Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (3 page)

“You’re thinking they must have liked to walk.”

“Well, there’s that,” Chee said. “But maybe they wanted to hide the
truck. Or if it was found, keep it far enough from the barn so there
wouldn’t be a connection.”

“Uh-huh,” Largo said, and sipped coffee. “The FBI says the truck was
disabled.”

“Out there, it’s easy enough to blow tires or bust an oil pan on the
rocks if you want to,” Chee said.

Largo nodded. “I remember back at Tuba City you did that to a couple
of our units, and you claimed you weren’t even trying.”

Chee let that pass. “Anyway,” he said, “I just hope that airplane
had enough gas in it to get ‘em out of our jurisdiction.”

“Full tank, the owner said."

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Chee said. “I mean how neat
everything worked out on both ends of this business.”

Largo nodded. “If this was my responsibility now, I’d be getting
that rancher’s fingerprints and checking out his record and seeing if
he was maybe tied up with survivalists, or the Earth Liberation Front,
or the tree-huggers, or one of the militia.”

“I imagine the FBI is taking care of that. That’s the part they’re
good at,” Chee said. “And how about the casino end? What do you hear
about that?”

“They think the rent-a-cop was part of the team. Filled ’em in on
when the money was sacked up for the Brinks pickup. Which wires to cut,
which security people had the evening off. All that.”

“Any evidence?”

Largo shrugged. “Nothing much I know about. This Teddy Bai they’re
holding in the hospital, he had a juvenile record. Witnesses said he
was acting skittish all evening. Waiting around out in the lot when he
was supposed to be in watching the drunks.”

“That’s not much,” Chee said.

“They probably have more than that,” Largo said. “You know how they
are. The feds don’t tell us locals anything unless they have to. They
think we might gossip about it and screw up the investigation.”

Chee laughed. “What! Us gossip?”

Largo was grinning, too.

“Have they connected Bai with any of the suspects?”

Largo laughed. “That cold air up in Alaska made an optimist out of
you. Not a hint far as I hear. There was some guessing that one of the
militia did it to get money for blowing something up, or maybe it was
the Earth Liberation Front, but I haven’t heard Bai was in any of them.
The Earth Liberation folks have been pretty quiet since they burned up
all those buildings at the Vail ski resort. Anyway, if anything checked
out, they haven’t gotten around to informing the Navajo Tribal Police.”

“What do you think, Captain? Has your own grapevine been sending any
messages about Bai that you haven’t gotten around to telling the feds
about?”

Largo studied Chee, his expression suggesting he didn’t like the
tone of that, and he wasn’t sure he would answer it. But he did.

“If Deputy Sheriff Bai is on the wrong side of this one, I haven’t
heard it,” he said.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito was absolutely correct when she
reminded Chee that he knew a lot of people around Shiprock. That had
paid off. A chat with a senior San Juan County undersheriff, a drop-in
talk with an old friend in the county clerk’s office at Aztec, a visit
at the Farmington pool hall and another at the Oilmen’s Bar and Grill
had provided him with a headful of information about the Ute Casino in
general and Teddy Bai in particular.

The casino came off better than he’d expected. There was the usual
and automatic assumption that organized crime must have a finger in it
somehow, but no one could offer any support for that. Otherwise, the
people most likely actually to know anything considered it well run. No
one had any specific notion about who might have been the robbery’s
inside man if Bai wasn’t. There was agreement that Bai had been a wild
kid and mixed opinion on his character in later life, with the
consensus in favor of salvation. He had married a girl in the Streams
Come Together Clan, but that hadn’t lasted. One of the regulars at
Oilmen’s said since the divorce, Bai came in now and then with a young
woman. Who? Chee asked. He didn’t know her, but he described her as
‘cute as a bug’s ear.' It wasn’t the metaphor Chee would have chosen,
but it could fit Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

It was also at Oilmen’s that he learned Bai had been taking flying
lessons.

“Flying lessons?” Chee said. “Really? Where?”

Chee’s source for this was a New Mexico State Police dispatcher
named Alice Deal. She delayed taking the intended bite from her
cheeseburger to wave the free hand toward the Farmington Airport, which
sat, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, on the mesa looking
down on the city.

