Hunting Badger jlajc-14

by Tony Hillerman

  “I can’t believe this,” Louisa said. “Right off the top of her head?”

  “No. She had to do some arithmetic. She said banks get their money supply in counted bundles. They put the bundles on special scales to make sure someone with sticky fingers isn’t slipping a bill out here and there.”

  Louisa shook her head. “There’s so much going on out in the real world we academics don’t know about.” She paused, thinking. “For example, now I’m wondering how any of this is causing you to get suspicious about Gershwin’s visit.”

  “Ms Trujillo once ran the bank Everett Jorie used. I asked her if she could tell me anything about Jorie’s financial situation. She said probably not, but since Jorie was dead and his account frozen until an estate executor showed up, she could maybe give me some general hints. She said Jorie had both a checking and a savings account. He had “some” balance in the first one and “several thousand dollars” in the other. Plus a fine credit rating.”

  “Then why in the world—But he said it was to help finance their little revolution, didn’t he? I guess that explains it. But it doesn’t explain how you knew where Jorie did his banking.”

  “The checkbook was on Jorie’s desk,” Leaphorn said.

  Louisa was grinning at him. “Oh, really,” she said. “Right out there in plain sight just where people keep their checkbooks. Wasn’t that convenient for you?”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “Well, maybe I had to inch open a desk drawer a little. But anyway, then I asked if Ray Gershwin banked with her, and she said not now, but he used to. They’d turned him down for a loan last spring, and Gershwin had gotten sore about it and moved his business elsewhere. And did she know anything about Gershwin’s current solvency. She laughed and said it was bad last spring, and she doubted if it was going to get any better. I asked why not, and she said Gershwin may lose his biggest grazing lease. Some sort of litigation is pending in federal court. So I called the district court clerk up in Denver to ask about that. He called me back and said the case was moot. The plaintiff had died.”

  Silence. Leaphorn angled to the left off of Navajo Route 12 onto New Mexico Highway 134.

  “Now we cross Washington Pass,” he said. “Named after the governor of New Mexico Territory who thought this part of the world was full of gold, silver and so forth and was an early believer in ethnic cleansing. He’s the one who sent Kit Carson and the New Mexico Hispanos and the Utes to round us up and get rid of us—once and for all. The Tribal Council got the government to agree to change the name a few years ago, but everybody still calls it Washington Pass. I guess that proves we Navajos don’t hold grudges. We’re tolerant.”

  “I’m not,” Louisa said. “I’m tired of waiting for you to tell me the name of the deceased plaintiff.”

  “I’ll bet you’ve already guessed.”

  “Everett Jorie?”

  “Right. Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Let me think about it.”

  She did. “That could be a motive for murder, couldn’t it?”

  “Good enough I’d think.”

  “And lots of irony there,” Louisa said, ”if irony is the word for it. It reminds you of one of those awful wildlife films you’re always seeing on television. The lions pull down the zebra, and then the jackals and the buzzards move in to take advantage. Only this time it’s old Mr Timms, trying to defraud his insurance company, and Mr Gershwin, trying to get rid of a lawsuit.”

  “Doesn’t do a lot for one’s opinion of humanity,” Leaphorn said.

  Louisa was still looking thoughtful. “I’ll bet you know this district court clerk personally, don’t you? If I’d call the federal district court and asked for the court clerk, I’d get shifted around four or five times, put on hold, and finally get somebody who’d tell me he couldn’t release that information, or I had to drive up to Denver and get it from the judge or something like that." Louisa was sounding slightly resentful. “This all-encompassing, eternal, universal, everlasting good-old-boy network. You do know him, don’t you?”

  “I confess,” Leaphorn said. “But you know, it’s a small world up here in this empty country. Work as a cop as long as I did, you know about everybody who has anything to do with the law.”

  “I guess so,” Louisa said. “So he said he’d trot down and look it up for you?”

  “I think it’s just punch the proper keys on his computer and up comes Jorie, Everett, Plaintiff, and a list of petitions filed under that name. Something like that. He said this Jorie did a lot of business with the federal court. And he was also suing our Mr Timms. Some sort of a claim he was violating rights of neighboring leaseholders by unauthorized use of BLM land for an airport.”

