The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “Cowboy doesn’t think he’s guilty.”

  “Cowboy? Cowboy Dashee?”

  “Yes,” Janet said. “Your old friend, Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee. He told me Jano is his cousin. He’s known him since childhood. They were playmates. Close friends. Cowboy told me that thinking Robert Jano would kill somebody with a rock is like thinking Mother Teresa would strangle the Pope.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what he said. His exact words, in fact.”

  “How come you got in touch with Cowboy?”

  “I didn’t. He called the D.A.’s office. Asked who’d be assigned to handle Jano’s defense. They told him a new hire would be assigned to it, and he left a message for whoever that would be to give him a call. It was me, so I called him.”

  “Well, hell,” Chee said. “How come he didn’t contact me?”

  “I don’t have to explain that, do I? He was afraid you’d think he was trying—”

  “Sure,” Chee said. “Of course.”

  Janet looked sympathetic. “That makes it worse for you, doesn’t it? I know you guys go way back.”

  “Yeah, we do,” Chee said. “Cowboy’s about as good a friend as I ever had.”

  “Well, he’s a cop, too. He’ll understand.”

  “He’s also a Hopi,” Chee said. “And some wise man once told us that blood’s thicker than water.” He sighed. “What did Cowboy tell you?”

  “He said Jano had caught his eagle. He was coming home with it. He heard noises. He checked. He found the officer on the ground, head bleeding.”

  Chee shook his head. “I know. That’s the statement he gave us. When he finally decided to talk about it.”

  “It could be true.”

  “Sure,” Chee said. “It could be true. But how about the slash on his forearm, and his blood mixed with Ben’s? And no blood on the eagle? And where’s the perpetrator, if it wasn’t Jano? Ben Kinsman didn’t hit himself on the head with that rock. It wasn’t suicide.”

  “The eagle flew away,” Janet said. “And don’t be sarcastic.”

  That stopped Chee cold. He sat for a long moment, just staring at her.

  She looked puzzled. “What?”

  “He told you the eagle flew away?”

  “That’s right. When he caught it, Jano was under some brush or something,” she said. “A blind, I guess, with something on a cord for bait. He tried to grab the eagle by the legs and just got one of them, and it slashed him on the arm and he released it.”

  “Janet,” Chee said. “The eagle didn’t fly away. It was in a wire cage just about eight or ten feet from where Jano was standing over Kinsman.”

  Janet put down her coffee cup.

  Chee frowned. “He told you it got away? But he knew we had it. Why would he tell you that?”

  She shrugged. Looked down at her hands.

  “And it didn’t have any blood on its feathers. At least, I didn’t see any. I’m sure the lab would check for it.

  “If you think I’m lying, look.” He held out his hand, displaying the still healing slash on its side. “I picked up the cage to move it. That’s where its talon caught me. Ripped the skin.”

  Janet’s face was flushed. “You didn’t have to show me anything,” she said. “I didn’t think you were lying. I’ll ask Jano about it. Maybe I misunderstood. I must have.”

  Chee saw Janet was embarrassed.

  “I’ll bet I know what happened,” he said. “Jano didn’t want to talk about the eagle because it got too close to violating kiva secrecy rules. I think it would become a symbolic messenger to God, to the spirit world. Its role would be sacred. He just couldn’t talk about it, so he said he turned it loose.”

  “Maybe so,” she said.

  “I’ll bet he just wanted to divert you. To talk about something besides a touchy religious subject.”

  Janet’s expression told him she doubted that.

  “I’ll ask him about it,” Janet repeated. “I really haven’t had much chance to talk to him yet. Just a few minutes. I just got here.”

  “But he told you he didn’t kill Kinsman. Did he tell you who did?”

  “Well,” Janet said, and hesitated. “You know, Jim, I have to be careful talking about this. Let me just say that I guess whoever it was who had hit Officer Kinsman with the rock must have heard Jano coming and went away. Jano said it started raining about the time you got there. By the time you had him handcuffed in the patrol car, and called in for help, and tried to make Kinsman comfortable, any tracks would have been washed away.”

