Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

by Talking God(lit)

  "That's right."

  Dillon stared at him. "How did you get involved in this Santillanes business?"

  Leaphorn explained. The body beside the tracks. Learning the train had been stopped. Learning of the abandoned luggage. Learning of the prescription number. Going to the apartment on the prescription address.

  "Have you checked on the man in apartment two?" Leaphorn asked. "He fit the description of the man the attendant saw in Santillanes' roomette. And he was curious."

  Akron smiled slightly and looked down at his hands. Dillon cleared his throat. Leaphorn nodded. He knew what was coming. He had worked with the Bureau for thirty years.

  "You have no jurisdiction in this case," Dillon said. "You never had any jurisdiction. You may have already fouled up a very sensitive case."

  "Involving national security," Leaphorn added, thoughtfully and mostly to himself. He didn't intend any sarcasm. It was simply the code expression he'd been hearing the FBI use since the 1950s. It was something you always heard when the Bureau was covering up incompetence. He was simply wondering if the Bureau's current screwup was considered serious by Dillon's superiors. Apparently so.

  Dillon stared at him, scenting sarcasm. He saw nothing on Leaphorn's square Navajo face but deep thought. Leaphorn was thinking about how he could extract information from Dillon and he had reached some sort of conclusion. He nodded.

  "Did Agent Kennedy mention to you about the slip of paper found in Santillanes' shirt pocket?"

  Dillon's expression shifted from stern to unpleasant. He took his lip between his teeth. Released it. Started to say something. Changed his mind. Pride struggled with curiosity. "I am not aware of that at this point in time," he said.

  So there was no purpose in talking to Dillon about it. But he wanted Dillon's goodwill. "Nothing was written on it except the name Agnes Tsosie-Tsosie is a fairly common Navajo name, and Agnes is prominent in the tribe-and the name of a curing ceremonial. The Yeibichai. One of those had been scheduled to be held for Mrs. Tsosie. Scheduled about three or four weeks after the Santillanes body was found."

  "What is your interest in this?" Dillon asked.

  "The agent-in-charge at Gallup is an old friend," Leaphorn said. "We've worked together for years."

  Dillon was not impressed with "agent-in-charge at Gallup." As a matter of fact, an agent stationed in Washington wasn't easy to impress with an agent stationed anywhere else, much less a small Western town. In earlier days agents were transferred to places like Gallup because they had somehow offended J. Edgar Hoover or one of the swarm of yeasayers with which he had manned the upper echelons of his empire. In J. Edgar's day, New Orleans had been the ultimate Siberia of the Bureau. J. Edgar detested New Orleans as hot, humid, and decadent and presumed all other FBI employees felt the same way. But since his demise, his camp followers usually exiled to smaller towns agents considered unduly ambitious, unacceptably intelligent, or prone to bad publicity.

  "It's still not your case," Dillon said. "You don't have any jurisdiction outside your Indian reservation. And in this case, you wouldn't have jurisdiction even there."

  Leaphorn smiled. "And happy I don't," he said. "It looks too complicated for me. But I'm curious. I've got to get with Pete Domenici for lunch before I go home, and he's going to want to know what I'm doing here."

  Agent Akron had sat down in a bedside chair just out of Leaphorn's vision but Leaphorn kept his eye on Dillon while he said this. Obviously, Dillon recognized the name of Pete Domenici, the senior senator from New Mexico, who happened to be the ranking Republican on the committee which oversaw the Bureau's budget. Leaphorn smiled at Dillon again-a conspiratorial one-cop-to-another smile. "You know how some people are about homicides. Pete is fascinated by 'em. I tell Pete about Santillanes and he's going to have a hundred questions."

  "Domenici," Dillon said.

  "One thing the senator is going to ask me is why Santillanes was killed way out in New Mexico," Leaphorn said. "Out in his district."