  “Well, now. That’s nice. A Department of Defense spokesman would call that peripheral damage.”

  “Peripheral benefit in this case,” Leaphorn said.

  “It’s collateral damage. But how about the suicide note?”

  “Remember it wasn’t handwritten on paper,” Leaphorn said. “It was typed into a computer. Anyone could have done it. And remember that last manhunt. One of the perps turned up dead and the FBI declared him a suicide. That might have given somebody the idea that the feds would go for that notion again.”

  Louisa laughed. “You know what I’m wondering? Did the neat little trick Mr Timms tried to pull off suggest to retired lieutenant Joe Leaphorn that Gershwin might have seen the same opportunity to deal with a lawsuit?”

  Leaphorn grinned. “As a matter of fact, I think it did."

  Near the crest of Washington Pass he pulled off the pavement onto a dirt track that led through a grove of Ponderosa pines. He pulled to a stop at the edge of a cliff and gestured eastward. Below them lay a vast landscape dappled with cloud shadows and late-morning sunlight and rimmed north and east by the shapes of mesas and mountains. They stood on the rimrock, just looking.

  “Wow,” Louisa said. “I never get enough of this.”

  “It’s home country for me,” Leaphorn said. “Emma used to get me to drive up here and look at it those times I was thinking of taking a job in Washington." He pointed northeast. “We lived right down there when I was a boy, about ten miles down between the Two Grey Hills Trading Post and Toadlena. My mother planted my umbilical cord under a pinon on the hill behind our hogan." He chuckled. “Emma knew the legend. That’s the binding the wandering child can never break.”

  “You still miss her, don’t you?”

  “I will always miss her,” Leaphorn said.

  Louisa put her arm around him and hugged.

  “Due east,” she said. “That hump of clouds. Could that be Mount Taylor?”

  “It is, and that’s why its other name—I should say one of its other names—is Mother of Rains. The westerlies are pushed up there, and the mist becomes rain in the colder air and then the clouds drift on, dumping the moisture before they get to Albuquerque.”

  “Tsoodzil in Navajo,” Louisa said, ”and the Turquoise Mountain when you translate it into English, and Dark Mountain for the Rio Grande Pueblos, and your Sacred Mountain of the East.”

  “And due north, - maybe forty miles, there’s Ship Rock sticking up like a finger pointing at the sky, and, beyond, that blue bump on the horizon is the nose of Sleeping Ute Mountain.”

  “Scene of the crime,” Louisa said.

  Leaphorn said nothing. He was frowning, looking north. He drew in a deep breath, let it out.

  “What?” Louisa said. “Why this sudden look of worry?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Let’s drive on down to Two Grey Hills. I want to call Chee. I want to make sure the Bureau sent some people in to check out that old mine.”

  “I always wonder why you don’t have a cell phone. Don’t they work well out here?”

  “Until I quit being a cop I had a radio in my vehicle,” Leaphorn said. “When I quit being a cop, I didn’t have anybody to call."

  Which sounded sort of sad to Louisa. “What’
s this about a mine?” she asked, as they got back into the vehicle.

  “Maybe I didn’t mention that,” Leaphorn said. “Chee was looking for an old Mormon coal mine, abandoned in the nineteenth century that maybe had a canyon entrance and another one from the top of the mesa. Where they could lift the coal out without climbing out of the canyon carrying it. I thought that might have been the hideout of Ironhand’s dad. It would explain that business Old Lady Bashe was telling you about him disappearing in the canyon and reappearing on top.”

  “Yes,” Louisa said. “You’re thinking that’s where those two are hiding now?”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Just a possibility." He turned the truck left, down the bumpy dirt road and away from the highway. “This is rough going,” he said. “But if you don’t break something, its only about nine miles this way. If you go around by the highway, it’s almost thirty.”

  “Which tells me you’re in a hurry to make this telephone call. You want to tell me why?”

  “I want to make sure he told the FBI,” Leaphorn said, and laughed. “He’s awful touchy about the Bureau. Gets his feelings hurt. And if he did tell them, I want to find out if they followed up on it.”

