The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “Looks like nothing much here,” Bernie said, “unless we find something in the litter bag.”

  Chee wasn’t ready to concede that. Leaphorn had once told him that you’re more likely to find something if you’re not looking for anything in particular. “Just keep an open mind and see what you see,” Leaphorn liked to say. Now Chee saw a dark stain on the leather upholstery on the Jeep’s passenger seat.

  He pointed at it.

  “Oh,” Bernie said, and made a wry face.

  The stain, streaked downward, almost black.

  “I’d guess dried blood,” Chee said. “Let’s get the crime scene people out here.”

  “Did you notice his face when he said that?” Leaphorn asked. “Said ‘Mr. Nez is dead. Charley is still alive.’ The damn prairie dog is still alive. Like it was the best news possible.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you really angry before,” Louisa said.

  “I try not to let things get to me,” Leaphorn said. “You really can’t if you’re a cop. But that was a little too damn coldhearted for me.”

  “I’ve seen a few of the real superbrains act like that before,” she said. “He was making a point, of course. The dog’s immune system had modified to deal with the new bacteria forms, and nothing mattered except the research. No such luck with Nez. So now he thinks he’ll have a whole prairie dog colony full of test subjects. So it’s Nez died but the rodent lived. Hip, hip, hooray. And aren’t you driving too fast for this road?”

  Leaphorn slowed a little, enough so the following breeze engulfed them in dust but not enough to stop the jolting the car was taking. “Weren’t you going to have dinner with Mr. Peshlakai and set up interviews with some students? I don’t want you to miss that and we’re running late.”

  “Mr. Peshlakai and I always operate on Navajo time,” she said. “No such thing as late. We meet when I get there and he gets there. What’s got you in such a rush?”

  “I’m going on back down to Flag,” Leaphorn said. “I want to go to the hospital and talk to the people there and try to find out what Pollard learned that made her so angry.”

  “You mean that ‘Somebody is lying’ note in her journal?”

  “Yeah. That seemed to explain why she was going back up to Yells Back Butte. To find out for herself.”

  “Lying about what?” Louisa said, mostly to herself.

  “I’d guess she meant about where Nez picked up his lethal flea. That was her job, and from what I’ve heard, she took it very seriously.” He shook his head. “But who knows? I don’t. This is getting hard to calculate.”

  Louisa nodded.

  “Find out for herself?” Leaphorn repeated. “And how does she do that? We know she drove up to Yells Back bright and early either to talk to Woody about where he had Nez working on the day the flea got onto him. Or maybe to collect some rodents or fleas from around there for herself. But she didn’t go talk to Woody. Or so he tells us. And if she collected fleas she sure must have done it fast, because she drove right out again.”

  “Any idea now where she drove?”

  “Well, she didn’t go back to her motel room to pack up for a trip. Her stuff was still there. And none of the people there had seen her.”

  “Which doesn’t sound good.”

  “We’ve got to find that Jeep,” Leaphorn said. “And meanwhile I’ll try to find out who she talked to at the hospital. It could be helpful.”

  They jolted off the gravel onto Navajo Route 3 and skirted past Moenkopi to U.S. Highway 160 and Tuba City.

  “Where do I drop you?”

  “At the filling station right here,” Louisa said, “but just long enough to use the telephone. I’m going to call Peshlakai and cancel. Tell him I’ll get with him later.”

  Leaphorn stared at her.

  “This is getting too interesting,” she said. “I don’t want to quit now.”

  It was after nine when they got back to Flag. They stopped for a fast snack at Bob’s Burgers and decided to check at the hospital on the chance a doctor who knew something about the Nez case might be working the night shift.

  The doctor proved to be a young woman who had completed intern training at Toledo in March and was doing her residency duties at the Flagstaff hospital in a deal with the Indian Health Service—paying off her federal medical school loan.

  “I don’t think I ever saw Mr. Nez,” she said. “Dr. Howe probably handled him in the Intensive Care Unit. Or maybe the nurse on that floor would know something helpful. Tonight it would be Shirley Ahkeah.”

  Shirley Ahkeah remembered Mr. Nez very well. She also remember Dr. Woody. Even better, she remembered Catherine Pollard.