  Leaphorn watched Dillon making up his mind, imagining the process. He would think that probably Leaphorn was lying about Domenici, which he was, but Dillon hadn't survived in Washington by taking chances. Dillon reached his decision.

  "I can't talk about what he was doing out there," Dillon said. "Agent Akron and I are with the antiterrorist division. And I can say Santillanes was a prominent member of a terrorist organization."

  "Oh," Leaphorn said.

  "Opposed to the regime of President Pinochet." Dillon looked at Leaphorn. "He's the president of Chile," Dillon added.

  Leaphorn nodded. "But you can't tell me why Santillanes was out in New Mexico?" He nodded again. "I can respect that." In the code the FBI had developed down the years, it meant Dillon didn't know the answer.

  "I cannot say," Dillon said. "Not at this moment in time."

  "How about why he was killed?"

  "Just speculation," Dillon said. "Off the record."

  Leaphorn nodded, agreeing.

  "The effort that was made to avoid identification suggests that it was a continuation of the Pinochet administration's war against the Communists in Chile," Dillon said. He paused, studying Leaphorn to see if this needed explanation. He decided that it did.

  "Some time ago, a Chilean dissident was blown up here in Washington. A car bomb. The State Department deported several Chilean nationals and delivered a warning to the ambassador. Or so I understand." Dillon returned the same cop-to-cop smile he had received a few moments earlier from Leaphorn. "Therefore, the Chilean security people at the embassy seem to have decided they would wait until one of their targets was as far from Washington as possible before eliminating him. They would try to make sure the connection was never made."

  "I see," Leaphorn said. "I have two more questions."

  Dillon waited.

  "What will the Bureau do about the little man in apartment two?"

  "I can't discuss that," Dillon said.

  "That's fair enough. Does the name Henry Highhawk mean anything to you?"

  Dillon considered. "Henry Highhawk. No."

  "I think Kennedy mentioned him when he called the Bureau," Leaphorn prompted.

  "Oh, yeah," Dillon said. "The name in the notebook."

  "How does this Henry Highhawk fit in? Why would Santillanes be interested in him? Why was he interested in Agnes Tsosie? Or the Yeibichai ceremonial?"

  "Yeibichai ceremonial?" Dillon said, looking totally baffled. "I am not free to discuss any of that. At this point in time I cannot discuss Henry Highhawk."

  But Henry Highhawk stuck in Leaphorn's mind. The name had been somehow familiar the first time he'd seen it written in the Santillanes notebook. It was an unusual name and it had rung some sort of dim bell in his memory. He remembered looking at the name in Santillanes' careful little script and trying to place it, without any luck. He remembered looking at Highhawk's photograph at Agnes Tsosie's place. He knew he had never seen the man before. When Dillon and Akron had gone away to wherever FBI agents go, he tried again. Clearly the name had meant nothing to Dillon. Clearly, Leaphorn himself must have run across it before any of this business had begun. How? What had he been doing? He had been doing nothing unusual. Just routine police administration.

  He reached for the telephone and dialed the Navajo Tribal Police building in Window Rock. In about eleven minutes he had what he wanted. Or most of it.

  "A fugitive warrant? What was the original offense? Really? What date? No, I meant the date of the arrest? Where? Give me his home address off the warrant." Leaphorn jotted down the Washington address. "Who handled the arrest for us? I'll wait." Leaphorn waited. "Who?"

  The arresting officer was Jim Chee.

  "Well, thanks," Leaphorn said. "Is Chee still stationed up at Shiprock? Okay. I'll call him there."

  He dialed the number of the Shiprock sub-agency police station from memory. Office Chee was on vacation. Had he left an address where he might be reached? Navajo Tribal Police rules required that he would
, but Chee had a reputation for sometimes making his own rules.

  "Just a second," the clerk said. "Here it is. He's in Washington, D.C. I'll give you his hotel."

