Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (9 page)

Ms. Sam shook her head, made a disapproving sound. But she was still smiling.

“That lady with the red car,” Manuelito said. “I wonder if I know her, too. Is that Mrs.—”

Chee cleared his throat.

“I wonder if you noticed any pickups, anything you could haul a load of hay in, stopped over there on the road past the Rattlesnake pumping station. Probably a day or so before the snow.” He glanced at Officer Manuelito, tried to read her expression, decided she was either slightly abashed for gossiping instead of tending to police business, or irritated because he’d interrupted her. Probably the latter.

Ms. Sam was thumbing through the ledger, saying, “Let’s see now. Wasn’t it Monday night it started snowing?” She thumbed past another page, tapped the paper with a finger. “Big fifth-wheel truck parked there beside Route 33. Dark blue, and the trailer he was pulling was partly red and partly white, like somebody was painting it and didn’t get it finished. Had Arizona plates. But that was eight days before it snowed.”

“That sounds like my uncle’s truck,” Manuelito said. “He lives over there at Sanostee.”

Ms. Sam said she thought it had looked familiar. And, no, she hadn’t noticed any strange trucks the days just before the storm, but then she’d gone into Farmington to buy groceries and was gone one day. She read off the four other entries she’d made since getting Manuelito’s request. One sounded like Dick Finch’s truck with its bulky camper. None of the others would mean anything unless and until some sort of pattern developed. Pattern! That made him think of the days he’d worked for Leaphorn. Leaphorn was always looking for patterns.

“How did you know it was an Arizona license?” Chee asked. “The telescope?”

“Take a look,” Ms. Sam said, and waved at the scope.

Chee did, twiddling the adjustment dial. The mountain jumped at him. Huge. He focused on a slab of basalt fringed with mountain oak. “Wow,” Chee said. “Quite a scope.”

He turned it, brought in the point where Navajo Route 33 cuts through the Chinese Wall of stone that wanders southward from the volcano. A school bus was rolling down the asphalt, heading for Red Rock after taking kids on their fifty-mile ride into high school at Shiprock.

“We bought it for him, long time ago when he started getting sick,” Ms. Sam said—using the Navajo words that avoided alluding directly to the name of the dead. “I saw it in that big pawnshop on Railroad Avenue in Gallup. Then he could sit there and watch the world and keep track of his mountain.”

She produced a deprecatory chuckle, as if Chee might think this odd. “Every day he’d write down what he saw. You know. Like which pairs of kestrels were coming back to the same nests. And where the red-tailed hawks were hunting. Which kids were spray-painting stuff on that old water tank down there, or climbing the windmill. That sort of thing.”

She sighed, gestured at the talk show. “Better than this stuff. He loved his mountain. Watching it kept him happy.”

“I heard he used to come down to Shiprock, to the police station, and report people trespassing and climbing Tse’ Bit’ a’ i’,” Chee said. “Is that right?”

“He wanted them arrested,” she said. “He said it was wrong, those white people climbing a mountain that was sacred. He said if he was younger and had some money he would go back East and climb up the front of that big cathedral in New York.” Ms. Sam laughed. “See how they liked that.”

“What sort of things did he write in the book?” Chee asked, thinking of Lieutenant Leaphorn and feeling a twinge of excitement. “Could I see it?”

“All sorts of things,” she said, and handed it to him. “He was in the marines. One of the code talkers, and he liked to do things the way they did in the marines.”

The entries were dated with the numbers of day, month, and year, and the first one was 25/7/89. After the date Hosteen Sam had written in a tiny, neat missionary-school hand that he had gone into Farmington that day and bought this book to replace the old one, which was full. The next entry was dated 26/7/89. After that Sam had written: “Redtail hawks nesting. Sold two rams to D. Nez.”

Chee closed the book. What was the date Breedlove had vanished? Oh, yes.

He handed Ms. Sam the ledger.

“Do you have an earlier book?”

“Two of them,” she said. “He started writing more after he got really sick. Had more time then.” She took two ledgers down from the top of the cabinet where she stored canned goods and handed them to Chee. “It was something that kills the nerves. Sometimes he would feel pretty good but he was getting paralyzed.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Manuelito said. “They say there’s no cure.”

“We had a sing for him,” Ms. Sam said. “A Yeibichai. He got better for a little while.”

