The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 (18 page)

"Did he say what he was arranging?"

She shook her head. "I think he called it 'some just-in-case, backup insurance.'"

"No details?"

"No. He said he had to run."

Leaphorn chose to let the silence linger. Navajos are conditioned to polite silences, but he had learned long ago that they put pressure on most
belagaana
. It had that effect on Peggy McKay.

"And he said he'd be seeing me in a few hours. And he loved me."

Leaphorn nodded.

"I know everybody thinks Marvin was a crook, and I guess the way the laws are written, sometimes he was. But it was just his way of making a living, and he always did it in ways that wouldn't really hurt people."

"Do you think that he was selling Mr. Denton what Denton wanted to buy?"

"You mean the location of that Golden Calf Mine—or whatever you call it?"

"Yes."

"I never much believed in those treasure stories myself," Peggy McKay said. "But, yes. Marvin had done a lot of work on this Golden Calf thing. For more than a year. I think he was selling Mr. Denton everything you could possibly get to find that place. Whatever it was. I do."

"Do you think he pulled a gun on Denton?"

"No. Denton made that up."

"The police found the gun."

"Marvin didn't have a gun. He never did have one. He didn't like them. He said anyone who did the kind of work he did was crazy to have a gun."

"You told the officers that?"

"Of course," she said. "They seemed to think that's what a wife would be expected to say. And later when the sentencing came up, I told the district attorney. He said that pistol hadn't been recorded anywhere, and they hadn't been able to trace it."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "That's often the case."

"It was like they took for granted I was lying. It was finished. Marvin had a criminal record. He was dead. And Mr. Denton admitted shooting him. Why worry."

Leaphorn thought she had probably summed the situation up very well. But he just nodded. He was putting together what Peggy McKay had told him. He was thinking that the death of Marvin McKay looked an awful lot like a carefully planned and premeditated murder. And that left him two puzzles to solve. The one he had brought with him: Linda Denton was still missing with no reason why. And a new one. He couldn't think of a reason, short of insanity, why Denton would have wanted to kill Marvin McKay.

Chapter Nineteen

I know you've never had much use for academic methods," Louisa told Leaphorn, "but for heaven's sake, doesn't it make sense, when you're trying to solve a problem, to collect all the information available?"

His inability to find a good answer to that had led Joe Leaphorn to call Jim Chee at Chee's Shiprock office. Chee was en route to a meeting at ntp headquarters in Window Rock, the secretary said, but she'd have the dispatcher contact him and ask him to call Leaphorn. That happened. Leaphorn told Chee he was developing serious doubts about Wiley Denton's role in the McKay homicide. He asked Chee if he knew anything new that might strengthen the notion of a connection between the McKay and Doherty cases.

"Not me," Chee said. "But I think Osborne may have been putting some pieces together. And we may be about to make a mistake. Could we get together and talk?"

"What mistake?"

"The Bureau is getting a search warrant for Peshlakai's place."

"Bad idea?"

"I can't see Peshlakai killing anyone," Chee said. "But when you invest too much time in a suspect, you're inclined to get stuck with him. I'm early anyway. Okay if I stop by your place before checking in with the office?"

"I'll have the coffee on."

"Lay out a cup for Officer Manuelito, too," Chee said. "This Doherty homicide is her case." He laughed. "In my opinion, that is. We'll be there in about forty-five minutes."

"Officer Manuelito is with you?"

"Yes," Chee said, with no explanation.

For Leaphorn, with half his lifetime spent with the Navajo Tribal Police and thus battle-scarred by years of dealing with various federal law enforcement agencies, no explanation was needed. Officer Manuelito had been chosen by the Federals as their designated scapegoat in the difficult Doherty homicide. The fact that she had screwed up the supposed crime site had not been erased by her discovery of the genuine crime site. The meeting to which Chee had been summoned probably had been instigated by a Bureau of Indian Affairs law-and-order bureaucrat, and would involve the criminal investigator assigned by the bia, someone from the fbi, someone in the top ranks of the Navajo Nation's justice department, and assorted others, and Chee had brought Bernie along to defend herself and explain how she had found where the victim had apparently actually been shot.

By the time Chee's car parked in Leaphorn's driveway, Louisa had the kitchen's dining table set for four.

Leaphorn's old mugs had been put back on the shelf and replaced by cups and saucers—and each of the four places she had set was equipped with napkin, spoon, and a plate for cookies.

Louisa had stopped by en route to Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation where she hoped to locate an elderly Ute purported to have an account from his maternal great-grandfather of Ute warfare with Comanche raiders in the 1840s.

"But that can wait," Louisa said. "If you don't mind, I'll hang around and find out what's going on with this mysterious murder of yours."

"It's not my murder," Leaphorn had said. But he couldn't think of a way to tell her that maybe it would be better if she went about her academic business and left homicide to the cops. Then, too, he wasn't actually a cop himself any longer.

When the real cops arrived, they didn't seem to care, either. In fact, Bernadette seemed pleased. She and Louisa had gotten along well, and Bernie was greeted with a hug. But Chee had a meeting to attend. He looked at his watch, then at Leaphorn.

"I talked to Mrs. Marvin McKay," Leaphorn said, getting right to the point, "and she said several things of interest. One. She said McKay didn't have a gun. Had never had a gun. Always said that carrying a gun was insane."

Chee nodded. Waiting. Knowing that Leaphorn knew he'd be skeptical.

"The gun the police found on the floor by McKay's body was a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. A heavy old Colt model with a medium-length barrel. Too big to go into his pants' pockets. I put it in the pocket of McKay's jacket—an expensive leather job. I could hardly force it in. Hard to get it out. Denton told me McKay pulled the pistol out of his jacket pocket as he was preparing to leave, carrying Denton's case with the money in it, and his own case. That would be hard to do, but possible, I guess."

