Hunting Badger jlajc-14

by Tony Hillerman

“I might try that. The FBI has them flying away. I could tell them one of the guys is a pilot. That would be easy for them to check, and if one of them happens to be a flier, then they’d be interested. But that’s just half of the problem."He paused to take another bite of pancake.

  She watched him chew, waited, sighed. Said, “OK, what’s the other half?”

  “Maybe these three guys had nothing to do with it. Maybe Gershwin just wants them hassled for some personal reason, and if the robbers aren’t caught, this would damn sure do that sooner or later.”

  She nodded. “I’ll take it under advisement, then,” she said, and left the kitchen to call her interpreter.

  By the time Leaphorn had the dishes washed she was back, looking disheartened.

  “Not only is he sick, he has laryngitis. He can hardly talk. I guess I’ll head back to Flagstaff and try it later.”

  “Too bad,” Leaphorn said.

  “Another thing. He’d told them we were coming today. And no telephone, of course, to tell them we’re not.”

  “Where do these guys live?”

  Louisa’s expression brightened. “Are you about to volunteer to interpret? The Navajo’s a fellow named Dalton Cayodito and the address I have is Red Mesa Chapter House. The other one’s a Ute. Lives at Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation. How’s your Ute?”

  “Maybe fifty words or so,” Leaphorn said. “But I could help you with Cayodito.”

  “Let’s do it,” Louisa said.

  “I’m thinking that a couple of the men on that list are supposed to live up there in that border country. One of ’em’s Casa Del Eco Mesa. That couldn’t be too far from the chapter house.”

  Louisa laughed. “Mixing business with pleasure. Or I should say your business with my business. Or maybe my business with something that really isn’t your business.”

  “The one who has a place up there—according to the notes on that paper anyway—is Everett Jorie. I can’t place him, but the name’s familiar. Probably something out of the distant past. I thought we could ask around.”

  Louisa was smiling at him. “You’ve forgotten you’re retired,” she said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going along for the pleasure of my company.”

  Leaphorn drove the first lap—the 110 miles from his house to the Mexican Water Trading Post. They stopped there for a sandwich and to learn if anyone there knew how to find Dalton Cayodito. The teenage Navajo handling the cash register did.

  “An old, old man,” she said. “Did he used to be a singer? If that’s him, he did the Yeibichai sing for my grandmother. Is that the one you’re looking for?”

  Louisa said it was. “We heard he lived up by the Red Mesa Chapter House.”

  “He lives with his daughter,” the girl said. “That’s Madeleine Horsekeeper, I think they call her. Her place is -" She paused, thought, made a gesture of frustration with her hands, penciled a map on a grocery sack and handed it to Louisa.

  “How about a man named Everett Jorie?” Leap-horn said. “You know where to find him? Or Buddy Baker? Or George Ironhand.”

  She didn’t, but the man who had been stacking Spam cans on shelves along the back wall thought he could help.

  “Hey,” he said. “Joe Leaphorn. I thought you’d retired. What you want Jorie for? If you got a law against being a damned nuisance, you oughta had him locked up long ago.”

  They left the trading post a quarter hour later armed with explicit instructions on how to find the two places Jorie might be located, an addendum to the grocery-sack map outlining which turns to take from which roads to find Ironhand, and a vague notion that Baker might have moved into Blanding. Along with that they took a wealth of speculative gossip about Utah-Arizona borderland political ambitions, social activities, speculation about who might have robbed the Ute Casino, an account of the most recent outrages committed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Park Service, and other federal, state and county agencies against the well-being of various folks who lived their hardscrabble lives along the Utah border canyon country.

  “No wonder the militia nuts can sign people up,” Louisa said, as they drove away. “Is it as bad as that?”

  “They’re mostly just trying to enforce unpopular laws,” Leaphorn said. “Mostly fine people. Now and then somebody gets arrogant.”

  “OK, now,” Louisa said. “These guys you mentioned in there—Jorie and Ironhand and so forth. I guess they’re the three who robbed the casino?”