Chee found the page with the day of Hal Breedlove’s disappearance and scanned the dates that followed. He found crows migrating, news of a coyote family, mention of an oil field service truck, but absolutely nothing to indicate that Breedlove or anyone else had come to climb Hosteen Sam’s sacred mountain.

Disappointing. Well, anyway, he would think about this. And he’d tell Lieutenant Leaphorn about the book. That thought surprised him. Why tell Leaphorn? The man was a civilian now. It was none of his business. He didn’t exactly like Leaphorn. Or he hadn’t thought he did. Was it respect? The man was smarter than anybody Chee had ever met. Damn sure smarter than Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. And maybe that was why he didn’t exactly like him.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE that metaphor whites use about money burning a hole in your pocket had taken on meaning for Joe Leaphorn. The heat had been caused by a check for twenty thousand dollars made out to him against an account of the Breedlove Corporation. Leaphorn had endorsed it and exchanged it for a deposit slip to an account in his name in the Mancos Security Bank. Now the deposit slip resided uneasily in his wallet as he waited for Mrs. Cecilia Rivera to finish dealing with a customer and talk to him. Which she did, right now.

Leaphorn rose, pulled back a chair for her at the lobby table where she had deposited him earlier. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to keep a new customer waiting.” She sat, examined him briefly, and got right to the point. “What did you want to ask me about?”

“First,” Leaphorn said, “I want to tell you what I’m doing here. Opening this account and all.”

“I wondered about that,” Mrs. Rivera said. “I noticed your address was Window Rock, Arizona. I thought maybe you were going into some line of business up here.” That came out as a question.

“Did you notice who the check was drawn against?” Leaphorn asked. Of course she would have. It was a very small bank in a very small town. The Breedlove name would be famous here, and Leaphorn had seen the teller discussing the deposit with Mrs. Rivera. But he wanted to make sure.

“The Breedloves,” Mrs. Rivera said, studying his face. “It’s been a few years since we’ve seen a Breedlove check but I never heard of one bouncing. Hal’s widow banked here for a little while after he—after he disappeared. But then she quit us.”

Mrs. Rivera was in her mid-seventies, Leaphorn guessed, thin and sun-wrinkled. Her bright black eyes examined him through the top half of her bifocals with frank curiosity.

“I’m working for them now,” Leaphorn said. “For the Breedloves.” He waited.

Mrs. Rivera drew in a long breath. “Doing what?” she asked. “Would it be something to do with that moly mine project?”

“It may be that,” Leaphorn said. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. I’m a retired policeman.” He extracted his identification case and showed it to her. “Years ago when Hal Breedlove disappeared, I was the detective working that case.” He produced a deprecatory expression. “Obviously I didn’t have much success with it, because it took about eleven years to find him, and then it was by accident. But anyway, the family seems to have remembered.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Young Hal did like to climb up onto the mountains.” A dim smile appeared. “From what I read in the
Farmington Times
, I guess he needed more studying on how to climb down off of them.”

Leaphorn rewarded this with a chuckle.

“In my experience,” he said, “bankers are like doctors and lawyers and ministers. Their business depends a lot on keeping confidences.” He looked at her, awaiting confirmation of this bit of misinformation. Leaphorn had always found bankers wonderful sources of information.

“Well, yes,” she said. “Lot of business secrets come floating around when you’re negotiating loans.”

“Are you willing to handle another one?”

“Another secret?” Mrs. Rivera’s expression became avid. She nodded.

And so Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, laid his cards on the table. More or less. It was a tactic he’d used for years—based on his theory that most humans prefer exchanging information to giving it away. He’d tried to teach Jim Chee that rule, which was: Tell somebody something interesting and they’ll try to top it. So now he was going to tell Mrs. Rivera everything he knew about the affair of Hal Breedlove, who had been by Four Corners standards her former neighbor and was her onetime customer. In return he expected Mrs. Rivera to tell him something she knew about Hal Breedlove, and his ranch, and his business. Which was why he had opened this account here. Which was what he had decided to do yesterday when, after long seconds of hesitation, he had accepted the check he had never expected to receive.

They had met again yesterday at the Navajo Inn—Leaphorn, McDermott, and George Shaw.

“If I take this job,” Leaphorn had said, “I will require a substantial retainer.” He kept his eyes on Shaw’s face.

“Substantial?” said McDermott. “How sub—”

“How much?” asked Shaw.

