Vaggan had been studying McNair's face. It registered irritation, then distaste. About what Vaggan had expected.
"I'm not guilty," McNair said.
"Not until the jury convicts you," Vaggan said. "Then you are, and the judge raises the bail way up there, and it's all going to be a lot tougher and more expensive."
"I have never been convicted of anything." McNair said. "No McNair has ever been in prison. Never will be." He got up and stood by the window, his hand resting on a form Vaggan presumed was a sculpture cast in steel. "Besides, if you walk away from it, you can't take this along."
He seemed to mean the sculpture and what he saw from the window. Or perhaps it meant the bagpipe and being a McNair. Vaggan could appreciate this. One of the rulers. The hard men. An interesting man, Vaggan thought. He'd be dealing with the McNairs after the missiles, the tough ones. He understood the old man better again. The avidity he'd seen was as much like greed as it was cruelty. Cruelty bothered him because it seemed beside the point, a waste of emotions that seemed strange to him. But Vaggan could understand greed perfectly.
"I have a feeling you're balking," McNair said, still looking out the window. "Why else all this impertinence? All these questions? Will you take care of it for me?"
"All right," Vaggan said. He got up and took the paper from the old man's fingers, unfolded it, and read. The address was on a street he'd never heard of. He'd get it located on his map, and wait for dark, and get it over with.
Chapter 16
Jim chee, who had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people. For a while he managed to keep track of just where he was in relation to where he had been, noticing direction shifts and remembering when he switched from one freeway to another. But soon it overwhelmed him. He concentrated solely on the freeway map, which Shaw had marked for him, and on not missing his turns. The land had risen a little now out of the flatness of the city basin, and there were traces of desert visible in vacant lots, which became vacant blocks, which became entire vacant hillsides, eroded and dotted with cactus and the dry, prickly brush common to land where it rarely rains. The poor side of the city. Chee examined it curiously. He no longer had a sense of where he was in relation to his motel. But there, low on the southwestern horizon, hung the sun. And eastward over those dry ridges lay the desert. And behind him, somewhere beyond the thickening smog of the city, was the cold, blue Pacific. It was enough to know.
And now just ahead of him was the exit sign Shaw had told him to watch for. He angled the truck cautiously across the freeway lanes and down the exit ramp and rolled to a stop on the parking ramp of a Savemor service station. Here tumbleweeds grew through the broken asphalt. A paunchy, middle-aged man in bib overalls leaned against the cashier's booth, eyeing him placidly. Chee spread his Los Angeles street map across the steering wheel, making sure he was in the right place. The sign said Jaripa Street, which seemed correct. Now the job was to locate Jacaranda, which intersected somewhere and led to the address that Shaw had pried, finally, from Gorman's landlady. Watching Shaw work had been impressive.
Chee recalled the interview. Two interviews, to be correct, although the first one had been brief. He had rung her doorbell, and rung, and rung until finally she had appeared, staring at him wordlessly past the barely opened door. She had re-inspected his Navajo Tribal Police credentials, still with no sign they impressed her. No, she'd said, she hadn't seen anyone like Margaret Billy Sosi. And then Chee had told her that a witness had seen the girl here.
"They lied," the woman had said, and closed the door firmly in Chee's face.
It had taken almost an hour for the dispatcher at lapd to locate Shaw, and maybe twenty minutes later Shaw had arrived—driving up alone in an unmarked white sedan. The second interview had gone much better.
They'd done this one inside, in the woman's cluttered office-sitting room, and Chee had learned something from the way Shaw had handled it.
"This man hasn't got any business here," Shaw had said, pointing a thumb at Chee. "He's an Indian policeman. Couldn't arrest anybody in LA. I don't care what you told him. You could tell him to go to hell. But now I'm here."
Shaw fished out his identification and held it in front of the woman's face. "You and I've done business before, Mrs. Day," he said. "You called me when this guy showed up asking about Gorman, just like I told you to. I appreciate that. Now I need to find this girl, Margaret Sosi. She was here yesterday. What'd she say to you?"
