Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  “It was Gomez. What did you think of him?”

  The question surprised Chee. He thought. “Interesting man. I wondered how he managed to lose so many fingers.”

  There was a long silence.

  “How did he lose those fingers?”

  “I don’t know,” Janet said. “I’m just trying to get some sort of handle on this man. On my client, really. I like to understand what I’m getting into.”

  “How did you manage to get involved with this Highhawk bird anyway?” Chee asked. “Are you specializing in really weird cases?”

  “That’s easy. Highhawk is part Navajo and very proud of it. He wants to be whole Navajo. Anyway, he talks like he does. So he wants a Navajo attorney.”

  “Totally his idea then,” Chee said, sounding skeptical. “You didn’t volunteer?”

  Janet laughed. “Well, there’s been a lot about the case in the papers here. Highhawk’s a conservator at the Smithsonian and he’d been raising hell about them keeping a million or so Native American skeletons in their warehouse, and last year they tried to fire him. So he went and filed a suit and won his job back. It was a First Amendment case. First Amendment cases get a lot of space in the Washington Post. Then he pulls this caper you arrested him for. He dug up a couple of graves up in New England, and of course he picked a historically prominent couple, and that got him a lot more publicity. So I knew about him, and I had read about the Navajo connection…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I think you have a strange one for a client,” Chee said. “Any chance to get him off?”

  “Not if he gets his way. He wants to make it a political debate. He wants to put the belagaana grave robbers on trial for robbing Indian graves while he’s on trial for digging up a couple of whites. It might work in Washington, if I could pick the right jury. But the trial will be up in New Haven or someplace up in New England. Up in that part of the country everybody’s happy memories are of hearing great-granddaddy tell about killing off the redskins.“

  Another pause. Chee found himself looking at the picture. Mary Landon and Jim Chee on the doorstep, clowning. Mary’s hair was incredibly soft. Out on the malpais that day they went on the picnic, it had blown around her face. He had used his first finger to brush it away from her forehead. Mary’s voice saying: “You have a choice. You know if you go to the FBI Academy, then you’ll do well, and you know they’ll offer you a job. They need some Navajo agents. It’s not as if you didn’t have any choice.” And he had said, you have a choice, too, or something like that. Something inane.

  “You’re probably supposed to be working,” Janet Pete was saying, “and I don’t know what I called about exactly anyway. I think I just hoped you could tell me something helpful about Gomez. Or about Highhawk.”

  Or wanted to hear a friendly voice, Chee thought. It was his own feeling, exactly. “Maybe I’m overlooking something,” Chee said. “Maybe if I understood the problem better—”

  “I don’t understand the problem myself.”

  Janet said. She exhaled noisily. “Look. What would you think if you’re talking to your client and it went like this. This guy’s going on trial for desecrating a grave. You are being very cool, trying to talk some sense into him about how to handle it if he actually did what they accuse him of, and all of a sudden he says: ‘Of course I did it. I’m proud I did it. But would you be my lawyer for another crime?’ And I say, ‘What crime?’ And he says, ‘It hasn’t been committed yet.’ And I don’t know what to say to that so I say something flippant. ‘If you’re going to dig up another grave, I don’t want to hear about it,’ I say. And he says, ‘No, this one would be something better than that.’ And I look at him, surprised, you know. I’m thinking it’s a joke, but his face is solemn. He’s not joking.”

  “Did he tell you what crime?”

  “I said, ‘What crime? How serious?’ And he said we can’t talk about it. And, if we told you, you would be an accessory before the fact. He was smiling when he said that. Notice, he said we.”

  “We,” Chee repeated. “Any idea who? Is he part of some sort of Indian Power organization? Is somebody working with him on this ‘free the bones’ project?”

  “Well, he’s always talking about his Taho Society but I think he’s the only member. This time I think he meant Gomez.”

  “Why Gomez?”

