Threepersons Hunt (25 page)

“I persuaded Joe Threepersons to get me off the spot. In the privacy of this room I'm ready to admit to you that I was guilty of suborning Joe to perjury and tampering with evidence and maybe half a dozen other crimes on that level. But I didn't force Joe to do it, there was no extortion. I offered him a deal and he took it. I knew he would; I make it a point to know the character of the people who work for me.

“Now it may well be that whoever killed Ross Calisher decided he had a reason to kill Joe's wife and boy but I wouldn't know anything about that. All I'm sure of is. that if he's gunning for me he's gunning for the wrong man.”

3.

Watchman said, “A few minutes ago you told me in no uncertain terms that you weren't the one who was paying his family off.”

“Well I'm not exactly retracting that. Let's just say I plead
nolo contendere.
Suppose we drop that. It's just a sideshow anyway.”

“There's another item doesn't ring true. You're telling me your wife was having an affair with your foreman. That's not the way I've heard it.”

“Then you've heard it wrong. If I wasn't in a position to know, who was?”

“Your ex-wife,” Watchman murmured. “Kendrick's wife.”

He watched for the effect and was rewarded. Rand didn't move at all but somehow his look became the look of a man who was holding his arm before his face.

“So it just isn't quite good enough,” Watchman told him.

“She's a liar,” Rand murmured, but it was without conviction. “Naturally she'd try to slander me. She hates me. I think that was what attracted her to that slime of a lawyer in the first place. It was the thing they had in common, their hate for me.”

“When did she start seeing Kendrick?”

“When?”

Watchman just waited and finally Rand shrugged as if it didn't matter. “I suppose it was around that same time.”

“Before or after the murder?”

“I didn't find out about it until some time after the night I found Ross dead. It may have been going on for some time before that.”

“You've been divorced three or four times, haven't you?”

“What of it?”

“How can you afford it? This is a community property state.”

“I learned, after the first one. They all signed quit-claims against any properties of mine. Before I married them they had to sign. Gwen came to me without much more than the clothes on her back and she left the same way. I sent her to Nevada to get the divorce. There's no community property law up there.”

“That kind of quit-claim wouldn't hold up in an Arizona court, would it?”

“What's this supposed to be leading up to, Trooper?”

“I'm just wondering if maybe you weren't alone here that night. Maybe your wife was here to.”

“She wasn't. She was in Phoenix overnight, I believe. Or at least she said she was. She may have been, well, visiting some friend of hers.”

“Like Kendrick?”

“I doubt it but it's possible.”

“I understand she's not exactly a shrinking violet. She'd make a pretty tough antagonist in a fight, wouldn't she?”

“What are you aiming at?”

“Maybe she wasn't having an affair with Calisher. Maybe he wanted her to but she didn't want any part of him. Maybe he tried something with her and she defended herself by shooting him. Then maybe you told her you'd cover up for it if she'd be a good girl and go away quietly and get the divorce without demanding half your belongings.”

Rand's head tipped over a bit to one side. He smiled a little. ‘That's pretty good. There's no truth in it, but it's pretty good. You want to try that one on the judge, see how he likes it?”

It was the wrong tack then. Somewhere back there Watchman had taken the right tack but he'd got away from it; he could see that in the way Rand had relaxed. It wasn't a pose. Rand was almost anxious for him to continue along that line of reasoning and so Watchman dropped it. If push came to shove he'd find that Gwen Rand had a perfect alibi for the night of Calisher's murder. Nothing short of that kind of insurance could make Rand this confident, not in the strained state of fear he was in right now.

He said, “Joe tells me you've got Harlan Natagee working for you.”

“Does he.” Rand contrived to maintain his attitude of amusement. “Now that's pretty far out.”

“Since we're in the privacy of this room, the way you keep pointing out, what about it?”

“What can I say? The only way Harlan Natagee would like to look at me is over the sights of a gun. He's a rednecked tin pisspot agitator, he likes to blow things up just to hear the noise. I wouldn't have dealings with that bastard if he was the last Indian alive. How could you trust an idiot like him? He's most likely a little bit psychotic, you know.”

“I understand it was Harlan Natagee's men who broke into Kendrick's office and stole the files on the water-rights case.”

“It may well have been.”

“You're the only one who could have benefited from the theft.”

“If that's what you think then you don't understand the workings of minds like Harlan Natagee's. He'd do anything he could to discredit a lawyer, particularly a white lawyer. He wants to take it all back to the days of tomahawks and scalping knives.”

“What do you think of Kendrick? Personally.”

“I hate his guts.”

“Because he stole your own wife from under your nose?”

“No, not really. Kendrick's the jealous type, I'm not. He was more jealous of her than I was, even back in those days when she was still my wife. I didn't care if she wanted to amuse herself with trash but I think it bothered Kendrick that she still had to put up the front of being my wife. He couldn't stand that. He talked her into getting the divorce even though she'd have been a lot better off financially if she'd stayed married to me. They could have gone on having their tawdry little fling in motel rooms.”

“And that didn't bother you?”

“I've got better things to do than work myself into a fury over things like that. She hadn't been much of a wife to me and I wasn't sorry to get rid of her but I'd have let it ride if she'd been willing. She made a pretty good hostess, she always knew which fork to use and she kept a good eye on the house staff here.”

“And you'd have settled for that?”

“Why not? Hell, a man can always hire sex by the hour. I didn't need her for that.”

Watchman felt uncomfortable; he knew there were men like that but in his gut he didn't understand them. What was the point in marriage if there wasn't something more to it?

“If it wasn't on account of your wife, why did you start hating Kendrick?”

“He's slime.”

“You said that before.”

Rand had dropped the letter-opener. Now he picked it up again and abruptly stabbed it down into the desk top. When he removed his hand the letter-opener stood erect by itself, impaled in the wood.

