“There won’t be any more trouble for Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “But from the look of all those bandages, there’s been some trouble for you.”
Nez considered that. Then he considered Leaphorn.
“Tell me if you found him on Ship Rock,” Nez said. “Was he climbing Tse´ Bitáí´?” Absolutely nothing Amos Nez could have said would have surprised Leaphorn more than that. He spent a few moments re-collecting his wits.
“That’s right,” he said finally. “Somebody spotted his skeleton down below the peak. How the hell did you know?” Nez shrugged.
“Did Breedlove tell you he was going there?”
“He told me.”
“When?”
Nez hesitated again. “He’s dead?”
“Dead.”
“When I was guiding them,” Nez said. “We were way up Canyon del Muerto. His woman, Mrs. Breedlove, she’d gone up a little ways around the corner. To urinate, I guess it was. Breedlove, he’d been talking about climbing the cliff there.” He gestured upward.
“You been up there. It’s straight up. Worse than that. Some places the top hangs over. I said nobody could do it. He said he could.
He told me some places he’d climbed up in Colorado. He started talking then about all the things he wanted to do while he was still young and now he was already thirty years old and he hadn’t done them. And then he said—” Nez cut it off, looking at Leaphorn.
“I’m not a policeman anymore,” he said. “I’m retired, like you. I just want to know what the hell happened to the man.”
“Maybe I should have told you then,” Nez said.
“Yeah. Maybe you should have,” Leaphorn said. “Why didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t any reason to,” Nez said. “He said he wasn’t going to do it until spring came. Said now it was too close to winter. He said not to talk about it because his wife wanted him to stop climbing.”
“Did Mrs. Breedlove hear him?”
“She was off taking a leak,” Nez said. “He said he thought maybe he’d do it all by himself. Said nobody had ever done that.”
“Did you think he meant it? Did he sound serious?”
“Sounded serious, yes. But I thought he was just bragging. White men do that a lot.”
“He didn’t say where he was going?”
“His wife came back then. He shut up about it.”
“No, I mean did he say anything about where he was going to go that evening? After you came in out of the canyon.”
“I remember they had some friends coming to see them. They were going to eat together.”
“Not drinking, was he?”
“Not drinking,” Nez said. “I don’t let my tourists drink. It’s against the law.”
“So he said he was going to climb Tse´ Bitáí´ the following spring,” Leaphorn said. “Is that the way you remember it?”
“That’s what he said.”
They sat a while, engulfed by sunlight, cool air, and silence. A raven planed down from the rim, circled around a cottonwood, landed on a Russian olive across the canyon floor, and perched, waiting for them to die.
Nez extracted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt, offered one to Leaphorn, and lit one for himself.
“Like to smoke while I’m thinking,” he said.
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“I used to do that, too,” Leaphorn said. “But my wife talked me into quitting.”
“They’ll do that if you’re not careful,” Nez said.
“Thinking about what?”
“Thinking about why he told me that. You know, maybe he figured I’d say something and his woman would hear it and stop him.” Nez exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “And he wanted somebody to stop him. Or when spring came and he slipped off to climb it by himself, he thought maybe he’d fall off and get killed and if nobody knew where he was nobody would find his body. And he didn’t want to be up there dead and all alone.”
“And you think he figured you’d hear about him disappearing and you’d tell people where to find him?” Leaphorn asked.
“Maybe,” Nez said, and shrugged.
“It didn’t work.”
“Because he was already missing,” Nez said. “Where was he all those months between when he goes away from his wife here, and when he climbed our Rock with Wings?”
Leaphorn grinned. “That’s what I was hoping you’d know something about. Did he say anything that gave you ideas about where he was going after he left here? Who he was meeting?”
Nez shook his head. “That’s a long time to stay away from that good woman,” Nez said. “Way too long, I think. I guess you policemen haven’t found out where he was?”
“No,” Leaphorn said. “We don’t have the slightest idea.”
8
A MILD PRELUDE TO WINTER
had come quietly during the night, slipping across the Arizona border, covering Chee’s house trailer with about five inches of wet whiteness. It caused him to shift his pickup into four-wheel drive to make the climb from his site under the San Juan River cottonwoods up the slope to the highway. But the first snow of winter is a cheering sight for natives of the high, dry Four Corners country. It’s especially cheering for those doing Chee’s criminal investigation division’s job. The snow was making extra work for the troopers out on the highways, but for the detectives it dampened down the crime rate.
Lieutenant Jim Chee’s good humor even survived the sight of the stack of folders Jenifer had dumped on his desk. The note atop them said: “Cap. Largo wants to talk to you right away about the one on top but I don’t think he’ll be in before noon because with this snow he’ll have to get some feed out to his cows.”
On the table of organization, Jenifer was Chee’s employee, the secretary of his criminal investigation unit. But Jenifer had been hired by Captain Largo a long time ago and had seen lieutenants come and go. Chee understood that as far as Jenifer was concerned he was still on probation. But the friendly tone of the note suggested she was thinking he might meet her standards.
