The Ghostway jlajc-6

by Tony Hillerman

  A white Ford sedan pulled up behind his pickup truck. Two men in it. The one on the passenger side got out and hurried up the walk to the manager's office. He was a short man, middle-aged, with a stocky, disciplined body and a round pink face. He wore gray pants and a seersucker coat. The door of the office opened before he reached it. The conversation there was brief. The short man looked over at Chee, saw him, and came directly across the grass toward him. At the Ford, the driver's door opened and a much larger man emerged. He stood for a moment watching. Then he, too, came sauntering toward the Gorman apartment.

  The short man was talking before he reached the porch. "Lady says you're looking for Albert Gorman. That right?"

  "More or less," Chee said.

  "That your truck?"

  "Yes."

  "You from Arizona?"

  "No," Chee said. He had bought the license plates when he was stationed at Tuba City, before his transfer to Shiprock.

  "Where you from?"

  "New Mexico."

  The bigger man arrived. Much bigger. Six-foot-four or so, Chee guessed, and broad. Much younger too. Maybe thirty-five. He looked tough. While he waited on the porch, Chee had decided he might expect fbi agents to arrive. These men were not fbi agents.

  "You're a long way from home," Shortman said.

  "Nine hundred miles," Chee agreed. "You fellows know where I can find this Albert Gorman? Or any of his family? Or his friends?"

  "What's your connection with Gorman?" Shortman asked.

  "Don't know him," Chee said. "What's your interest?"

  Under Shortman's coat, Chee could see just the edge of a brown leather strap, which might be part of a harness holding a shoulder holster. Chee couldn't think of anything else it might be. Shortman wasn't interested in answering Chee's question. He reached under his jacket and extracted a leather folder from the inside pocket. "Los Angeles Police Department," he said, letting the folder flop open to display a badge and photograph. "Let's see some identification."

  Chee fished out his wallet, opened it to show his own badge, and handed it to Shortman.

  "Navajo Tribal Police," Shortman read. He eyed Chee curiously. "Long way from home," he said again.

  "Nine hundred miles," Chee repeated. "And now can you tell me anything about this Gorman? We have a girl—" He stopped. The big man was engulfed in laughter. Chee and Shortman waited.

  "Mister," the big man said, "Shaw here can tell you everything about Albert Gorman. Shaw is the world champion expert on everything about Gorman. Gorman is part of Shaw's hobby."

  Chee held out his hand to the short man. "My name is Chee," he said.

  "Willie Shaw," the short man said, shaking hands. "This is Detective Wells. You have time for a talk? Cup of coffee?"

  Wells shook Chee's hand with the soft, gentle grip he'd learned to expect from huge people. "Good thing Shaw is retiring," he said. "Police work is starting to interfere with the hobby."

  "Mr. Chee here will give me a ride, I'll bet," Shaw said. "We'll go to that Vip's down on Sunset." He said it to Wells, but Wells was already walking back to the Ford. "Now," Shaw said, "I want you to start off by telling me what got the Navajo police interested in Albert Gorman."

  Chee kept the explanation simple—just the oddity of Gorman's unfinished burial preparations, the question of where Hosteen Begay had gone, the problem of finding Margaret Sosi and learning from her what Begay had said in his letter. He had finished it by the time they slid into a booth in the coffee shop. Shaw stirred sweetener into his coffee. It was time for questions.

  "The way I got it, Lerner just drove up to Gorman in the parking lot and shot him. Gorman shot back and drove off. Lerner dead in the lot. The Feds find Gorman dead of his gunshot wound later, at his uncle's house. That's it?"

  "Not quite," Chee said. He filled in the details.

  "And Albert had stopped in the lot to talk to an old man there?"

  "Yes," Chee said. "To ask directions." Apparently Shaw had seen the fbi report. Why would he have seen it?

  Wells had driven into the Vip's lot and come in and spotted them.

  "Scoot over," he said, and sat beside Shaw.

  "What did they talk about?" Shaw asked. "Gorman and the old man?"

  It was exactly the right question, Chee thought. Shaw impressed him.

  "What's your interest in Gorman?" Chee asked, keeping his voice very friendly. "I mean, as a Los Angeles police department detective?"

