The Fallen Man jlajc-12

by Tony Hillerman

  “I’m taking off now for Gallup,” he said. “If Largo needs me—if anybody calls—tell them I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Hey,” Jenifer said, “you have two meetings on the calendar for this afternoon. The security man from the community college and Captain Largo was—”

  “Call them and tell them I had to cancel,” Chee said, forgetting to say please, and forgetting to say thanks when he hung up. Captain Largo wouldn’t like this. But then he didn’t particularly like Captain Largo and he sure as hell didn’t like being an acting lieutenant.

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  TheFallenMan

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  15

  LOUISE GUARD’S FORD ESCORT

  was not in the driveway of the little house she shared with Janet Pete in Gallup. Good news, but not as good as it would have seemed when Jim Chee was feeling better about life. This evening his mood had been swinging back and forth between a sort of grim anger at the world that Janet occupied and self-contempt for his own immature attitude. It hadn’t taken long for Chee, who was good at self-analysis, to determine that his problem was mostly jealousy. Maybe it was 90 percent jealousy. But even so, that left 10

  percent or so that seemed legitimate.

  He gave the door of his pickup the hard slam required to shut it and walked up the pathway with the videotape of the traditional wedding clutched in one hand and the other holding a pot of some sort of autumn-blooming flowers he’d bought for her at Gallup Best Blossoms. It wasn’t a very impressive floral display, but what could you expect in November?

  “Ah, Jim,” Janet said, and greeted him with such a huge and enthusiastic hug that it left him helpless—tape in one hand and flowerpot in the other. It also left him feeling guilty. What the devil was wrong with him? Janet was beautiful. Janet was sweet. She loved him. She was wearing a set of designer jeans that fit her perfectly and a blouse of something that shimmered. Her black hair was done in a new fashion he’d been observing on the nighttime soap opera shows. It made her look young and jaunty and like someone the muscular actor in the tank top would be laughing with at the fancy party in a Coca-Cola commercial.

  “I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are,” Chee said. “Just back from Washington, you should be looking tired.” Janet was in the kitchen by then, watering whatever it was he’d brought her, opening the refrigerator and fixing something for them.

  “It wasn’t tiresome,” she shouted. “It was lots of fun. The people in the BIA were on their very best behavior, and the people over at Justice were reasonable for a change. And there was time to see a show some German artist had going in the National Gallery. It was really interesting stuff. Partly sculpture and partly drawings. And then there was the concert I told you about. The one in the Library of Congress hall. It was partly Mozart. Really great.”

  Yes. The concert. He’d thought about that before. Maybe too much. In Washington and at the Library of Congress it wouldn’t be a public event. It would be exclusive. Some sort of high-society fund-raiser. Shaking down the social set for some worthy literacy cause, probably. Almost certainly it would be by invitation only. Or just members and guests for the big-money patrons of library projects. She’d mentioned some ambassador being there. He had thought, once, that John McDermott might have taken her. But that was crazy. She detested the man. He had taken advantage of the leverage a distinguished professor has over his students. He’d seduced Janet. He’d taken her to Albuquerque as his live-in intern, had taken her to Washington as his token Indian. She had come back to New Mexico ashamed and brokenhearted when she realized what he was doing. There were a dozen ways McDermott could have learned the Fallen Man had been identified. Leaphorn, as usual, was right. McDermott’s firm probably had connections with lawyers in New Mexico. Of course they would. They would be working with Arizona and New Mexico law firms on Indian business. Anyway, he damn sure wasn’t going to bring it up. It would be insulting.

  From the kitchen the sound of something clattering, the smell of coffee. Chee inspected the room around him. Nothing different that he could see except for something or other on the mantle over the gas-log fireplace. It was made of thin stainless steel tubing combined with shaped Plexiglas in three or four colors held together by what seemed to be a mixture of aluminum wiring and thread. Most peculiar. In fact, weird. Chee grinned at it. Something Louise had found somewhere. A conversation piece. Louise haunted garage sales, and in Gallup, garage sales were always offering odd harvests.

  Janet emerged with a cup of coffee for him—fragile china on a thin-as-paper saucer—and a crystal goblet of wine for herself. She snuggled onto the sofa beside him, clicked glass against cup, smiled at him, and said, “To your capture of a whole squadron of cattle rustlers, your promotion to commander in chief of the Navajo police, chief honcho of the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, and international boss of Interpol.”

  “You forgot my busting up the Shiprock graffiti vandals and election as sheriff of San Juan County and bureaucrat in chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency.”

  “All that, too,” Janet said, raised her glass again, and sipped. She picked up the videocassette and inspected it. “What’s this?”

  “Remember?” Chee said. “My paternal uncle’s niece was having a traditional wedding at their place north of Little Water. I got him to get me a copy of the videotape they had made.”

  Janet turned it over and inspected the back, which was just as black and blank as the other side. “You want me to look at it?”