  Louisa waited, glanced at him, braced herself as the truck crossed a rocky washout and tilted down the slope.

  “That doesn’t tell me why you’re worried. All of a sudden.”

  “Because I’m remembering how interested Gershwin was in the location of that mine.”

  She thought about that. “It seems reasonable. If somebody threatens you, you’re going to wonder where they’re hanging out.”

  “Right,” Leaphorn said. “Probably nothing to worry about.”

  But he didn’t slow down.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Sergeant Jim Chee was in his house-trailer home, sprawled in his chair with his foot perched on a pillow on his bunk and a Ziploc bag full of crushed ice draped over his ankle. Bernadette Manuelito was at the stove preparing a pot of coffee and being very quiet about it because Chee wasn’t in the mood for conversation or anything else.

  He had gone over everything that had happened in Largo’s office, suffered again the humiliation of Cabot handing him his photos of the mine, Cabot’s snide smile, being more or less dismissed by Captain Largo, slinking out of the room without a shred of dignity left. And then, his head full of outrage, indignation and self-disgust, not paying attention to where the hell he was walking, losing his balance tripping over something in the parking lot, and coming down full weight on his sprained ankle and dumping himself full length on the gravel.

  And of course a swarm of the various sorts of cops working on the casino hunt had been there to see this—two of his NTP officers reporting in, the division radio gal coming out, three or four Border Patrol trackers up from El Paso, a BIA cop he’d once worked with, and a couple of the immense over-supply of FBI agents standing around picking their noses and waiting for Cabot to emerge. And of course, when he was pushing himself up—awkwardly trying to keep any pressure off the ankle—there was Bernie taking his arm.

  And now here was Bernie in his trailer, puttering with his coffeepot. Largo had emerged and, despite Chee’s objections, had dispatched Bernie to take him to the clinic to have the ankle looked after. She had done that, and brought him home, and now it was past quitting time for her shift but here she was anyway, measuring the coffee on her own time.

  And looking pretty as she did it. He resisted thinking about that, unwilling to diminish the self-pity he was enjoying. But looking at her, as neat from the rear elevation as from the front, reminded him that he was comparing her with Janet Pete. She lacked Janet’s high-gloss glamour, her physical perfection (depending, however, on how one rated that) and her sophistication. Again, how did one rate sophistication? Did you rate it by the standards of the Ivy League, Stanford and the rest of the politically correct privileged class, or by the Chuska Mountain sheep-camp society, where sophistication required the deeper and more difficult knowledge of how one walked in beauty, content in a difficult world? Such thoughts were causing Chee to feel better, and he turned his mind hurriedly back to the memory of Cabot returning his photographs, thereby restoking his anger.

  Just then the telephone rang. It was the Legendary Lieutenant himself—the very one whose notions about Ute tribal legends was at the root of this humiliation.

  “Did you report finding that mine to the Bureau?”

  “Yes,” Chee said.

  Silence. Leaphorn had expected more than that.

  “What’s being done about it? Do you know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Leaphorn’s tone said he couldn’t believe that.

  “That’s right,” Chee said. He realized he was playing the same childish game with Leaphorn that he had played with Cabot. He didn’t like the feel of that. He admired Leaphorn. Leaphorn, he had to admit it, was his friend. So he interrupted the silence.

  “The Special Agent involved said they’d already searched that mine. Nothing in it but animal tracks and mice droppings. He handed me back the photos I’d taken, and they sent me on my way.”

  “Be damned,” Leaphorn said. Chee could hear him breathing for a while. “Did he say when they did their search?”

  “He said right after the truck was found. He said they searched the whole area. Everything.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “How much structure was left on top of the mesa?”

  “Some stone walls, partly fallen down, roof gone from part of it. Then there was a framework of timbers, sort of a triangle structure, sticking out of it.”

  “Sounds like the support for the tipple to lift the coal out and dump it.”

  “I guess so,” Chee said, wondering about the point of all this. The feds had looked, and nobody was home.

  “Searched the whole area, you said? That day?”