  "In fact, as an arson squad detective," Wells said. "It's a good question. One of these days, the captain is going to ask it. He's going to say, Sergeant Shaw, how come everybody is burning down Los Angeles and you're chasing around after car thieves?"

  Shaw ignored him. "I'd like to find out exactly why Gorman went to New Mexico," he said. "That would be interesting."

  "You going to tell me what I need to know about this end? Help me find the Sosi girl?"

  "Of course," Shaw said. "But I need to know what's behind the Navajos sending a man a thousand miles outside his jurisdiction. It's got to be better than a runaway teenager."

  "They didn't send me," Chee said. "I'm taking vacation time. Sort of on my own. Makes it simpler."

  Wells snorted. "Lordy," he said. "Spare me from this. Two of them in the same booth. The vigilantes ride again."

  "My friend here," said Shaw, tilting his round, red face toward Wells, "thinks police should just stick to their assignments."

  "Like arson," said Wells. "Right now we're supposed to be over on Culver looking into a warehouse fire, which is every bit as much fun as a New Mexico homicide and which the taxpayers are paying us for."

  "You're on your own then?" Shaw said. "Nothing official. A personal interest?"

  "Not exactly," Chee said. "The department wants to find the girl, and Old Man Begay. They're more or less missing. And me doing it on time off makes it less complicated." Chee could see Shaw understood the implications of that.

  "Yeah," Shaw said. "It's an fbi case." Some of the caution had left his face, and there was a touch of friendliness there now. And something else. Excitement?

  "You were going to tell me what Gorman talked about in the parking lot," Shaw said.

  Chee told him.

  "Albert was looking for Leroy?" Shaw frowned. "Had a picture of a house trailer?" He extracted a leather-covered notebook from a pocket of his coat, put on his bifocals, and read.

  "Joseph Joe," he muttered. "I wonder why he didn't tell the Feds about that."

  "He did," Chee said.

  Shaw stared at him.

  "He told the fbi everything I've told you."

  Shaw digested that. "Ah," he said. "So."

  "If that interests you," Chee said, "you might like to know that when the fbi emptied out Albert Gorman's pockets, the photograph Gorman had shown Joe wasn't there."

  "Stranger and stranger," Shaw said. "What happened to it?"

  "Two obvious possibilities. Gorman threw it away after he got shot. Or Old Man Begay took it."

  Shaw was reading his notebook. "I suspect you thought of a third possibility," he said, without looking up.

  "That the fbi agent palmed it?"

  Shaw glanced up from his notebook, a look that mixed appraisal and approval.

  "I'm almost certain that didn't happen. I found the body. I was watching. He didn't have a chance."

  "Could you find that trailer? Albert thought it was in Shiprock. Isn't that a small place?"

  "We found it. The man living in it said his name was Grayson. Said he didn't know any Leroy Gorman."

  "Do you know who Leroy Gorman is?" Shaw asked.

  "That's one of the things you were going to tell me."

  "Let me see that identification again."

  Chee dug out his ID folder and handed it to Shaw. Shaw studied it, memorizing the information, Chee guessed. "I'll make a telephone call," he said. "Back in a minute."

  Chee sipped his coffee. Through the window came the sound of traffic, the clamor of an ambulance hurrying
somewhere. Wells slid his cup back and forth across his saucer, pushing it with a finger.

  "He's a good man, Shaw," he said. "Great record. But he's going to screw himself up with this. Mess around until he gets into trouble."

  "Why? Why's he so interested?"

  "His friend got killed," Shaw said. "Died, actually." He drained the cup and signaled a waitress for a refill. "However it was, Shaw thinks they killed him, and they're getting away with it. It drives him crazy."

  "He's not happy with the investigation?"

  "There isn't any," Wells said. He waited for the waitress to finish pouring. "The man had a coronary. Natural causes. No sign of foul play."

  "Oh."

  Wells's face was moody. "I've been his partner for four years, and I can tell you he's a dandy. Three commendations. Smart as they get. But he can't seem to turn loose of this Upchurch business."

  "Upchurch. Was he the fbi agent?"

  Wells stared at him.

  "I heard the fbi lost a man on this case," Chee explained. "And they seem to be acting funny."

