“Well, now,” Leaphorn said, "it sounds like you were right to be worrying about those people. Let me get you a cup of coffee.”
“I don’t want any coffee,” Gershwin said. “I want to know what you did to get me screwed like this.”
“What I did?” Leaphorn diverted the coffeepot from the fresh cup and refilled his own. “Well, let’s see. First, I just thought about what you were asking me to do for you. I couldn’t think of any way to do it without getting into a crack—having a choice of either telling a judge you were my source or going to jail for contempt of a court order.”
He sat across the table from Gershwin and sipped his coffee. “You sure you don’t want a cup?”
Gershwin shook his head.
“So then I went up and talked to people around Bluff and around there about those men. I learned a little about all of them, but more about Jorie,” Leaphorn said, watching Gershwin over the rim of his cup. “I decided I’d see if any of them were home. Jorie was.”
“Killed himself. That right? So you’re the one who found his body.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Paper said he left a suicide note. Is that right?”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “There it was.“ He wondered how he would answer when Gershwin asked him what was in it. But Gershwin didn’t ask.
“I wonder why -" Gershwin began, but he cut off the sentence and started again. “The newspaper story sort of said the note was a confession. That he gave the names of the other two. That right?”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Then I don’t see why those militia bastards are putting the blame on me." The tone of that was angry, and so was his stare.
“That’s a puzzle,” Leaphorn said. “Do you think they suspect you know a lot about the robbery plan and were giving that away? Any chance of that?”
“I don’t see how that could be. When I was going to meetings, there was always somebody talking about doing something wild. Something to call attention to their little revolution. But nobody ever talked about robbery.”
Leaphorn let it drop. He took another sip of coffee, looked at Gershwin, waited.
Gershwin slammed his fist on the table. “Damn it to hell,” he said. “Why can’t the cops catch those bastards? They’re out there somewhere. They got their names. Know what they look like. Know where they live. Know their habits. It’s just like that ‘98 mess. You got FBI agents swarming around everywhere. You Navajo cops, and the Border Patrol, and four kinds of state cops, and county sheriffs, and twenty other kinds of cops standing around and manning roadblocks. Why in hell can’t they get the job done?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But there’s enough canyons out there to swallow up ten thousand cops.”
“I guess so. I guess I’m being unreasonable." He shook his head. “To be absolutely honest about it, I’m scared. I’ll admit it. That guy that came to the filling station at Bluff the other morning, he could just as easy have come to my house. I could be dead right now. Dead in my bed. Just waiting for somebody to come wandering by and find my body.”
Leaphorn tried to think of something reassuring to say. The best he could come up with was that he guessed the bandits would rather run than fight. It didn’t seem to console Gershwin.
“You got any idea if the cops are closing in on them? Have they figured out where they might be?”
Leaphorn shook his head.
“If I knew that, I could sleep a little better. Now I can’t sleep at all. I just sit in my chair with the lights off and my rifle on my lap." He gave Leaphorn a pleading look. “I’ll bet you know something. Long as you was a cop, knowing all the other cops the way you do, and the FBI, they must tell you something.”
“The last 1 heard is pretty much just common knowledge. That stolen truck was abandoned out there on the mesa south of the San Juan, and that’s where I understand they’re trying to pick up some tracks. South of Bluff and Montezuma Creek and over in the Aneth Oil -"
The buzz of his telephone interrupted him.
He picked it up off the table, said, “Leaphorn.”
“This is Jim Chee. We found that mine." Chee’s voice was loud with exuberance.
“Oh. Where?”
“You got your map there?”
“Just a minute.“ Leaphorn slid the map closer, picked up his pen. “OK.”
“The mouth is not more than thirty feet below the canyon rim. About a hundred, hundred and ten feet up from the canyon bottom on a fairly wide shelf. And above it, there’s the remains of what must have been a fairly large building. Most of the roof gone now, but a lot of the stone walls still standing. And the framework of what might have been some sort of a hoist sticking up.”
“Sounds like what you were hoping to find,” Leaphorn said.
“And the reason it fits the theory is you couldn’t see the mouth of the mine from the bottom. It’s maybe seventy feet up, and hidden by the shelf.”
“How’d you find it?”
Chee laughed. “The easy way. Hitched a ride in the EPA helicopter.”
Leaphorn still had the pen poised. “Where is it from the place they abandoned the truck?”
“About two miles north—maybe a little less than that.”
Leaphorn marked one of his small, precise X’s at the proper spot. He glanced at Gershwin.
“What’s all this about?” Gershwin asked.
Leaphorn made one of those ‘just a second’ gestures. “Have you notified the FBI?”
“I’m going to call Captain Largo right now,” Chee said. “Let him explain it to the federals.”
“That sounded interesting,” Gershwin said. “Did they find something useful?”
Leaphorn hesitated. “Maybe. Maybe not. They’ve been looking for an old, long-abandoned mine out there. One of a thousand places people might hide.”
“An old coal mine,” Gershwin said. “There’s lots of those around. You think it’s something I could count on? Sleep easy again?”
Leaphorn shrugged. “You mean, would I bet my life on it?”
