The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  He walked to the window, crumpled a handkerchief from his overalls pocket, chased the spider across the web with it, folded the cloth carefully around the insect, opened the window screen, and shook it out into the yard. Obviously the old man had a lot of practice capturing such insects. Leaphorn remembered once seeing McGinnis capture a wasp the same way, evicting it unharmed through the same window.

  McGinnis retrieved his drink and lowered himself, groaning, back into his chair.

  “Sonofabitch will be right back first time he sees the door open,” he said.

  “I’ve known people to just step on them,” Leaphorn said, but he remembered his mother dealing with spiders in the same way.

  “I used to do that,” McGinnis said. “Even had some bug spray. But you get older, and you look at ’em up close and you get to thinking about it. You get to thinking they got a right to live, too. They don’t kill me. I don’t kill them. You step on a beetle, it’s like a little murder.”

  “How about eating sheep?” Leaphorn asked.

  McGinnis was rocking again, ignoring him. “Very small murders, I guess you’d have to say. But one thing leads to another.”

  Leaphorn sipped his Pepsi.

  “Sheep? I quit eating meat a while back,” McGinnis said. “But you didn’t drive all the way in here to talk about my diet. You want to talk about that Health Department girl that run off with their truck.”

  “You hear anything about that?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Woman named Cathy something or other, wasn’t it?” McGinnis said. “The Fleacatcher, the folks out here call her, because she collects the damned things. She was in here a time or two, asking questions. Wanted to get some gas once. Bought some soda pop, some crackers. Can of Spam, too. And it wasn’t a truck, either, now I think of it. It was a Jeep. A black one.”

  “About that black Jeep. The family’s offering a thousand-dollar reward to anybody who finds it.”

  McGinnis took another sip, savored it, stared out the window.

  “That don’t sound like they think she eloped.”

  “They don’t,” Leaphorn said. “They think somebody killed her. What sort of questions was she asking when she was in here?”

  “About sick folks. Where they might have got the fleas on ’em to get the plague. Did they have sheepdogs? Anybody notice prairie dogs dying? Or dead squirrels? Dead kangaroo rats?” McGinnis shrugged. “Strictly business, she was. Seemed like a mighty tough lady. No time for kidding around. Hard as nails. And I noticed when she was walking around, she was looking at the floor all the time. Looking for rat droppings. And that pissed me off some. And I said, ‘Missy, what are you looking for back there behind the counter? You lose something?’ And she said, ‘I’m looking for mice manure.” McGinnis produced a rusty laugh and slapped the arm of his rocker. “Came right out with it without a blink and kept right on looking. Quite a lady she is.”

  “You heard anything about what might have happened to her?”

  McGinnis laughed, took another sip of his bourbon. “Sure,” he said. “It gives folks something to talk about. Heard all kinds of things. Heard she might have run off with Krause—that fellow she works with.” McGinnis chuckled. “That’d be like Golda Meir running off with Yasser Arafat. Heard she might have run off with another young man who was out here with her a time or two. Some sort of student scientist, I think he was. He seemed kind of strange to me.”

  “Sounds like you don’t think she and her boss got along.”

  “They was in here just twice that I remember,” McGinnis said. “First time they never said a word to each other. I guess that’s all right if you’re stuck in the same truck all day. Second time it was snarling and snapping. Hostile-like.”

  “I’d heard she didn’t like him,” Leaphorn said.

  “It was mutual. He was paying for some stuff he got, and she walked past him out the door and he said ‘Bitch.’”

  “Loud enough for her to hear him?” -

  “If she was listening.”

  “You think he might have knocked her on the head and dumped her somewhere?”

  “I figure him for being hell on rodents and fleas, things like that. Not humans,” McGinnis said. He thought about that for a moment and chuckled again. “Of course, couple of my customers figure the skinwalkers got off with her.”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Not much,” McGinnis said. “Skinwalkers get a lot of blame around here. Sheepdog dies. Car breaks down. Kid gets the chicken pox. Roof leaks. Skinwalkers get the blame.”