  “I don’t know. Gomez brings him to my office. I call Highhawk at Highhawk’s place, and Gomez answers the telephone. Gomez always seems to be around. Did you know Gomez bonded him out after you picked him up in Arizona?”

  “I didn’t,” Chee said. “Maybe they’re just friends.”

  “I wanted to ask you about that,” Janet said. “Did they come to the Yeibichai together? Did you get the feeling they were friends? Old friends?”

  “They were strangers,” Chee said. “I’m sure of that.” He remembered the scene, described it to Janet—Gomez arriving first, waiting in the rental car, disinterested, making contact with Highhawk. He described the clear, obvious fact that Highhawk didn’t know Gomez. “I’d say that Gomez came to the Yeibichai just to find Highhawk. But how could he have known Highhawk was coming, if they were really strangers?”

  “That’s easy. The same way the FBI knew where to arrest him,” Janet said. “He told everybody, the woman he rents his apartment from, his neighbors, his drinking buddies, the people he works with at the Smithsonian, told everybody, that he was coming out to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai for his shima’sa’ni’.”

  “He used that word? Maternal grandmother?”

  “Well, he told them he had found this old woman in his Bitter Water Clan. He claims his maternal grandmother was a Bitter Water Dineh. And he claims the old woman had invited him to her Yeibichai.”

  Chee found he was getting interested in all this. “Well, whatever, when I saw them, Gomez was trying to get acquainted with a stranger. Either that, or they’re both good actors. And who would they be trying to fool?” Chee didn’t wait for an answer to that rhetorical question. He was thinking about what Janet had said about the crime not yet committed. Something serious. Something “we” couldn’t talk about.

  “I’d say you have a very flaky client,” Chee added. “Any reason to think this isn’t just some neurotic Lone Ranger trying to impress a pretty lawyer?”

  “There’s a little bit more,” Janet Pete said. “His telephone is tapped.”

  “Oh,” Chee said. “He tell you that?”

  “I heard the click. The interference on the line. I called him just before I called you. In fact, that’s what actually motivated me to make this call.”

  “Oh,” Chee said. “I thought maybe you were missing me.”

  “That too,” Janet said. “That, and somebody’s been following me.”

  “Ah,” Chee said. He was remembering Janet Pete. How she had handled him when she thought he was mishandling one of her clients the first time they had met; how she had dealt with the situation when he’d damaged a car she was buying. Janet Pete was not a person who would be easy to spook.

  “If not exactly following me, then keeping an eye on my place. And on me. I see this guy outside my apartment. I see him in the newsstand below where we work. I see him too often. And I never saw him until I got tied up with this Highhawk business.”

  Chee had been holding Mary Landon’s letter in his left hand, folding and unfolding it between his fingers. Now he dropped it into his out-basket on top of the little folder which held his round-trip Continental Airlines ticket to Milwaukee. He thought he might go to Washington, drop in at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. See what it looked like. Talk to a couple of people he knew back there. See what it would feel like to work for the Bureau.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m coming to Washington anyway. Next day or two. I have some business at the FBI office. I’ll let you know exactly when and you set it up for me to talk to Highhawk. And Gomez, too, if you can. That is, if you want to see what I think of it.”

 
; “I do.” A long pause. “Thanks, Jim.”

  “It’ll be good to see you,” he said. “And I want to meet your boyfriend, the rich and famous attorney.”

  At least it would be better than two weeks lying around the trailer. And he had detected something in Janet Pete’s voice that he’d never heard before. She sounded frightened.

  Chapter Eight

  « ^ »

  Sunday Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had felt a lot better about the man with pointed shoes. His sense of the natural order of things had been restored. While in many ways Joe Leaphorn had moved into the world of the whites, his Navajo requirement for order and harmony remained. Every effect must have its cause, every action its necessary result. Unity existed, universal and eternal. And now it seemed that nothing violating this natural order had happened in the sagebrush plain east of Gallup. Apparently Pointed Shoes had flashed his bankroll in the wrong place, perhaps at a poker game in the observation car. The man with the knife had killed him, stopped the train, put the body under a convenient cover of chamisa brush, and gotten back on with the victim’s wallet.

