Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  Now, with the rain drumming down on his neck, he paid the cabby. He pulled his hat lower over his ears, and hurried across the sidewalk to the Amtrak office. He had an appointment with Roland Dockery, who was the person in the Amtrak bureaucracy stuck with handling such nondescript problems as Leaphorn represented.

  Dockery was waiting for him, a plump, slightly bald, and slightly disheveled man of perhaps forty. He examined Leaphorn’s Navajo Tribal Police identification through bifocal glasses with obvious curiosity and invited Joe to sit with a wave of his hand. He pointed to the luggage on his desk—a shabby leather suitcase and a smaller, newer briefcase.

  “The FBI’s already been through them,” Dockery said. “Like I told you on the phone. I guess they would have told you if they found anything.”

  “Nothing useful,” Leaphorn said. “What we’re looking for is anything that might connect the bags to a homicide we have out in New Mexico. I hope you won’t mind me going over some questions the FBI probably already covered.”

  “No problem,” Dockery said. He laughed. “No trouble about keys. The FBI already opened them.” He flipped open both cases with a flourish. Dockery was obviously enjoying this. It represented something unusual in a job that must be usually routine.

  Leaphorn sorted through the big case first. It held a spare suit, dark gray and of some expensive fabric, but looking much used. A sweater. Two dark blue neckties. White, long-sleeved shirts, some clean and neatly folded, some used and folded into a laundry sack. Eight altogether. Three used. Five clean. Leaphorn checked his notes. The neck and arm sizes matched the shirt on the corpse. Shorts and undershirts, also white. Same total, same breakdown. Same with socks, except the color now was black. He thought about the numbers and the timetable. He’d check but it seemed about right. If this was indeed the luggage of Pointed Shoes, then he had in fact been about three shirts west of Washington by the time he reached Gallup. Wearing shirt four when he was stabbed, with five clean ones to take him to where he was going. Or—if he was simply going to see Agnes Tsosie—home again to Washington.

  The smaller bag contained a jumble of things. Leaphorn glanced up from it but Dockery didn’t give him a chance to ask the question.

  “One of the cleanup crew packed it,” Dockery said. “Just dumped all the stuff that was around the roomette into the bag. I’ve got his name somewhere. The FBI had him in and talked to him when they checked on it.”

  “So this would be everything left lying around?” Leaphorn asked. And Dockery nodded his agreement. But it wasn’t everything, of course, Leaphorn knew. Odds and ends that seemed to have no value would have been discarded. Old newspapers, notes, empty envelopes, just the sort of stuff that might be most helpful would have been thrown away.

  But what hadn’t been thrown away was also helpful. First, Leaphorn noticed an almost empty tube of Fixodent and a small can of denture cleaner. He had expected to find them. If he hadn’t he would have doubted that this was the luggage of a man who wore false teeth. Three books, all printed in Spanish, added another bit of support. The clothing Pointed Shoes had been wearing had looked old-fashioned and foreign. So did the clothing in the suitcase. He found a thin little notebook, covered in black plastic, glanced at it, and set it aside. Under a sweater in the bag he found two pots, each wrapped in newspaper. He examined them. They were the sort Pueblo Indians made to sell to tourists—small, one with a black-on-white lizard design, the other geometric. Probably they had been purchased as gifts at the Amtrak station in Albuquerque, where such things were sold beside the track. But the pots interested Leaphorn less than the newspaper pages in which the purchaser had cushioned them.

  Spanish again. Leaphorn unfolded a wad of pages, looking for the name and the date. The name was El Crepúsculo de Libertad. Something-or-other of Liberty. Leaphorn’s working vocabulary in Spanish was mostly the Gallup-Flagstaff wetback variety. Now he ransacked his memory of the twelve credit hours he’d taken at Arizona State. He came up with “sunrise,” or perhaps “twilight.” Dawn seemed more likely. The Dawn of Liberty. The date on the page was late October, about two weeks before Pointed Shoes had been knifed. Leaphorn glanced at the headlines, getting only a word or two, but enough to guess the subject was politics. Neither of the crumpled pages included a place of publication.