Chee was trying to read Mrs. Day's expression. It was closed. Hostile. Was it fearful? Call it tense, he thought.
"Trashy people are always showing up here, ringing my doorbell." She glanced at Chee. "You can't expect me to remember them."
"I can," Shaw said. "I do expect it." He stared at her, face hard. "We're going to find the girl, and I'm going to ask her if she talked to you."
Mrs. Day said nothing.
"If she did, then I'm going to get the fire marshal's boys interested in this place of yours. Wiring. Exits. Trash removal. You familiar with the fire code for rental property?"
Mrs. Day looked stubborn.
"When we find this girl, if she's got her throat cut, like maybe she will have from what we know now, and you haven't helped us, then that makes you an accessory to murder. I don't guess we could prove it, but we can get you downtown, and book you in, and then you have to deal with the bonding company, and get a lawyer hired, and show up for the grand jury, and—"
"She was looking for Gorman," Mrs. Day said.
"We know that," Shaw said. "What did she say about him?"
"Nothing much. I told her Gorman wasn't here."
"What else—" Shaw began, but the telephone cut him off.
Mrs. Day looked at Shaw. On the wall behind her, the telephone rang again.
Shaw nodded.
Mrs. Day said hello into the mouthpiece, listened, said no, said I'll call you back. "Just a sec," she said. She reached behind her and wrote a number on a calendar mounted to the wall beside the phone. "I don't know. Maybe fifteen minutes," she said, and hung up.
"What else did she say?" Shaw continued.
"She was trying to find some old man. I don't remember his name. Her grandfather. Wanted to know if the old man had come here looking for Gorman."
"Had he?" Shaw asked.
"I never seen him if he did. Then she wanted to know if I had any other address for Gorman, and I gave her what I had and she went away."
"What did you give her?"
"Next of kin," Mrs. Day said. "I make my renters fill out a little card for me." She took a metal box from the desk, fingered through it, and handed Shaw a file card. "Gives them the idea that if they steal everything you got a way at getting back at 'em."
Shaw copied information into his notebook.
"Jacaranda Street? That right?"
Mrs. Day nodded.
"Never heard of it," Shaw said. "And the name's Bentwoman Tsossie? Could that be right?"
"What he said," Mrs. Day said. "Who knows about Indians?"
Shaw returned the card. Chee was looking at the calendar pad beside the telephone. It was divided into the thirty-one days of October, and Mrs. Day had written the telephone number of whoever had just called her in the October 23 space—which was today. October 22 was blank, as were many of the days. Others bore terse notations, accompanied by numbers. In the October 3 square, the word Gorman was written, with a number under it. A line ran from Gorman to another number in the margin. Chee recognized the second number. It was on a card in his billfold—the number of Shaw's telephone. Whose phone would the first number ring?
N
ow, as he sat in his pickup amid the tumbleweeds beside this rundown service station, the significance of all this began to take shape in Jim Chee's mind. The date was wrong. Too early. Days too early.
There was a pay phone booth at the sidewalk adjoining the station. Chee opened the truck door, swung his legs out, and stopped to think it through again. Mrs. Day had written Gorman's name in the October 3 box, at least a week before Shaw had recruited her as a watcher. Then she had written the number of Shaw's arson office number in the margin and linked it to Gorman's name with a line. But someone had contacted her a week before that and arranged for her to call a number relative to Gorman. Had she been watching him for someone else before she had watched his apartment for Shaw? What was the number? Chee recalled the number, as he was expected to recall it, without feeling particularly proud of the feat. Chee had been taught to remember when he emerged from infancy, and it was a skill his training as a yataalii had honed. He climbed out of the truck.
Chee called the arson number, hoping only to extract Shaw's home number. But the detective answered.
"It don't mean a thing to me," Shaw said. "It's a downtown telephone, judging from the prefix. Have you tried it?"