  “Sure,” Chee said, his good feelings fading fast. “Remember? We talked about that.” They had argued a little, actually. About cultures, and traditions, and all that. It wasn’t that Janet was opposed, but her mother wanted a huge ceremony in an Episcopal cathedral in Baltimore. And Janet had agreed, or so he thought, that they would do both. “You said you had never been to a regular Navajo wedding with a shaman and the entire ceremony. I thought you’d be interested.”

  “Louise described it to me,” Janet said, and put the videotape on the coffee table in a way that made Chee want to change the subject. Suddenly Louise’s peculiar purchase seemed useful.

  “I see Louise has been sailing the garage sales again. Quite an acquisition there,” he said, nodding toward the thing. He laughed.

  “Louise is a wonderful lady, but I wonder about her taste sometimes.” 45 of 102

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  Janet had no comment.

  Chee said: “What’s it for?” And waited, and belatedly understood that he should have kept his stupid mouth shut.

  “It’s called ‘Technic Inversion Number Three, Side View,’” Janet said.

  “Remarkable,” Chee said. “Very interesting.”

  “I found it in the Kremont Gallery,” Janet said, glum. “The artist is a man named Egon Kuzluzski. The critic at the Washington Post called him the most innovative sculptor of the decade. An artist who finds beauty and meaning in the technology which is submerging modern culture.”

  “Very complex,” Chee said. “And the colors . . . “ He couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.

  “I really thought you would like it,” Janet said. “I’m sorry you don’t.”

  “I do,” Chee said, but he knew it was too late for that. “Well, not really. But I think it takes time to understand something that’s so innovative. And then tastes vary, of course.”

  Janet didn’t respond to that.

  “It’s the reason they have horse races,” Chee said, and attempted a chuckle. “Differences of opinion, you know.”

  “I ran into something interesting in Washington,” Janet said, in a fairly obvious effort to cut off this discussion. “I think it was why everybody was so cooperative with our proposals. Crime on Indian reservations has become very chic inside the Beltway.

 
; Everybody had read up on narcotics invading Indian territory, and Indian gang problems, Indian graffiti, Indian homicides, child abuse, the whole schmear. All very popular with the Beltway intelligentsia. We have finally made it into the halls of the mighty.”

  “I guess that would fall into the bad news, good news category,” Chee said, grinning with relief at being let off the hook.

  “Whatever you call it, it means everybody is looking for our expertise these days.” Chee’s grin faded. “You got a job offer?”

  “I didn’t mean me. But one of the top assistants in BIA Law and Order wanted to let me know they’re recruiting experienced reservation cops with the right kind of credentials for Civil Service, and I heard the same thing over at Justice.” She smiled at him.

  “At Justice they actually asked me to be a talent scout for them, and when they told me what they wanted it sounded like they were describing you.” She patted him on the leg. “I told ’em I’d already signed you up.”

  “Thank God for that,” Chee said. “I did time in Washington a couple of times, remember? At the FBI academy for their training course, and once on an investigation.” He shuddered, remembering. At the academy he had been the tolerated rube, one of “them.” But they would, naturally, look on Janet as one of “us.” It was a fact he’d have to find a way to deal with.

  Janet removed her hand.

  “Really, Jim, Washington’s a nice place. It’s cleaner than most cities, and something beautiful every place you look and there’s always—”

  “Beautiful what? Buildings? Monuments? There’s too much smog, too much noise, too much traffic, too damn many people everywhere. You can’t see the stars at night. Too cloudy to see the sunset.” He shook his head.

  “There’s the breeze coming in off the Potomac,” Janet said. “And the clean salty smell of the bay, and seafood fresh from the ocean and good wine. In April, the cherry blossoms, and the green, green hills, and the great art galleries, and theater, and music.” She paused, waved her hands, overcome by the enormous glories of Washington’s culture. “And the pay scales are about double what either one of us can make here—especially in the Justice Department.”

  “Working in the J. Edgar Hoover Building,” Chee said. “That’d be a real kick. That old blackmailer should have been doing about twenty years for misuse of public records, but they named the building after him. At least it’s an appropriately ugly building.” Janet let that one lie, sipped her wine, reminded Chee his coffee was getting cold. He tested it. She was right.

  “Jim,” she said, “that concert was absolutely thrilling. It was the Philadelphia Orchestra. The annual Founders Society affair. The First Lady was there, and all sorts of diplomats—all white tie and the best jewels dug out of the safety-deposit boxes. And Mozart.

  You like Mozart.”

  “I like a lot of Mozart,” Chee said.

  He took a deep breath. “It was one of those members-only things, I guess,” he said. “Members and guests.”

  “Right,” she said, smiling at him. “I was mingling with the crème de la crème.”

  “I’ll bet your old law firm is a member,” Chee said. “Probably a big donor.” 46 of 102

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  “You betcha,” Janet said, still smiling. Then she realized where Chee was headed. The smile went away.

  “You’re going to ask me who took me,” she said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I was a guest of John McDermott,” she said.

  Chee sat silent and motionless. He had known it, but he still didn’t want to believe it.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No,” Chee said. “I guess not. Should it?”