  Chee didn’t comment on that. He had to be careful, too.

  “Don’t you think so? Or did you find other tracks?”

  “You mean other than Jano’s?”

  “Of course. Did you have a chance to look for any before it started raining?”

  Chee considered the question, why she had asked it and whether she already knew the answer.

  “You want some more coffee?”

  “Okay,” Janet said.

  Chee signaled the waiter, thinking about what he was about to do. It was fair, if her effort to get him to state that he hadn’t looked for other tracks was fair.

  “Janet, Jano told you how he got those deep slashes on his forearm. Did he mention exactly when he got scratched?”

  The boy brought the coffee, refilled their cups, asked if they were ready to order breakfast.

  “Give us another minute,” Chee said.

  “When?” Janet said. “Isn’t that obvious? It would have been either while he was catching the eagle or when he was putting it in the cage. Or somewhere in between. I didn’t quiz him about it.”

  “But did he say? Specifically when?”

  “You mean in relation to what?” she asked, grinning at him. “Come on, Jim. Say it. The police lab people have told you that Jano’s blood is mixed with Kinsman’s on Kinsman’s shirt. The lab is probably doing some of their new molecular magic to tell them if Jano’s blood had been exposed to the air longer than Kinsman’s, and how much longer, and all that.”

  “Can they do that now?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t been pressing her on this, making her angry for no reason. “They probably would if they could, because the official, formal theory of the crime will be that Jano struggled with Kinsman and got his arm slashed on Kinsman’s belt buckle.”

  “Can they do it? I don’t know. Probably. But how can you get cut on a belt buckle?”

  “Kinsman liked to bend the rules when he could. Put a feather in his uniform hat, that sort of thing. He put a fancy buckle on his belt to see how long it would be before I told him to take it off. Anyway, that’s why the timing seems to be important.”

  “Well, go ahead then. Ask me. Just exactly to the minute, when did Jano get his arm slashed?”

  “Okay,” Chee said. “Exactly, precisely when?”

  “Ha!” Janet said. “You’re treading on client confidentiality.”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “You know what I mean. I see J. D. Mickey with a new hundred-dollar haircut and an Italian silk suit addressing the jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. The defendant’s blood was found mixed with the blood of the victim on Officer Kinsman’s uniform.’ And then he gets into all the blood chemistry stuff.” Janet raised her hand, dropped her voice—providing a poor imitation of Mickey’s courtroom dramatics. “’But! But! He told an officer of this court that he suffered the cut later. After he had moved Officer Kinsman.”

  “So I guess you’re not going to tell me,” Chee said.

  “Right,” Janet said. She put down her menu, studied him. Her expression was somber. “A little while ago, I might have.”

  Chee let his expression ask the question.

  “How can I trust you when you don’t trust me?”

  Chee waited.

  She shook her head. “I’m not just a shyster trying for a reputation with some sort of cheap acquittal,” she said. “I really want to know if Robert Jano is innocent. I want to know what happened.�
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  She put down her menu and stared at him, inviting a response.

  “I understand that,” Chee said.

  “I respect—” she began. Her voice tightened. She paused, looked away from him. “When I asked you about the tracks, I wasn’t trying to trick you,” she said. “I asked because I think if somebody else had been there and left any traces you would have found them. That is, if anybody in the world could have found them. And if there weren’t any, then maybe I’m wrong and maybe Robert Jano did kill your officer, and maybe I should be trying to talk him into a plea bargain. So I ask you, but you don’t trust me, so you change the subject.”

  Chee had put down his menu to listen to this. Now he picked it up, opened it. “And now, once again, I think we should change the subject. How were things in Washington?”

  “I’m really not going to have time for breakfast.” She put down her menu, said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and walked out.

  “There’s just one thing I can tell you and feel absolutely certain about it,” said Richard Krause without looking up from the box full of assorted stuff he was picking through. “Cathy Pollard didn’t just run off with our Jeep. Something happened to her. But don’t ask me what.”

  Leaphorn nodded. “That’s what my client believes,” he said. My client. It was the first time he’d used that term, and he didn’t like the sound of it. Was this what he was making of himself? A private investigator?