"No. I thought I'd ask you. It's after five so nobody is going to be there."
"Who knows?" Shaw said. "We'll just give a try. I'm going to put you on hold a minute and call it." The telephone clicked.
Chee waited. Through the dirty window of the telephone booth, he could see a row of rundown residences scattered down a street that was mostly weedy vacant lots. From across the hills, smoke rose white and gray. A brush fire, Chee guessed. Shaw had called this "poor boy territory," the habitat of losers, of transients and bums and other marginal people. He'd warned Chee not to expect the streets to match the street maps.
"I wish I could get off and go along," Shaw had said. "It's a good place to get lost, if you want to get lost. Or to lose something if you got something you don't want nobody to find. Including bodies. Every once in a while we get one reported from out there. They just turn up. Dumped behind the brush. Or somebody notices a foot sticking out after a mudslide, or old bones in a rotten sleeping bag."
The telephone clicked again. "Turned out to be an answering service," Shaw said. "And of course nobody knew anything about anything except the boss and he wasn't in. Sort of establishment you have to go down and show a badge to find out something. I'm going to put you on hold again and call the landlady."
The telephone booth smelled dusty. Chee pushed open the door to admit the outside air and got with that the aroma of warm asphalt. There was also the smell of smoke, the perfumed smoke of the desert burning that drifted down from the fire over the ridge. Through that, faintly and only now and then, he could detect an acrid chemical taint—the bad breath of the city. Last night's Santa Ana wind had blown the Los Angeles smog far out over the Pacific. But that was many hours ago. The city had exhaled again. Through the window of the cashier's cage, the service station attendant was watching Chee, openly curious. Chee thought about Mary Landon. About now she'd be in her little Crownpoint teacherage preparing her supper. He saw her, as he had often seen her from his favorite chair in that tiny living-dining room, working at the drainboard, hair pulled to the top of her head, slender, intent, talking as she did whatever she was doing to the vegetable she was working on.
Chee closed his eyes, rested his head against the cool metal of the telephone box, and recreated the scene and his feeling for it. Anticipation. A good meal. But not that, really. Anticipation of a good meal in good company. Mary across from him, checking his response to whatever she had given him, caring whether he liked it, her knee against his knee. Her—
Click. "You still there?" Shaw asked and went on without waiting. "Day said that some fellow had called her on the phone and told her that if she was willing to keep an eye on Gorman's apartment and let him know anything interesting, he was going to mail her a hundred bucks, and there would be another hundred anytime she called with anything interesting."
"Like what?"
"Like any visitors. Like Gorman packing up, moving out. Anything unusual."
"Did she make any calls?"
"She said just one. The day Gorman left for Shiprock."
"You believe her?"
"No," Shaw said. "But it might be true. Far as we know, nothing else happened."
"That's true," Chee agreed.
"Call me if you locate the girl," Shaw said. He gave Chee his home telephone number.
The service station attendant, with considerable gesturing, showed Chee that if he drove directly north on Jaripa he would inevitably drive right past its junction with Jacaranda.
"Map's screwed up," he said. "Jacaranda runs up into the hills about a mile from here. Access to some jackleg housing development, but the city never put in the utilities so the whole thing went down the tube. You bought in there, you got burned."
"I'm trying to find some people at thirteen thousand two hundred and seventy-one Jacaranda," Chee said. "That sound like it would be back in there?"
"God knows," the attendant said. "They got all sorts of street names and numbers back in there. Just no house to put 'em on."
"But some people do live back there," Chee said. "That right?"
"There's some," the man said. "Beats sleeping under a bridge. But if you're sleeping under a bridge, at least somebody didn't sell it to you." He laughed and glanced at Chee to see if he enjoyed the humor.
But Chee was thinking something else. He was thinking that whoever had paid Mrs. Day to keep track of Albert Gorman almost certainly knew all about this address.