  Leaphorn folded them into his pocket and sorted through the odds and ends in the bottom of the bag. He extracted a sheet of white note-paper, folded vertically as if to fit into a pocket. On it, someone had written what seemed to be a checklist.

  Pockets

  Prescription bottles eyeglasses (check case, too)

  dentures (if any)

  labels in coats address books, etc.

  letters, envelopes book plats (plates?) stuff written in books addresses on mags, etc.

  Leaphorn stared at the list, thinking. He showed it to Dockery. “What do you think of this?”

  Dockery looked at it. “Looks like some sort of shopping list,” Dockery said. “No, it’s not that. Reminders, maybe. Things to do.”

  Leaphorn put the list on the desk. He picked up the notebook he’d set aside, opened it. Several pages had been torn out. The writing in it was in Spanish, done with blue ink in a small, careful hand. He got out his wallet, extracted the note he’d found in the dead man’s shirt pocket. The handwriting matched the small, neat penmanship in the notebook. And it looked nothing at all like the handwriting on the list.

  “Do you happen to know if that fellow had a roommate?” he asked.

  “Just the single occupant,” Dockery said.

  “Any sign somebody broke in?”

  “Not that I know of,” Dockery said. “And I think I would have heard. I’m sure I would have. That’s the sort of thing that would get around.” He fished a pack of Winstons from his desk drawer, offered one to Leaphorn.

  “I finally managed to quit,” Leaphorn said.

  Dockery lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. “What are you fellows looking for, anyway?”

  “What did the FBI tell you?”

  Dockery laughed. “Not a damned thing. It was some young fella. He didn’t tell me squat.”

  “We found the body of a man beside the tracks east of Gallup. Stabbed. All identification gone. False teeth missing.” Leaphorn tapped the Fixodent with a finger. “Turns out the Amtrak had an emergency there at the right time. Turns out the baggage unclaimed from this roomette has also been stripped of all identification. The clothing we have here in this bag is the same size and type the corpse was wearing. So we think it’s likely that the man who reserved this roomette under the phony name was the victim.”

  “Hey, now,” Dockery said. “That’s interesting.”

  “Also,” Leaphorn added slowly, looking at Dockery, “we think that someone—probably the person who knifed our victim—got into this roomette, searched through his stuff, and took out everything that would help identify the corpse.”

  “Have you talked to the attendant?” Dockery asked.

  “I’d like to,” Leaphorn said. “And whoever it was who cleaned up the room, and packed up the victim’s stuff.”

  “He saw somebody in that roomette,” Dockery said.

  Leaphorn stopped leafing through the notebook and stared at Dockery. “He told you that?”

  “Conductor on that run’s a guy named Perez, an old-timer. He used to be our chapter chairman in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. He told me he and the guy traveling in that roomette would chat in Spanish now and then. You know, just polite stuff. He said the guy was a nice man, and kind of sickly. Had some sort of heart condition and the altitude out there had been bothering him. So when they had that non-scheduled stop there in New Mexico, after they got the train rolling again, Perez checked at the roomette to see if this guy needed any help getting off at Gallup.” Dockery paused, ashed his cigarette into something invisible in his desk drawer, inhaled more smoke. Through the window behind him Leaphorn noticed it was raining hard now.

  “There was a man in
there. Perez said that he tapped on the door and when nobody answered it, he was uneasy about this sick passenger so he unlocked it. And he said there was a man in there. He asked Perez what he wanted, and Perez told him he was checking to see if the passenger needed any help. The man said ‘No help needed’ and shut the door.” Dockery blew a smoke ring. “Seemed funny to Perez because he said he couldn’t see his passenger back in the roomette and he’d never seen the passenger and this guy together. So he was watching for the passenger when they made the Gallup stop. Didn’t see him get off so he tapped at the door again and nobody answered. So he unlocked the door and went in and all this stuff was in there but no passenger.” Dockery stopped, waiting for reaction.

  “Odd,” Leaphorn said.

  “Damn right,” Dockery agreed. “It’s the sort of thing you remember.”

  “You tell the FBI agent about this?”

  “Didn’t really get a chance. He just wanted to look at the bags and be on his way.”

  “Could I talk to Perez?”

  “He’s on the same run,” Dockery said. He fished a timetable out of his drawer and handed it to Leaphorn. “Call some station a stop ahead where they stop long enough to get him to the telephone. He’ll call you back. He’d be damned interested in what happened to his passenger.”

  Leaphorn was thumbing his way through the notebook a second time, making notes in his own notebook. Most of the pages were blank. Some contained only initials and what seemed to be telephone numbers. Leaphorn copied them off. One page contained only two letter-number combinations. Most of the notations seemed to concern meetings. The one Leaphorn was looking at read, “Harrington. Cuarto 832. 3 p.”

  “Harrington,” Leaphorn said. “Would that be a hotel?”

  “It’s downtown,” Dockery said. “Over on E Street and not far from the Mall. Sort of lower middle class. They let it run down. Usually when that happens somebody buys it and turns it into offices.”

  Leaphorn wrote the address and room number in his notebook. At the top of the next page “AURANOFIN” was written in capital letters, followed by “W1128023.” He jotted that down, too. Below, on the same page, a notation touched a faint chord in Joe Leaphorn’s excellent memory. It was a name, slightly unusual, that he’d seen somewhere before.

  The man with the pointed shoes had written: “Natl. Hist. Museum. Henry Highhawk.”

  Chapter Eleven

  « ^ »

  Janet Pete decided they would take the Metro from the Smithsonian Station up to Eastern Market. It cost only eighty cents a ticket, and was just as fast as a taxi. Then, too, it would give Jim Chee a chance to see the Washington subway. As Chee was wise enough to guess, Janet wanted to play city mouse to his country mouse. That was okay with Chee. He could see that Janet Pete’s self-esteem could use a little burnishing.

  “Not like New York,” Janet said. “It’s clean and bright and fast and you feel perfectly safe. Not at all like New York.” Chee, who had only heard rumors of the New York subway, nodded. He’d always wanted to ride the New York subway. But maybe this trip would be interesting, too.

  It was. The soaring waffled ceiling, the machines which dispensed paper slips as tickets along with the proper change, the gates which accepted those paper slips, opened, and then returned the slips, the swarm of people conditioned to avoid human contact—eye, knee, or elbow. Chee clung to the bracket by the sliding door and inspected them. It surprised him, at first, that he wasn’t being inspected in return. He must look distinctly different: his best felt reservation hat with its silver band, his best leather jacket, his best boots, his rawboned, weather-beaten, homely Navajo face. But the only glances he drew were quick and secretive. He was politely ignored. That seemed odd to Chee.

  And there were other oddities. He’d presumed the subway would be used by the working class. The blue-collar people were here, true enough, but there was more than that. He could see three men and one woman in navy uniforms, with enough stripes on their sleeves to indicate membership in the privileged class. Since rank had come young for them, they would be graduates of the Naval Academy. They would be people with political connections and old family money. At least half the white men, and about that mix of blacks, wore the inevitable dark three-piece suit and dark tie of the Eastern Establishment, or perhaps here it was the Federal Bureaucracy. The women wore mostly skirts and high heels. Chee’s study of anthropology at the University of New Mexico had led him into sociology courses. He remembered a lecture on those factors which condition humans and thereby form culture. He felt detached from this subway crowd, an invisible entity looking down on a species that had evolved to survive overcrowding, to endure aggression, to survive despite what old Professor Ebaar called “intraspecies hostility.”

  On the long ride up the escalator to what his own Navajo Holy People would have called the Earth Surface World, Chee mentioned these impressions to Janet Pete.

  “Will you ever feel at home here?” he asked. She didn’t answer until they reached the top and walked out into the dim twilight, into what had become something between drizzle and mist.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so once. But it’s hard to handle. A different culture.”

  “And you don’t mean different from Navajo?”