“Hah!” he said, grinning. But that faded away before he finished working through the folders. The top one concerned the theft of two more Angus calves from a woman named Roanhorse who had a grazing lease west of Red Rock. The ones in the middle involved a drunken brawl at a girl dance at the Lukachukai chapter house, in which shots were fired and the shooter fled in a pickup, not his own; a request for a transfer from this office by Officer Bernadette (Bernie) Manuelito, the rookie trainee Chee had inherited with the job; a report of drug use and purported gang activity around Hogback, and so forth. Plus, of course, forms to be filled out on mileage, maintenance, and gasoline usage by patrol vehicles, and a reminder that he hadn’t submitted vacation schedules for his office.
The final folder held a citizen’s complaint that he was being harassed by Officer Manuelito. What remained of Chee’s high spirits evaporated as he read it.
The form was signed by Roderick Diamonte. Mr. Diamonte alleged that Officer Manuelito was parking her Tribal Police car at the access road to his place of business at Hogback, stopping his customers on trumped-up traffic violations, and using what Diamonte called “various sneaky tricks” in an effort to violate their constitutional protection against illegal searches. He asked that Officer Manuelito be ordered to desist from this harassment and be reprimanded.
Diamonte? Yes, indeed. Chee remembered the name from the days when he had been a patrolman assigned here. Diamonte operated a bar on the margin of reservation land and was one of the first people to come to mind when something lucrative and illegal was going on. Still, he had his rights.
Chee buzzed Jenifer and asked if Manuelito was in. She was out on patrol.
“Would you call her? Tell her I want to talk to her when she comes in. Please.” Chee had learned early on that Jenifer’s response time shortened when an order
became a request.
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“Right,” Jenifer said. “I thought you’d want to talk to her. I guess you know who that Diamonte is, don’t you?”
“I remember him,” Chee said.
“And you had a call,” Jenifer said. “From Janet Pete in Washington. She left a number.” Someday when he was better established Chee intended to talk to his secretary about her practice of deciding which calls to tell him about when. Calls from Janet tended to get low priority. Maybe that was because Jenifer had the typical cop attitude about defense lawyers. Or maybe not.
He called the number.
“Jim,” she said. “Ah, Jim. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“And yours,” he said. “You called to tell me you’re headed out to National Airport. Flying home. You want me to pick you up at the Farmington Airport?”
“Don’t I wish,” she said. “But I’m stuck here a little longer. How about you? The job getting any easier? And did you get a snowstorm? The weather girl always stands in front of the Four Corners when she’s giving us the news, but it looked like a front was pushing across from the west.”
They talked about the weather for a moment, talked about love, talked about wedding plans. Chee didn’t ask her about the Justice Department and Bureau of Indian Affairs business that had called her away. It was one of several little zones of silence that develop when a cop and a defense lawyer are dating.
And then Janet said: “Anything new developing on the Fallen Man business?”
“Fallen Man?” Chee hadn’t been giving that any thought. It was a closed case. A missing person found. A corpse identified.
Officially an accidental death. Officially none of his business. A curious affair, true, but the world of a police lieutenant was full of such oddities and he had too much pressing stuff on his desk to give it any time.
“No. Nothing new.” Chee wanted to say, “He’s in the dead file,” but he was a little too traditional for that. Death is not a subject for Navajo humor.
“Do you know if anyone ever climbed up there—I mean after the rescue party brought the bones down—to see if they could find any evidence of funny stuff?”
Chee thought about that. And about Janet’s interest in it.
“You know,” she continued, talking into his silence. “Was there any suggestion that it might not have been an accident? Or that somebody was up there with him and just didn’t report it?”
“No,” Chee said. “Anyway, we didn’t send anyone up.” He found himself feeling defensive. “The only apparent motive would be the widow wanting his money, and she waited five years before getting him declared legally dead. And had an ironclad alibi.
And—” But Chee stopped. Irked. Why explain all this? She already knew it. They’d talked about it the last time he’d seen her. At dinner in Farmington.
“Why—” he began, but she was already talking. A new subject. She’d gone to a dinner concert at the Library of Congress last night, some fifteenth-century music played on the fifteenth-century instruments. Very interesting. The French ambassador was there—and his wife. You should have seen her dress. Wow. And so it went.
When the call was over, Chee picked up the Manuelito file again. But he held it unopened while he thought about Janet’s interest in the Fallen Man. And about how a dinner concert at the Library of Congress must have been by invitation only. Or restricted to major donors to some fund or other. Super exclusive. In fact he had no idea the Library of Congress even produced such events, no idea how he could wangle an invitation if he’d wanted to go, no idea how Janet had come to be there.
Well, yes, he did have an idea about that. Of course. Janet had friends in Washington. From those days when she had worked there as what she called “the House Indian” of Dalman, MacArthur, White and Hertzog, Attorneys at Law. One of those friends had been John McDermott. Her ex-lover and exploiter. From whom Janet had fled.
Chee escaped from that unhappy thought into the problem presented by Officer Bernadette Manuelito.
