Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

by Talking God(lit)

  The story continued, but Fleck dropped the paper again. He felt sick but he had to think. He had guessed right about the embassy, and about why they had wanted him to kill Santillanes a long way from Washington, and why all that emphasis had been placed on preventing identification. How the hell had the FBI managed to make the connection? But what difference did that make? His problem was what to do about it.

  They weren't going to send him the ten thousand now. No identification and no publicity for a month. That was the deal. A month without anything in the papers was going to be proof enough he hadn't screwed it up. And now, what was it? Twenty-nine days? For a moment he allowed himself to think that they would agree that this was close enough. But that was bullshit thinking. All they needed to screw him was the slightest excuse. They looked down on him like trash. Like dirt. Just like Mama had always told Delmar and him.

  He smelled the liver burning in the frying pan, moved it off the burner, and fanned away the smoke. Elkins had told him that Mama was right. He hadn't remembered telling Elkins anything about Mama, certainly wouldn't have normally, but Elkins said he talked about it when he was coming out from under the sodium pen-tothal-the stuff they'd given him when they fixed him up there at the prison infirmary. Right after the rape.

  Elkins had been standing beside his bed when he came to, holding a pan in case he threw up the way people sometimes do when they come up from sodium pentothal. "I want you to listen now," Elkins had told him in a whisper right by his face. "They're going to be coming in here as soon as they know you can talk and asking you questions. They're going to ask you which ones did you." And he guessed he had mumbled something about getting the score evened with the sons of bitches because Elkins had put his hand over Fleck's mouth-Fleck remembered that very clearly even now-and said: "Get even. But not now. You got to do it yourself. You tell the screws that you don't know who did you. Tell 'em you didn't get a look at anybody. They hit you from behind. If you want to stay alive in here, you don't talk to the screws. You do your own business. Like your Mama told you."

  "Like your Mama told you!" So he must have been talking about Mama when he was still under the anesthesia. It was all still so very vivid.

  He'd asked Elkins if they had really raped him the way he seemed to remember, and Elkins said they truly had.

  "Then I got to kill 'em."

  "Yes," Elkins said. "I think so. Unless you want to live like an animal."

  Elkins was a disbarred lawyer with some seniority in Joliet and he understood about such things. He was doing four to eight on an Illinois State felony count. Something to do with fixing up some witnesses, or maybe it was jurors, for somebody important in the Chicago rackets. Fleck understood that Elkins had kept his mouth shut and taken the fall for it, and that seemed to be the way it worked out. Because now Eddy Elkins was important again with some Chicago law firm, even if he couldn't practice law himself.

  For that matter, Elkins had been important even in the prison. He was just a trustee working as a male nurse and orderly in the prison hospital. But he had money. He had connections inside and out and everybody knew it. When Fleck came out of isolation, he found he had a job in the infirmary. Elkins had done that. And Elkins had helped him with the big problem-how to kill three hard cases. All bigger than him. All tougher. First he'd started him pumping iron. Fleck had been skinny then as well as small. But at nineteen you can develop fast if you have direction. And steroids. Elkins got him them, too. And then Elkins had showed him how a knife can make a small man equal to a big one if the small man is very, very fast and very cool and knows what to do with the blade. Fleck had always been fast-had to be fast to survive. Elkins used the life-size body chart in the infirmary office and the plastic skeleton to teach him where to put the shank.

  "Always flat," Elkins would say. "Remember that. What you're after is behind the bones. Hitting the bones does you no good at all and the way past them is through the crevices." Elkins was a tall, slender man, slightly stooped. He was a Dartmouth man, with his law degree from Harvard. He looked like a teacher and he liked to teach. In the empty, quiet infirmary he would stand there in front of the skeleton with Fleck sitting on the bed, and Elkins would tutor Fleck in the trade.

  "If you have to go in from the front"-Elkins recommended against going in from the front-"you have to go between the ribs or right below the Adam's apple. Quick thrust in, and then the wiggle." Elkins demonstrated the little wiggle with his wrist. "That gets the artery, or the heart muscle, or the spinal column. A puncture is usually no damn good. Any other cut is slow and noisy. If you can go in from the back, it's the same. Hold it flat. Hold it horizonal."

  Elkins would demonstrate on the plastic skeleton. "The very quickest is right there"-and he would point a slender, manicured finger-"above that first vertebra. You do it right and there's not a motion. Not a sound. Very little bleeding. Instant death."

  When it was time for him to go into the yard again, he went with a slender, stiff little shank fashioned of surgical steel and as sharp as the scalpel it had once been. Elkins had given him that along with his final instructions.

  "Remember the number for you is three. There are three of them. If you get caught with the first one you don't do the last two. Remember that, and remember to hold it flat. What you're after is behind the bone."

  He had been twenty when he did it. A long time ago. He had yearned to tell Mama about it. But it wasn't the sort of thing you could say in a letter, with the screws reading your mail. And Mama hadn't ever been able to get away to come on visiting days. He felt badly about that. It had been a hard life for her and not much he'd done had made it any easier.