  “I heard she had driven out toward Yells Back Butte to do some work out there,” Leaphorn said. “There always seemed to be a lot of witching talk around there.”

  “Lot of talk about that place,” McGinnis said. “Had its own legend. Old Man Tijinney was supposed to be a witch. Had a bucket of silver dollars buried somewhere. A tub full, the way some told it. When the last of that outfit died off people dug holes all around out there. Some of the city kids didn’t even respect the death hogan taboo. I heard they dug in there, too.”

  “Find anything?”

  McGinnis shook his head, sipped his drink. “You ever run into that Dr. Woody fella out there? He comes in here a time or two just about every summer. Working on some sort of a rodent research project here and there, and I think he has some sort of setup near the butte. He was in three or four weeks back to get some stuff and teffing me another skinwalker story. I think it’s a kind of hobby of his. Collects them. Thinks they’re funny.”

  “Who’s he get ’em from?” Leaphorn asked. It was a rare Navajo who’d pass along a skinwalker report to anyone he didn’t know pretty well.

  McGinnis obviously knew exactly what Leaphorn was thinking.

  “Oh, he’s been coming out here for years. Long enough to speak good Navajo. Comes and goes. Hires local folks to collect rodent information for him. Friendly guy.”

  “And he told you a fresh skinwalker story? Something that happened out near Yells Back?”

  “I don’t know how fresh it was,” McGinnis said. “He said Old Man Saltman told him about seeing a skinwalker standing by a bunch of boulders at the bottom of the butte a little bit after sundown, and then disappearing behind them, and when he came out he turned into an owl and went flopping away like he had a broken wing.”

  “Turned from what into an owl?”

  McGinnis looked surprised by the question.

  “Why, from a man. You know how it goes. Hosteen Saltman said the owl kept flopping around as if he wanted to be followed.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “And he didn’t follow, of course. That’s how the story usually goes.”

  McGinnis laughed. “I remember about the first or second time I saw you, I asked if you believed in skinwalkers, and you said you just believed in people who believed in ’em, and all the trouble that caused. Is that still the case?”

  “Pretty much,” Leaphorn said.

  “Well then, let me tell you one I’ll bet you haven’t heard before. There’s an old woman who comes in here after shearing time every spring to sell me three or four sacks of wool. Sometimes they call her Grandma Charlie, I think it is, but I believe her name is Old Lady Notah. She was in here just yesterday telling me about seeing a skinwalker.”

  McGinnis raised his glass in a toast to Leaphorn. “Now listen to this one. She said she was out looking after a bunch of goats she has over by Black Mesa—right on the edge of the Hopi Reservation—and she notices somebody down the slope messing around with something on the ground. Like hunting for something. Anyway, this fda disappears behind the jumpers for a minute or two and then emerges, and now he’s different. Now he’s bigger, and all white with a big round head, and when he turned her way, his whole face flashed.”

  “Flashed?”

  “She said like the flash thing on her daughter’s little camera.”

  “What did the man look like when he quit being a witch?”

  “She didn’t stick around to see,
” McGinnis said. “But wait a minute. You ain’t heard all of it yet. She said when this skinwalker turned around he looked like he had an elephant’s trunk coming out of his back. Now how about that?”

  “You’re right,” Leaphorn said. “That’s a new one.”

  “And come to think of it, you can add that one to your Yells Back Butte stories. That’s about where Old Lady Notah has her grazing lease.”

  “Well, now,” Leaphorn said, “I think I might want to talk to her about that. I’d like to hear some more details.”

  “Me, too,” McGinnis said, and laughed. “She said the skinwalker looked like a snowman.”

  They’d agreed to meet for breakfast, early because Janet had to drive south to Phoenix and Chee had to go about as far north to Tuba City. “Let’s make it seven on the dot, and not by Navajo time,” Janet had said.

