Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  But he choked back the rage. He couldn’t afford it. He had to pick her up right away. He had to get her to a place where they’d take care of her.

  “I know who you are,” Fleck said. “I followed you back to your embassy. I get paid or I can cause you some trouble.” Then he listened.

  What he heard was a stream of obscenities. He heard himself called the filthy, defecation-eating son of a whore, the son of an infected dog. And the click of the line disconnecting.

  Standing in the drizzle outside the booth, Fleck spit on the sidewalk. He let the rage well up. He’d get the money another way, somehow. He’d done it in the past. Mugging. A lot of mugging to come up with three thousand dollars unless he was lucky. It was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Only the ruling class carried big money, and some of them carried only plastic. And the police protected the ruling class. And now there was something else he had to do. It involved getting even. It involved using his shank again. It involved getting the blade in behind the bone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  « ^ »

  What I want to know, for starters,” Joe Leaphorn said, “is everything you know about this Henry Highhawk.“

  They had met in what passed for a coffee shop in Jim Chee’s hotel, surrounded by blue-collar workers and tourists who, like Chee, had asked their travel agents to find them moderately priced housing in downtown Washington. Leaphorn had donned the Washington uniform. But his three-piece suit was a model sold by the Gallup Sears store in the middle seventies, and its looseness testified to the pounds Leaphorn had lost eating his own cooking since Emma’s death.

  With the single exception of his Blessing Way ceremonial, Jim Chee had never seen the legendary Leaphorn except in a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. He was having psychological trouble handling this inappropriate attire. Like a necktie on a herd bull, Chee thought. Like socks on a billy goat. But above the necktie knot Leaphorn’s eyes were exactly as Chee remembered them—dark brown, alert, searching. As always, something in them was causing Chee to examine his conscience. What had he neglected? What had he forgotten?

  He told Leaphorn about Highhawk’s job, his educational background, the charge against him for vandalizing graves, his campaign to cause the Smithsonian to release its thousands of Native American skeletons for reburial. He described how he and Cowboy Dashee had arrested Highhawk. He reported how Gomez had shown up, how Gomez had agreed to post Highhawk’s bond. How yesterday Gomez had appeared at Highhawk’s house. He described Highhawk’s limp, his leg brace, and how Janet Pete had come to be his attorney. He touched on Janet Pete’s doubts about the Tano Pueblo fetish and what he had seen in Highhawk’s office-studio. But he said nothing at all about Janet Pete’s doubts and problems. That was another story. That was none of Leaphorn’s business.

  “What do you think he was doing at the Yeibichai?” Leaphorn asked.

  Chee shrugged. “He doesn’t look it but he’s one-fourth Navajo. One grandmother was Navajo. I guess she made a big impression on him. Janet Pete tells me he wants to be a Navajo. Thinks about himself as a Navajo.” Chee considered that some more. “He wanted to be sort of initiated into the tribe. And he knew enough about the Yeibichai to show up on the last night.” He glanced at Leaphorn. Did this Navajo version of pragmatist-agnostic know enough about the Yeibichai himself to know what that meant? He added: “When the hataalii sometimes initiates boys—lets them look through the mask. Highhawk wanted to do that.”

  Leaphorn merely nodded. “Did he?”

  “We arrested him,” Chee said.

  Leaphorn thought about that answer. “Right away?”

  Leaphorn picked up his coffee cup, examined it, looked across it at Chee, took a small sip, put it back in the saucer, and waited. “Stuck around about two hours,” he said. “Right?”

  “About,” Chee agreed.

  “You didn’t just stand around. You talked. What did Highhawk talk about?”

  Chee shrugged. What had they talked about?

  “It was cold as hell—wind out of the north. We talked about that. He thought the people wearing the yei masks must get awful frostbitten with nothing on but leggings and kilts. And he asked a lot of questions. Did the paint on their bodies insulate them from the cold? Which mask represented which yei? Questions about the ceremonial. And he knew enough about it to ask smart questions.” Chee stopped. Finished.

  “About anything else?”

  Chee shrugged.

