Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 12 - The Fallen Man

by The Fallen Man(lit)

  The mobile home was one of the flimsier models but it had been placed solidly on a base of concrete blocks to keep the wind from blowing under it. A small satellite dish sat on its roof, helping a row of old tires hold down the aluminum panels as well as bringing in a television signal. Beside this insubstantial residence stood the Sam hogan, solidly built of sandstone slabs with its door facing properly eastward. Chee's practiced eyes could tell that it had been built to the specifications prescribed for the People by Changing Woman, their giver of laws. Beyond the hogan was a hay shed with a plank holding pen for cattle, a windmill with attendant water tank, and, on top of the shed, a small wind generator, its fan blades spinning in the morning breeze. Down the slope a rusty and long-deceased Ford F100 pickup rested on blocks with its wheels missing. Farther down stood an outhouse. Beyond this untidy clutter of rural living, the view stretched away forever.

  It reminded Chee of a professor he'd had once at the University of New Mexico who had done a research project on how Navajos place their hogans. The answer seemed to Chee glaringly obvious. A Navajo, like a rancher anywhere, would need access to water, to grazing, to a road, and above all a soul-healing view of-in the words of one of the curing chants-"beauty all around you."

  The Sam family had put beauty first. They had picked the very crest of the high grassy ridge between Red Wash and Little Ship Rock Wash. To the west the morning sun lit the pink and orange wilderness of erosion that gave the Red Rock community its name. Beyond that the blue-green mass of the Carrizo Mountains rose. Far to the north in Colorado, the Roman nose shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain dominated, and west of that was the always-changing pattern of lights and shadows that marked the edge of Utah's canyon country. But look eastward, and all of this was overpowered by the dark monolith of the Rock with Wings towering over the rolling grassland. Only five or six million years old, the geologists said, but in Chee's mythology it had been there since God created time or, depending on the version one preferred, had flown in fairly recently carrying the first Navajo clans down from the north.

  Lucy Sam reappeared at her doorway, the signal that she was ready to receive her visitors. She had started a coffeepot brewing on her propane stove, put on a blouse of dark blue velveteen, and donned her silver and turquoise jewelry in their honor. Now they went through the polite formalities of traditional Navajo greetings, seated themselves beside the Sam table, and waited while Ms. Sam extracted what she called her "rustler book" from a cabinet stacked with magazines and papers.

  Chee considered himself fairly adept at guessing the ages of males and fairly poor with females. Ms. Sam he thought must be in her late sixties-give or take five or ten years. She did her hair bound up in the traditional style, wore the voluminous long skirt demanded by traditional modesty, and had a television set on a corner table tuned to a morning talk show. It was one of the sleazier ones-a handsome young woman named Ricki something or other probing into the sexual misconduct, misfortune, hatreds, and misery of a row of retarded-looking guests, to the amusement of the studio audience. But Chee was distracted from this spectacle by what was sharing table space with the television set.

  It was a telescope mounted on a short tripod and aimed through the window at the world outside. Chee recognized it as a spotting scope-the sort the marksmanship instructor had peered through on the police recruit firing range to tell him how far he'd missed the bull's-eye. This one looked like an older, bulkier model, probably an artillery observer's range-finding scope and probably bought in an army surplus store.

  Ms. Sam had placed her book, a black ledger that looked even older than the scope, on the table. She settled a pair of bifocals on her nose and opened it.

  "I haven't seen much since you asked me to be watching," she said to Officer Manuelito. "I mean I haven't seen much that you'd want to arrest somebody for." She looked over the bifocals at Chee, grinning. "Not unless you want to arrest that lady that used to work at the Red Rock trading post for fooling with somebody else's husband."

  Officer Manuelito was grinning, too. Chee apparently looked blank, because Ms. Sam pointed past the telescope and out the window.

  "Way over there toward Rock with Wings," she explained. "There's a nice little place down there. Live spring there and cottonwood trees. I was sort of looking around through the telescope to see if any trucks were parked anywhere and I see the lady's little red car just driving up toward the trees. And then in a minute, here comes Bennie Smiley's pickup truck. Then, quite a little bit later, the truck comes out over the hill again, and then four or five minutes, here comes the little red car."

  She nodded to Chee, decided he was hopeless, and looked at Manuelito. "It was about an hour," she added, which caused Officer Manuelito's smile to widen.

  "Bennie," she said. "I'll be darned."

  "Yes," Ms. Sam said.

  "I know Bennie," Officer Manuelito said. "He used to be my oldest sister's boyfriend. She liked him but then she found out he was born to the Streams Come Together clan. That's too close to our `born to' clan for us."

  Ms. Sam shook her head, made a disapproving sound. But she was still smiling.

  "That lady with the red car," Manuelito said. "I wonder if I know her, too. Is that Mrs.-"

  Chee cleared his throat.

  "I wonder if you noticed any pickups, anything you could haul a load of hay in, stopped over there on the road past the Rattlesnake pumping station. Probably a day or so before the snow." He glanced at Officer Manuelito, tried to read her expression, decided she was either slightly abashed for gossiping instead of tending to police business, or irritated because he'd interrupted her. Probably the latter.

