At Ease with the Dead

by Walter Satterthwait

  I was surprised—I had thought he’d stay for the day. And I suppose I was disappointed; I’d been enjoying his company. But mountain men don’t whimper when they say ciao. I nodded and asked him, “Where’re you heading?”

  “Tuba City. Got to see some people.”

  “Long drive.”

  He nodded.

  I didn’t offer my hand—some Navajos, I knew, aren’t comfortable with the tradition—but he offered his, and I took it. “Drive carefully,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Good fishing,” he told me. He smiled his faint smile. “You watch out for those bottoms now.”

  I smiled. “I’ll do that. You too.”

  “I will,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “I will.”

  Two months later, and a week after the first snow up in the Ski Basin, I was sitting with my chair swiveled around so I could stare up at the crisp line of bright white mountain against pale blue sky. A thin banner of creamy cloud was sailing over the ridge. It was as though a big fluffy ball were unraveling behind the mountain, sending out a pale streamer that slowly feathered, dissipated, finally disappeared.

  The temperature out there was in the forties. Like a lot of other people in town, I was looking back to the summer’s heat wave with a certain fond regard.

  Maybe I should take up skiing, I told myself. Go shussing down the slopes in a pair of tights, showing off my teeth and my crotch. Hang around the lodge afterward, get loaded on hot buttered rum. Chatter about base and powder while I ogled trim butts and jouncing sweaters.

  But I’d been raised mostly in New England, and in my circles snow had been something you shoveled, like manure. Except at a distance, I haven’t liked the stuff since.

  Still, every year about this time, especially when business is slow, I go through the same interior argument.

  And business was slow. Pedro had long since gotten the goods on the unfortunate Mr. Murchison. Three runaway kids had been traced, two to LA., one to New York. Once case of insurance fraud had been proven, another was about to be disproven. When that was closed out, the Mondragon Agency would be clientless.

  And then someone walked into the office.

  For a moment I didn’t recognize him. For one thing, it had been a while since Lake Asayi. For another, when I last saw him he’d been wearing jeans, a plaid western shirt, and battered cowboy boots. Now he was wearing a gray wool suit, a white shirt, and a black bolo tie. Boots now, too; but dressy ones, highly polished. With the steel gray hair knotted behind his head, he looked very dapper indeed.

  Then I noticed the cane. Suddenly his features became familiar, swimming up into focus on the surface of the stranger’s face. “Daniel,” I said, and stood up and came around the desk. He held out his hand, I shook it. “Daniel Begay. Good to see you. How goes it?”

  “Pretty good,” he said, smiling that faint hint of a smile. “And you?”

  “I’m okay. Have a seat.”

  There are two client chairs in the office. I directed him to one and took the other myself. “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, “I’d like your help.”

  I was a bit surprised. He hadn’t struck me, back at Asayi, as a man who’d need anybody’s help with anything. But sooner or later, I suppose, it’s something we all need. “Sure,” I said. “If I can.”

  He slipped a pipe and a leather tobacco pouch from the right-hand pocket of his suit coat. “Okay to smoke?”

  “Be my guest.”

  He opened the pouch, pinched some tobacco, twisted it into the pipe. “How much do you charge to find someone?”

  “Missing person? Depends. Sometimes all it takes is a couple of phone calls. Who’s missing?”

  “Relative of a woman I know.” He screwed some more tobacco into the bowl.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Man.” Tamping tobacco down with his thumb.

  “How long’s he been missing?”

  He put the pipe stem between his teeth. From his left-hand coat pocket he pulled a red Bic lighter. He lighted it, held the flame to the bowl, the flame flared as he puffed. “Since Nineteen twenty-five,” he said.

  I sat back, wondering how to phrase it politely. “Well, Daniel,” I said. “That’s a long time ago. He could be dead by now.”

  The faint smile came again, a fractional movement of the lips against the pipe stem. “Oh, he is. He was dead then too.”

  3

  Dead,” Rita said.

  “Since Eighteen sixty-six,” I told her. “How’s your Navajo history?”