  Leaphorn stared at him. “That won’t get it,” he said. “I need to know.”

  Chee was not in the mood for this. He felt his face flushing. “Highhawk was taping some of it,” Chee said. “He had this little tape recorder palmed. Then he’d pull it up his sleeve if anyone noticed it. You’re not supposed to do that unless you square it with the hataalii. I let that go. Didn’t say anything. And once I heard him singing the words of one of the chants. What else? He and this Gomez went into the kitchen shed once and ate some stew. And when Dashee and I arrested him, Gomez came up and wanted to know what was going on.“

  “If he knew as much as he seemed to know, then he knew he shouldn’t be taping without the singer’s permission,” Leaphorn said. “And it looked to you like he was being sneaky about it?”

  “It was sneaky,” Chee said. “Hiding the recorder in his palm. Up his sleeve.”

  “Not very polite,” Leaphorn said. “Not as polite as his letter sounded.” He said it mostly to himself, thinking out loud.

  “Letter?” Chee said, louder than he intended. The edge in his voice was enough so that at the next table two men in Federal Express delivery uniforms looked up from their waffles and stared at him.

  “He wrote a letter to Agnes Tsosie,” Leaphorn said. “Very polite. Tell me about this Gomez. Describe him.”

  Chee was aware that his face was flushed. He could feel it, distinctly.

  “I’m on vacation,” Chee said. “I’m off duty. I want you to tell me about this letter. When did that happen? How did you know about it? How did you know about Highhawk? What the hell’s going on?”

  “Well, now,” Leaphorn began, his face flushing. But then he closed his mouth. He cleared his throat. “Well, now,” he said again, “I guess you’re right.” And he told Chee about the man with pointed shoes.

  Leaphorn was unusually good at telling. He organized it all neatly and chronologically. He described the body found beside the tracks east of Gallup, the cryptic note in the shirt pocket, the visit to the Agnes Tsosie place, the letter from Highhawk with Highhawk’s photograph included, what the autopsy showed, all of it.

  “This little man in the next apartment, he fit the description of the man in Santillanes’ compartment on the train. No question he was interested in the Santillanes bunch. Any chance he and Gomez are the same?”

  “Not the way you describe him,” Chee said. “Gomez has black hair. He’s younger than your man sounds, and taller and slender—none of those weightlifter muscles. And I think he lost several fingers.”

  Leaphorn’s expression shaded from alert to very alert. “Several? What do you mean?”

  “He was wearing leather gloves, but on both hands some of the fingers were stiff—as if the gloves were stuffed with cotton or maybe there was a finger in it that didn’t bend. I took a look every chance I got because it seemed funny. Strange I mean. Losing fingers off both hands.”

  Leaphorn thought. “Any other scars? Deformities?”

  “None visible,” Chee said. And waited. He watched Leaphorn turning these mangled fingers over in his mind. Chee reminded himself that he was on vacation and so was Leaphorn. By God, he was simply not going to let the lieutenant get away with this.

  “Why?”

  Leaphorn, his thoughts interrupted, looked startled. “What?”

  “I can tell you’re thinking those missing fingers are important. Why are they important? How does that fit with what you know?”

  “Probably they’re not important,” Leaphorn said.

  “Not good enough,
” Chee said. “Remember, I’m on vacation.”

  Leaphorn’s expression shifted into something that might have been a grin. “I have some bad habits. A lot of them involve doing things to save time. A strange habit for a Navajo, I guess. But you’re right. You’re on vacation. So am I, for that matter.” He put down his coffee cup.

  “Where do I start? Santillanes didn’t have any teeth. All pulled. But the pathologist who did the autopsy said there was no sign of any reason to have them pulled. No jawbone problems, no traces left by the gum diseases that cause you to lose your teeth. I wondered how Santillanes lost his teeth. You wondered how Gomez lost his fingers.” Leaphorn took the final sip of his coffee, signaled the waiter. “You see a connection?”

  Chee hesitated. “You mean like they both might have been tortured?”