  There were some holes in that theory, some unanswered questions. For example, what the devil had happened to the false teeth? What was the connection with the Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai? But basically much of the disharmony had seeped out of this homicide. Leaphorn could think of other things. He thought about cleaning his house, and getting ready for his vacation. As with most Navajo Tribal Policemen, vacation time for Leaphorn came after the summer tourist season ended and before winter brought its blizzards with their heavy work load of rescue operations. If Leaphorn wanted to take his vacation, now was the time. He had already postponed it once, simply because in the absence of Emma he could think of nothing he would enjoy doing. But he should take it. If he didn’t, his friends would notice. He would see more of those subtle little indications of their kindness and their pity that he had come to dread. So he would think of someplace to go. Something to do. And he would think of it today. Just as soon as he got the dishes done, and the dirty clothes down to the laundromat. But when the phone rang just as he was getting ready to go to lunch Monday he still hadn’t thought of anything. Lunch was going to be with Kennedy. Kennedy was in Window Rock on some sort of Bureau records-checking business and was waiting for him at the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation Motor Inn. He had decided he would ask Kennedy for suggestions about what to do with eighteen days off. Leaphorn picked up the receiver and said “Leaphorn,” in a tone which he hoped expressed hurry.

  The voice was Bernard St. Germain’s. Leaphorn had time for this call.

  “Pretty good guess you made,” St. Germain said. “Not perfect, but close.”

  “Good,” Leaphorn said. Now, he thought, Pointed Shoes becomes a homicide committed in interstate commerce. A federal case. Now the Bureau would be involved. More than eleven thousand FBI agents, well dressed, well trained, and highly paid, would be unleashed to attach an identity to the man with pointed shoes. The world’s most expensive crime lab would be involved. And if Pointed Shoes was important and a solution seemed imminent, law enforcement’s best-funded and most successful public relations machinery would spring into action. Kennedy, his old friend, with whom he was about to have lunch, would have to get to work.

  “What do you mean, close but not perfect?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Close because the Amtrak did stop that evening, and right about where your body was found. But nobody pulled the big hole lever,” St. Germain said. “The ATS system malfunctioned and stopped it.”

  “ATS?”

  “They used to call it the dead man’s switch,” St. Germain said. “If the engineer doesn’t push the button periodically, it automatically applies the air brakes. It’s just in case the engineer has a heart attack or a stroke or something. Or maybe goes to sleep. Then he doesn’t push the button and the ATS stops the train automatically.”

  “That means it was just an accident? A passenger couldn’t cause that? No question about it?”

  “No question at all. Such things have to be reported in writing. It’s all there on the delay report. The Amtrak was seven minutes behind schedule. Then, a few miles east of the Fort Wingate spur, the ATS shorted out or something and put on the brakes.”

  Leaphorn stared at the map on the wall behind his desk, rethinking his theory.

  “How long was it stopped?”

  “I knew you’d ask that,” St. Germain said. “It was stopped thirty-eight minutes. From 8:34 until 9:12 P.M. That would be about average, I think. The engineer has to get the air pressure up and the brakes have to be reset. So forth.”

  “Could passengers get off?”

  “Not supposed to.”

  “But could they?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “And get back on again?”

  “Yep.”

  “Would anybody see if someone did? Anybody on the train crew?”

  “You mean at night? After dark? It would depend. But probably not. Not if the guy didn’t want to be seen. It would be simple enough. You’d just have to wait until everybody was busy. Nobody looking.”

  “Bernard, what happens to the luggage if a passenger gets off before his destination and leaves it?”

  “They take it off at the end of the line—the turnaround point when they’re cleaning out the cars. It goes into the claims office. The Lost and Found. Or, if it comes out of a reserved compartment on the sleeper, or a roomette, then they’d do a tracer on it and send it back to the point of origin. So the passenger could pick it up there.”

