Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

by Talking God(lit)

  "Where do I start? Santillanes didn't have any teeth. All pulled. But the pathologist who did the autopsy said there was no sign of any reason to have them pulled. No jawbone problems, no traces left by the gum diseases that cause you to lose your teeth. I wondered how Santillanes lost his teeth. You wondered how Gomez lost his fingers." Leaphorn took the final sip of his coffee, signaled the waiter. "You see a connection?"

  Chee hesitated. "You mean like they both might have been tortured?"

  "It occurs to me. I guess they're Chilean leftists. The right wing's in power. There's been a lot of reporting of the secret police, or maybe the army, knocking people off. People disappearing. Political prisoners. Murder. Torture. Some really hideous stuff causing investigations by Amnesty International."

  Chee nodded.

  "I think we should go talk to Highhawk," Leaphorn said. "Okay?"

  "If we can find him," Chee said. "I called this morning. Called his house. Called his office. No answer. So I called Dr. Hartman. She's the curator he's working for at the museum. She hadn't seen him either. She was looking for him."

  "Let's go try to find him anyway," Leaphorn said. He picked up the check.

  "I didn't tell you about last night," Chee said. He described how Highhawk had taken the telephone call, then left saying he'd be right back, and never returned.

  "I think we should go on out there. See if we can find the man. Try his house and if he's not there, we'll try the Smithsonian."

  Chee put on his hat and followed.

  "Why not?" he said, but even as he said it he had a feeling they weren't going to find Henry Highhawk.

  They took a cab to Eastern Market.

  "Stick around a minute until we see if our party is home," Leaphorn said.

  The cabby was a plump young man with a mass of curly brown hair and fat, red lips. He pulled a paperback copy of Passage to Quivera off the dashboard and opened it. "It's your money," he said. "Spend it any way you like."

  Leaphorn punched the doorbell. They listened to it buzz inside. He punched it again. Chee walked back down the porch steps and rescued the morning paper from where it had been thrown beside the front walk. He showed it to Leaphorn. He nodded. Punched the doorbell again. Chee walked to the window, shaded the glass with his hands. The blinds were up, the curtains open. The room was empty and dark on this dreary, overcast morning.

  "What do you think?" Chee said.

  Leaphorn shook his head, rang the bell again. He tried the doorknob. Locked.

  "Curtains open, blinds up," Chee said. "If he came home last night, maybe he didn't turn on the lights."

  "Maybe not." Leaphorn tried the door again. Still locked. "I know a cop here," he said. "I think we'll give him a call and see what he thinks."

  "FBI?" Chee asked.

  "A real cop," Leaphorn said. "A captain on the Washington police force."

  They took the cab to the public phone booths at the Eastern Market Metro station. Leaphorn made his call. Chee waited, watching the cabby read and trying to decide what the hell Highhawk was doing. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? How was Bad Hands involved in this? He thought of Bad Hands in the role of revolutionary. He thought of how it would feel to have your fingers removed by a torturer trying to make you talk. Leaphorn climbed back into the cab.

  "He said he would meet us at a little coffee place in the old Post Office building."

  The cabby was awaiting instructions. "You know how to find it?" Leaphorn asked.

  "Is the Pope a Catholic?" the cabby said.

  They found Captain Rodney awaiting them just inside the coffee shop door, a tall, bulky black man wearing bifocals, a gray felt hat, and a raincoat to match. The sight of Leaphorn provoked a huge, delighted, white-toothed grin.

  "This is Jim Chee," Leaphorn said. "One of our officers."

  They shook hands. Rodney's craggy, coffee-colored face usually registered expression only when Rodney allowed it to do so. Now, just for a moment, it registered startled surprise. He removed the fedora, revealing kinky gray hair cropped close to the skull.

  "Jim Chee," he said, memorizing Chee's face. "Well, now."

  "Rodney and I go way back," Leaphorn said. "We survived the FBI Academy together."

  "Two misfits," Rodney said. "Back in the days when all FBI agents had blue eyes instead of just most of them." Rodney chuckled, but his eyes never left Chee. "That's when I first learned that our friend here"-he indicated Leaphorn with a thumb-"has this practice of just telling you what he thinks you have to know."

  They were at a table now and Leaphorn was ordering coffee. Now he looked surprised. "Like what?" he said. "What do you mean by that?"

  Rodney was still looking at Chee. "You work for this guy, right? Or with him, anyway."

  "More or less," Chee said, wondering where this was leading. "Now I'm on vacation."

  Rodney laughed. "Vacation. Is that a fact. You just happen to be three thousand miles east of home at the same time as your boss. I think maybe I was blaming Joe for something that's a universal Navajo trait."

  "What are we talking about here?" Leaphorn asked.

  "About the Navajo Tribal Police sending two men"-he pointed a finger at Leaphorn and then at Chee-"two men, count 'em, to Washington, Dee, Cee, which is several miles out of their jurisdiction, to look for a fellow which us local cops didn't even yet know there was a reason to be looking for."

