The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “Who?”

  “Kennedy called me from Albuquerque. Remember him? We worked with him a time or two, and then the Bureau transferred him. He was asking me about a thing we were looking into just before I retired. He’s retiring himself at the end of the year and he wanted to know how I liked being a civilian. Asked about you, too. And he said you had made yourself some enemies. So I asked him how you managed that.”

  “And he said I’d taped a telephone call without permission,” Chee said. “Thereby violating a federal statute.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Did he have it right?”

  Chee nodded.

  “It’s nice you don’t want that promotion then,” Leaphorn said. “Had you decided that before or after you turned on the tape recorder?”

  Chee thought for a moment. “Before, I guess. But I didn’t really realize it.”

  They turned up the track toward Yells Back Butte, circled around a barrier of tumbled boulders and found themselves engulfed in goats. And not just the goats. There, beside the track was an aged woman on a large roan horse watching them.

  “Lucked out,” Leaphorn said. He climbed out of the patrol car, said “Ya’eeh te’h” to Old Lady Notah and introduced himself, reciting his membership in his born to and born for clans. Then he introduced Jim Chee, by maternal and paternal clans and as a member of the Navajo Tribal Police at Tuba City. The horse stared at Chee suspiciously, the goats milled around, and Mrs. Notah returned the courtesy.

  “It is a long way to Tuba City,” Mrs. Notah said. “And I have seen you here before. I think it must be because the other policeman was killed here. Or because the Hopi came to steal our eagles.”

  “It is even more than that, mother,” Leaphorn said. “A woman who worked with the health department came here the day the policeman was killed. No one has seen her since. Her family asked me to look for her.”

  Mrs. Notah waited a bit to see if Leaphorn had more to say. Then she said: “I don’t know where she is.”

  Leaphorn nodded. “They say you saw a skinwalker somewhere near here. Was that the day the policeman was killed?”

  She nodded. “Yes. It was that day it rained. Now I think it might have been somebody who helps the man who works in that big motor home.”

  Chee sucked in his breath.

  Leaphorn said: “Why do you think that?”

  “After that day I saw that man come out of his place carrying a white suit . He walked way up the slope with it, and through the junipers, and then he put it on and put a white hood over his head.” She laughed. “I think it is something to keep the sickness off of them. I saw something like that on television.”

  “I think that’s right,” Leaphorn said. And then he asked Mrs. Notah to try to tell them everything she had seen or heard around Yells Back Butte that morning. She did, and it took quit e a while.

  She had risen before dawn, lit her propane burner, warmed her coffee and ate some fry bread. Then she saddled her horse and rode there. While she was rounding up the goats, she heard a truck coming up the track toward the butte. About sunup, she had seen a man climb up the saddle and disappear over the rim onto the top of the butte.

  “I thought it must be one of the Hopi eagle-catchers come to get one. They used to come out here a lot before the government changed the boundary, and I had seen this same man the afternoon before. Just looking around,” she said. “That’s the way they used to work. Then they would come back before daylight the next morning and go up and catch one.”

  Chee asked: “Did you tell anyone about this?”

  “I was down by the road when a police car came by. I told him I thought the Hopis were going to steal an eagle again.”

  Chee nodded. Mrs. Notah had been Kinsman’s confidential source.

  Next in Mrs. Notah’s narration was the arrival of the black Jeep.

  “It was going too fast for those rocks,” Mrs. Notah said. “I thought it would be the young woman with the short hair, but I couldn’t see who it was.”

  “Why the woman with the short hair?” Leaphorn asked.

  “I have seen her driving that car before. She drives too fast.” Mrs. