Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  And they had almost spit on them that time, if Mama hadn’t been so smart. Some of the neighbors had seen Delmar down there that night just before the explosion and the big fire. And they told on him, and the police came there to the Salvation Army shelter where Mama was keeping them and they took Delmar off with them. And then he and Mama had gone down to the sheriffs office and he told them it was him, not Delmar, the neighbors had seen. And it had worked out just like Mama had said it would. They had to go easy on him because he was only thirteen and it was a first offense on top of that, and they’d have to handle him in juvenile court. But with Delmar being older, and with shoplifting and car theft and assault already on his books, they would try him as an adult. Fleck had only got sixty days in the D Home and a year’s probation out of that one. Mama had always been good at handling things.

  But now she was just too old and her mind was gone.

  Fleck’s reverie was ended by a woman hurrying around the corner toward him. She wore a raincoat, something shiny and waterproof over her head, and was carrying a plastic sack. She walked past Fleck’s Lincoln without a glance. While he watched her in the rearview mirror, another figure appeared at the corner ahead of him. A man in a dark blue raincoat and a dark gray hat. He carried an umbrella and as he hesitated at the curb, looking for traffic, he opened it.

  It had started to rain, streaking the car windows, pattering against the windshield. Fleck glanced at his watch. Seventeen minutes until two. If this was his man, the man was early. He crossed the street, slanting the umbrella against the rain, and hurried down the sidewalk toward the telephone booth. He walked past it.

  Fleck slumped down in the seat, too low to see or be seen. He waited. Then he pushed himself up. He used the electric control to adjust the side mirror, found the man just as he turned the corner behind the car. Probably someone with nothing to do with this business, Fleck thought. He relaxed a little. He glanced at his watch again. Waited.

  What Mama had always taught Delmar and him had saved him there in the Joliet State Penitentiary, that was certain enough. It had been hard to do it. Things are always hard when you’re a little man, and you’re young. He thought they’d kill him if he tried it. But it had saved him. He couldn’t have lived through those years if he’d let them spit on him. He’d have died. Or worse than that, been like the little pet animals they turned their baby dolls into. Three of them had been after him. Cassidy, Neal, and Dalkin, those were their names. Cassidy had been the biggest, and the one Fleck had been the most afraid of, and the one he’d decided he had to kill first. But looking back on it, knowing what he knew now, Dalkin was really the dangerous one. Because Dalkin was smart. Cassidy had made the move on him first, and when he got away from that, the three of him had got him into a corner in the laundry. He’d never forget that. Never tried to, in fact, because that had been the black, grim, hard-rock bottom of his life and he needed to think of it whenever things were tough, like today. They’d held him down and raped him, Cassidy first. And when they were all finished with him, he had just laid there a moment, not even feeling the pain. He remembered vividly exactly what he had thought. He’d thought: Do I want to stay alive now? And he absolutely didn’t want to. But he remembered what Mama had taught him. And he thought, I’ll get even first. I’ll get that done before I die. And he’d got up and told them all three they were dead men. Three or four other cons had been in the laundry by then. He hadn’t noticed them. He wouldn’t have noticed anyone then, but they got the word out in the yard. Cassidy had beaten him after that, and Dalkin had beaten him, too. But getting even had kept him alive.

  It was raining harder now. Fleck turned on the ignition and started the windshield wipers. As he did, the man with the umbrella turned the corner again. He’d circled the block and was walking again down the opposite sidewalk toward the telephone booth. Fleck turned off the wipers and glanced at his watch. Five minutes until two. The Client was punctual. He watched him enter the booth, close the umbrella and the door. Cassidy had been punctual, too. Fleck had gotten the note to him. Printed on toilet paper. “I’ll have something just for you five minutes into the work break. Behind the laundry.”

  He gambled that Cassidy would think only of sex. He gambled that a macho two-hundred-and-forty-pounder who could bench press almost four hundred pounds wouldn’t be nervous about a hundred-and-twenty-pounder, the kid the yard called Little Red Shrimp. Sure enough, Cassidy wasn’t nervous. He came around the corner, grinning. He had walked out of the sunlight into the shadow, squinting, reaching out for Fleck when he saw Fleck smiling at him, walking into the shank.

  Fleck dialed all but the final digit of the 266 number, glanced at his watch. Almost a minute early. Fleck could still remember the sensation. Holding the narrow blade flat, just as he’d practiced it, feeling it slide between the ribs, flicking the handle back and forth and back again as it penetrated to make certain it cut the artery and the heart. He hadn’t really expected it to work. He expected Cassidy to kill him, or the thing to end with him on trial for premeditated murder and getting nothing better than life and probably the gas chamber. But there was no choice. And Eddy had told him it would be like Cassidy was being struck by lightning if he did it right.

  “Do it right, he shouldn’t make a sound,” Eddy had said. “It’s the shock that does it.”

  Now it was time. Fleck punched the final digit, heard the beginning of the ring, then The Client’s voice.

  Fleck brought him up to date, told him about checking on Highhawk, about the woman lawyer showing up there with the cowboy, about Santero driving up and going in and the woman and the cowboy coming out a minute later. He told him about the cowboy walking right up and tapping on his window. “I circled the block and followed them back to the Eastern Market Metro station, and then I dropped it. There’s just one of me. Now I want to know who that cowboy is. He’s tall. Slender. Dark. Looks like an Indian to me. Narrow face. Leather jacket, boots, cowboy hat, all that. Who the hell is he? Something about him smells like cop to me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said the woman thought I was following her. I told him he was crazy. Told him to screw off.”

  “Amateurs!” The Client’s voice was full of scorn. It took a moment for Fleck to realize he meant Fleck.

  Fleck pressed it. “You know anything at all about the cowboy? Know who he is?”

  “God knows,” The Client said. “This is the product of you letting Santero slip away from you. We don’t know where he went or who he talked to and we don’t know what he did. I warned you about that.”

  “And I told you about it,” Fleck said. “Told you there’s just one of me and seven of them, not counting the womenfolk. I can’t watch them all all the time.”

  “Seven?” The Client said. “Was that a slip? You told us you had subtracted one. The old man. You’re expecting us to pay you for that.”

  “Six is the correct number,” Fleck said. “Old Man Santillanes is definitely off the list. Did you send the ten thousand?”

  “We wait for the full month. Now I wonder if we should also ask to see a little more proof.”

  “I sent you the goddamn billfold. And the false teeth.” Fleck sighed. “You’re just stalling,” he said. “I can see that now. I want that money by tomorrow night.”

  There was a period of silence from the other end. Fleck noticed the rain had stopped. With his free hand he rolled down the window beside him. Then he picked up the camera and checked the settings.

  “The deal is no publicity, no identification for one full month. Then you get the money. After a month. Now I want you to think about Santero. I think he needs to go. The same deal. But remember it can’t happen in the District. We can’t risk that. It should be a long way outside the Beltway. A long way from here. And no chance of identification. No chance at all of identification.”

  “I have got to have the ten thousand now,” Fleck said. Never lose your temper, Mama had said. Never show them a thing. About all
we got going for us, Mama had always told Delmar and him, is they never expect us to do anything at all but crawl there on the ground on our bellies and wait to get stepped on again.

  “No,” The Client said.

  “Tell you what. If you’ll have three thousand of it delivered to me tomorrow, then I can wait for the rest of it.“

  “You can wait anyway,” The Client said. And hung up.

  Fleck put down the telephone and picked up the camera. It rattled against the door, making him aware that he was shaking with rage. He took a deep breath. Held it. Through the range-finder he saw The Client emerge from the telephone booth, umbrella folded. He stood with hand outstretched, looking around, confirming that the rain had stopped. Fleck had taken four shots before he walked down the sidewalk away from him.

  Fleck let The Client get well around the corner before he left the car to follow. He kept a block behind him down Eighteenth Street, and then east to Sixteenth. There The Client turned again. He walked down the row of second-string embassies and disappeared down a driveway.

  Fleck walked past it with only a single sidelong glance. It was just enough to tell him who he was working for.

  Chapter Thirteen

  « ^ »

  Since Joe Leaphorn and Dockery had arrived a little early, and the Amtrak train had arrived a little late, Leaphorn had been given the opportunity to answer a lot of Dockery’s questions. He’d presumed that Dockery had volunteered to come down to Union Station on his day off because Dockery was interested in murder. And clearly Dockery was interested in that. And he was interested in what Perez might have seen in the roomette of his doomed passenger. But Dockery seemed even more interested in Indians.

  “Sort of a fascination with me ever since I was a kid,” Dockery began. “I guess it was all those cowboy and Indian movies. Indians always interested me. But I never did know any. Never had the opportunity.” And Leaphorn, not knowing exactly what to say to this, said: “I never knew any railroad people, either.”

  “They have this commercial on TV. Shows an Indian looking at all this trash scattered around the landscape. There’s a tear running down his cheek. You seen that one?”

  Leaphorn nodded. He had seen it.

  “Are Indians really into that worshiping Mother Earth business?”

  Leaphorn considered that. “It depends on the Indian. The Catholic bishop at Gallup, he’s an Indian.”

  “But in general,” Dockery said. “You know what I mean.”

  “There are all kinds of Indians,” Leaphorn said. “What religion are you?”

  “Well, now,” Dockery said. He thought about it. “I don’t go to church much. I guess you’d have to say I’m a Christian. Maybe a Methodist.”

  “Then your religion is closer to some Indians’ than mine is,” Leaphorn said.

  Dockery looked skeptical.

  “Take the Zunis or the Hopis or the Taos Indians for example,” said Leaphorn, who was thinking as he spoke that this sort of conversation always made him feel like a complete hypocrite. His own metaphysics had evolved from the Navajo Way into a belief in a sort of universal harmony of cause and effect caused by God when He started it all. Inside of that, the human intelligence was somehow intricately involved with God. By some definitions, he didn’t have much religion. Obviously, neither did Dockery, for that matter. And the subject needed changing. Leaphorn dug out his notebook, opened it, and turned to the page on which he’d reproduced the list from the folded paper. He asked Dockery if he’d noticed that the handwriting on that paper was different from the fine, careful script in the passenger’s notebook.

  “I didn’t take a really close look at it,” Dockery said.

  About what Leaphorn had expected. But it was better than talking religion. He turned another page and came to the place he had copied “AURANOFIN W1128023” from the passenger’s notebook. That had puzzled him. The man apparently spoke Spanish, but it didn’t seem to be a Spanish word. Aura meant something more or less invisible surrounding something. Like a vapor. No fin in Spanish, if it held such a phrase, would mean something like “without end.” No sense in that. The number looked like a license or code designation. Perhaps that would lead him to something useful.

  He showed it to Dockery. “Can you make any sense out of that?”

  Dockery looked at it. He shook his head. “Looks like the number off an insurance policy, or something like that. What’s the word mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Leaphorn said.

  “Sounds like a medicine my wife used to take. Former wife, that is. Expensive as hell. I think it cost about ninety cents a capsule.”

  The sound of the train arriving came through the wall. Leaphorn was thinking that in a very few minutes he would be talking to a conductor named Perez, and that there was very little reason to believe Perez could tell him anything helpful. This was the final dead end. After this he would go back to Farmington and forget the man who had kept his worn old shoes so neatly polished.

  Or try to forget him. Leaphorn knew himself well enough to recognize his weakness in that respect. He had always had difficulty leaving questions unanswered. And it had become no better with the age that, in his case, hadn’t seemed to have brought any wisdom. All he had gotten out of Dockery was more evidence of how careful the killer of Pointed Shoes had been. That catalog of things on the folded paper must have been intended as a checklist, things to be checked off to avoid leaving behind any identification. The dentures were gone. So were the glasses, and their case, which might have contained a name and address, and prescription bottles which would certainly have a name on them. Prescription bottles were specifically mentioned on the checklist. And judging from the autopsy report the man must have taken medications. But no prescription bottles were in the luggage. He didn’t need more evidence of the killer’s cleverness. What he needed was some clue to the victim’s identity. He would talk to Perez but it would be more out of courtesy—since he had wasted everyone’s time to arrange this meeting—than out of hope.

  Perez didn’t think he’d be much help.

  “I just got one look at him,” the attendant said, after Dockery had introduced them and led them back to a cold, almost unfurnished room, where the passenger’s luggage sat on a long, wooden table. “I’d noticed this passenger wasn’t feeling all that great so I went by his compartment to see if he needed any help. I heard somebody moving in there but when I tapped on the door, nobody answered. I thought that was funny.”

  Perez pushed his uniform cap back to the top of his head and looked at them to see if that needed explanation. It didn’t seem to.

  “So, I unlocked it. There’s this man in there, standing over a suitcase. I told him I’d come by to see if my passenger needed a hand and he said something negative. Something like he’d take care of it, or something like that. I remember he looked sort of hostile.”

  Perez stopped, looking at them. “Now when I think about that I think I was talking to the guy who had already knifed my passenger to death. And what he was probably thinking about right at that moment was whether he should do it to me, too.”

  “What’d you do then?” Dockery asked.

  “Nothing. I said, Okay. Or let me know if he needs a hand, or something like that. And then I got out.” Perez looked slightly resentful. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know anything was wrong. Far as I know this guy really is just a friend.”

  “What did he look like?” Leaphorn asked. He had remembered now why the name Henry Highhawk scribbled in the notebook struck a chord. It was the name of the man who had written Agnes Tsosie about coming to the Yeibichai. The man who had sent his photograph. He felt that odd sort of relief he had come to expect when unconnected things that troubled him suddenly clicked together. Perez would describe a blond man with braided hair and a thin, solemn face—the picture Agnes Tsosie had shown him. Then he’d have another lead away from this dead end.

  “I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. “I’d say sort of small. I
think he had on a suit coat, or maybe a sports coat. And he had short hair. Red hair. Curly and close to his head. And a freckled face, like a lot of redheads have. Sort of a round face, I think. But he wasn’t fat. I’d say sort of stocky. Burly. Like he had a lot of muscles. But small. Maybe hundred and thirty pounds, or less.“

  The good feeling left Leaphorn.

  “Any other details? Scars? Limp? Anything like that? Anything that would help identify him?”

  “I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. He made a wry face. “Just one look.”

  “When did you check the room again?”

  “When I didn’t see the passenger get off at Gallup. I sort of was watching for him, you know, because Gallup was his destination. And I didn’t see him. So I thought, well, he got off at another door. But it seemed funny, so when we was ready to pull out west, I took a look.” He shrugged. “The roomette was empty. Nobody home. Just the luggage. So I looked for him. Checked the observation car, and the bar. I walked up and back through all the cars. And then I went back and looked in the room again. Seemed strange to me. But I thought maybe he had got sick and just got off and left everything behind.”

  “Everything was unpacked.”

  “Unpacked,” Perez agreed. “Stuff scattered around.“ He pointed to the bags. ”I took it and put it in the bags and closed them.“

  “Everything?”

  Perez looked surprised, then offended.

  “Sure, everything. What’d ya think?”

  “Newspapers, magazines, empty candy wrappers, paper cups, everything?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Well, no,” Perez said. “Not the trash.”

  “How about some magazine that might have been worth saving?” Leaphorn phrased the question carefully. Perez was obviously touchy about the question of him taking anything out of the passenger’s room. “Some magazine, maybe, that might have something interesting in it and shouldn’t be thrown away. If it was something he had subscribed to, then it would have an address label on it.”