  Krause was probably in his late forties, Leaphorn guessed, big-boned, lean and gristly, probably an athlete in college, with a shock of blondish hair just showing signs of gray. He was sitting on a high stool behind a table in a faded green work shirt, dividing his attention between Leaphorn and stacks of transparent Ziploc bags that seemed to contain small dead insects—fleas or lice. Or maybe ticks.

  “I guess you’re working for her family,” Krause said. He opened another bag, extracted a flea, and put it on a slide, which he placed in a binocular microscope. “Do they have any theories?”

  “Ideas float around,” Leaphorn said, asking himself if the ethics of private investigators, presuming they had them, allowed one to reveal the identity of clients. He’d deal with that when circumstances required. “The obvious ones. A sex crime. A nervous breakdown. A rejected boyfriend. Things like that.”

  Krause adjusted the microscope’s focus, stared into the lenses, grunted and removed the slide. In its former existence this temporary lab had been a low-down-payment double-wide mobile home, and the heat of the summer sun radiated through its aluminum roof. The swamp-cooler fan roared away at its highest setting, mixing damp air into the dry heat. The rows of specimen jars on the shelf behind Krause were sweating. So was Krause. So was Leaphorn.

  “I really doubt there’s a boyfriend involved in this,” he said. “She didn’t seem to have one. Never talked about it anyway.” He transferred the flea into another Ziploc bag, wrote something on an adhesive tag, and stuck it in place. “Of course, there could be a jilted one floating around somewhere in the past. That wouldn’t be the sort of thing Cathy would have chatted about, even if she chatted. Which she didn’t do much.”

  The cluttered, makeshift laboratory was reminding Leaphorn of his student career at Arizona State, which in those long-ago days required a mix of natural science courses even if your major was anthropology. Then he realized it wasn’t as much what he was seeing as what he was smelling—those tissue-preserving, soap-defying chemicals that drove the scent of death deep into the pores of even the cleanest students.

  “Cathy was a very serious lady. Focused. Just talked about business,” Krause was saying. “She had a thing about bubonic plague. Thought it was downright criminal that we protect the middle-class urbanites from these communicable diseases and let the vectors do their thing out here in the boondocks where nobody gets killed except the working class. Cathy sounded like one of those old-fashioned Marxists sometimes.”

  “Tell me about the Jeep,” Leaphorn said.

  Krause stopped what he’d been doing, stared at Leaphorn, frowning. “The Jeep? What’s to tell?”

  “If there’s foul play involved in this, the truck will probably be how the case gets broken.”

  Krause shook his head. Laughed. “It was just a black Jeep. They all look alike.”

  “It’s harder to dispose of a vehicle,” Leaphorn said.

  “Than a body?” Krause said. “Sure. I see what you mean. Well, actually it was a pretty fancy model. We heard it was one of those seized by the DEA guys in a drug bust and turned over to the Health Department. Had a white pinstripe. Very hi-fl radio with special speakers. Telephone installed. The cowboy model. No top. Roll bars. Winch on the front. Tow-chain hooks and a trailer hitch on the back. I think it was three years old, but you know they don’t change those models much. I drove it myself some until Cathy got it away from me.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “What Cathy wanted, Cathy got.” He shrugged. “Actually, she had a good argument for it. Spent more time out in the bad country while I was doing the paperwork in here.”

  “I’m trying to get the word around that there’s a reward out for whoever finds that vehicle. A thousand dollars.”

  Krause raised his eyebrows. “The family sounds serious then,” he said, grinning. “What if she just drives in here and parks it? Can I call in and collect?”

  “Probably not,” Leaphorn said. “But I’d appreciate the call.”

  “I’ll be happy to let you know.”

  “How about a man named Victor Hammar?” Leaphorn asked. “I’m told they knew each other. You wouldn’t put him in the boyfriend category?”

  Krause looked surprised. “Hammar? I don’t think so.” He shook his head, grinning.

  “One of the theories has it that Hammar was in love with her. The way it’s told, she didn’t share the sentiment, but she couldn’t get rid of him.”