The sign over the office door of Four Corners Flight declared it the
source of charter flights, aircraft rentals, repair, sales, parts,
supplies and FAA-certified flight instruction. It didn’t appear to be
busy in any of those categories when Chee walked into the front office.
The only person on the premises was a woman in the manager’s office.
She interrupted her telephone conversation long enough to wave Chee in.

“Well, now,” she was saying, "that’s no way to behave. If Betty acts
like that, I just wouldn’t invite her anymore." She motioned Chee into
a chair, listened a moment longer, said, "Well, maybe you’re right.
I’ve got a customer. Got to go,” and hung up.

Chee introduced himself and his subject.

“Bai,” she said. “He owes us for a couple of lessons. The FBI
already talked to us about him.”

“Could you -"

“Matter of fact, they wanted the names of everybody we’d been
teaching for way back. Then they came back again to talk specifically
about Teddy.”

“Could you tell me if he had his license yet?”

“I doubt it. You’re-going to have to talk to Jim Edgar,” she said.
“He’s out there talking to the people at the DOE copter, and if he’s
not there, he’ll be working in the hangar.”

The copter was a big white Bell with Department of Energy
identification markings. Round white bathtub-sized containers had been
attached above the skids, and a woman in blue coveralls was doing
something technical at one of them. The only others present were two
men in the same sort of coveralls engaged in conversation. Probably
pilot and copilot. Chee tried to guess what the big tubes would
contain, with no luck. Obviously none of these people was Jim Edgar.

He found Edgar in the back of the hangar, muttering imprecations and
doing something at a workbench to something that looked like a small
electric engine. Chee stopped a polite distance away and stood waiting.

Edgar put down a small screwdriver, sucked at a freshly injured
thumb and inspected Chee.

Chee explained himself.

“Teddy Bai,” Edgar said, inspecting his thumb as he said it. “Well,
he’d soloed, but he wasn’t near ready to be licensed. He was sort of
mediocre as a student. I already told the FBI fellas if he was going to
be flying that old L-17, I didn’t want to be along on the trip.”

“That’s the one that was stolen? Why not?”

“He was learning in a new Cessna. Everything modern. Tricycle
landing gear. Power-assisted stuff. Different instrumentation. Piper
built that L-17 thing for the army in World War Two. Easy enough to
fly, I guess, if you understand it, but you’d do a lot of things
different than that little Cessna he was learning in.”

Edgar paused, seeking a way to explain this. “For example that was
one of the first of that sort of plane to use wing flaps. But you can’t
use ‘em on the L-17 if your airspeed is over eighty. And you have to
set the tabs on the ground. Little things like that you have to know
about.”

“And more than fifty years old,” Chee said. “Do you know anything
about what shape it was in?”

Edgar laughed. “From what I heard on the television, the FBI thinks
those casino robbers flew away in it. They better be lucky if they did.
Unless Old Man Timms decided to spend some money on it since I saw it.”

Chee found himself getting more and more interested in this
conversation.

“Was that recently? What was wrong with it?”

Edgar grinned at him. “How much time you got?”

“Any serious stuff?”

“Well, he brought it in for an FAA inspection last autumn. Wanted to
get the FAA airworthy certification renewed. Way overdue anyway for an
overage plane like that one, and he could have gotten in trouble for
just flying it. First thing I noticed he’d let the mice get into it. He
keeps it in a barn out at his ranch, which ain’t too uncommon out here.
But if you do that, you’ve got to keep the rodents from chewing on
things. Set the tail wheel in a bucket of kerosene, maybe. So the
wiring and fabric needed inspection, and the engine was running sour.
Then these things have twelve-gallon gasoline tanks built into each
wing root, feeding into a header tank behind the engine fire wall. Had
a little leak in one of the lines.”

Edgar shrugged. “Other things, too.”

“He got them fixed?”

“He got me to give him an estimate. Said it was way too damn high."
Edgar chuckled. “Said he’d sell me the plane for half that. He was
going to fly it up to Blanding and get the inspection done at
CanyonAire up there. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“Would you have a phone number for Mr Timms?” Chee asked. “Or his
address?”

“Sure.”