  “It occurs to me. I guess they’re Chilean leftists. The right wing’s in power. There’s been a lot of reporting of the secret police, or maybe the army, knocking people off. People disappearing. Political prisoners. Murder. Torture. Some really hideous stuff causing investigations by Amnesty International.”

  Chee nodded.

  “I think we should go talk to Highhawk,” Leaphorn said. “Okay?”

  “If we can find him,” Chee said. “I called this morning. Called his house. Called his office. No answer. So I called Dr. Hartman. She’s the curator he’s working for at the museum. She hadn’t seen him either. She was looking for him.”

  “Let’s go try to find him anyway,” Leaphorn said. He picked up the check.

  “I didn’t tell you about last night,” Chee said. He described how Highhawk had taken the telephone call, then left saying he’d be right back, and never returned.

  “I think we should go on out there. See if we can find the man. Try his house and if he’s not there, we’ll try the Smithsonian.”

  Chee put on his hat and followed.

  “Why not?” he said, but even as he said it he had a feeling they weren’t going to find Henry Highhawk.

  They took a cab to Eastern Market.

  “Stick around a minute until we see if our party is home,” Leaphorn said.

  The cabby was a plump young man with a mass of curly brown hair and fat, red lips. He pulled a paperback copy of Passage to Quivera off the dashboard and opened it. “It’s your money,” he said. “Spend it any way you like.”

  Leaphorn punched the doorbell. They listened to it buzz inside. He punched it again. Chee walked back down the porch steps and rescued the morning paper from where it had been thrown beside the front walk. He showed it to Leaphorn. He nodded. Punched the doorbell again. Chee walked to the window, shaded the glass with his hands. The blinds were up, the curtains open. The room was empty and dark on this dreary, overcast morning.

  “What do you think?” Chee said.

  Leaphorn shook his head, rang the bell again. He tried the doorknob. Locked.

  “Curtains open, blinds up,” Chee said. “If he came home last night, maybe he didn’t turn on the lights.”

  “Maybe not.” Leaphorn tried the door again. Still locked. “I know a cop here,” he said. “I think we’ll give him a call and see what he thinks.”

  “FBI?” Chee asked.

  “A real cop,” Leaphorn said. “A captain on the Washington police force.”

  They took the cab to the public phone booths at the Eastern Market Metro station. Leaphorn made his call. Chee waited, watching the cabby read and trying to decide what the hell Highhawk was doing. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? How was Bad Hands involved in this? He thought of Bad Hands in the role of revolutionary. He thought of how it would feel to have your fingers removed by a torturer trying to make you talk. Leaphorn climbed back into the cab.

  “He said he would meet us at a little coffee place in the old Post Office building.”

  The cabby was awaiting instructions. “You know how to find it?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Is the Pope a Catholic?” the cabby said.

  They found Captain Rodney awaiting them just inside the coffee shop door, a tall, bulky black man wearing bifocals, a gray felt hat, and a raincoat to match. The sight of Leaphorn provoked a huge, delighted, white-toothed grin.

  “This is Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “One of our officers.”

  They shook hands. Rodney’s craggy, coffee-colored face usually registered expression only when Rodney allowed it to do so. Now, just for a moment, it registered startled surprise. He removed the fedora, revealing kinky gray hair cropped close to the skull.

  “Jim Chee,” he said, memorizing Chee’s face. “Well, now.”

  “Rodney and I go way back,” Leaphorn said. “We survived the FBI Academy together.”

  “Two misfits,” Rodney said. “Back in the days when all FBI agents had blue eyes instead of just most of them.” Rodney chuckled, but his eyes never left Chee. “That’s when I first learned that our friend here”—he indicated Leaphorn with a thumb—“has this practice of just telling you what he thinks you have to know.”

  They were at a table now and Leaphorn was ordering coffee. Now he looked surprised. “Like what?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”

  Rodney was still looking at Chee. “You work for this guy, right? Or with him, anyway.”

  “More or less,” Chee said, wondering where this was leading. “Now I’m on vacation.”