  "They're going to be acting even funnier when they find out Shaw—" He stopped. Shaw slid back into the booth.

  "Albert Gorman was a car thief," Shaw began without preamble. "He and Leroy. They're brothers, and they both stole cars for a living. Worked for an outfit called McNair Factoring. Old outfit down on the San Pedro docks. Imports coffee beans, cocoa, raw rubber, stuff like that—mostly from South America, I think, but some from Asia and Africa too. Exports whatever is going out—including stolen cars. It's sort of a specialty. Mostly expensive stuff. Ferraris, Mercedes, Caddies. So forth. Mostly to Argentina and Colombia, but now and then to Manila and wherever they had orders. That's the way they worked. Gorman and the others were on commission. They'd get orders for specific models. Say a Mercedes Four-fifty SL. And a delivery date when the right ship was at the wharf. They'd spot the car, wait until the date, then nail it and drive it right onto the dock. Have it on the ship before the owner missed it. Pretty slick."

  Shaw paused to see if Chee agreed. Chee nodded.

  "Then an fbi agent got into this. His name was… Kenneth…" Shaw's voice choked. The muscle along his upper jaw tensed. Wells, who had been watching him, looked quickly away to study the traffic passing on this seedy end of Sunset Boulevard. Chee thought of the Navajo custom of not speaking the name of the dead. For Shaw, the name had certainly called back the ghost.

  Shaw swallowed. "His name was Kenneth Upchurch." He stopped again. "Sorry," he said to Chee. "He was a good friend. Anyway, Upchurch worked up a case on the McNair operation. A good one."

  Shaw had control again now. A man who had made a thousand reports was making another one, and he made it clearly and concisely. When Upchurch had gone to the grand jury he found his witnesses slipping away. A first mate fell overboard. A ship's captain remained behind in Argentina. A thief lost his memory. Another changed his mind. Upchurch got some indictments, but the top people got away clean."

  "Went scot-free," Wells said sourly. "A pun. The clan McNair went scot-free. Ha ha." He didn't smile and neither did Shaw. A bad old joke.

  "That was nine years ago," Shaw continued. "After a while McNair Factoring went back into the car business, and Upchurch got wind of it, and the word was they were tying it in now with Colombia cocaine trade. He told me that what went wrong the first time was that everybody knew about it. This time he was going to make a case by himself. Keep it totally quiet. Just work on it by himself; you know, take his time. Nail a witness here and there and keep 'em in the bag until he was ready. Tell nobody except whoever he had to work with in the U.S. District Attorney's office, and maybe somebody in Customs if he had to. So that's the way he did it. Worked for years. Anyway, this time he had everything cold. He was really tickled, Ken was." Shaw's red face was happy, remembering it. "He had witnesses nailed down to tie in the top people, old George McNair himself, and a guy named Robert Beno, who sort of ran the stealing end, and one of McNair's sons—everybody big."

  Shaw gestured with both hands, a smoothing motion. "Like silk. Seven indictments. The whole shebang." Shaw grinned at the recollection. "That was on a Tuesday. Complete surprise. Got 'em all except Beno, mugged and fingerprinted and booked in and bonded out on Wednesday. Kenneth, he made some of the arrests himself—McNair, it was, and his boy—and then he made sure he got his witnesses tucked in safe. He had 'em in the Witness Protection Program, and as soon as they got through talking to the grand jury, he'd take 'em himself and tuck 'em back in. Not taking any chances this time. By that weekend he was all finished with it."

  Shaw stopped, staring straight ahead. He took a deep breath and let it out.

  "That weekend, Saturday night, we was going to celebrate. My wife and Kenneth and Molly. Had reservations. Saturday he was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway. Don't know where he was going, but he was just about at Culver City, and he lost control of the car and hit a van and another car and went over an off ramp."

  There was another dragging moment of silence.

  "Killed him," Shaw said.

  Wells stirred, started to say something, shrugged instead.

  "How?" Chee asked. "In the crash?"

  "Autopsy showed he had a coronary," Shaw said, glancing at Wells. "Death by natural causes."

  "Nice timing," Chee said.

  "Sure, it makes you suspicious," Wells interjected. "It made the fbi suspicious too. One of their own had just closed a big case. They got right on it, heavy. I know for sure they had the autopsy rechecked. Had their own doctor in on it. They didn't find anything but a guy driving down the freeway having a heart attack."