Edgar walked across the hangar to his desk and sorted through a
Rolodex file. Chee stood watching, trying to understand his motive for
what he was doing. What did this have to do with Bernie’s boyfriend’s
problem? Had he spent so many hours fishing and fighting mosquitoes in
Alaska that he yearned for some way to get himself into trouble? Was he
hungering for some explanation of the wildly illogical way the casino
bandits had managed their escape? Whatever his motive, Captain Largo
would be very unhappy indeed if Largo learned that Chee had stuck his
nose into FBI business and the FBI caught him at it.

Edgar interrupted these thoughts by handing him a copy of a Mountain
Mutual Insurance claim form.

“He had me sign off on his insurance claim. He’d left the plane out
in the weather and gotten some hail damage,” Edgar said. “That was
several years ago, but as far as I heard, he hasn’t moved.”

Chee jotted the information he wanted into his notebook, thanked
Edgar and headed back to his truck. Then a sudden thought caused him to
grin. With the plane now stolen, Timms would be filing another
insurance claim.

“Mr Edgar,” he shouted. “Do you remember what you’d have had to
charge Timms for those repairs? When he said he’d sell it for half your
estimate?”

“I think the estimate was close to four thousand dollars,” Edgar
said. “But if I was stupid enough to want that thing, and made him an
offer, he’d have said it was a valuable antique and asked for about
thirty thousand.”

Chee laughed. That, he thought, would probably be about what Timms
would claim from his insurance company.

“How about using your telephone?” Chee asked. “And the directory.”

He punched in the Mountain Mutual Insurance Farmington agent’s
number, identified himself, asked the woman who ran the place if she
still handled Eldon Timms's insurance.

“Unfortunately,” she said.

“His airplane, too?”

“Same answer,” she said. “Or I guess you’d say the former airplane,
the one those robbers stole?”

“Does he have another one?”

“Lordy, I hope not,” she said.

“He file a claim on it?”

“Yes, indeedy, he did. Right away. I just heard about the robbers
stealing a plane out there and flying off in it, and he’s on the phone
asking about getting his money. And I said, “What’s the hurry. They
have to land someplace and the cops recover it and you get it back.”
And he said, “If that happens, we tear up the claim.”

“How much was the insurance?”

“Forty thousand,” she said. “He just jacked it up to that a couple
of months ago.”

“Sounds like quite a bit for a fifty-year-old aircraft,” Chee said.

“I thought so,” she said. “But no skin off my nose. Timms was the
one paying the premium. He said it was an antique, a real rare
airplane, and he was going to sell it to that military-aircraft museum
in Tucson. I have a feeling he was using that higher-insured value to
sort of—you know—establish a sales price.”

Edgar had been standing nearby, listening.

“That do it for you?”

“Yeah,” Chee said, "and thanks. But by the way, what’s that Energy
Department helicopter doing here? And what’s the DOE doing with those
big white pods?”

“Actually, the pods aren’t DOE, they’re EPA,” Edgar said. “You are
looking at a rare case of inter-agency cooperation. The Environmental
Protection bunch borrows the copter and the pilots from the DOE’s
Nevada Test site. They got radiation detectors in those pods, and they
use them to find old uranium mines. Get the hot stuff covered up.”

After he left Four Corners Flight, Chee dropped in at the New Mexico
State Police office below the airport and made two more calls—the first
one to the Air War Museum at Tucson. Yes, the manager told him, Mr
Timms had flown his L-17 down in June and offered it for sale. And,
yes, they would have liked to add it to their collection, but they
hadn’t made an offer. Why not? The usual reason, said the manager. He
wanted way too much for it. He was asking fifty thousand.

The second call was to Cowboy Dashee, his old friend from boyhood.
But it wasn’t just to reminisce. Deputy Sheriff Dashee worked for the
Sheriff’s Department of Apache County, Arizona, which meant the ranch
of Eldon Timms—at least the south end of it—might be in Deputy Dashee’s
jurisdiction.

For no reason except habit born of childhood in a crowded hogan, Joe
Leaphorn awoke with the first light of dawn. The bedroom he and Emma
had shared for three happy decades faced both the sunrise and the noisy
street. When Leaphorn had noted the noise disadvantage to Emma she had
pointed out that the quieter bedroom had no windows facing the dawn. No
further explanation was needed.