  Rodney laughed. “Vacation. Is that a fact. You just happen to be three thousand miles east of home at the same time as your boss. I think maybe I was blaming Joe for something that’s a universal Navajo trait.“

  “What are we talking about here?” Leaphorn asked.

  “About the Navajo Tribal Police sending two men”—he pointed a finger at Leaphorn and then at Chee—“two men, count ’em, to Washington, Dee, Cee, which is several miles out of their jurisdiction, to look for a fellow which us local cops didn’t even yet know there was a reason to be looking for.”

  “Nobody sent us here,” Leaphorn said.

  Rodney ignored the remark. He was staring at Chee.

  “What time did you leave the Smithsonian last night?”

  Chee told him. He was baffled. How did this Washington policeman know he had been at the museum last night? Why would he care? Something must have happened to Highhawk.

  “Which exit?”

  ’Twelfth Street.“

  “Nobody checked you out?”

  “Nobody was there.”

  Surprise again registered on Rodney’s face.

  “Ah,” he said. “No guard? No security person? How did you get out?”

  “I just walked out.”

  “The door wasn’t locked.”

  Chee shook his head. “Closed, but unlocked.”

  “You see anything? Anybody?”

  “I was surprised no one was there. I looked around. Empty.”

  “You didn’t see a young woman in a museum guard’s uniform? A black woman? The guard who was supposed to be keeping an eye on that Twelfth Street entrance?”

  Chee shook his head again. “Nobody was around,” he said. “Nobody. What’s the deal?” But even as he asked the question, he knew the deal. Highhawk was dead. Chee was just about the last person who’d seen him alive.

  “The deal is”—Rodney was looking at Leaphorn now—“that I get a call from my old friend Joe here to check on whether there’s any kind of report on a man named Henry Highhawk and I find out this Highhawk is on a list of people Homicide would like to talk to.” Rodney shifted his gaze back to Chee. “So I come down here to talk to my old friend Joe, and he introduces me to you and, what do ya know, you happen to be another guy on Homicide’s wish list. That’s what the deal is.”

  “Your homicide people want to talk to Highhawk,” Chee said. “That means he’s alive?”

  “You have some reason to think otherwise?” Rodney asked.

  “When you said you had a homicide I figured he was the one,” Chee said. He explained to Rodney what had happened last night at the Smithsonian. “Back in
just a minute, he said. But he never came back. I went out and wandered around the halls looking for him. Then finally I went home. I called him at home this morning. No soap. I called his office. The woman he works for was looking for him too. She was worried about him.”

  Rodney had been intent on every word.

  “Went home when?”

  “I told you,” Chee said. “I must have left the Twelfth Street entrance a little before ten thirty. Very close to that. I walked right back to my hotel.”

  “And when did Highhawk receive this telephone call? The call just before he left?”

  Chee told him.

  “Who was the caller?”

  “No idea. It was a short call.”

  “What about? Did you hear it?”

  “I heard Highhawk’s end. Apparently he had been trying to tell Highhawk how to fix something. Highhawk had tried and it hadn’t worked. I remember he said it’didn’t turn on,’ and Highhawk said since he was coming down anyway the caller could fix it. And then they set the nine-thirty time and Highhawk told him to remember it was the Twelfth Street entrance.“

  “Him?” Rodney said. “Was the caller a man?”

  “I should have said him or her. I couldn’t hear the other voice.”

  “I’m going to make a call of my own,” Rodney said. He rose, gracefully for a man of his bulk. “Pass all this along to the detective handling this one. I’ll be right back.” He grinned at Chee. “Quicker than Highhawk, anyway.”

  “Who’s the victim?” Leaphorn asked.

  Rodney paused, looking down on them. “It was the night-shift guard at the Twelfth Street entrance.”

  “Stabbed?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Why do you say stabbed?”

  Now Leaphorn’s voice had an impatient edge in it. “I told you about what brought me here,” he said. “Remember? Santillanes was stabbed. Very professionally, in the back of the neck.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Rodney said. “No. Not stabbed this time. It was skull fracture.” He made another move toward the telephone.

  “Where did they find the body?” Chee asked. “And when?”