  The liver had that burned taste. And the hamburger buns were pretty much dried out. But he didn't like liver anyway. He only bought it because it was about half the price of hamburger. And it satisfied what little appetite he had tonight. Then he put on his hat and his still-damp coat and went out to make his call to Elkins.

  "There's not a damn thing I can do for you," Elkins said. "You know how we work. After twenty years you ought to know. We keep insulated. It's got to be that way."

  "It's been more than twenty years," Fleck said. "Remember that first job?"

  The first job had been while he was still in prison. Elkins was out, thanks to a lot of good time and an early parole. And the visitor had come to see him. As a matter of fact, it was the only visitor he'd ever had. A young lawyer. Elkins had sent him to give Fleck a name. It had been a short visit.

  "Elkins just said to tell you to make it four instead of three. He wants you to make it Cassidy and Dalkin and Neal and David Petresky. He said you'd understand. And to tell you you'd be represented by a lawyer at the parole hearing and that he had regular work for you after that." The lawyer was a plump, blond man with greenish-blue eyes. He was not much older than Fleck and he looked nervous-glancing around all the time to see if the screw was listening. "He said for me to bring back a yes or a no."

  Fleck had thought about it a minute-wondering who Petresky was and how to get to him. "Tell him yes," he said.

  And now Elkins remembered it.

  "That one was sort of a test," Elkins said. "They said you couldn't handle Petresky. I said I'd seen your work."

  "All these years," Fleck said. "Now I need help. I think you owe me."

  "It was always business," Eddy Elkins said. "You know that. It couldn't be any other way. It would just be too damned dangerous."

  Dangerous for you, Fleck thought, but he didn't say it. Instead he said: "I simply got to have three thousand. I've got to have enough to get my Mama moved." Fleck paused. "Man, I'm desperate."

  There was a long silence. "You say this involves your mother?"

  "Yeah." In Joliet he had talked to Elkins a lot about Mama. He thought Elkins understood how he felt about her.

  Another silence. "What's your number there?"

  Fleck told him.

  "Stay there. I'll make a contact and see what I can do."

 
; Fleck waited almost an hour, huddled in his damp coat in the booth and, when he felt the chill stiffening him, pacing up and down the sidewalk close enough to hear the ring.

  When it rang, it was The Client.

  "You dirty little hijo de puta," he said. "You want money? You bring us nothing but trouble and you want us to pay you money for it?"

  "I got to have it," Fleck said. "You owe me." He thought: hijo de puta; the man had called him son of a whore.

  "We ought to break your dirty little neck." The Client said. "Maybe we do that. Yes. Maybe we cut your dirty little throat. We give you a simple little job. What do you do? You screw it up!"

  Fleck felt the rage rising within him, felt it like bile in his throat. He heard Mama's voice: "They treat you like niggers. You let 'em, they treat you like dogs. You let 'em step on you, they'll treat you like animals."

  But he choked back the rage. He couldn't afford it. He had to pick her up right away. He had to get her to a place where they'd take care of her.

  "I know who you are," Fleck said. "I followed you back to your embassy. I get paid or I can cause you some trouble." Then he listened.

  What he heard was a stream of obscenities. He heard himself called the filthy, defecation-eating son of a whore, the son of an infected dog. And the click of the line disconnecting.

  Standing in the drizzle outside the booth, Fleck spit on the sidewalk. He let the rage well up. He'd get the money another way, somehow. He'd done it in the past. Mugging. A lot of mugging to come up with three thousand dollars unless he was lucky. It was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Only the ruling class carried big money, and some of them carried only plastic. And the police protected the ruling class. And now there was something else he had to do. It involved getting even. It involved using his shank again. It involved getting the blade in behind the bone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ®

  What I want to know, for starters," Joe Leaphorn said, "is everything you know about this Henry Highhawk."

  They had met in what passed for a coffee shop in Jim Chee's hotel, surrounded by blue-collar workers and tourists who, like Chee, had asked their travel agents to find them moderately priced housing in downtown Washington. Leaphorn had donned the Washington uniform. But his three-piece suit was a model sold by the Gallup Sears store in the middle seventies, and its looseness testified to the pounds Leaphorn had lost eating his own cooking since Emma's death.

  With the single exception of his Blessing Way ceremonial, Jim Chee had never seen the legendary Leaphorn except in a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. He was having psychological trouble handling this inappropriate attire. Like a necktie on a herd bull, Chee thought. Like socks on a billy goat. But above the necktie knot Leaphorn's eyes were exactly as Chee remembered them-dark brown, alert, searching. As always, something in them was causing Chee to examine his conscience. What had he neglected? What had he forgotten?

  He told Leaphorn about Highhawk's job, his educational background, the charge against him for vandalizing graves, his campaign to cause the Smithsonian to release its thousands of Native American skeletons for reburial. He described how he and Cowboy Dashee had arrested Highhawk. He reported how Gomez had shown up, how Gomez had agreed to post Highhawk's bond. How yesterday Gomez had appeared at Highhawk's house. He described Highhawk's limp, his leg brace, and how Janet Pete had come to be his attorney. He touched on Janet Pete's doubts about the Tano Pueblo fetish and what he had seen in Highhawk's office-studio. But he said nothing at all about Janet Pete's doubts and problems. That was another story. That was none of Leaphorn's business.