  Ms. Sam was thumbing through the ledger, saying, "Let's see now. Wasn't it Monday night it started snowing?" She thumbed past another page, tapped the paper with a finger. "Big fifth-wheel truck parked there beside Route 33. Dark blue, and the trailer he was pulling was partly red and partly white, like somebody was painting it and didn't get it finished. Had Arizona plates. But that was eight days before it snowed."

  "That sounds like my uncle's truck," Manuelito said. "He lives over there at Sanostee."

  Ms. Sam said she thought it had looked familiar. And, no, she hadn't noticed any strange trucks the days just before the storm, but then she'd gone into Farmington to buy groceries and was gone one day. She read off the four other entries she'd made since getting Manuelito's request. One sounded like Dick Finch's truck with its bulky camper. None of the others would mean anything unless and until some sort of pattern developed. Pattern! That made him think of the days he'd worked for Leaphorn. Leaphorn was always looking for patterns.

  "How did you know it was an Arizona license?" Chee asked. "The telescope?"

  "Take a look," Ms. Sam said, and waved at the scope.

  Chee did, twiddling the adjustment dial. The mountain jumped at him. Huge. He focused on a slab of basalt fringed with mountain oak. "Wow," Chee said. "Quite a scope."

  He turned it, brought in the point where Navajo Route 33 cuts through the Chinese Wall of stone that wanders southward from the volcano. A school bus was rolling down the asphalt, heading for Red Rock after taking kids on their fifty-mile ride into high school at Shiprock.

  "We bought it for him, long time ago when he started getting sick," Ms. Sam said-using the Navajo words that avoided alluding directly to the name of the dead. "I saw it in that big pawnshop on Railroad Avenue in Gallup. Then he could sit there and watch the world and keep track of his mountain."

  She produced a deprecatory chuckle, as if Chee might think this odd. "Every day he'd write down what he saw. You know. Like which pairs of kestrels were coming back to the same nests. And where the red-tailed hawks were hunting. Which kids were spray-painting stuff on that old water tank down there, or climbing the windmill. That sort of thing."

  She sighed, gestured at the talk show. "Better than this stuff. He loved his mountain. Watching it kept him happy."

  "I heard he used to come down to Shiprock, to the poli
ce station, and report people trespassing and climbing Tse' Bit' a'i'," Chee said. "Is that right?"

  "He wanted them arrested," she said. "He said it was wrong, those white people climbing a mountain that was sacred. He said if he was younger and had some money he would go back East and climb up the front of that big cathedral in New York." Ms. Sam laughed. "See how they liked that."

  "What sort of things did he write in the book?" Chee asked, thinking of Lieutenant Leaphorn and feeling a twinge of excitement. "Could I see it?"

  "All sorts of things," she said, and handed it to him. "He was in the marines. One of the code talkers, and he liked to do things the way they did in the marines."

  The entries were dated with the numbers of day, month, and year, and the first one was 25/7/89. After the date Hosteen Sam had written in a tiny, neat missionary-school hand that he had gone into Farmington that day and bought this book to replace the old one, which was full. The next entry was dated 26/7/89. After that Sam had written: "Redtail hawks nesting. Sold two rams to D. Nez."

  Chee closed the book. What was the date Breedlove had vanished? Oh, yes.

  He handed Ms. Sam the ledger.

  "Do you have an earlier book?"

  "Two of them," she said. "He started writing more after he got really sick. Had more time then." She took two ledgers down from the top of the cabinet where she stored canned goods and handed them to Chee. "It was something that kills the nerves. Sometimes he would feel pretty good but he was getting paralyzed."

  "I've heard of it," Manuelito said. "They say there's no cure."

  "We had a sing for him," Ms. Sam said. "A Yeibichai. He got better for a little while."

  Chee found the page with the day of Hal Breedlove's disappearance and scanned the dates that followed. He found crows migrating, news of a coyote family, mention of an oil field service truck, but absolutely nothing to indicate that Breedlove or anyone else had come to climb Hosteen Sam's sacred mountain.

  Disappointing. Well, anyway, he would think about this. And he'd tell Lieutenant Leaphorn about the book. That thought surprised him. Why tell Leaphorn? The man was a civilian now. It was none of his business. He didn't exactly like Leaphorn. Or he hadn't thought he did. Was it respect? The man was smarter than anybody Chee had ever met. Damn sure smarter than Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. And maybe that was why he didn't exactly like him.

  12

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE that metaphor whites use about money burning a hole in your pocket had taken on meaning for Joe Leaphorn. The heat had been caused by a check for twenty thousand dollars made out to him against an account of the Breedlove Corporation. Leaphorn had endorsed it and exchanged it for a deposit slip to an account in his name in the Mancos Security Bank. Now the deposit slip resided uneasily in his wallet as he waited for Mrs. Cecilia Rivera to finish dealing with a customer and talk to him. Which she did, right now.

  Leaphorn rose, pulled back a chair for her at the lobby table where she had deposited him earlier. "Sorry," she said. "I don't like to keep a new customer waiting." She sat, examined him briefly, and got right to the point. "What did you want to ask me about?"