  “Poor Mr. Nez,” she said. “Except for Dr. Howe, it didn’t seem like the others cared about him after he was dead.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Leaphorn said.

  “Forget it,” she said. “It wasn’t fair to say it. After all, it was Dr. Woody who checked him in. And Miss Pollard was just doing her job—trying to find out where he picked up the infected flea. Did she ever find out?”

  “We don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “The morning after she left here she left a note for her boss. It just said that she was driving up to where Dr. Woody had his mobile laboratory and checking for plague carriers around there. Dr. Woody tells us she never arrived at his lab. She didn’t go back to her office or to the motel where she was staying. Nobody has seen her since.”

  Shirley’s face registered a mixture of shock and surprise.

  “You mean—has something happened to her?”

  “We don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Her office reported her disappearance to the police. And the vehicle she was driving is missing, too.”

  “You think I was the last one to talk to her? Nobody has seen her since she left here?”

  “We don’t know. No one that we can locate. Did she say anything to you about where she was going? Anything that would give us a hint of what was going on with her?”

  Shirley shook her head. “Nothing that you don’t already know. All she talked about here was Mr. Nez. She wanted to know how he’d been infected. Where and when.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Dr. Delano told her we didn’t know for sure. That Nez had a high fever and fully developed plague symptoms—the black splotches under the skin where the capillaries have failed, and the swollen glands—he already had all that when we got him up here in Intensive Care, and they brought him right up. She asked Delano a lot of questions, and he told her that Dr. Woody had said that Nez had been bitten by the flea the evening before he brought him in. And she said that wasn’t what Dr. Woody had told her, and Delano—”

  “Wait a second,” Louisa said. “She had already talked to Woody about Nez?”

  Shirley chuckled. “Apparently. She said something about a lying sonofabitch. And Delano, he’s sort of touchy and he seemed to think that Miss Pollard was accusing him of lying. So then she said something to make it clear she had meant Woody. And Delano said he wasn’t certifying what Woody had told him, because he didn’t think it was true either. He said Nez couldn’t possibly have developed a fever that high and the other plague symptoms so quickly.”

  Shirley shrugged. End of explanation.

  Leaphorn frowned, digesting this. He said: “Do you think Dr. Delano could have misunderstood him? About when Nez was infected?”

  “I don’t see how,” Shirley said. She pointed. “They were standing right there and I heard it all myself. Delano had told Woody that Nez had died sometime after midnight. And Woody said he wanted to know just exactly when Nez died. Exactly. He said the flea had bitten Nez on the inside of his thigh the evening before he brought him in. Woody was very emphatic about the time. He told Delano he’d left a list of symptoms and so forth that he wanted timed and charted as the disease developed. He wanted an autopsy scheduled and he wanted to be there when it was done.”

  “Was it done?”

  “So I hear,” Shirle
y said. “Nurses aren’t included in the circuit of information at that level, but the word gets around.”

  Louisa chuckled at that. “Hospitals and universities. About the same story.”

  “What did you hear?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Mostly that Woody had more or less tried to take over the procedure, and the pathologist was sore as hell. Otherwise, I guess it was just a finding of another death from bubonic plague. And Woody had a lot of tissue and some of the organs preserved.”

  Neither Leaphorn nor Louisa had much to say on their way back to his truck. Settled in their seats, Louisa said they were probably lucky Delano hadn’t been there. “He might have known a little more, but he probably wouldn’t have told us much. Professional dignity involved, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said, and started the engine.

  “You’re not very talkative,” Louisa said. “Did that answer any questions for you?”

  “Well, now we know for sure who Miss Pollard thought had been lying to her,” Leaphorn said. “And of course that raises the next question.”

  “Which is why would Woody lie to her? And for that matter, he must have lied to us, too.”

  “Exactly,” Leaphorn said.

  “We should go up there again and confront him with it. See what he says.”

  “Not yet,” Leaphorn said. “I think he’d just insist he wasn’t lying. He’d come up with some sort of explanation. Or he’d tell me to bug off. Quit wasting his time.”