  “This Amtrak that comes through here, would the turnaround point be Los Angeles?”

  “Not exactly. There’s an eastbound and a westbound each day. West is Number 3. East is Number 4.”

  “Who would I call there to find out about left-behind luggage?”

  St. Germain told him.

  Kennedy could wait a minute to have lunch with him. He called the Amtrak claims office in Los Angeles, and told the man who answered who he was, what he needed, and why he needed it. He gave the man the train and the date. Then he waited. It didn’t take long.

  “Yeah. There was a suitcase and some personal stuff left in a roomette on that train. We held it here to see if somebody would claim it. But now it’s gone back to Washington,” the man said.

  “Washington?”

  “That’s where the passenger boarded. He transferred to Number 3 in Chicago.”

  Leaphorn took the cap off his ballpoint, pulled his note pad toward him.

  “What was his name?”

  “Who knows? I guess you could get it from the claims office in Washington. Or from the reservations office. Wherever they keep that sort of records. That’s not my end of the business.”

  “How about locating the train crew? That possible?”

  “That’s Washington, too. That’s where that crew is based. I’d think it would be easy enough to get their names out of Washington.”

  Kennedy had already ordered when Leaphorn reached his table. He was eating a club sandwich.

  “You running on Navajo time?” he asked.

  “Always,” Leaphorn said. He sat, glanced at the menu, ordered green chili stew. He felt great.

  “I’ve learned a few things about that body,” he said. He told Kennedy about the Amtrak being stopped that night at the place where the body was left, and about what St. Germain had told him, and about the passenger’s baggage being left in the roomette.

  Kennedy chewed, looking thoughtful. He grinned, but the grin was faint. “If you don’t quit this, you know, you’re going to make a federal case out of it,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Do your famous FBI thing,” Leaphorn said.

  Kennedy swallowed, took a sip of water, nodded. “Okay. I’ll get somebody in Washington to go down and take a look at the luggage. We’ll see if they can get an identification. We’ll see where that leads us.”

  “What more could anyone ask?”

  “I can
think of a few more things you’re going to ask,” Kennedy said. “Based on our past experiences with you. It’ll turn out this luggage belongs to an alcoholic who has a habit of falling through cracks. So we will sensibly decide he’s not the body, but you won’t be happy with that.” Kennedy held up a hand, all fingers extended. He bent down one. “One. You’ll want some sort of latent fingerprint check on the luggage.” He bent down another. “Two. You’ll want identification of the eighty-two people who have handled it since the owner.” He bent down a third. “Three. You’ll want a rundown on everybody who was on that particular Amtrak trip.” Kennedy bent down the surviving finger. “Four. You’ll want interviews with the train crews. Five—” Kennedy had exhausted his supply of fingers. He extended his thumb. “In summation, you’ll want the same sort of stuff we’d do if the Emperor of Earth had been kidnapped by the Martians. Cost eighty-six billions in overtime and then it turns out that your body is a car dealer who got in an argument with somebody in the bar of the train and it’s not the business of the Bureau.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “It’s none of your business, either,” Kennedy added. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Leaphorn nodded again. “Not my business yet.” He took a spoonful of the stew, ate it. “But I wonder why he was going to the Yeibichai,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Kennedy said. “That seems strange.”

  “And if he was going, why was he almost a month early?”

  “I wonder about a lot of things,” Kennedy said. “I wonder why George Bush picked what’s-his-name for vice president. I wonder why the Anasazis walked away from all those cliff dwellings. I wonder why the hell I ever got into law enforcement. Or had lunch with you when I knew you’d be wanting a favor.”

  “And I wonder about that guy’s false teeth,” Leaphorn said. “Not so much where the false ones went as what happened to his original teeth.”

  Kennedy laughed. “I’m not that deeply into the wondering game,” he said.

  “There was nothing wrong with his gums, or his jawbone,” Leaphorn said. “That’s what the autopsy showed. And that’s why people have their teeth pulled.”