  It was evening. I’d closed the office, swam my mile in the municipal pool, hammered down a quick green chili stew at the Plaza Restaurant, and then driven up to Rita’s. The two of us were sipping mulled claret on the living room sofa. The air was cozy with the scents of cinnamon and clove, and a fire snapped and flapped in the big kiva fireplace across the darkened room. Shadows slid along the Persian carpet. Outside, beyond the picture window, a blanket of starlit snow glowed between the trees. Rita was wearing a light blue skirt, a silk blouse the color of the summertime sky, and a light blue cashmere cardigan. She looked fairly cozy herself.

  She smiled and said, “How was yours, before you talked to Daniel Begay?”

  “Terrific,” I lied. “You remember Kit Carson?”

  She sipped at her mug of claret. “Vividly.”

  “Then you remember that in Eighteen sixty-four he rounded up all the Navajos in the Southwest. Most of them were hiding out in Canyon de Chelly—apparently, the Canyon was a kind of focal point for the tribe. Carson had two other guys, Pfeiffer and Carey, go through the place, burning down the hogans and the orchards. Anyway, once he had them all together, maybe six thousand of them, Carson came back to Santa Fe. Carey was put in charge of the operation. He was the one who organized the walk to Fort Sumner.”

  Holding the mug in her lap with both hands, she nodded. “The Long Walk. Three hundred miles. But not all of them made it.”

  “No. But the thing is, Carson hadn’t really gotten all the Navajos. Some of them managed to slip away, and after Carson left they sneaked back into the Canyon. They stayed there until the others came back in Eighteen sixty-eight.”

  “And this man, the one Daniel Begay wants you to find, was one of those.”

  “Right. He died in ’sixty-six, and he was buried there in the Canyon.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Ganado.”

  She nodded. “His body reappeared in Nineteen twenty-five?”

  I sipped at my wine. “Yeah. There was a guy digging in the Canyon then, an archaeologist.”

  Rita nodded. “David Bedford.”

  I frowned. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before, Rita.”

  She smiled. “He was famous, Joshua.” She raised her eyebrows inquisitively and asked, “Was he the one who found the body?”

  I took another sip of wine. “I’m being mollified, right?”

  She laughed. “Was he?”

  I shook my head. “Guy named Lessing. Dennis Lessing. A friend of Bedford’s. Or a friend, anyway, until they had their big fight. He wasn’t even an archaeologist, Lessing. Taught oil geology. At the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. Which is part of the Texas university system now, you’ll be happy to know. University of Texas at El Paso.”

  “What was the big fight?”

  “Right. That summer, Lessing brought a bunch of his students to the Navajo Reservation. A field trip, looking for oil—on-the-job training, evidently. They stayed mostly at Piñon, to the west of Canyon de Chelly. But before they went back to El Paso, he took them to the Canyon to meet Bedford and do a little amateur digging.”

  “Why look for oil on the Navajo Reservation?”

  “Because it was there, I suppose. Daniel Begay said they’d found some on an earlier trip.”

  “Yes, but the Texas fields were coming in by then, if memory serves. Why go all the way to Arizona in the first place?”

  “What am I? Mr. Wizard?”r />
  She smiled. “You’ll always be Mr. Wizard to me, Joshua.”

  “Thanks, Rita. Means a lot to me.” I swallowed some more claret. “Anyway, Bedford was working with another archaeologist, guy named Randolph, in the northern branch of the Canyon. What they call Canyon del Muerte. He was digging around the White House ruins and he told Lessing that he and his students could dig a little farther upriver. And a week later, Lessing found Ganado’s grave.”

  “And that started the big fight.”

  “Yeah. Lessing wanted to take the body back with him to El Paso. Bedford didn’t want him to. Randolph, of course, sided with Bedford. But Lessing took the body anyway.”

  “Why? Why would he want it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what happened to Ganado’s body?”

  “It disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “In September, about a month after Lessing came back from the field trip, he was killed. Murdered in his house one night. And no one’s seen Ganado’s body since.”