He glanced at Chee, found him looking more interested and less skeptical.

"So we go to item two. No holes in the jacket. No blood on it. And no jacket on McKay's body when the law arrived. It was hanging on the back of a chair. It makes it seem sort of obvious that the shooting didn't happen while McKay was leaving."

He looked at Chee again, and at Bernie. Both nodded.

"So I'm left wondering why Denton lied to me about it. Which brings us to some other things." He described what Mrs. McKay had told him about the call from her husband, about Denton questioning McKay about the whereabouts of the mine and McKay giving him only a rough description. That led Leaphorn to the peculiar question of the two maps.

"If we believe Mrs. McKay, her husband told Denton he was selling him a map of a mine site on Mesa de los Lobos. But Denton told me McKay tried to sell him a location in the southeastern end of the Zuñi Mountains. I can't think of a reason she would have to lie about it. How about Denton? Any thoughts about why he'd want to mislead me about that?" Leaphorn asked. "Any ideas about that? Or any of this?"

Chee broke the extended silence.

"If we make this McKay homicide a premeditated murder, it looks to me like it makes connecting it with Doherty a lot more plausible. Or does it?"

"It might," said Bernie, "if we could find the motive for either one of them."

"Who owns the land?" Louisa asked. She rose and walked to the coffeepot.

"Have you run into anything at all," Chee asked, "that connects Doherty and McKay in the past? Anything that would have got him looking into the McKay stuff down at the sheriffs office beyond this Golden Calf business?"

"Not that I know of," Leaphorn said. "To tell the truth I haven't been thinking much about the Doherty homicide until now. Until wondering if it might help explain this funny business with Denton and the damned maps."

Louisa was back with Leaphorn's coffeepot. She poured them each a cup. "Have any of you checked into who owns the land all this map business is about?"

"I guess it could be owned by about anybody," Leaphorn said. "It's part of Checkerboard. Partly land reserved for the Navajo tribe that could be leased out. And some of it was granted to the railroad and then sold off into various ownerships. Part of it is Bureau of Land Management property, and that's probably leased for ranching. Maybe a little of it might be U.S. Forest Service, but I doubt that."

"You know," said Bernie, "I think Professor Bourbonette is asking a good question."

"Yes," said Leaphorn. "It might tell us something."

"I'll find out," Louisa said.

Leaphorn chuckled. "Louisa used to be a real estate operator. For a little while when she was in school," he said.

Louisa's expression suggested she did not like the tone of that. "When I was a student, and a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and an assistant professor," she said. "Doing what you do to make a halfway decent living in the academic world. I was in charge of checking titles, looking into credit, and some price estimating. So, yes, I know how to find out who owns property."

"Great," Chee said. "It wouldn't hurt to know that."

"Another question I want to bring up. See if you have any suggestions," said Leaphorn, who was eager to change the subject.

"Mrs. McKay said her husband told her he had what he called'some just-in-case backup insurance,' in case Denton was intending to cheat him. Anyone have any ideas about that?"

They discussed that while they drank their coffee. But no one came up with anything that seemed plausible to Leaphorn.

"And finally, how about this one. How did whoever killed Doherty get home again? I doubt if old Hostiin Peshlakai could have walked all the way from the Arizona border back to his hogan. And I doubt if Wiley Denton was much of a walker. If you agree with that, who was the accomplice and how did it work?" He gazed at Chee. "If Agent Osborne is about to make Peshlakai the official suspect, how did he solve that puzzle?"

Chee laughed. "I've been wondering about that myself. If the Feds have an answer, they haven't told me."

"Hostiin Peshlakai had a cellphone," Bernie said.

"What!" said Chee. "How do you know?"

"It was in a boot box on a shelf with some of his ceremonial things," Bernie said.

Chee looked abashed, shook his head. "I noticed that box," he said. "His pollen containers, his medicine bundle, other things. But I guess I didn't really look at it."

"Well," said Leaphorn, "that might solve the riddle for Peshlakai. Maybe he walked a mile or two from the truck and then called a friend to come and pick him up." He thought about that idea. "Or something like that."

"But I wonder how many of Peshlakai's friends have telephones," Bernie said.

"If you turn it around, Denton uses his cell phone to call George Billie, that man who works for him," Chee said.

"Or," said Leaphorn, and laughed, "maybe Denton uses it to call Peshlakai to set everything up. How about that for linking your two homicides?"

"That would work fine," said Bernie. "Then all you'd need to go with that is a motive that fits both a superrich white oil-lease magnate and a dirt-poor Navajo shaman."

Chapter Twenty

Technically, it was not Sergeant Chee's day off, but he had logged it as off-duty time because he didn't want someone in authority demanding that he explain what he'd done with it. He had intended to use it to eliminate any doubts he might have of Hostiin Peshlakai's innocence. His instincts as a traditional Navajo told him Peshlakai was not guilty of shooting Thomas Doherty or anyone else. However, his instincts as a policeman were at war with that. He wanted to resolve this problem, and he had thought of a way to do it. His reasoning went like this.

If Peshlakai was—as Chee was almost certain—a well-schooled and believing Navajo medicine person, then Peshlakai would avoid violence. But if circumstances had driven him to it, if he had killed anyone, he would be beset by guilt, by knowledge that he had violated the rules laid down by various Holy People. Thus, he would seek a cure for the sickness brought on by these broken taboos. Shamans cannot cure themselves.

The first step, Chee decided, would be to ask Peshlakai himself about it. He called the fbi office in Gallup, asked for Osborne, and asked Osborne if he'd noticed that Peshlakai had a cellphone in his hogan. Osborne had noticed. Had he gotten the number, checked calls Peshlakai had been making? That was being done. Chee asked for the number.