  "What do you think he was doing at the Yeibichai?" Leaphorn asked.

  Chee shrugged. "He doesn't look it but he's one-fourth Navajo. One grandmother was Navajo. I guess she made a big impression on him. Janet Pete tells me he wants to be a Navajo. Thinks about himself as a Navajo." Chee considered that some more. "He wanted to be sort of initiated into the tribe. And he knew enough about the Yeibichai to show up on the last night." He glanced at Leaphorn. Did this Navajo version of pragmatist-agnostic know enough about the Yeibichai himself to know what that meant? He added: "When the hataalii sometimes initiates boys-lets them look through the mask. Highhawk wanted to do that."

  Leaphorn merely nodded. "Did he?"

  "We arrested him," Chee said.

  Leaphorn thought about that answer. "Right away?"

  Leaphorn picked up his coffee cup, examined it, looked across it at Chee, took a small sip, put it back in the saucer, and waited. "Stuck around about two hours," he said. "Right?"

  "About," Chee agreed.

  "You didn't just stand around. You talked. What did Highhawk talk about?"

  Chee shrugged. What had they talked about?

  "It was cold as hell-wind out of the north. We talked about that. He thought the people wearing the yei masks must get awful frostbitten with nothing on but leggings and kilts. And he asked a lot of questions. Did the paint on their bodies insulate them from the cold? Which mask represented which yei? Questions about the ceremonial. And he knew enough about it to ask smart questions." Chee stopped. Finished.

  "About anything else?"

  Chee shrugged.

  Leaphorn stared at him. "That won't get it," he said. "I need to know."

  Chee was not in the mood for this. He felt his face flushing. "Highhawk was taping some of it," Chee said. "He had this little tape recorder palmed. Then he'd pull it up his sleeve if anyone noticed it. You're not supposed to do that unless you square it with the hataalii. I let that go. Didn't say anything. And once I heard him singing the words of one of the chants. What else? He and this Gomez went into the kitchen shed once and ate some stew. And when Dashee and I arrested him, Gomez came up and wanted to know what was going on."

  "If he knew as much as he seemed to know, then he knew he shouldn't be taping without the singer's permission," Leaphorn said. "And it looked to you like he was being sneaky about it?"

  "It was sneaky," Chee said. "Hiding the recorder in his palm. Up his sleeve."

  "Not very polite," Leaphorn said. "Not as polite as his letter sounded." He said it mostly to himself, thinking out loud.

  "Letter?" Chee said, louder than he intended. The edge in his voice was enough so that at the next table two men in Federal Express delivery uniforms looked up from their waffles and stared at him.

  "He wrote a letter to Agnes Tsosie," Leaphorn said. "Very polite. Tell me about this Gomez. Describe him."

  Chee was aware that his face was flushed. He could feel it, distinctly.

  "I'm on vacation," Chee said. "I'm off duty. I want you to tell me about this letter. When did that happen? How did you know about it? How did you know about Highhawk? What the hell's going on?"

  "Well, now," Leaphorn began, his face flushing. But then he closed his mouth. He cleared his throat. "Well, now," he said again, "I guess you're right." And he told Chee about the man with pointed shoes.

  Leaphorn was unusually good at telling. He organized it all neatly and chronologically. He described the body found beside the tracks east of Gallup, the cryptic note in the shirt pocket, the visit to the Agnes Tsosie place, the letter from Highhawk with Highhawk's photograph included, what the autopsy showed, all of it.

  "This little man in the next apartment, he fit the description of the man in Santillanes' compartment on the train. No question he was interested in the Santillanes bunch. Any chance he and Gomez are the same?"

  "Not the way you describe him," Chee said. "Gomez has black hair. He's younger than your man sounds, and taller and slender-none of those weightlifter muscles. And I think he lost several fingers."

  Leaphorn's expression shaded from alert to very alert. "Several? What do you mean?"

  "He was wearing leather gloves, but on both hands some of the fingers were stiff-as if the gloves were stuffed with cotton or maybe there was a finger in it that didn't bend. I took a look every chance I got because it seemed funny. Strange I mean. Losing fingers off both hands."r />
  Leaphorn thought. "Any other scars? Deformities?"

  "None visible," Chee said. And waited. He watched Leaphorn turning these mangled fingers over in his mind. Chee reminded himself that he was on vacation and so was Leaphorn. By God, he was simply not going to let the lieutenant get away with this.

  "Why?"

  Leaphorn, his thoughts interrupted, looked startled. "What?"

  "I can tell you're thinking those missing fingers are important. Why are they important? How does that fit with what you know?"

  "Probably they're not important," Leaphorn said.

  "Not good enough," Chee said. "Remember, I'm on vacation."

  Leaphorn's expression shifted into something that might have been a grin. "I have some bad habits. A lot of them involve doing things to save time. A strange habit for a Navajo, I guess. But you're right. You're on vacation. So am I, for that matter." He put down his coffee cup.