  “I guess he could, couldn’t he.”

  “We’re just two nosy civilians,” Leaphorn said, wondering if that sounded as sad as it felt.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to call Chee in the morning. See if anything new has turned up on Pollard or her Jeep. And then I’ll return Mrs. Vanders’s call and tell her what little we know. And then I want to go see Krause.”

  “And see if he knows more than he’s told you?”

  “I didn’t know what questions to ask,” Leaphorn said. “And I’d like to get a look at that note Pollard left for him.”

  Louisa’s expression asked him why.

  Leaphorn laughed. “Because I spent too many years being a cop, and I can’t get over it. I ask him to see the note, so what happens? Possibility A. He finds a reason not to show it to me. That makes me wonder why not.”

  “Oh,” Louisa said. “You think he might, ah, be involved?”

  “I don’t think that now, but I might if he refused to let me see the note. But on to possibility B. He shows me the note. The handwriting obviously doesn’t match her script in the journal. That raises all sorts of possibilities. Or C. He hands me the note, and it has information on it that he didn’t think was important enough to mention. Possibility C is the best bet. Even that’s unlikely, but it doesn’t cost anything to try.”

  “Are you going to invite me along again?”

  “I’m counting on it, Louisa. Instead of the job just being a grind, you make it fun.”

  She sighed. “I can’t go tomorrow. I’m chairing a committee meeting, and it’s my project and my committee.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Leaphorn said. And he knew he would.

  Chee had stared at the telephone with distaste, dreading this call. Then he picked it up, took a deep breath and dialed Janet Pete’s office at the federal building in Phoenix. Ms. Pete was not in. Did he want her voice mail? He didn’t. Where could he reach her? Was this matter urgent?

  “Yes,” Chee said. Janet might not agree, but it was urgent for him. He couldn’t focus on anything else until the genie that Cowboy’s “Pollard did it” theory had released was securely back in the bottle. Chee’s “yes” earned him a number in Flagstaff which proved to be the telephone on a desk in a multiple-users’ office assigned to public defenders in the courthouse at Flagstaff.

  The very familiar voice of many happy memories said: “Hello, Janet Pete.”

  “Jim Chee,” he said. “Do you have some time to talk, or should I call you back?”

  Brief silence. “I have time.” The voice was even softer now, or was it his imagination? “Is this about business?”

  “Alas, it’s business,” Chee said. “I’ve heard Cowboy Dashee’s theory of what happened to Kinsman and we’ve been checking on it. I need to talk to your client. Is he still being held there at Flag? And would you be willing to get me in to talk to him?”

  “Yes, on the first one,” Janet said. “He’s still there because I couldn’t get bail for him. Mickey opposed it and I think that’s stupid. Where could Jano hide?”

  “It is stupid,” Chee agreed. “But Mickey wants to go for the death penalty, I guess. If he didn’t fight bond, even for a Hopi who sure as hell isn’t going to run, then you could use it to prove even the U.S. attorney didn’t really believe Jano is dangerous.”

  Even as he was finishing the sentence, Chee was wondering why he always seemed to begin conversations with Janet like this—as if he were trying to start a fight. The silence at the other end of the line suggested she was having the same thought.

  “What do you want to talk to Mr. Jano about?”

  “I understand he saw the Jeep Ms. Pollard was driving.”

  “He saw a Jeep. Have you picked her up yet?”

  More adversarial than “Have you found her?” Chee closed his eyes, remembering how it had been once.

  “We haven’t located her,” he said.

  “It may not be easy,” Janet said. “She’s had a long time to hide, and I understand she has plenty of money to make that easy.”

  “We didn’t make the connection until—” He stopped. He wasn’t going to apologize. None was needed. Janet had worked as a defense attorney long enough to know how the police operated. How they couldn’t possibly investigate every time someone drove off without telling anyone where they were going. Why explain what she already knew?

  “Look, Jim,” she said. “I’m the man’s defense attorney. Unless you can let me see how he—how justice would benefit by letting you cross-examine him, then I can’t do it. Tell me what good it would do him.”