How much, indeed, Leaphorn thought. He had decided he would mention a price too large for them to pay, but not ludicrously overdone Twenty thousand dollars, he had decided. They would make a counteroffer. Perhaps two thousand. Two weeks pay in advance. He would drop finally to, say, ten thousand. They would counter And finally he would establish how important this affair was to Shaw.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Leaphorn said.

McDermott had snorted, said, “Be serious We can’t—”

But George Shaw had reached into his inside coat pocket and extracted a checkbook and a pen.

“From what I’ve heard about you we won’t need to lawyer this,” he said. “The twenty thousand will be payment in full, including any expenses you incur, for twenty weeks of your time or until you develop the information we need to settle this business. Is that acceptable?”

Leaphorn hadn’t intended to accept anything—certainly not to associate himself with these two men. He didn’t need money. Or want it. But Shaw was writing the check now, face grim and intent. Which told Leaphorn there was much more involved here than he’d expected.

Shaw had torn out the check, handed it to him. A little piece of the puzzle that had stuck in Leaphorn’s mind for eleven years—that had been revived by the shooting of Hosteen Nez— had clicked into place. Unreadable yet, but it shed a dim light on the effort to kill Nez. If twenty thousand dollars could be tossed away like this, millions more than that must be somehow involved. That told him hardly anything. Just a hint that Nez might still be, to use that white expression, “worth killing.” Or for Shaw, perhaps worth keeping alive.

He had held the check a moment, a little embarrassed, trying to think of what to say as he returned it. He knew now that he would try again to find a way to solve this old puzzle, but for himself and not for these men. He extended the check to Shaw, said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think—”

Then he had seen how useful that check could be. It would give him a Breedlove connection. He wasn’t a policeman any longer. This would give him the key he’d need to unlock doors.

And this morning, in this small, old-fashioned bank lobby, Leaphorn was using it.

“This is sort of hard to explain,” he told Mrs. Rivera. “What I’m trying to do for the Breedlove family is vague. They want me to find out everything about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and about his death on Ship Rock.”

Mrs. Rivera leaned forward. “They don’t think it was an accident?”

“They don’t exactly say that. But it was a pretty peculiar business. You remember it?”

“I remember it very well,” Mrs. Rivera said, with a wry laugh. “The Breedlove boy did his banking here—like the ranch always had. He was my customer and he was four payments behind on a note. We’d sent him notices. Twice, I believe it was. And the next thing you know, he’s vanished.”

Mrs. Rivera laughed. “That’s the sort of thing a banker remembers a long, long time.”

“How was it secured? I understand he didn’t get title to the ranch until his birthday—just before he disappeared.”

Mrs. Rivera leaned back now and folded her arms. “Well, now,” she said. “I don’t think we want to get into that. That’s private business.”

“No harm me asking, though,” Leaphorn said. “It’s a habit policemen get into. Let me tell you what I know, and then you decide if you know anything you would be free to add that might be helpful.”

“That sounds fair enough,” she said. “You talk. I’ll listen.”

And she did. Nodding now and then, sometimes indicating surprise, enjoying being an insider on an investigation. Sometimes indicating agreement as Leaphorn explained a theory, shaking her head in disapproval when he told her how little information Shaw and McDermott had given him to work on. As Leaphorn had hoped, Mrs. Rivera had become a partner.

“But you know how lawyers are,” he said. “And Shaw’s a lawyer, too. I checked on it. He specializes in corporate tax cases. Anyway, they sure didn’t give me much to work with.”

“I don’t know what I can add,” she said. “Hal was a spendthrift, I know that. Always buying expensive toys. Snowmobiles, fancy cars. He’d bought himself a—can’t think of the name—one of those handmade Italian cars, for example. A Ferrari, however you pronounce that. Cost a fortune and then he drove it over these old back roads and tore it up. He’d worked out some sort of deal with the trust and got a mortgage on the ranch. But then when they sold cattle in the fall and the money went into the ranch account he’d spend it right out of there instead of paying his debts.”

She paused, searching for something to add. “Hal always had Sally get him first-class tickets when he flew—Sally has Mancos Travel—and first class costs an arm and a leg.”

“And coach class gets there almost as quick,” Leaphorn said.

Mrs. Rivera nodded. “Even when they went places together Sally had her instructions to put Hal into first class and Demott in coach. Now what do you think of that?”

Leaphorn shook his head.