  "Nobody sent us here," Leaphorn said.

  Rodney ignored the remark. He was staring at Chee.

  "What time did you leave the Smithsonian last night?"

  Chee told him. He was baffled. How did this Washington policeman know he had been at the museum last night? Why would he care? Something must have happened to Highhawk.

  "Which exit?"

  'Twelfth Street."

  "Nobody checked you out?"

  "Nobody was there."

  Surprise again registered on Rodney's face.

  "Ah," he said. "No guard? No security person? How did you get out?"

  "I just walked out."

  "The door wasn't locked."

  Chee shook his head. "Closed, but unlocked."

  "You see anything? Anybody?"

  "I was surprised no one was there. I looked around. Empty."

  "You didn't see a young woman in a museum guard's uniform? A black woman? The guard who was supposed to be keeping an eye on that Twelfth Street entrance?"

  Chee shook his head again. "Nobody was around," he said. "Nobody. What's the deal?" But even as he asked the question, he knew the deal. Highhawk was dead. Chee was just about the last person who'd seen him alive.

  "The deal is"-Rodney was looking at Leaphorn now-"that I get a call from my old friend Joe here to check on whether there's any kind of report on a man named Henry Highhawk and I find out this Highhawk is on a list of people Homicide would like to talk to." Rodney shifted his gaze back to Chee. "So I come down here to talk to my old friend Joe, and he introduces me to you and, what do ya know, you happen to be another guy on Homicide's wish list. That's what the deal is."

  "Your homicide people want to talk to Highhawk," Chee said. "That means he's alive?"

  "You have some reason to think otherwise?" Rodney asked.

  "When you said you had a homicide I figured he was the one," Chee said. He explained to Rodney what had happened last night at the Smithsonian. "Back in just a minute, he said. But he never came back. I went out and wandered around the halls looking for him. Then finally I went home. I called him at home this morning. No soap. I called his office. The woman he works for was looking for him too. She was worried about him."

  Rodney had been intent on every word.

  "Went home when?"

  "I told you," Chee said. "I must have left the Twelfth Street entrance a little before ten thirty. Very close to that. I walked right back to my hotel."

  "And when did Highhawk receive this telephone call? The call just before he left?"

  Chee told him.

  "Who was the caller?
"

  "No idea. It was a short call."

  "What about? Did you hear it?"

  "I heard Highhawk's end. Apparently he had been trying to tell Highhawk how to fix something. Highhawk had tried and it hadn't worked. I remember he said it'didn't turn on,' and Highhawk said since he was coming down anyway the caller could fix it. And then they set the nine-thirty time and Highhawk told him to remember it was the Twelfth Street entrance."

  "Him?" Rodney said. "Was the caller a man?"

  "I should have said him or her. I couldn't hear the other voice."

  "I'm going to make a call of my own," Rodney said. He rose, gracefully for a man of his bulk. "Pass all this along to the detective handling this one. I'll be right back." He grinned at Chee. "Quicker than Highhawk, anyway."

  "Who's the victim?" Leaphorn asked.

  Rodney paused, looking down on them. "It was the night-shift guard at the Twelfth Street entrance."

  "Stabbed?" Leaphorn asked.

  "Why do you say stabbed?"

  Now Leaphorn's voice had an impatient edge in it. "I told you about what brought me here," he said. "Remember? Santillanes was stabbed. Very professionally, in the back of the neck."

  "Oh, yeah," Rodney said. "No. Not stabbed this time. It was skull fracture." He made another move toward the telephone.

  "Where did they find the body?" Chee asked. "And when?"

  "A couple of hours ago. Whoever hit her on the head found the perfect place to hide her." Rodney looked down at them, the tale teller pausing to underline his point. "They laid her out on, the grass there between the shrubbery and the sidewalk, and got some old newspapers out of the trash bin there and threw them over her."

  Chee understood perfectly the sardonic tone in Rodney's voice, but Leaphorn said: "Right by the sidewalk and nobody checked all morning?"

  "This is Friday," Rodney said. "In Washington, the Good Samaritan comes by only on the seventh Tuesday of the month." And he walked away to make his telephone call.

  The only remaining sign that a corpse had been on display under the shrubbery adjoining the Twelfth Street entrance to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was a uniformed policeman who stood beside a taped-off area. He was whistling idly, and he glanced at Rodney without a sign of recognition. Probably too young.

  Inside, Rodney's badge got them through the STAFF ONLY doorway. They took the elevator to the sixth floor and found that Dr. Hartman was not in. A young woman who seemed to be her assistant said she was probably down on the main floor at her mask exhibition. And no, the young woman said, Henry Highhawk had not showed up for work.

  "Did you hear what happened?" she asked. "I mean about the guard being killed?"

  "We heard," Rodney said. "Do you know where we can get the key to Highhawk's office?"

  "Dr. Hartman would probably have one," she said. "But wasn't that dreadful? You don't expect something like that to happen to someone you know."