  “Yeah,” Chee said, sensing Leaphorn’s point and feeling a faint stir of illogical optimism.

  “Didn’t Deputy Dashee say they found the truck about middle of the day?”

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “And they’d be searching the Timms place, house, barns, outbuildings, and all those roads wandering around to those Mobil Oil pump stations, and -" Chee ran out of other examples. Casa Del Eco Mesa was huge, but it was almost mostly empty hugeness.

  “The best they would have had time to do would be to give it a quick glance,” Leaphorn said.

  “Well, yes. Wouldn’t that be enough to show it was empty?”

  “I think I’ll take a drive up there and look around for myself. Is that area still roadblocked?”

  “It was yesterday,” Chee said. Then he added exactly what he knew the Legendary Lieutenant hoped he would add. “I’ll go with you and show ’em my badge.”

  “Fine,” Leaphorn said. “I’m calling from Two Grey Hills. Professor Bourebonette is with me, but she’s run into a couple of her fellow professors dickering over a rug. Hold on. Let me find out if they can give her a ride back to Flagstaff.”

  Chee waited.

  “Yep,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll pick you up soon as I can get there.”

  “Right. I’ll be ready.”

  Bernadette Manuelito was staring at him. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Go where with whom? You can’t go anywhere with that ankle. You’re supposed to keep it elevated. And iced.”

  Chee relaxed, closed his eyes, recognized that he was feeling much, much better. Why did talking to Joe Leaphorn do that for him? And now this business with Bernie. Worrying about his ankle. Bossing him around. Why did that make him feel so much better? He opened his eyes and looked up at her. A very pretty young lady even when she was frowning at him.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Sergeant Jim Chee kept his ankle elevated by resting it on pillows on the rear seat of Officer Bernie Manuelito’s battered old Unit 11. He kept it iced with a plastic sack loaded with ice cubes. The ankle was feeling better, and so was Chee. Going to the clinic and having it expertly wr
apped and taped had done wonders for the injury. Having his old boss showing him some respect had been good for bruised morale.

  Bernie was tooling westward on U.S. 160, past the Red Mesa School, heading toward the Navajo 35 intersection at Mexican Water, Chee was behind her, slumped against the driver’s side of the car, watching the side of Leaphorn’s graying burr haircut. The lieutenant was not nearly as taciturn as Chee remembered him. He was telling her of the names Gershwin had left on the note at the Navajo Inn coffee shop, and how that had led to Jorie’s place and about learning Jorie was suing Gershwin and the rest of it. Bernie was hanging on every word, and Leaphorn was obviously enjoying the attention. He’d been explaining to her why he had always been skeptical of coincidence, and Chee had heard that so often when he was the man’s assistant in the Window Rock office that he had it memorized. It was bedrock Navajo philosophy. All things interconnected. No effect without cause. The beetle’s wing affects the breeze, the larks’ song bends the warrior’s mood, a cloud back on the western horizon parts, lets light of the setting sun through, turns the mountains to gold, affects the mood and decision of the Navajo Tribal Council. Or, as the Anglo poet had put it, “No man is an island.”

  And Bernie, in her kindly fashion, was recognizing a lonely man’s need and asking all the right questions. What a girl. “Is that sort of how you use that map Sergeant Chee tells me about?” And of course it was.

  “I think Jim’s mind works about the way mine does,” Leaphorn said. “And I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. This casino business, for example. The casino’s by Sleeping Ute Mountain. The escape vehicle is abandoned a hundred miles west on Casa Del Eco Mesa. Nearby a barn with an aircraft in it. The same day the aircraft is stolen. Closeness in both time and place. Nearby is an old mine. The Ute legends suggest the father of one of the bandits used it as his escape route. A little cluster of coincidences.”

  Bernie said, “Yes,” but she sounded doubtful.

  There are more,” Leaphorn said. “Remember the Great 1998 Manhunt. Three men involved. Police shot, stolen vehicle abandoned. Huge hunt begins. The fellow believed to be the ringleader is found dead. The FBI rules it suicide. The other two men vanish in the canyons.”