“Well, I think it’s insulting,” Mrs. Rivera said.

“Could have been Demott’s idea,” Leaphorn said.

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Sally told—” She cut that off.

“I talked to Demott when I was investigating Breedlove’s disappearance,” Leaphorn said. “He seemed like a solid citizen.”

“Well, yes. I guess so. But he’s a strange one, too.” She chuckled. “I guess maybe we all get a little odd. Living up here with mountains all around us, you know.”

“Strange,” Leaphorn said. “How?”

Mrs. Rivera looked slightly embarrassed. She shrugged. “Well, he’s a bachelor for one thing. But I guess there’s a lot of bachelors around here. And he’s sort of a halfway tree-hugger. Or so people say. We have some of those around here, too, but they’re mostly move-ins from California or back East. Not the kind of people who ever had to worry about feeding kids or working for a living.”

“Tree-hugger? How’d he get that reputation?” Leaphorn was thinking of a favorite nephew, a tree-hugger who’d gotten himself arrested leading a noisy protest at a tribal council meeting, trying to stop a logging operation in the Chuskas. In Leaphorn’s opinion his nephew had been on the right side of that controversy.

“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But they say Eldon was why they didn’t do that moly operation. Up there in the edge of the San Juan National Forest.”

Leaphorn said, “Oh. What happened?”

“It was years ago. I think the spring after Hal went missing. We weren’t in on the deal, of course. This bank is way too little for the multi-million-dollar things like that. A bank up in Denver was involved I think. And I think the mining company was MCA, the Moly Corp. Anyway, the way it was told around here, there was some sort of contract drawn up, a mineral lease involving Breedlove land up the canyon, and then at first the widow was going to handle it, but Hal legally was still alive and she didn’t want to file the necessary papers to have the courts say he was dead. So that tied it up. People say she stalled on that because Demott was against it. Demott’s her brother, you know. But to tell the truth, I think it was her own idea. She’s loved that place since she was a tot. Grew up on it, you know.”

“I don’t know much about their background,” Leaphorn said.

“Well, it used to be the Double D ranch. Demott’s daddy owned it. The price of beef was way down in the thirties. Lot of ranches around here went at sheriffs auction, including that one. Old Edgar Breedlove bought it, and he kept the old man on as foreman. Old Breedlove didn’t care a thing about ranching. One of his prospectors had found the moly deposit up the headwaters of Cache Creek and that’s what he wanted. But anyway, Eldon and Elisa grew up on the place.”

“Why didn’t he mine the molybdenum?” Leaphorn asked.

“War broke out and I guess he couldn’t get the right kind of priority to get the manpower or the equipment.” She laughed. “Then when the war ended, the price of the ore fell. Stayed down for years and then went shooting up. Then Hal got himself lost and that tied it all up once again.”

“And by the time she had Breedlove declared dead, the price of ore had gone down. Is that right?”

“Right,” Mrs. Rivera said. And looked thoughtful.

“And now it’s up again,” Leaphorn said.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“You think that might be why the Breedlove Corporation would pay me the twenty thousand?”

She looked over her glasses at him. “That’s an unkind thought,” she said, “but I confess it occurred to me.”

“Even though Hal’s widow owns the place now?”

“She owns it, unless they can prove she had something to do with killing him. We had our lawyer look into that. She wanted to extend a mortgage on the place.” She looked mildly apologetic. “Can’t take chances, you know, with your investors’ money.”

“Did you extend the mortgage?”

Mrs. Rivera folded her arms again. But finally she said, “Well, yes, we did.”

Leaphorn grinned. “Could I guess then that you don’t think she had anything to do with killing Breedlove? Or anyway, nobody is ever going to prove it?”

“I just own a piece of this bank,” Mrs. Rivera said. “There’s people I’m responsible to. So I’d have to agree with you. I thought the loan was safe enough.”

“Still do?”

She nodded, remembering. Then shook her head.

“When it happened, I mean when he just disappeared like that, I had my doubts. I always thought Elisa was a fine young lady. Good family. Raised right. She used to help take care of her grandmother when the old lady had the cancer. But you know, it sure did look suspicious. Hal inherits the Lazy B and then the very same week—or pretty close to that, anyway—he’s gone. So you start thinking she might of had herself another man somewhere and—well, you know.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Leaphorn said. “What do you think now?”

“I was wrong,” she said.

“You sound certain,” Leaphorn said.