  "First," Leaphorn said, "I want to tell you what I'm doing here. Opening this account and all."

  "I wondered about that," Mrs. Rivera said. "I noticed your address was Window Rock, Arizona. I thought maybe you were going into some line of business up here." That came out as a question.

  "Did you notice who the check was drawn against?" Leaphorn asked. Of course she would have. It was a very small bank in a very small town. The Breedlove name would be famous here, and Leaphorn had seen the teller discussing the deposit with Mrs. Rivera. But he wanted to make sure.

  "The Breedloves," Mrs. Rivera said, studying his face. "It's been a few years since we've seen a Breedlove check but I never heard of one bouncing. Hal's widow banked here for a little while after he-after he disappeared. But then she quit us."

  Mrs. Rivera was in her mid-seventies, Leaphorn guessed, thin and sun-wrinkled. Her bright black eyes examined him through the top half of her bifocals with frank curiosity.

  "I'm working for them now," Leaphorn said. "For the Breedloves." He waited.

  Mrs. Rivera drew in a long breath. "Doing what?" she asked. "Would it be something to do with that moly mine project?"

  "It may be that," Leaphorn said. "To tell the truth, I don't know. I'm a retired policeman." He extracted his identification case and showed it to her. "Years ago when Hal Breedlove disappeared, I was the detective working that case." He produced a deprecatory expression. "Obviously I didn't have much success with it, because it took about eleven years to find him, and then it was by accident. But anyway, the family seems to have remembered."

  "Yes," Mrs. Rivera said. "Young Hal did like to climb up onto the mountains." A dim smile appeared. "From what I read in the Farmington Times, I guess he needed more studying on how to climb down off of them."

  Leaphorn rewarded this with a chuckle.

  "In my experience," he said, "bankers are like doctors and lawyers and ministers. Their business depends a lot on keeping confidences." He looked at her, awaiting confirmation of this bit of misinformation. Leaphorn had always found bankers wonderful sources of information.

  "Well, yes," she said. "Lot of business secrets come floating around when you're negotiating loans."

  "Are you willing to handle another one?"

  "Another secret?" Mrs. Rivera's expression became avid. She nodded.

  And so Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, laid his cards on the table. More or less. It was a tactic he'd used for years-based on his theory that most humans prefer exchanging information to giving it away. He'd tried to teach Jim Chee that rule, which was: Tell somebody something interesting and they'll try to top it. So now he was going to tell Mrs. Rivera everything he knew about the affair of Hal Breedlove, who had been by Four Corners standards her former neighbor and was her onetime customer. In return he expected Mrs. Rivera to tell him something she knew about Hal Breedlove, and his ranch, and his business. Which was why he had opened this account here. Which was what he had decided to do yesterday when, after long seconds of hesitation, he had accepted the check he had never expected to receive.

  They had met again yesterday at the Navajo Inn-Leaphorn, McDermott, and George Shaw.

  "If I take this job," Leaphorn had said, "I will require a substantial retainer." He kept his eyes on Shaw's face.

  "Substantial?" said McDermott. "How sub-"

  "How much?" asked Shaw.

  How much, indeed, Leaphorn thought. He had decided he would mention a price too large for them to pay, but not ludicrously overdone. Twenty thousand dollars, he had decided. They would make a counteroffer. Perhaps two thousand. Two weeks pay in advance. He would drop finally to, say, ten thousand. They would counter. And finally he would establish how important this affair was to Shaw.

  "Twenty thousand dollars," Leaphorn said.

  McDermott had snorted, said, "Be serious. We can't-"

  But George Shaw had reached into his inside coat pocket and extracted a checkbook and a pen.

  "From what I've heard about you we won't need to lawyer this," he said. "The twenty thousand will be payment in full, including any expenses you incur, for twenty weeks of your time or until you develop the information we need to settle this business. Is that acceptable?"

  Leaphorn hadn't intended to accept anything-certainly not to associate himself with these two men. He didn't need money. Or want it. But Shaw was writing the check now, face grim and intent. Which told Leaphorn there was much more involved here than he'd expected.

  Shaw had torn out the check, handed it to him. A little piece of the puzzle that had stuck in Leaphorn's mind for eleven years-that had been revived by the shooting of Hosteen Nez-had clicked into place. Unreadable yet, but it shed a dim light on the effort to kill Nez. If twenty thousand dollars could be tossed away like this, millions more than that must be somehow involved. That told him hardly anything. Just a
hint that Nez might still be, to use that white expression, "worth killing." Or for Shaw, perhaps worth keeping alive.

  He had held the check a moment, a little embarrassed, trying to think of what to say as he returned it. He knew now that he would try again to find a way to solve this old puzzle, but for himself and not for these men. He extended the check to Shaw, said, "I'm sorry. I don't think-"

  Then he had seen how useful that check could be. It would give him a Breedlove connection. He wasn't a policeman any longer. This would give him the key he'd need to unlock doors.

  And this morning, in this small, old-fashioned bank lobby, Leaphorn was using it.

  "This is sort of hard to explain," he told Mrs. Rivera. "What I'm trying to do for the Breedlove family is vague. They want me to find out everything about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and about his death on Ship Rock."