  Rita sipped at her wine. “One question does spring immediately to mind.”

  I nodded. “Where was David Bedford in September.”

  “That one, yes.”

  “Still in Canyon de Chelly. Plenty of witnesses, according to Daniel Begay.”

  “All right. What is it, exactly, that Mr. Begay wants us to do?”

  “Locate the remains.”

  “Why now? Why sixty-five years later?”

  “Evidently this Ganado has a descendant. A woman. And lately she’s been having dreams.”

  Her face expressionless, Rita repeated the word: “Dreams.”

  “About Ganado. Nightmares. They’ve gotten so bad she can’t sleep. And she won’t sleep, she thinks, until the remains are located and brought back to the Reservation. She came to Begay and asked him for help. He found out what he could, and now he’d like us to do the rest.”

  “Why do I suddenly feel like a character in a Tony Hillerman novel?”

  “If there are any records at all, anything about Lessing and the body, they’re down in El Paso, at the university.”

  “Why doesn’t Mr. Begay go down there and find them for himself?”

  “He feels that this requires the skilled hand of a professional investigator.”

  “Meaning you.”

  I shrugged. “He’s easily impressed.”

  She sipped at her wine, looked at me over the rim of her mug. “I think it’s safe to say that the trail’s fairly cold at this point, Joshua.”

  “Not for a guy who can sniff out a grizzly at thirty miles.”

  Sighing, she put the cup in her lap and lightly shook her head. “Don’t start.”

  Grinning, I said, “I told him that if you agreed, we’d give it a couple of days. I could run down to El Paso, snoop around, see what the possibilities are.”

  “The possibilities are minimal.”

  “He knows that.”

  “And he’s still willing to pay?”

  “Well,” I said, “I did give him kind of a deal on the rate.”

  “Ah.” Smiling, she nodded. “The male-bonding discount.”

  “Take me three, four hours to drive down there. Two days, probably less, of brilliant sleuthing. Then I scoot back here and give Daniel Begay what I’ve got. Which is most likely nothing. And then he goes back and tells this woman that he’s done everything he can.”

  “Why drive down there? Why not take the plane? Never mind. I see. We’re keeping expenses down for our faithful Indian companion.”

  “Be a nice drive. I’ve never been to El Paso. And let’s face it, we don’t have anything else going right now.”

  She was looking off, into the fire. “Who do we know in El Paso?”

  “Grober.”

  She turned to me, distaste tightening her face. “I thought he was in Albuquerque.”

  “He moved.” I smiled. “He’s not so bad, Rita.”

  “He’s the most offensive man I’ve ever met.”

  “Well, that gives him a certain distinction, no?”

  She finished off the wine, leaned forward, and set the mug on the coffee table. “You could call Hector Ramirez and see if he knows anyone in the police department down there.”

  “I already did,” I told her. “He gave me a name. A Sergeant Mendez.”

  She smiled. “All right, Joshua. When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow morning. After I talk to Daniel Begay.”

  Another nod. “Meantime, I’ll see if the computer can come up with anything on Lessing. Or Bedford and Randolph.”

  It was her new toy, the computer. She had it hooked into one of those databases that know more than God.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow night,” I told her.

  “Do that,” she said.

  Cerillos Road is Santa Fe’s commercial strip. You can find a street like it, assuming you’d want to, in every fair-sized city in the country. The big boys are all there: K-Mart, Walmart, Walgreen’s, Motel 6, McDonald’s, Burger King. And closer to town, shouldering each other along the corridor, are the small shadowy shops owned by people named Ray and Jim and Buzz that sell, or try to sell, office siding, fan belts, faucets, used waffle irons, knives, and guns. You might be in Peoria or Duluth except for the occasional gas station built of ersatz adobe. One of these even has a tower and a ladder, so you can zip up there and hide out when the Pueblo Indians revolt again. This tells you that you’re in Santa Fe.