  Chee sighed. “We found the Jeep,” he said. “The passenger-side seat was smeared with dried blood. There’s evidence it was abandoned within an hour or so after Jano—after Kinsman was hit on the head.”

  Silence. Then Janet said: “Blood. Whose was it? But you haven’t had time for any lab work yet, I guess. Is Jano a suspect in this, too?”

  “I don’t see how he could be. I know exactly where he was when the Jeep was being abandoned.”

  “Where was it?”

  “About twenty miles southwest. Down an arroyo.”

  “You think Jano might have seen something, or heard something, that would help you find Catherine Pollard?”

  “I think he might have. Slim chance, but we don’t have anything else to go on. Not now, anyway. Maybe we will when the crime scene crew and the lab people finish with the Jeep.”

  “Okay then,” Janet said. “You know the rules. I’m there, and if I cut off the questions, that ends it. You want to do it today?”

  “Fair enough,” Chee said. “And the sooner the better. I’ll leave Tuba City as soon as I hang up.”

  “I’ll meet you at the jail,” she said. “And, Jim, let’s try not to make each other mad all the time.” She didn’t wait for a response.

  Janet was waiting in the interrogation room—a small dingy space with two barred windows looking out at nothing. She was sitting across a battered wooden table from Robert Jano. She talked quietly. Jano listened intently. Glanced up as Chee appeared in the doorway. Examined Chee with mild, polite curiosity. Chee nodded to him, suddenly aware that when he had caught Jano with his hands still red with Kinsman’s blood he hadn’t—in his shock and rage—really studied the man. He studied him now. This handsome, polite young killer whom Chee was trying to give a place in history. The first man strapped into a gas chamber under the new federal reservation death sentence law.

  Chee no
dded to Janet, said: “Thanks.”

  “You two have met,” Janet said, with no sign that she appreciated the irony of that. They nodded. Jano smiled, then seemed embarrassed that he had.

  “Have a seat,” Janet said, “and I’ll go over the rules. Mr. Chee here will ask a question. And, Robert, you won’t answer it until I say it’s okay. All right?”

  Jano nodded. Chee looked at Janet, who returned the look with no trace of warmth. She’d learned a lot, he thought, since he’d first met her in the interrogation room at the San Juan County Jail in Aztec. Many happy times ago.

  “Okay,” Chee said. He looked at Jano. “That morning I arrested you, did you see a young woman anywhere around there?”

  “I saw—” he began, but Janet interrupted.

  “Just a moment,” she said, and took a tape recorder from her purse, put it on the table, set up a microphone and switched it on. “Okay,” she said.

  “I saw a black Jeep,” Jano said. “I didn’t see who was driving it.”

  “When did you see it, and where were you?”

  Jano looked at Janet. She nodded. “I had climbed the butte and was walking along the rim to where I have a blind for catching eagles. I looked down and saw a black Jeep parked on that rise near the abandoned hogan.”

  “No one was in it?” Jano glanced at Janet. She nodded. “No.”

  “Did you see Officer Kinsman’s car driving in?”

  Jano glanced at Janet.

  “What’s the purpose of that question?”

  “I want to find out if the Jeep was still there when Kinsman arrived.”

  Janet thought about it. “Okay.”

  “I saw him coming in, yes. And the Jeep was still there.”

  Chee looked at Janet. “So,” he said, “if Pollard was the Jeep driver, she was in the vicinity when Kinsman was killed.”

  “Injured,” Janet said. “But yes, she was.”

  “I intend to ask your client to just re-create what he saw and heard and did that morning,” Chee said.

  She thought. “Go ahead. We’ll see.”

  Jano said he arrived about dawn, parked his pickup, unloaded his eagle cage with the rabbit in it that he’d brought along as bait and climbed the saddle to the rim of the butte. He heard an engine sound, watched and saw the Jeep arriving, but he couldn’t see who got out of it because of where it had been parked. He had settled himself into the blind and put the rabbit, secured with a cord on the brush, on top of it. Then he had waited about an hour. The eagle came circling over, in its hunting pattern. It saw the rabbit, dived, and caught it. He had caught the eagle by one leg and its tail. It had slashed his forearm with its other talon. “Then I turned the eagle loose and—”