but her mother wanted a huge ceremony in an Episcopal cathedral in Baltimore. And Janet had agreed, or so he thought, that they would do both. “You said you had never been to a regular Navajo wedding with a shaman and the entire ceremony. I thought you’d be interested.”

“Louise described it to me,” Janet said, and put the videotape on the coffee table in a way that made Chee want to change the subject. Suddenly Louise’s peculiar purchase seemed useful.

“I see Louise has been sailing the garage sales again. Quite an acquisition there,” he said, nodding toward the thing. He laughed. “Louise is a wonderful lady, but I wonder about her taste sometimes.”

Janet had no comment.

Chee said: “What’s it for?” And waited, and belatedly understood that he should have kept his stupid mouth shut.

“It’s called ‘Technic Inversion Number Three, Side View,’” Janet said.

“Remarkable,” Chee said. “Very interesting.”

“I found it in the Kremont Gallery,” Janet said, glum. “The artist is a man named Egon Kuzluzski. The critic at the
Washington Post
called him the most innovative sculptor of the decade. An artist who finds beauty and meaning in the technology which is submerging modern culture.”

“Very complex,” Chee said. “And the colors…” He couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.

“I really thought you would like it,” Janet said. “I’m sorry you don’t.”

“I do,” Chee said, but he knew it was too late for that. “Well, not really. But I think it takes time to understand something that’s so innovative. And then tastes vary, of course.”

Janet didn’t respond to that.

“It’s the reason they have horse races,” Chee said, and attempted a chuckle. “Differences of opinion, you know.”

“I ran into something interesting in Washington,” Janet said, in a fairly obvious effort to cut off this discussion. “I think it was why everybody was so cooperative with our proposals. Crime on Indian reservations has become very chic inside the Beltway. Everybody had read up on narcotics invading Indian territory, and Indian gang problems, Indian graffiti, Indian homicides, child abuse, the whole schmear. All very popular with the Beltway intelligentsia. We have finally made it into the halls of the mighty.”

“I guess that would fall into the bad news good news category,” Chee said, grinning with relief at being let off the hook.

“Whatever you call it, it means everybody is looking for our expertise these days.”

Chee’s grin faded. “You got a job offer?”

“I didn’t mean me. But one of the top assistants in BIA Law and Order wanted to let me know they’re recruiting experienced reservation cops with the right kind of credentials for Civil Service, and I heard the same thing over at Justice.” She smiled at him. “At Justice they actually asked me to be a talent scout for them and when they told me what they wanted it sounded like they were describing you.” She patted him on the leg. “I told ’em I’d already signed you up.”

“Thank God for that,” Chee said. “I did time in Washington a couple of times, remember? At the FBI academy for their training course, and once on an investigation.” He shuddered, remembering. At the academy he had been the tolerated rube, one of “them.” But they would, naturally, look on Janet as one of “us.” It was a fact he’d have to find a way to deal with.

Janet removed her hand.

“Really, Jim, Washington’s a nice place. It’s cleaner than most cities, and something beautiful every place you look and there’s always—”

“Beautiful what? Buildings? Monuments? There’s too much smog, too much noise, too much traffic, too damn many people everywhere. You can’t see the stars at night. Too cloudy to see the sunset.” He shook his head.

“There’s the breeze coming in off the Potomac,” Janet said. “And the clean salty smell of the bay, and seafood fresh from the ocean and good wine. In April, the cherry blossoms, and the green, green hills, and the great art galleries, and theater, and music.” She paused, waved her hands, overcome by the enormous glories of Washington’s culture. “And the pay scales are about double what either one of us can make here—especially in the Justice Department.”

“Working in the J. Edgar Hoover Building,” Chee said. “That’d be a real kick. That old blackmailer should have been doing about twenty years for misuse of public records, but they named the building after him. At least it’s an appropriately ugly building.”

Janet let that one lie, sipped her wine, reminded Chee his coffee was getting cold. He tested it. She was right.

“Jim,” she said, “that concert was absolutely thrilling. It was the Philadelphia Orchestra. The annual Founders Society affair. The First Lady was there, and all sorts of diplomats—all white tie and the best jewels dug out of the safety-deposit boxes. And Mozart. You like Mozart.”

“I like a lot of Mozart,” Chee said.

He took a deep breath. “It was one of those members-only things, I guess,” he said. “Members and guests.”

“Right,” she said, smiling at him. “I was mingling with the
crème de la crème
.”

“I’ll bet your old law firm is a member,” Chee said. “Probably a big donor.”

“You betcha,” Janet said, still smiling. Then she realized where Chee was headed. The smile went away.

“You’re going to ask me who took me,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I was a guest of John McDermott,” she said.

Chee sat silent and motionless. He had known it, but he still didn’t want to believe it.

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” Chee said. “I guess not. Should it?”

“It shouldn’t,” she said. “After all, we go way back. He was my teacher. And then I worked with him.”

He was looking at her. Wondering what to say. She flushed. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“I’m thinking I had it all wrong. I thought you detested the man for the way he treated you. The way he used you.”

She looked away. “I did for a while. I was angry.”

“But not now? No longer angry?”

“The Navajo way,” she said. “You’re supposed to get yourself back into harmony with the way the world is.”

“Did you know he’s out here again?”

She nodded.

“Did you know he’s hired Joe Leaphorn to look into that Fallen Man business?”

“He told me he was going to try,” she said.

“I wondered how he learned about the skeleton being identified as Harold Breedlove,” Chee said. “It wasn’t the sort of story that would have hit the
Washington Post
.”

“No,” she said.

“Did you tell him?”

“Why not?” she said, staring at him. “Why the hell not?”

“Well, I don’t know. The man you’re going to marry is on the telephone reminding you he loves you. And you ask him about a case he’s working on, and so he sort of violates police protocol and tells you the skeleton has been identified.” He stopped. This wasn’t fair. He’d held this anger in for too many hours. He had heard his voice, thick with emotion.

She was still staring at him, face grim, waiting for him to continue.

“So?” she said. “Go on.”

“So I’m not exactly sure what happened next. Did you call him right away and tell him what you’d learned?”

She didn’t respond to that. But she edged a bit away from him on the sofa.

“One more question and then I’ll drop it. Did that son of a bitch ask you to get that information out of me? In other words, I want to know whether he—”

Janet was on her feet.

“I think you’d better go now,” she said.

He got up. His anger had drained away now. He simply felt tired and sick.

“Just one more thing I’d like to know,” he said. “It would tell me something about just how important this business is to the Breedlove Corporation. In other words if you’d told him about the skeleton being found up there when you first got to Washington, it might naturally have reminded McDermott of Hal Breedlove disappearing. And he’d want to know who the skeleton belonged to. But if it was already on his mind even before that, if he brought it up instead of you, then it would mean a higher level of—it would mean they already—”

“Go away,” Janet said. She handed him the videotape. “And take this with you.”

He took the tape.

“Janet,” he said. “Did you recommend that he hire Leaphorn to work for him?”

He asked that before he noticed the angry tears in Janet’s eyes. She didn’t answer and he didn’t expect her to.