“Yeah,” Gershwin said. “I guess that’s what I mean." He stood, picked up his hat, looked down at the map. “Well, to hell with it. I think I owe you an apology, Joe, storming in here like I did. I’m just going to head on home, pack up my stuff, and move out to a motel until this business is over with.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Sergeant Jim Chee limped into Largo’s cluttered office feeling even more uneasy than he usually did when approaching the captain. And rightfully so. When he’d pulled into the Navajo Tribal Police parking lot he’d noticed two of the shiny black Ford Taurus FBI sedans. Chee’s law-enforcement rela-tionship with the world’s largest police force had often been beset with friction. And Captain Largo’s telephone call summoning him to this meeting had been even more terse than usual.
“Chee,” Largo had said, "get your ass up here. Now!" Chee nodded to Special Agent Cabot and the other well-dressed fellow sitting across the desk from the captain and took the chair to which Largo motioned him. He put his cane across his lap and waited.
“You already know Agent Cabot,” Largo said. “And this gentleman is Special Agent Smythe." Mutual mumbles and nods followed.
“I’ve been trying to explain to them why you think this old mine you’ve found might be the place to look for Ironhand and Baker,” Largo said. “They tell me they’ve already checked every mine deeper than a dog hole up on that mesa. If you’ve found one they missed, they want to know where it is.”
Chee told them, estimating as closely as he could the distance of the mine’s canyon mouth from the San Juan and the distance of the surface structure in from the canyon rim.
“You spotted this from a helicopter?” Cabot asked. “Is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Chee said.
“Did you know we have prohibited private aircraft flights in that area?” Cabot said.
“I presumed you had,” Chee said. “That was a good idea. O
therwise, you’ll have those bounty hunters your reward offer is bringing in tying up the air-lanes.”
This caused a very brief pause while Cabot decided how to respond to this—a not very oblique reminder of the gales of laughter the Bureau had produced in its 1998 fiasco by offering a $250,000 reward one day, and promptly following that with an exhortation for swarms of bounty hunters the offer had attracted to please go away. They hadn’t.
Cabot decided to ignore the remark.
“I’ll need the name of the company that was operating this aircraft.”
“No company, actually,” Chee said. “This was a federal-government helicopter.”
Cabot looked surprised.
“What agency?”
“It was a Department of Energy copter,” Chee said. “I believe it’s based at the Tonapaw Proving Grounds over in Nevada.”
“Department of Energy? What business do the energy folks have out here?”
Chee had decided he didn’t much like Special Agent Cabot, or his attitude, or his well-shined shoes and necktie, or perhaps the fact that Cabot’s paycheck was at least twice as large as his, plus all those government perks. He said, “I don’t know.”
Captain Largo glowered at him.
“I understand the Department of Energy had leased the copter to the EPA,” Chee said, and waited for the next question.
“Ah, let’s see,” said Cabot. “I will rephrase the question so you can understand it. What are the Environmental Protection people doing up here?”
“They’re hunting old mines that might be a threat to the environment,” Chee said. “Mapping them. Didn’t the Bureau know about that?”
Cabot, used to asking questions and not to answering them, looked surprised again. He hesitated. Glanced at Captain Largo. Chee glanced at
Largo, too. Largo’s almost-suppressed grin showed that he also knew what Chee was doing and wasn’t as upset by it as it had seemed a moment ago.
“I’m sure we did,” Cabot said, slightly flushed. “I’m sure if such mapping was in any way helpful to us in this case, it would be used.”
Chee nodded. The ball was in the FBI court. He outwaited Cabot, who glanced at Largo again. Largo had found something interesting to look at out the window.
“Sergeant Chee,” Cabot said, "Captain Largo told us you had some reason to suspect this particular mine might be used by the perpetrators of the Ute Casino robbery. Would you explain that, please?”
This was the moment Chee had dreaded. He could imagine the amused look on Cabot’s face as he tried to explain that the idea came from a Ute tribal legend, trying to describe a hero figure who could jump from canyon bottoms to mesa rims. He took a deep breath and started.
Chee hurried through the relationship of George Ironhand with the original Ironhand, the account of how the Navajos couldn’t catch the villain, the notion that since the man was called the Ute name for the badger he might have—like that animal—a hole to hide in with an exit as well as an entrance. As Chee had expected, both Cabot and his partner seemed amused by it. Captain Largo did not appear amused. No suppressed grin now. His expression was dour. Chee found himself talking faster and faster.
“So here was the EPA doing its survey, I hitchhiked a ride, and there it was. The old entrance on a shelf high up on the canyon wall and above it the ruins of the old surface mine. It made sense,” Chee said. “I recommended to Captain Largo that it be checked out.”
Cabot was studying him. “Let’s see now,” he said. “You think that the people digging coal out of the cliff down in the canyon decided to dig right on up to the top? If I know my geology at all, that would have them digging through several thick levels of sandstone and all sorts of other strata. Isn’t that right?”
“Actually, I was thinking more of digging down from the top,” Chee said.
“Can you describe the old mine structure?” Cabot asked. “The building?”
“I have pictures of it,” Chee said. “I took my Polaroid camera along." He handed Cabot two photos of the old structures, one shot from rim level and one from a higher angle.