  She laughed. “No. I don’t mean that. I guess I mean different from the empty West.”

  Henry Highhawk’s place was about seven blocks from the Metro station—a narrow, two-story brick house halfway down a block of such narrow houses. Tied to the pillar just beside the mailbox was something which looked like a paho. Chee inspected it while Janet rang the bell. It was indeed a Navajo prayer stick, with the proper feathers attached. If Highhawk had made it, he knew what he was doing. And then Highhawk was at the door, inviting them in. He was taller than Chee remembered him from the firelight at Agnes Tsosie’s place. Taller and leaner and more substantial, more secure in his home territory than he had been surrounded by a strange culture below the Tsosies’ butte. The limp, which had touched Chee with a sense of pity at the Tsosie Yeibichai, seemed natural here. The jeans Highhawk wore had been cut to accommodate the hinged metal frame that reinforced his short leg. The brace, the high lift under the small left boot, the limp, all of them seemed in harmony with this lanky man in this crowded little house. He had converted his Kiowa-Comanche braids into a tight Navajo bun. But nothing would convert his long, bony, melancholy face into something that would pass for one of the Dineh. He would always look like a sorrowful white boy.

  Highhawk was in his kitchen pouring coffee before he recognized Chee. He looked at Chee intently as he handed him his cup.

  “Hey,” he said, laughing. “You’re the Navajo cop who arrested me.”

  Chee nodded. Highhawk wanted to shake hands again—a “no hard feelings” gesture. “Policeman, I mean,” Highhawk amended, his face flushed with embarrassment. “It was very efficient. And I appreciated you getting that guy to drive that rent-a-car back to Gallup for me. That saved me a whole bunch of money. Probably at least a hundred bucks.”

  “Saved me some work, too,” Chee said. “I would have had to do something about it the next morning.” Chee was embarrassed, too. He wasn’t accustomed to this switch in relationships. And Highhawk’s behavior puzzled him a little. It was too deferential, too—Chee struggled for the word. He was reminded of a day at his uncle’s sheep camp. Three old dogs, all shaggy veterans. And the young dog his uncle had won somewhere gambling. His uncle lifting the young dog out of the back of the pickup. The old dogs, tense and interested, conscious that their territory was being invaded. The young dog walking obliquely toward them, head down, tail down, legs bent, sending all the canine signals of inferiority and subjection, deferring to their authority.

  “I’m Bitter Water Dinee,” Highhawk said. He looked shy as he said it, tangling long, slender fingers. “At least my grandmother was, and so I guess I can claim it.”

  Chee nodded. “I am one of the Slow Talking Dineh,” he said. He didn’
t mention that his father’s clan was also Bitter Water, which made it Chee’s own ”born for“ clan. That made him and Highhawk related on their less important paternal side. But then, after two generations under normal reservation circumstances, that secondary paternal link would have submerged by marriages into other clans. Chee considered it, and felt absolutely no kinship link with this strange, lanky man. Whatever his dreams and pretensions, Highhawk was still a belagaana.

  They sat in the front room then, Chee and Janet occupying a sofa and Highhawk perched on a wooden chair. Someone, Chee guessed it had been Highhawk, had enlarged the room by removing the partition which once had separated it from a small dining alcove. But most of this space was occupied by two long tables, and the tables were occupied by tools, by what apparently had been a section of tree root, by a roll of leather, a box of feathers, slabs of wood, paint jars, brushes, carving knives—the paraphernalia of Highhawk’s profession.

  “You had something to tell me,” Highhawk said to Janet. He glanced at Chee.

  “Your preliminary hearing has been set,” Janet said. “We finally got them to put it on the calendar. It’s going to be two weeks from tomorrow and we have to get some things decided before then.“

  Highhawk grinned at her. It lit his long, thin face and made him look even more boyish. “You could have told me that on the telephone,” he said. “I’ll bet there was more than that.” He glanced at Chee again.

  Chee got up and looked for a place to go. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said.

  “You could take a look at my kachina collection,” Highhawk said. “Back in the office.” He pointed down the hallway. “First door on the right.”