  “It shouldn’t,” she said. “After all, we go way back. He was my teacher. And then I worked with him.” He was looking at her. Wondering what to say. She flushed. “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “I’m thinking I had it all wrong. I thought you detested the man for the way he treated you. The way he used you.” She looked away. “I did for a while. I was angry.”

  “But not now? No longer angry?”

  “The Navajo way,” she said. “You’re supposed to get yourself back into harmony with the way the world is.”

  “Did you know he’s out here again?”

  She nodded.

  “Did you know he’s hired Joe Leaphorn to look into that Fallen Man business?”

  “He told me he was going to try,” she said.

  “I wondered how he learned about the skeleton being identified as Harold Breedlove,” Chee said. “It wasn’t the sort of story that would have hit the Washington Post.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Why not?” she said, staring at him. “Why the hell not?”

  “Well, I don’t know. The man you’re going to marry is on the telephone reminding you he loves you. And you ask him about a case he’s working on, and so he sort of violates police protocol and tells you the skeleton has been identified.” He stopped. This wasn’t fair. He’d held this anger in for too many hours. He had heard his voice, thick with emotion.

  She was still staring at him, face grim, waiting for him to continue.

  “So?” she said. “Go on.”

  “So I’m not exactly sure what happened next. Did you call him right away and tell him what you’d learned?” She didn’t respond to that. But she edged a bit away from him on the sofa.

  “One more question and then I’ll drop it. Did that son of a bitch ask you to get that information out of me? In other words, I want to know whether he—”

  Janet was on her feet.

  “I think you’d better go now,” she said.

  He got up. His anger had drained away now. He simply felt tired and sick.

  “Just one more thing I’d like to know,” he said. “It would tell me something about just how important this business is to the Breedlove Corporation. In other words if you’d told him about the skeleton being found up there when you first got to Washington, it might naturally have reminded McDermott of Hal Breedlove disappearing. And he’d want to know who the skeleton belonged to.

  But if it was already on his mind even before that, if he brought it up instead of you, then it would mean a higher level of—it would mean they already—”

  “Go away,” Janet said. She handed him the videotape. “And take this with you.” 47 of 102

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  He took the tape.

  “Janet,” he said. “Did you recommend that he hire Leaphorn to work for him?” He asked that before he noticed the angry tears in Janet’s eyes. She didn’t answer and he didn’t expect her to.

  16

  DECEMBER CAME TO THE FOUR CORNERS

  but winter lingered up in the Utah mountains. It had buried the Wasatch Range under three feet and ventured far enough south to give Colorado’s San Juans a snowcap. But the brief post-Halloween storm that had whitened the slopes of Ship Rock and the Chuskas proved to be a false threat. It was dry again across the Navajo Nation—skies dark blue, mornings cool, sun dazzling. The south end of the Colorado Plateau was enjoying that typically beautiful autumn weather that makes the inevitable first blizzard such a dangerous surprise.

  Beautiful or not, Jim Chee was keeping himself far too busy to enjoy it—even if his glum mood would have allowed it. He had learned that he could handle administrative duties if he tried hard enough, and that he would never, ever enjoy them. For the first time in his life, he felt no sense of pleasure as he went to work. But the work got done. He made progress. The vacation schedules were established in a way that produced no serious discontent among the officers who worked with him. A system had been devised whereby whatever policemen who happened to be in the Hogback neighbor
hood would drop in on Diamonte’s establishment for a friendly chat. This happened several times a week, thus keeping Diamonte careful and his customers uneasy without giving him any solid grounds for complaint. As a by-product, it had also produced a couple of arrests of young fellows who had been ignoring fugitive warrants.

  On top of that, his budget for next year was about half finished and a plan had been drafted for keeping better track of gasoline usage and patrol car maintenance. This had produced an unusual (indeed, unprecedented in the experience of Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee) smile on the face of Captain Largo. Even Officer Bernadette Manuelito seemed to be responding to this new efficiency in Chee’s criminal investigation domain.

  This came about after the word reached the ear of Captain Largo (and very shortly thereafter the ear of Acting Lieutenant Chee) that Mr. Finch had nailed a pair of cattle-stealing brothers so thoroughly that they had actually admitted not just rustling five unweaned calves but also about six or seven other such larcenies from the New Mexico side of Chee’s jurisdiction. So overwhelming was the evidence, the captain said, that they had plea-bargained themselves into jail at Aztec.

  “Well, good,” Chee had said.

  “Well, goddammit,” Largo replied, “why can’t we nail some of those bastards ourselves?” Largo’s imperial “we” had actually meant him, Chee realized. He also realized, before this uncomfortable conversation ended, that Finch had revealed to Largo not only Chee’s ignorance of heifer curiosity but how he and Officer Manuelito had screwed up Finch’s trap out by Ship Rock. Chee had walked down the hall away from this meeting with several resolutions strongly formed. He would catch Finch’s favorite cow thief before Finch could get his hands on him. Having beaten Finch at Finch’s game, he would resign his role as acting lieutenant and go back to being a real policeman. There would be no more trying to be a bureaucrat to impress Janet.