  “Naw,” Krause said. “I don’t think so. Matter of fact, she invited him out here a while back. He’s working on his doctorate in vertebrate biology. He’s interested in what we’re doing.”

  “Just in what you’re doing? Not in the woman who’s doing it?”

  “Oh, they’re friends,” Krause said. “And he probably feels those glandular urges. Young male, you know. And he likes her, but I think that was because she sort of gave him a little mothering when he was new in the country. He has a sort of funny accent. No friends in the department, I’ll bet. From what I’ve seen of him, probably not many friends anywhere else either. So along comes Cathy. She’s like a lot of these kids who grow up rich. They like doing good for the working-class losers. So she helped him along. Makes ’em feel less guilty about being part of the parasitic privileged class.”

  “When you think about it, though,” Leaphorn said, “what you described is sort of typical of these stalker homicides. You know, the kindhearted girl takes pity on the poor nerd and he thinks it’s love.”

  “I guess you could ask him. He’s out here again and said he was coming in to get copies of some of our mortality statistics.”

  “Mortality?”

  “In fact, he’s late,” Krause said, looking at his watch. “Yeah, mortality. Die-offs among mammal communities in plague outbreaks, rabbit fever, hantavirus, that sort of thing. How many kangaroo rats survive compared with ground squirrels, pack rats, prairie dogs, so forth. But my point is, it’s the data that brings him out, not Cathy. Take today, for example. He knows Cathy’s not here, but he’s coming anyway.”

  “He knew she was missing?”

  “He called a couple of days after she didn’t show up. Wanted to talk to her.”

  Leaphorn considered this.

  “How well do you remember that conversation?”

  Krause looked surprised, frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “You know: ‘he said,’ and ‘I said,’ and ‘he said.’ That sort of thing. How did he react?”

  Krause laughed. “You’re hard to convince, aren’t you?”

/>   “Just curious.”

  “Well, first he asked whether we’d wrapped up the work on the plague cases. I said no, we still didn’t know where the last one got it. I told him Cathy was still working on that one. Then he asked if we’d found any live kangaroo rats up around the Disbah place. That’s one of the places where a hantavirus case had turned up. I told him we hadn’t.”

  Krause tore off a sheet from a roll of paper towels and swabbed the sheen of perspiration from his forehead. “Let’s see now. Then he said he had some time and thought he’d come out and maybe go along with Cathy if she was still chasing down prairie dogs and plague fleas. He wanted to ask her if she’d mind. I said she wasn’t here. He said when’ll she be back. So I told him about her not coming to work. Couple of days I guess it was by then.”

  Leaphorn waited. Krause shook his head. Went back to sorting through his bags. Now the chemical smell reminded Leaphorn of the Indian Health Service Hospital at Gallup, of the gurney rolling down the hallway carrying Emma away from him. Of the doctor explaining— He drew a deep breath, wanting to finish this. Wanting out of this laboratory.

  “She didn’t tell you she was taking off?”

  “Just left a note. Said she was going back up to Yells Back to collect some fleas.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Krause shook his head.

  “Could I see the note?”

  “If I can find it. It probably went in the wastebasket but I’ll look for it.”

  “How did Hammar react to what you told him?”

  “I don’t know. I think he said something like, whaddaya mean? Where did she go? What did she tell you? Where’d she leave the truck? That sort of thing. Then he seemed worried. What did the police say? Was anybody looking for her? So forth.”

  Leaphorn considered. That response seemed normal. Or well rehearsed.

  There was the sound of tires crunching over gravel, a car door slamming.

  “That’s probably Hammar,” Krause said. “Ask him yourself.”

  About a month into his first semester at Arizona State, Leaphorn had overcome the tendency of young Navajos to think that all white people look alike. But the fact was that Victor Ha-mar looked a lot like a bigger, less sun-baked weightlifter version of Richard Krause. At second glance Leaphorn noticed Hammar was also several years younger, his eyes a paler shade of blue, his ears a bit flatter to his skull, and—since cops are conditioned to look for “identifying marks”—a tiny scar beside his chin had defied sunburning and remained white.