The Navajo culture that had produced Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee had taught him the power of words and of thought. Western metaphysicians might argue that language and imagination are products of reality. But in their own migrations out of Mongolia and over the icy Bering Strait, the Navajos brought with them a much older Asian philosophy. Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual’s reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it. He would think of his duties instead of his love.
Chee flipped open the Manuelito folder. He read through it, wondering why he could have ever believed he wanted an administrative post. That brought him back to Janet. He’d wanted the promotion to impress her, to make himself eligible, to narrow the gap between the child of the urban privileged class and the child of the isolated sheep camp. Thus he had made a thoroughly 23 of 102
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non-Navajo decision based on an utterly non-Navajo way of thinking. He put down the Manuelito file and buzzed Jenifer.
Officer Manuelito, it seemed, had come in early, and called in about nine saying she was working on the cattle-rustling problem.
Chee allowed himself a rare expletive. What the hell was she doing about cattle theft? She was supposed to be finding witnesses to a homicide at a wild party.
“Would you ask the dispatcher to contact her, please, and ask her to come in?” Chee said.
“Want ’em to tell her why?” Jenifer asked.
“Just tell her I want to talk to her,” Chee said, forgetting to say please.
But what would he say to Officer Manuelito? He’d have time to decide that by the time she got to the office. It would keep him from thinking about what might have provoked Janet’s curiosity about Harold Breedlove, late of the Breedlove family that had been a client of John McDermott.
9
AS IT HAPPENED, OFFICER MANUELITO didn’t get to the office.
“She says she’s stuck,” Jenifer reported. “She went out Route 5010 south of Rattlesnake and turned off on that dirt track that skirts around the west side of Ship Rock. Then she slid off into a ditch.” This amused Jenifer, who chuckled. “I’ll see if I can get somebody to go pull her out.”
“I think I’ll just take care of it myself,” Chee said. “But thanks anyway.” He pulled on his jacket. What the devil was Manuelito doing out in that empty landscape by the Rock with Wings? He’d told her to work her way down a list of people who might be willing to talk about gang membership at Shiprock High School, not practicing her skill at driving in mud.
Just getting out of the parking lot demonstrated to Chee how Manuelito could manage to get stuck. The overnight storm had drifted eastward, leaving the town of Shiprock under a cloudless sky. The temperature was already well above freezing and the sun was making short work of the snow. But even after he shifted into four-wheel drive, Chee’s truck did some wheel-spinning. The ditches beside the highway were already carrying runoff water and a cloud of white steam swirled over the asphalt where the moisture was evaporating.
Navajo Route 5010, according to the road map, was “improved.” Which meant it was graded now and then and in theory at least had a gravel surface. On a busy day, probably six or eight vehicles would use it. This morning, Officer Manuelito’s patrol car had been the first to leave its tracks in the snow and Chee’s pickup was number two. Chee noted approvingly that she had made a slow and careful left turn off of 5010 onto an unnumbered access road that led toward Ship Rock—thereby leaving no skid marks. He made the same turn, felt his rear wheels slipping, corrected, and eased the truck gingerly down the road.
All muscles were tense, all senses alert. He was enjoying testing his skill against the slick road surface. Enjoyin
g the clean, cold air in his lungs, the gray-and-white patterns of soft snow on sage and salt bush and chamisa, enjoying the beauty, the vast emptiness, and a silence broken only by the sound of his truck’s engine and its tires in the mud. The immense basalt monolith of Ship Rock towered beside him, its west face still untouched by the warming sun and thus still coated with its whitewash of snow. The Fallen Man must have prayed for that sort of moisture before his thirst killed him on that lonely ledge.
Then the truck topped a hillock, and there was Officer Bernadette Manuelito, a tiny figure standing beside her stuck patrol car, representing an unsolved administrative problem, the end of joy, and a reminder of how good life had been when he was just a patrolman. Ah, well, there was a bright side. Even from here he could see that Manuelito had stuck her car so thoroughly that there would be no hope of towing it out with his vehicle. He’d simply give her a ride back to the office and send out a tow truck.
Officer Manuelito had seemed to Lieutenant Jim Chee to be both unusually pretty and unusually young to be wearing a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. This morning she wouldn’t have made that impression. She looked tired and disheveled and at least her age, which Chee knew from her personnel records was twenty-six years. She also looked surly. He leaned across the pickup seat and opened the door for her.
“Tough luck,” he said. “Get your stuff out of it, and the weapons, and lock it up. We’ll send out a tow truck to get it when the mud dries.”
Officer Manuelito had prepared an explanation of how this happened and would not be deterred.
“The snow covered up a little wash, there. Drifted it full so you couldn’t see it. And . . . “
“It could happen to anybody,” Chee said. “Let’s go.”
“You didn’t bring a tow chain?”
“I did bring a tow chain,” Chee said. “But look at it. There’s no traction now. It’s clay and it’s too soft.” 24 of 102
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“You have four-wheel drive,” she said.
“I know,” Chee said, feeling in no mood to debate this. “But that just means you dig yourself in by spinning four wheels instead of two. I couldn’t budge it. Get your stuff and get in.”
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