Chapter 17
Chee found 13271 jacaranda street just as the setting sun was converting the yellow-gray smog along the western horizon into oddly beautiful layers, pink-gray alternated with pale rose, making a milder, more pastel display than the garish sunsets of the high desert country. He had enjoyed the hunt. The scenery was different: desert, but low-altitude desert, and without the bitter winters of the Big Reservation it produced a different kind of vegetation. He had decided fairly early that he wouldn't find the Jacaranda address, that it was simply a number Gorman had pulled from the air to satisfy Mrs. Day's requirement. Tomorrow morning he would get up early, drive back to Shiprock, and put out feelers at St. Catherine and Two Gray Hills and here and there, to make sure he'd know if and when Margaret Sosi returned to home country. And he'd drive over to Crownpoint and talk to Mary Landon. And, having time to think about it, Mary Landon would have decided that raising their children Dinee and among the Dinee was, after all, what she really wanted to do. Or maybe not. Probably not. Almost certainly not. And what then? What would he do?
Meanwhile Chee drove. The junction of Jacaranda Drive was marked by a huge billboard that rose from a fieldstone base and was topped by the legend j c R ND EST TES in raised wooden letters, once red. Even expecting it, it took Chee a moment to recognize jacaranda estates with the A'S stolen. And to wonder who had such a specialized need for letters. Below the defaced name the billboard featured a map. A great green blob in the middle was labeled Golf Course, and a dim blue oblong near the center of the green was marked Trout Lake. Other landmarks included Shopping Center, Post Office, School, and Country Club. Nothing on the map seemed to bear any relationship to the reality of lonely desert foothills around him, but Chee studied the network of streets it displayed. Jacaranda meandered east-southeast, a main artery. He felt encouraged.
The encouragement was brief. Jacaranda's asphalt surface, already cracked and weedy, gave way to gravel within a quarter mile, and the gravel that replaced it was soon replaced in turn by graded dirt, replaced by a rutted track from which streets led, streets which were nothing more than a few passes made by a bulldozer years ago. Chee passed street signs (Jelso, Jane, Jenkins, Jardin, Jellico), warped plywood boards mounted on two-by-fours with their paint weathered almost beyond the point of legibility. Jane Street had offered a half dozen dilapidated mobile homes clustered near a
rusty water tank. On Jenkins he passed a concrete foundation, on Jellico an abandoned frame house from which doors and window frames had been looted. But mostly there was only emptiness. Judy, July, Jerri, and Jennifer streets offered nothing but creosote brush, sandstone, and cacti. Beyond Jennifer, the erosion of an arroyo had erased Jacaranda.
Chee detoured, and detoured again, and rediscovered Jacaranda—worse than ever. And finally, over a ridge, there were homes again—a dented aluminum mobile home on a foundation of cinder blocks and, beyond it, a frame shanty partly covered with roofing shingles, and beyond that a charred jumble of partly burned boards. In front of the mobile home, three old cars and a school bus were parked. A middle-aged man, shirtless, a blue bandanna tied around his head, had the front wheel off the bus and seemed to be replacing a brake lining. Chee stopped, rolled down his window.
"Thirteen two seventy-one Jaracanda," he shouted. "You know where it is?"
The man looked up from his work, squinted, wiped sweat from his eyebrow.
"That them Indians?" he asked. "That old woman and all?" He had a high-pitched, whining voice.
"Sounds right," Chee said. "Name's Tsossie, or something like that."
"I don't know about that," the man said. "But their place is over that ridge yonder." He gestured down the track.
Over the ridge was a house. It was a patchwork affair, apparently built by a series of owners with diminishing ambitions, money, and hope. The front section was made of neat red bricks. A subsequent builder had tried to finish it with cinder-block walls and an addition to the pitched roof, using asphalt shingles that didn't quite match the original. To this a lean-to of planks had been added, with a roof of corrugated sheet metal. The lean-to jutted from the side, and behind it was the framework skeleton of another room, roofless, floorless, and open to the wind. Judging from the collection of dead weeds the framework had accumulated, this project must have been abandoned years ago.
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