  There he was, a little before seven, waiting for her at a table in the hotel coffee shop, thinking about the night he’d walked into her apartment in Gallup. He’d been carrying flowers, a videotape of a traditional Navajo wedding and the notion that she could explain away the way she had used him, and—

  He didn’t want to think about that. Not now and not ever. What could change that she’d gotten information from him and tipped off the law professor, the man she’d told Chee she hated?

  Before he’d finally slept, he decided he would simply ask her if they were still engaged. “Janet,” he would say. “Do you still want to marry me?” Get right to the point. But this morning, with his head still full of gloomy thoughts, he wasn’t so sure. Did he really want her to say yes? He decided she probably would. She had left her high-society inside-the-Beltway life and come back to Indian Country, which said she really loved him. But that would carry with it, in some subtle way, her understanding that he would climb the ladder of success into the social strata where she felt at home.

  There was another possibility. She had taken her first reservation job to escape her law professor lover. Did this return simply mean she wanted the man to pursue her again? Chee turned away from that thought and remembered how sweet it had been before she had betrayed him (or, as she saw it, before he had insulted her because of his unreasonable jealousy). He could land a federal job in Washington. Could he be happy there? He thought of himself as a drunk, worthless, dying of a destroyed liver. Was that what had killed Janet’s Navajo father? Had he drowned himself in whiskey to escape Janet’s ruling-caste mother?

  When he’d exhausted all the dark corners that scenario offered, he turned to an alternative. Janet had come back to him. She’d be willing to live on the Big Rez, wife of a cop, living in what her friends would rate as slum housing, where high culture was a second-run movie. In that line of thought, love overcame all. But it wouldn’t. She’d yearn for the life she’d given up. He would see it. They’d be miserable.

  Finally he thought of Janet as court-appointed defense attorney and of himself as arresting officer. But by the time she walked in, exactly on time, he was back to thinking of her as an Eastern social butterfly, and that thought gave this Flagstaff dining room a worn, grungy look that he’d never noticed before.

  He pulled back a chair for her.

  “I guess you’re used to classier places in Washington,” he said, and instantly wished he hadn’t so carelessly touched the nerve of their disagreement.

  Janet’s smile wavered. She looked at him a moment, somberly, and looked away. “I’ll bet the coffee is better here.”

  “It’s always fresh anyway,” he said. “Or almost always.”

  A teenage boy delivered two mugs and a bowl filled with single-serving-size containers labeled NON-DAIRY CREAMER.

  Janet looked over her mug at him. “Jim.”

  Chee waited. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. I guess this is a time to talk business.”

  “So we take off our friend hats, and put on adversary hats?”

  “Not really,” Janet said. “But I’d like to know if you’re absolutely certain Robert Jano killed Officer Kinsman.”

  “Sure I’m certain,” Chee said. He felt his face flushing. “You must have read the arrest report. I was there, wasn’t I? And what do you do with it if I say I’m not sure? Do you tell the jury that even the arresting officer told you that he had reasonable doubts?”

  He’d tried to keep the anger out of his voice, but Janet’s face told him he hadn’t managed it. Another raw nerve touched.

  “I’d do absolutely nothing with it,” she said. “It’s just that Jano swears he didn’t do it. I’ll be working with him. I’d like to believe him.”

  “Don’t,” Chee said. He sipped his coffee and put down the mug. It occurred to him that he hadn’t noticed how it tasted. He picked up one of the containers: “’Non-dairy creamer,’” he read. “Produced, I understand, on non-dairy farms.”

  Janet managed a smile. “You know what? Doesn’t this episode we’re having here remind you of the first time we met? Remember? In the holding room at the San Juan County Jail in Aztec. You were trying to keep me from bonding out that old man.”

  “And you were trying to keep me from talking to him.”

  “But I got him out.” Janet was grinning at him now.

  “But not until I got the information I wanted,” Chee said.