  Leaphorn called Chee's hotel. Yes, Chee was still registered. But he didn't answer his telephone. Leaphorn left a message and hung up. He sat on the bed, asking himself what could have possibly drawn Officer Jim Chee from Shiprock to Washington. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had never, never believed in coincidence.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ®

  Leroy Fleck simply couldn't get his mind relieved. He sat on the folding lawn chair in his empty apartment with the telephone on the floor beside him. In about an hour it would be time to go out to the phone booth and put in his once-a-month check-in call to Eddy Elkins. What he was going to say to Elkins was part of the problem. He was going to have to ask Elkins to wire him enough money to get Mama moved, enough to tide him over for the two or three days it would take The Client to pay up. He dreaded asking, because he was almost sure Elkins would just laugh and say no. But he had to get enough to move Mama.

  Fleck had on his hat and his coat. It was cold in the apartment because he was trying to save on the utility bill. What he was doing while he was doing all this thinking normally brought him pleasure. He was hunting through the classified ad section of the Washington Times, looking for somebody to talk to. Normally that relieved his mind. Not tonight. Even with talking to people he couldn't get Mama out of his thoughts. The worst of it was he'd had to hurt the Fat Man. He'd had to threaten to kill the son of a bitch and twisted his arm while he was doing it. There just wasn't any other way to make him keep Mama until he could find another place. But doing that had opened things up to real trouble-or the probability of it. He'd warned the man not to call the police and the bastard had looked scared enough so maybe he wouldn't. On the other hand, maybe he would. And when the police checked his address and found it was phony-well, who knows what then? They'd be interested. Fleck couldn't afford to have the police interested.

  The tape recorder on the box against the wall made a whispering sound. Fleck glanced at it, his thoughts elsewhere. It whispered, and fell silent. The microphone he'd installed in the crawlspace above the ceiling of the Santillanes apartment was supposed to be voice activated. That really meant "sound activated." A lot of what Fleck was recording was Mrs. Santillanes, or whoever that old Mexican woman was, running her vacuum cleaner or clattering around with the dishes. At first, he had sometimes played the tape before sending it off to the post-office-box address Elkins had given him. He'd heard a lot of household noises, and now and then people talking. But the talking was in Spanish. Fleck had picked up a little of that in Joliet from the Hispanos. Just enough to understand that most of what he was taping was family talk. What's for dinner? Where's my glasses? That sort of stuff. Not enough for Fleck to guess why Elkins' clients wanted to keep track of this bunch. It had seemed to Fleck from very early in this assignment that these folks next door were smart enough to do their serious talking somewhere else.

  He found an ad that sounded promising. It offered an Apple computer complete with twelve video games for sale by owner. Fleck knew almost nothing about computers, and cared less. But this sounded like a family where the kids had grown up and the item for sale was expensive enough so the owner wouldn't mind talking for a while. Fleck dialed the number, listened to a busy signal, and picked up the paper again. This time he selected a gasoline-powered trash shredder. A man answered on the second ring.

  "I'm calling about the shredder," Fleck said. "What are you asking for it?"

  "Well, we paid three hundred and eighty dollars for it, and it's just like new." The man had a soft, Virginia Tidewater voice. "But we ain't got no use for it anymore. And I think we'd come down to maybe two hundred."

  "No use for it?" Fleck said. "Sounds like you're moving or something. Got anything else you're selling? Several things I need."

  "Not moving," the man said. "We're just getting out of gardening. My wife's developed arthritis." He laughed. "And she's the one that did all the work."

  From there, Leroy Fleck led the conversation into personal affairs-first the affairs of the owner of the item offered, and then Fleck's own. It was something he had done for years and had become very good at doing. It was his substitute for hanging out in a bar. Keeping Mama in a rest home had made bars too expensive and the people you talked to there tended not to be normal anyway. Fleck had discovered more or less by accident that it was pleasant and relaxing to talk to regular people. It happened when he decided that it would be nice for Mama to have one of those little refrigerators in her room. He'd noticed one in the want ads, and called, and got into a good-natured conversation with the lady selling it. Mama had thrown the little refrigerator on the floor and broke it, but Fleck had remembered the chat. And it had become a habit. At first he did it only when he needed to relieve his mind. But for the last few years he'd done it almost every night. Except Saturday. People didn't like to be called on Saturday night. With practice he had learned which ads to call, and how to keep the conversation going. After three or four such calls Fleck found he could usually sleep. Talking to somebody normal relieved the mind.