  “Or maybe robbed it,” Leaphorn said. “If we believe Gershwin.”

  Louisa was driving and spent a few moments looking thoughtful.

  “You know,” she said, "as long as I’ve been out here I still can’t get used to how everybody knows everybody.”

  “You mean that guy at the store recognizing me? I was a cop out here for years.”

  “But living where? About a hundred and fifty miles away. But I didn’t mean just you. The cashier knew all about Everett Jorie. And people know about Baker and Ironhand living"—she waved an expressive hand at the window—"living way the hell out there someplace. Where I came from people didn’t even know who lived three houses down the block.”

  “Lot more people in Baltimore,” Leaphorn said.

  “Not a lot more people on our block.”

  “More people in your block, I’ll bet, than in a twenty-mile circle around here,” Leaphorn said. He was remembering the times he’d spent in Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles, when he’d considered this difference between urban and rural social attitudes.

  “I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re interested. We sort of collect them.”

  “You’ll have to make it a lot more complicated than that to get the sociologists to adopt it,” Louisa said. “But I know what you’re driving at.”

  “Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him yet. In the city, nobody wants to make eye contact. They have built themselves a little privacy bubble—hard to get any privacy in crowded places—and if you look at them, or speak on the street, then you’re an intruder.”

  Louisa looked away from the road to give him a sidewise grin.

  “I take it you don’t care for the busy, exciting, stimulating city life,” she said. “I’ve also heard it put another way. Like “rural folks tend to be nosy busy-bodies.”’

  They were still discussing that when they turned off the pavement of U.S. 160 onto the dirt road that climbed over the Utah border onto the empty, broken highlands of the Casa Del Eco Mesa. She slowed while Leaphorn checked the map against the landscape. The clouds were climbing on the western horizon, and the outriders of the front were speckling the landscape spreading away to the west with a crazy-quilt pattern of shadows.

  “If my memory’s good, we hit an intersection up here about seven miles,” he said. “Take the bad road to the right, and it takes you to the Red Mesa Chapter House. Take the worse road to the left, and it gets you to Highway 191 and on to Bluff.”

  “There’s the junction up ahead,” she said. “We do a left? Right?”

  “Left is right,” Leaphorn said. “And after the turn, we’re looking for a track off to our right.”

  They found it, and a dusty, bumpy mile later, they came to the place of Madeleine Horsekeeper, which was a fairly new double-wide mobile home, with an attendant hogan of stacked stones, sheep pens, outhouse, brush arbor and two parked vehicles -an old pickup truck and a new blue Buick Regal. Madeleine Horsekeeper was standing in the doorway greeting them, with a stern-looking fortyish woman standing beside her. She proved to be Horsekeeper’s daughter, who taught social studies at Grey Hills High in Tuba City. She would sit in on the interview with Hosteen Cayodito, her maternal grandfather, and would make sure the interpreting was accurate.
Or do it herself.

  Which was fine with Joe Leaphorn. He had thought of a way to spend the rest of this day that would be much more interesting than listening for modifications and evolutions in the legends he’d grown up with. That talk with Louisa about how folks in lonely country knew everything about their neighbors had reminded him of Undersheriff Oliver Potts, now retired. If anyone knew the three on Gershwin’s list, it would be Oliver.

  Chapter Seven

  Oliver Potts’s modest stone residence was shaded by a grove of cottonwoods beside Recapture Creek, maybe five miles northeast of Bluff and a mile down a rocky road even worse than described at the Chevron station where Leaphorn had topped off his gas tank.

  “Yes,” said the middle-aged Navajo woman who answered his knock, "Ollie’s in there resting his eyes." She laughed. “Or he’s supposed to be, anyway. Actually he’s probably reading, or studying one of his soap operas." She ushered Leaphorn into the living room, said, "Ollie, here’s company,” and disappeared.

  Potts looked up from the television, examined Leaphorn through thick-lensed glasses. “Be damned. You look like Joe Leaphorn, but if it is, you’re out of uniform.”