  The Dunkin’ Donuts was on Cerillos, in toward town. I was there at seven o’clock that chilly Wednesday morning. Daniel Begay was late, which provided me plenty of time to savor the coffee, the glazed donuts, and the diesel fumes that seeped around the glass door, donated by the big rigs barreling down the road outside. Plenty of time, too, to admire the plumes of exhaust from the Ford pickups, the Chevy Blazers, the lowriders, the station wagons, the delivery vans. Everyone hustling and bustling, everyone in an enormous hurry to get somewhere where he could buy something, or sell something, or be something. If that particular universe had been created that particular morning, I wouldn’t have wanted to share any of the responsibility.

  No hustle and bustle for Daniel Begay. He showed up at twenty minutes after seven, parking his pickup next to my Subaru. His cane swinging down lightly against the asphalt, he approached the building in the same slow thoughtful way he’d circled Lake Asayi. He stood outside the door for a moment, eyeing it as though contemplating its doorness. Finally he pulled it open and stepped in. He looked unhurriedly around the room, found me, moved down the aisle to my booth, and, slowly, thoughtfully, he sat down.

  We said hello and I told him I was on my way to El Paso, and gave him Rita’s home phone number. He gave me his number in Gallup. I told him, once again, that it was unlikely I’d learn anything.

  “Sure,” he said. “I understand.” He was back in jeans again, and wearing an old coat of gray wool over his plaid wool shirt. Warming his hands against the coffee mug, he said, “And I thank you for telling the truth. Lot of people would take the money and promise me the sky.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not in the sky business.”

  He smiled his faint smile. “But I hope you find something. I got to help this woman, if I can. She comes from a good family but one with a lot of tragedy. Her grandfather, he was the head of our Tribal Council, years ago. He committed suicide. Her father died in World War Two, at Bataan. Her brother was lost in Vietnam. Missing in action. And now these dreams.” He shook his head solemnly. “They’re bad.”

  “Why’d she come to you for help?”

  “I know her from when she was a little girl.”

  I nodded. “When did she start having the dreams?”

  “About two years ago.”

  “Has there been anything in them that might be useful?”

  He looked at me, unblinking. “You believe in dreams?”

  “Some kinds.”

  Truth was, it’d been Rita’s idea to ask
the questions. Generally I don’t put much stock in dreams. Most of my own, when I can remember them, are pretty prosaic affairs: waterfalls and running faucets when the bladder’s full.

  Daniel Begay nodded. “There’s a smell in the dreams.”

  “A smell.”

  “Always, whenever she has the dreams, the same smell. The smell of flowers.”

  “Flowers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “Only that his spirit is tortured, and he wants to come home.”

  I nodded. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”

  4

  After you live for a while in Santa Fe, most other American cities seem large; maybe too large. El Paso, when I first saw it from I-10 as the road curved around the broad base of a bare brown mountain, seemed huge. It spread out for miles below the haze in a yellowish brown urban sprawl.

  The interstate started getting complex just about then, signs sprouting up, entrances and exits shooting off in every direction, overpasses and underpasses arching all around me. When I noticed a sign for UTEP, I slid the Subaru, gratefully, down that chute.

  East of the university, I found a motel on Mesa Street. I demonstrated my fiscal responsibility at the office, then drove over to my new home-away-from-home and carted my suitcase inside. The room was the same as a million others across the country: neat and clean and so bland that it slipped from memory the moment you closed your eyes. A paper strip across the toilet seat assured me that the fixture had been sanitized for my protection. The water glasses had been blitzed by the same process.

  I called up the police department and after a few minutes reached Sergeant Emiliano Mendez. Hector had spoken to him, clearing the way, and no doubt Mendez was delighted to hear from me, but he managed to contain his exuberance remarkably well. He told me, in grudging monosyllables, that all police records before 1950 had been destroyed in a fire. Learning anything about a homicide committed in 1925 was, therefore, out of the question. He suggested I try the back issues of the local newspaper, available at the public library. I thanked him. He asked me if I was carrying a weapon. I told him only the purity of my heart. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Ramirez said you were kind of a wiseass.” And then he hung up.