  "Did you know her?" Rodney said.

  The young woman looked slightly flustered. "Well, I saw her a lot," she said. "You know. When I worked late she would be standing there."

  "Her name was Alice Yoakum," Rodney said, mildly. "Mrs. Alice Yoakum. Is there a way we can page Dr. Hartman? Or call down there for her somehow?"

  There was, but Dr. Hartman proved to be either unreachable or too busy to come to the telephone.

  "It might not be locked," Chee said. "It wasn't when I left. If he didn't come back who would lock it?"

  "Maybe some sort of internal security," Rodney said.

  But nobody had locked it. The door opened under Rodney's hand. The room was silent, lit by an overhead fluorescent tube, the blinds down as Chee remembered them. Highhawk's gesture at keeping his light from leaking out into the night was now holding out the daylight.

  "You leave the light on last night?" Rodney asked.

  Chee nodded. "He said he was coming back. I thought he might. I just pulled the door closed."

  They stood inside the doorway, inspecting the room.

  "Everything look like you left it?" Rodney asked.

  "Looks like it," Chee said.

  Rodney picked up the telephone, dialed, listened. "This is Rodney," he said. "Get hold of Sergeant Willis and tell him I'm calling from Henry Highhawk's office on the sixth floor of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He's not here. Nobody's seen him. Tell him I have Jim Chee with me. We're going to look around up here and if I don't hear from him before then, I'll call back in-" he glanced at his watch "-about forty-five minutes." He cradled the telephone, sat in Highhawk's chair, looked at Leaphorn who was leaning against the wall, then at Chee by the window.

  "Either one of you have any creative thoughts?" he asked. 'This isn't my baby-nor yours either for that matter-but here we are knee deep in it."

  "I'm asking myself some questions," Leaphorn said. "We have this Highhawk vaguely connected to the knifing of a terrorist, or whatever you want to call him, out in New Mexico. Just the name in the victim's notebook. Now we have him disappearing, I guess, the same night this guard is killed here. But do we know when the guard was killed?"

  "Coroner said the first glance looked like it was before midnight," Rodney said. "He may get closer when they have the autopsy finished."

  Leaphorn looked thoughtful. "So it might have been either shortly before, or shortly after, Highhawk walked out of here. Either way?"

  "Sounds like it," Rodney said. He glanced at Chee. "How about you?"

  "I'm thinking that this is the world's best place to hide a body," Chee said, slowly. "Tens of thousands of cases and containers lining the halls. Most of them big enough for a body."

  "But locked," Rodney said. "And some of them, I noticed, were sealed, too."

  "They all use the same simple little master key," Chee said. "At least most of them must use the same key, or you'd need a truck to haul your keys around. I think you just pick up a key, sign for it, and keep it until you're finished with it. Something like that."

  "You know if Highhawk had a key?"

  "I'd guess so," Chee said. "He was a conservator. He would have been working with this stuff all the time."

  Leaphorn put his forefinger on a hook which had been screwed into the doorjamb. "I'd been wondering what this was for," he said. "I'd guess it was where Highhawk hung his key."

  No key hung there now, but the white paint below the hook was discolored with years of finger marks.

  "Let's go look around," Rodney said. He got up.

  "He took it when he left," Chee said. "And before we go looking, why not make a telephone call first? Call maintenance, or whoever might know, and ask them if they found anything unusual this morning."

  Rodney paused at the doorway, looking interested. "Like what?"

  Chee noticed that Leaphorn was looking at him, smiling slightly.

  "Chee's a pessimist," Leaphorn said. "He thinks somebody killed Highhawk. If somebody did, it would be tough to drag him out of the building-even with the guard dead. Not many people around at night in here, I'd guess, but it would only take one to see you."

  Rodney still looked puzzled. "So?"

  "So this place is jammed with bins and boxes and cases and containers where you could hide a body. But they're probably all full of things already. So the killer empties one out, puts in the body, and then he relocks it. But now he's stuck with whatever came out of the bin. So he looks for a place and dumps it somewhere."

  Rodney picked up the telephone again. He dialed, identified himself, and said: "Give me the museum security office, please." Judging from the Rodney end of the conversation, Museum Security had no useful information. The call was transferred to maintenance. Chee found himself watching Leaphorn, thinking how quickly his mind had worked. Leaphorn was still standing beside the open door and as Chee watched, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, grimacing slightly. He was wearing black wing-tip shoes burnished to a high gloss. Leaphorn's feet, as was true of Chee's, would be accustomed to boots and more
breathing space. Chee guessed Leaphorn's hurt and that made him conscious of the comfort of his own feet, at home in the familiar boots. He felt slightly superior. It served Leaphorn right for trying to look like an Easterner.

  "A what?" Rodney was saying. "Where did they find it?" He listened. "How large is it?" Listened again. "Where did it come from?" Listened. "Okay. We'll check. Thanks." He hung up, looked at Chee.