  “I’ve been out of uniform almost as long as you have,” Leaphorn said, "but not long enough to watch the soap operas.”

  He took the chair Potts offered. They exhausted the social formalities, agreed retirement became tiresome after the first couple of months, and reached the pause that said it was time for business. Leaphorn recited Gershwin’s three names. Could Potts tell him anything about them?

  Potts hadn’t seemed to be listening. He had laid himself back in his recliner chair, glasses off now and eyes almost closed, either dozing or thinking about it. After a moment he said, “Odd mix you got there. What kind of mischief have those fellows been up to?”

  “Probably nothing,” Leaphorn said. “I’m just checking on some gossip.”

  It took Potts a moment to accept that. His eyes remained closed, but a twist of his lips expressed skepticism. He nodded. “Actually, Ironhand and Baker fit well enough. We’ve had both of them in a time or two. Nothing serious that we could make stick. Simple assault, I think it was, on Baker, and a DWI and resisting arrest. George Ironhand, he’s a little meaner. If I remember right, it was assault with a deadly weapon, but he got off. And then we had him as a suspect one autumn butchering time in a little business about whose steers he was cutting up into steaks and stew beef.”

  He produced a faint smile, reminiscing. “Turned out to be an honest mistake, if you know what I mean. And then, the feds got interested in him. Somebody prodded them into doing something about that protected antiquities law. They had the idea that his little bitty ranch was producing way too many of those old pots and the other Anasazi stuff he was selling. They couldn’t find no ruins on his place, and the feds figured he was climbing over the fence and digging them out of sites on federal land.”

  “I remember that now,” Leaphorn said. “Nothing came of it? Right?”

  “Usual outcome. Case got dropped for lack of evidence.”

  “You said they fit better than Jorie. Why’s that?”

  “Well, they’re both local fellas. Ironhand’s a Ute and Baker’s born in the county. Both rode in the rodeo a little, as I remember. Worked here and there. Probably didn’t finish high school. Sort of young." He grinned at Leaphorn. “By our standards, anyway. Thirty or forty. I think Baker is married. Or was.”

  “They buddies?”

  That produced another thoughtful silence. Then: "I think they both worked for El Paso Natural once, or one of the pipeline outfits. If it’s important, I can tell you who to ask. And then I think both of them were into that militia outfit. Minutemen I think they called it.”

  Potts opened his eyes now, squinted, rubbed his hand across them, restored the glasses and looked at Leaphorn. “You heard of our militia?”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “They had an organizing meeting down at Shiprock last winter.”

  “You sign up?”

  “Dues were too high,” Leaphorn said. “But they seemed to be getting some recruits.”

  “We got a couple of versions up here. Militia to protect us from the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and the seventy-two other federal agencies. Then the survivalists, getting us ready for when all those black helicopters swarm in to round us up for the United Nations concentration camps. And then for the rich kids, we have our Save Our Mountains outfit trying to fix it so the Ivy Leaguers don’t have to associate with us redneck working folks when they want to get away from their tennis courts.”

  Potts had his eyes closed again. Leaphorn waited, Navajo fashion, until he was sure Potts had finished this speech. He hadn’t.

  “Come to think of it,” Potts added, "maybe that’s how you could tie in ole Everett Jorie. He used to be one of the militia bunch.”

  Potts sat up. “Remember? He used to run that afternoon talk show on one of the Durango radio stations. Right-winger. Sort of an intellectual version of what’s his name? That fat guy. Ditto Head. Made him sound almost sane. Anyway, Jorie was always promoting the militia. He’d quote Plato, and

  Shakespeare and read passages from Thoreau and Thomas Paine to do it. Finally got so wild the station fired him. I think he was a fairly big shot in the militia. I heard Baker was a member. At least I’d see him at meetings. I think I saw George at one, too.”

  “Jorie still in the militia?”