  "The fbi," Shaw said. "Lawyers and certified public accountants."

  "lapd Homicide helped them," Wells said. "You know that. You know those guys as well as I do. Better. They don't miss much when they're interested, and they didn't find a damn thing either."

  "Well," Shaw said, "you know and I know that McNair killed him. Just killed him to get even. Had money enough to do it so it wouldn't show. Induced the heart attack."

  Wells looked angry. Obviously it was something they had covered before. Often. "Nothing wrong with the brakes. No sign of drugs in the body. No skin punctures. No poison darts fired from airplanes. No canisters of poison gas. Nothing in the blood."

  "The car was all torn up," Shaw said. "So was the body."

  "They're used to that," Wells said. "The pathologists—"

  "We won't argue about it," Shaw said. "Kenneth is dead. He was as good a friend as a man ever had. I don't want somebody getting away with killing him, casual as swatting a fly."

  "What's the motive?" Chee asked.

  Shaw and Wells both looked at him, surprised.

  "Like I said, getting even," Shaw said. "For starters. And it got him out of the way before the trial."

  "But the D.A.'s office would handle that, wouldn't it? Was he an important witness?"

  "I guess not," Shaw conceded. "But the case was his baby. He'd be in the background, making sure nothing went wrong, making sure the witnesses were okay, that the prosecutor knew what the hell he was doing. That sort of thing."

  "Witnesses all safe?"

  "Sure. Far as I know, and I think I would have heard. But it's the Witness Protection Program. All secret, secret, secret."

  "Albert Gorman wasn't safe," Chee said.

  "Albert wasn't a witness," Shaw said. "Kenneth couldn't turn him. Couldn't get anything on him. Leroy, now, he's a witness. Ken got him cold, in a stolen Mercedes with his hotwire kit and keys. And he even had written himself a note about the model and when to deliver it to what dock. Two previous convictions."

  "So now Leroy's a protected witness?" Chee said.

  "I'd guess yes," Shaw said. "Wouldn't you? I know he hadn't been in town since before the grand jury. If I was guessing, I'd guess maybe they assigned him the name of Grayson and hid him in a trailer on the Navajo Reservation."

  "So why shoot Albert?" Chee asked. But he was already
guessing the answer.

  "I don't think they planned to do it. I think they were watching him to see if he'd lead 'em to Leroy, and they followed him to Shiprock. Sent Lerner. Lerner was supposed to follow Al or get him to tell where Leroy was hiding. Something went wrong. Boom."

  "Makes sense," said Chee. "The fbi report didn't say much about Lerner. Who was he?"

  "We have a folder on him," Shaw said. "Longtime hood. Used to work in one of the longshoremen's rackets, extortion, collecting for the sharks. Then he was bodyguard for somebody in Vegas, and for a long time he worked for McNair."

  "Sort of a hit man?" Chee asked. He was uneasy with the expression. It wasn't a term in the working vocabulary of the Tribal Police.

  "Not really," Shaw said. "Their regular muscle, from what Upchurch told me, was a freelancer. A guy named Vaggan."

  "Wonder why he didn't go," Chee said. "Looks like it would have been important to them."

  Shaw shrugged. "No telling. Maybe it cost too much. Vaggan is supposed to be expensive."

  "But good," Wells said. "But good."

  Chapter 13

  Vaggan rarely wasted time. Now, while he waited for 3 a.m. and time to begin Operation Leonard, he listened to Wagner on his tape deck and reread The Navajo. He sat in the swivel chair in the rear of his van, light-tight curtains drawn over its windows, and absorbed the chapter about Navajo curing ceremonials. The page he read was illuminated by a clip-on battery-powered light that Vaggan had ordered from Survive magazine at a cost of $16.95 plus cod charges. He kept the light in the glove box of the van for just such occasions, the long waits in dark places where he had business to do and where he didn't want to be noticed. The light was advertised for reading in poorly lit motels, on aircraft, and so forth, and it made turning pages awkward. But its light focused narrowly on the page and nowhere else. If anyone was snooping around Vaggan's van they'd see nothing reflecting on his windshield.