Rand said almost musingly, “The son of a bitch is colorblind, did you know that? When he gets a little upset he runs red lights because he can't remember whether it's red on top and green on the bottom or the other way around. I saw him run over a dog in the road once and the damn dog was right in the middle of the crosswalk on the green light. You imagine how tough it must have been for that dog to learn about crosswalks and green lights? And Kendrick wiped it right out like that because the bastard couldn't be bothered to think about whether the red light was on the top or the bottom.”

“And that's why you hate him? On account of a dog?”

“No. But it's a symptom. I look pretty ruthless to most people, don't I, but it's mainly because I'm a successful man. I've never treated another man like dirt. I just pick the best people for the jobs, that's my secret. I picked Joe Threepersons for that lineshack because I knew he was pretty thickheaded, he wouldn't get bored with the job and he had a sense of responsibility to his hire that you don't find much in men any more, especially when you've got to stick them out in the woods somewhere on a job where nobody's going to supervise them. I took one look at that wife of his and I knew she'd make sure he did his work. She had the puritan work-ethic right up her spine, that girl. Funny, considering the background she came from. Her father was a drunk.”

“Maybe that's what made her the way she was.”

“Maybe. Who knows. But Kendrick, he's the kind of man who'll pull the rug out from under anybody at all if he sees an advantage to it. He'd stick a knife in his own mother's back and twist it if he could get a good price for her blood. The day's going to come when he finds a better lay than Gwen, and when it does he'll throw her out like an old shoe. I never threw her out, I just didn't stand in the way when she elected to walk out. That's the difference between Kendrick and me.”

Now Watchman began to see it. Rand wasn't as callous as he wanted to think he was. He still had something for Gwen and wanted to think himself a better man than the one she'd left him for. Rand was never going to admit it but he had been hurt by Gwen's decision. Badly hurt, and that was why he hated Kendrick.

There were gaps. The identity of Maria's benefactor went unexplained; Rand first denied it and then hedged on the denial and why would he be vague about it if he had simply kept his word to Joe and put up the money for Maria and Joe Junior?

Watchman said, “There's a lot you're holding out. Right now I've got no leverage to pry it out of you but sooner or later I'll get it. You could save us the time.”

“I've told you everything I know that's relevant to the case. I've told you a whole lot that isn't. I don't think you're entitled to any more than that, and besides I can't think of anything else that would help. I've wondered myself, all these past six years, who it was that killed Ross. I even thought of hiring a private agency to look into it but I decided against it; the case was officially solved and if people started asking questions it could stir up trouble. From my point of view it was better to let Ross's killer go free than ruin my own position.”

“Didn't you make any guesses?”

“Of course. It could have been some irate husband. It could have been somebody with a grudge from Ross' past. He had a pretty checkered life on the rodeo circuit. Maybe it was some woman he'd left at the altar somewhere, who knows. It could have been anybody.”

“But it wasn't,” Watchman said. “Anybody like that, they'd have had no reason to kill Maria Threepersons.”

“I can't answer that one, I'm afraid. I'm as mystified as you are.”

The telephone rang.

Through the first three rings Rand didn't react to it; he was following some private line of thought. Then he jerked his head back. “Hell I forgot Wilma left for the day.” And reached for the phone. “Hello?” Then he waved the receiver at Watchman. “For you.”

Watchman crossed the room. “Hello?”

“How, red brother.” That was Buck Stevens. “Listen, I'm still in Whiteriver.”

“Didn't you find Harlan Natagee?”

“Seems he's in Oklahoma this week, something about an intertribal powwow, some Indian nationalism outfit he's tied up with. They don't expect him back for three, four days.”

“I guess that's just as well. Keep him out of the line of fire.”

“What you want me to do now?”

“I think maybe—”

“Hey,” Stevens interrupted, “I'm in that phone booth at the trading post here? I've got Tom Victorio tugging on my sleeve, he wants to talk to you.”

“Put him on.”

Victorio came on the line. “Listen, I couldn't talk before, I was on the office phone. I got to talk to you.”

“Go ahead and talk then.”

“It's what I found and what I didn't find last night. Dwight's got two file cabinets there. They're both locked. I've got a key to one of them, but I know he keeps the key to the other one in his desk so I got into both of them last night. You know those files on the water-rights case, the ones that were stolen?”

“What about them?”

“I found part of them. In the dead files, man. A whole bunch of my notes on precedent cases, they were in the case-closed file right down at the back of the bottom drawer. That's part of the stuff that was stolen. If I'd known that stuff was there it would have saved three months of work.”

“Any idea how it got there?”

“You bet your ass. You know Lisa Natagee, the girl on the front desk in the council house? She's the one who usually locks up the place at night.”

“She's Harlan Natagee's daughter?”

“She's Frank's daughter, he's the chief. But she's Harlan's niece.”

“Would she have a key to Kendrick's files?”

“She might know where he hides the keys in his desk. She does have keys to the offices, all the rooms in the building.”

“Is she the only one?”

“No, there's a lot of people with keys but it looks fishy to me. I mean she could have slipped in there one night and just moved that stuff from the active file into the closed files and nobody'd ever think of looking down there.”

“I thought you said there were jimmy marks on the window.”

“There were. And some of the missing stuff's still missing. But I still want to know how that stuff got there.”

“What about the trust fund?”

“There isn't any trust fund,” Victorio said. “At least no records. I even looked under Maria's maiden name. No file. The only file under Threepersons was the murder case. Now that ain't like Dwight, he's methodical, he keeps everything in triplicate just the way the Army does. I think he's got every letter he ever wrote or received.”

“What about the checks?”

“Nothing in the check stubs, man. Nothing at all. No deposits, no checks.”