  Usually, that is. Tonight, it didn't work. After a while the man selling the trash shredder just wanted to talk about that-what Fleck would pay for it and so forth. Fleck had then called about a pop-up-top vacation trailer which would sleep four. But this time he found himself getting impatient even before the woman who was selling it did.

  After that call he just sat there on the lawn chair. To keep from worrying about Mama, he worried about those two Indians-and especially about the one who had come to his door here. Both of those men had really smelled like cops to him. Fleck didn't like having cops know where to find him. Normally in a situation like that he would have moved right out of here and got lost. But now he couldn't move. This job Eddy Elkins had got him into this time kept him tied here. He was stuck. He had to have the money. Absolutely had to have it. Absolutely had to wait two more days until the month was up. Then he'd get the ten thousand the bastards were making him wait for.

  He went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. He had a little bit of beef liver left and two hamburger buns, but no ground beef and only two potatoes. That would handle his needs tonight. But he'd need food tomorrow. He didn't even have enough grease to fry the potatoes for breakfast. Fleck put on his hat and his coat and went out into the misty rain.

  He returned with a plastic grocery sack and an early edition of the Washington Post. Fleck knew how to stretch his dollars. The bag contained two loaves of day-old bread, a dozen grade B eggs, a half -gallon of milk, a carton of Velveeta, and a pound of margarine. He put the frying pan on the gas burner, dumped in a spoonful of margarine and the liver. Fleck's furniture consisted of stuff he could fold into the trunk of his old Chevy, which meant nothing in the kitchen except what was built in. He leaned against the wall and watched the liver fry. As it fried he unfolded the Post and read.

  There was nothing he needed to know on the front page. On page two, the word Chile caught his eyes.

  TOP CHILEAN POLICE BRASS VISITS; ASKS MUSEUM TO RETURN GOLDEN MASK

  He scanned the story, mildly interested in the affairs of his client. It told him that General Ramon Huerta Cardona, identified as "commander of Chilean internal security forces," was in Washington on government business and planned to deliver a personal appeal tomorrow to the Smithsonian Institution for the return of an Inca mask. According to the story, the mask was "golden and encrusted with emeralds," and the general described it as "a Chilean national treasure which should be returned to the people of Chile." Fleck didn't finish the story. He turned the page.

  The picture caught his eye instantly. The old man. It was on page four, a single-column photograph halfway down the page with a story under it. Old man Santillanes.

  "Oh, shit!" Fleck said it aloud, in something close to a shout.

  The headline read:


  KNIFE VICTIM PROVES TO BE CHILEAN REBEL

  Fleck slammed the paper to the floor and stood against the wall. He was shaking. "Ah, shit," he repeated, in something like a whisper now. He bent, retrieved the paper, and read:

  "The body of a man found beside a railroad track in New Mexico last month has been identified as Elogio Santillanes y Jimenez, an exiled leader of the opposition to the Chilean government, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today.

  "The FBI spokesman said Santillanes had been killed by a single stab wound in the back of the neck and his body removed from an Am-trak train.

  " `All identification had been removed from his body-even his false teeth,' the spokesman said. He noted that this made identification difficult for the agency.

  "The FBI declined comment on whether any suspects were being investigated. Two years ago, another opposition leader to the Pinochet regime was assassinated in Washington by the detonation of a bomb in his car. Following that incident, the Department of State issued a sharply worded protest to the Chilean embassy and two members of the embassy staff were deported as personae non gratae in the United States."