  “Okay,” Janet said, still grinning. “We’ll call that one a tie. Even though you had to cheat a little.”

  “How about our next competition,” Chee said. “Remember the old alcoholic? You thought Leaphorn and I were picking on him. Until your client pleaded guilty.”

  “That was a sad, sad case,” Janet said. She sipped her coffee. “Some things about it still bother me. Some things about this one bother me, too.”

  “Like what? Like the fact Jano is a Hopi and the Hopis are peaceful people? Nonviolent?”

  “There’s that, of course,” Janet said. “But everything he told me has a sort of logic to it and a lot of it can be checked out.”

  “Like what? What can be checked?”

  “Like, for example, he said he was going to collect an eagle his kava needed for a ceremonial. His brothers in his religious group can confirm that. That made it a religious pilgrimage, on which no evil thoughts are allowed.”

  “Such as thoughts of revenge? Such as getting even with Kinsman for the prior arrest? The kind of thoughts the D.A. will want to suggest to the jury if he’s going for malice, premeditation. The death penalty stuff”

  “Right,” she said.

  “They would confirm why he was going for the eagle, and the prosecution would concede it,” Chee said. “But how do you prove that deep down Jano didn’t want to even the score?”

  Janet shrugged.

  “J. D. Mickey will probably state that in his opening. He’ll say that Jano had gone onto the Navajo reservation to poach an eagle—a crime in itself. He’ll say that Officer Benjamin Kinsman of the Navajo Tribal Police had previously arrested him doing the same crime last year and that Jano got off on some sort of technicality. He’ll say that when he saw Kinsman was after him again, Jano was enraged. So instead of releasing the bird, getting rid of the evidence and trying to escape, he let Kinsman catch him, caught him off-guard and brained him.”

  “Is that the way Mickey is planning it?”

  “I’m just guessing,” Chee said.

  “I have no doubt at all that Mickey will go for death. It would be the first one since the 1994 Congress allowed federal death penalties and there would be a media coverage circus.” Janet doctored her coffee with the non-dairy creamer, tasted it. “Mickey for Congress,” she intoned. “Your law-and-order candidate.”

  “That’s the way I see it,” Chee said. “But the courts would have to rule that Kinsman was a federal officer.”

  “People in criminal justice say he was.”

  Chee shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Which led the U.S. Department of Justice to unplug him from the various life support machines,” Janet said. “So Benjamin Kinsman could
hurry up and be a-murder victim instead of the subject of criminal assault. Thereby simplifying the paperwork.”

  “Come on, Janet,” Chee said. “Be fair Ben was already dead. The machines were breathing for him, making his heart pump. Kinsman’s spirit had gone away.”

  Janet was sipping her coffee. “You’re right about one thing,” she said. “This is good fresh java. Not that weird perfumed stuff the yuppie bars sell for four dollars a cup.”

  “What else could be checked out?” Chee asked. “In Jano’s version.”

  Janet raised her hand. “First something else,” she said. “How about that autopsy? The law requires one in homicides, sort of, but a lot of Navajos don’t like the idea and sometimes they’re skipped. And I heard one of the docs saying something about organ donations?”

  “Kinsman was a Mormon. So were his parents. He’d had a donor card registered,” Chee said, studying her as he said it. “But you already knew that. You were changing the subject.”

  “I’m the defense attorney,” she said. “You think my client is guilty. I’ve got to be careful what I tell you.”

  Chee nodded. “But if there’s something that can be checked out that I’m missing, something that could help his case, then I ought to know about it. I’m not going to go out there and destroy the evidence. Don’t you—”

  He had started to say: “Don’t you trust me?” But she would have said she did. And then she would have returned the question, and he had no idea how he could answer it.

  She was leaning forward, elbows on table, chin resting on clasped hands, waiting for him to finish.

  “End of statement,” he said. “Sure, I think he’s guilty. I was there. Had I been a little faster, I would have stopped it.”