Cabot looked at them, then handed them to his partner.
“Is that the one you thought it might be?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Smythe said. “We spotted that the day we found their truck. We put a crew in there that afternoon and searched it, along with all the other buildings on that mesa.”
“What did you find?” asked Cabot, who obviously already knew the answer. “Did you see any sign that people might be hiding in the mine shaft?”
Smythe looked amused. “We didn’t even see a shaft,” he said. “Much less people. Just lots of rodent dropping, old, old trash, odds and end of broken equipment, animal tracks, three empty Thunderbird wine bottles with well-aged labels. There was no sign at all of human occupancy. Not in recent years.”
Cabot handed Chee the photographs, smiling. “You might want these for your scrapbook,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-four
As was his lifelong habit, Joe Leaphorn had gone to bed early.
Professor Louisa Bourebonette had returned from her Ute-myth-collecting expedition late. The sound of the car door shutting outside his open window had awakened him. He lay listening to her talking to Conrad Becenti about some esoteric translation problem. He heard her coming in, doing something in the kitchen, opening and closing the door to what had been Emma’s private working space and their guest bedroom, then silence. He analyzed his feelings about all this: having another person in the house, having another woman using Emma’s space and assorted related issues. He reached no conclusions. The next thing he knew the sunlight was on his face, he heard his Mister Coffee making those strangling sounds signaling its work was done, and it was morning.
Louisa was scrambling eggs at the stove.
“I know you like ’em scrambled,” she said, "because that’s the way you always order them.”
"True,” Leaphorn said, thinking that sometimes he liked them scrambled, and sometimes fried, and rarely poached. He poured both of them a cup of coffee, and sat.
“I had a fairly productive day,” she said, serving the eggs. “The old fellow in the nursing home at Cortez told us a version of the Ute migration story I’ve heard before. How about you?”
“Gershwin came to see me.”
“Really? What did he want?”
“To tell the truth, I’ve been wondering about that. I don’t really know.”
“So what did he say he wanted? I’ll bet he didn’t come just to thank you.”
Leaphorn chuckled. “He said he’d had a threatening telephone call. Someone accusing him of tipping off the police. He said he was scared, and he seemed to be. He wanted to know what was being done to catch them. If the police had any idea where they were. He said he was going to move into a motel somewhere until this was over.”
“Might be a big motel bill,” Louisa said. “Those two guys from the 1998 jobs are still out there, I guess. I hear the FBI has quit suggesting they’re dead.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He drank coffee, buttered his toast, ate eggs that were scrambled just a bit too dry for his taste and tried to decide what it was about Gershwin’s visit that was bothering him.
“Something’s on your mind,” Louisa said. “Is it the crime?”
“I guess. It’s none of my business anymore, but some things puzzle me.”
Louisa had consumed only toast and was cleaning up around the stove.
“I’m heading south to Flagstaff,” she said. “I’ll go through all these notes. I’ll take this wonderful old myth that has been floating around free as the air all these generations and punch it into my computer. Then one of these days I will call it up out of the hard disk and petrify it in a paper for whichever scholarly publication will want it.”
“You don’t sound very eager,” Leaphorn said. “Why not let that wait another day and come along with me?”
Louisa had made her speech facing the sink, where she
was rinsing his frying pan. Pan in hand, she turned.
“Where? Doing what?”
Leaphorn thought about that. A good question. How to explain?
“Actually doing what I do sometimes when I can’t figure something out. I drive off somewhere, and walk around for a while, or just sit on a rock and hope for inspiration. Sometimes I get it, sometimes not.”
Professor Bourebonette’s expression said she liked the sound of that.
“Being a social scientist, I think I’d like to observe that operation,” she said.
And so they left the professor’s car behind and headed south in Leaphorn’s pickup, taking Navajo Route 12 south, with the sandstone cliffs of the Manuelito Plateau off to their right, the great emptiness of Black Creek Valley on the left, and clouds lit by the morning sun building over the Painted Cliffs ahead of them.
“You said some things were bothering you,” Louisa said. “Like what?”
“I called an old friend of mine up at Cortez. Marci Trujillo. She used to be with a bank up there that did business with the Ute Casino. I told her I thought that our-hundred-and-something-thousand-dollar estimate of the loot sounded a little high to me. She said it sounded just about right for an end-of-the-month payday Friday night.”
“Wow,” Louisa said. “And that mostly comes from people who can’t afford to lose it. I think you Navajos were smart to say no to gambling.”
“I guess so,” Leaphorn said.
“On the other hand, in the old days when the Utes were stealing your horses they had to come down and get ’em. Now you drive up there and hand over the cash.”
Leaphorn nodded. “So I told her I was guessing that the loot would be mostly in smaller bills. A
very few hundreds or fifties, and mostly twenties, tens, fives, and ones. She said that was a good guess. So I asked her how much that would weigh.”
“Weigh?”
“She said if we decide the median of bills in the loot was about ten dollars, which she thought would be close, that would be forty-five thousand bills. The weight of that would be just about one hundred and seven pounds and eleven ounces.”
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