  “I don’t think so,” Potts said. “Heard they had a big falling-out. It’s all hearsay, of course, but the gossip was he wanted ’em to do less talking and writing to their congressman and things like that and get more dramatic"

  Potts had his eyes wide open now, peering at Leaphorn, awaiting the question.

  “Like what?”

  “Just gossip, you know. But like blowing up a Forest Service office.”

  “Or maybe a dam?”

  Potts chuckled. “You’re thinking of that big manhunt a while back. When the guys stole the water truck and shot the policeman, and the FBI decided they were going to fill the truck with explosives, blow up the dam and drain Lake Mead.”

  “What’s your theory on that one?”

  “Stealing the water truck? I figured they needed it to water their marijuana crop.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “FBI didn’t buy that. I guess there was budget hearings coming up. They needed some terrorism to talk about, and if it’s just pot farmers at work, that hands the ball to the Drug Enforcement folks. The competition. The enemy.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said.

  “Now,” Potts said, "it is time for you to tell me what you’re up to. I heard you been working as a private investigator. Did the Ute Casino people sign you up to get their money back?”

  “No,” Leaphorn said. “Tell the truth I don’t know what I’m up to myself. Just heard something, and had time on my hands, and got to wondering about it, so I thought I’d ask around.”

  “Just bored then,” Potts said, sounding as if he didn’t believe it. “Nothing interesting on TV, so you thought you’d just take a three-hour drive up here to Utah and do some visiting. Is that it?”

  “That’s close enough,” Leaphorn said. “And I’ve got one more name to ask about. You know Roy Gershwin?”

  “Everybody knows Roy Gershwin. What’s he up to?”

  “Is there anything to connect him to the other three?”

  Potts thought about it. “I don’t know why I want to tell you anything, Joe, when you won’t tell me why you’re askin‘. But, let’s see. He used to show up at militia meetings a while back. He was fighting with the BLM, and the Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Service, or whatever they call it now, over a grazing lease and over a timber-cutting permit, too, I think it was. That had gotten him into an antigovernment mood. I think Baker used to work for him once on that ranch he runs. And I think his place runs up against Jorie’s, so that makes them neighbors.”

  “Good ne
ighbors?”

  Potts restored his glasses, sat up and looked at Leaphorn. “Don’t you remember Gershwin? He wasn’t the kind of fellow you were good neighbors with. And Jorie’s even worse. As a matter of fact, I think Jorie was suing Roy over something or other. Suing people was one of Jorie’s hobbies.”

  “About what?”

  Potts shrugged. “This and that. He sued me once ‘cause his livestock was running on my place, and I penned them up, and he wanted to take ’em back without paying me for my feed. With Gershwin, I don’t remember. I think they were fighting over the boundaries of a grazing lease.” He paused, considering. “Or maybe it was locking a gate on an access road.”

  “Were any of those three people pilots?”

  “Fly airplanes?” Potts was grinning. “Like rob the Ute Casino and then stealing Old Man Timms’s airplane to fly away? I thought you was retired from being a cop.”

  Leaphorn could think of no response to that.

  “You think maybe those three guys did it?” Potts said. “Well, that’s as good a guess as I could make. Why not? You have any idea where they’d fly to?”

  “No ideas about anything much,” Leaphorn said. “I’m just idling away some time.”

  “Several ranchers around here have their little planes,” Potts said. “None of those guys, though. I remember hearing Jorie going on about flying for the navy on his talk show, but I know he didn’t have a plane. And airplanes was one of the things Jorie used to bitch about. People flying over his ranch. Said they scared his livestock. He thought it was people spying on him when he was stealing pots. Baker and Ironhand now. Far as I know, neither of them ever had anything better than a used pickup.”

  “You know where Jorie lives?” Leaphorn asked.

  Potts stared at him. “You going to go see him? What you going to say? Did you rob the casino? Shoot the cops?”

  “If he did, he won’t be home. Remember? He flew away.”

  “Oh, right,” Potts said, and laughed. “If the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude says it, it must be true." He pushed himself up. “Let me get myself a piece of paper and my pencil. I’ll draw you a little map.”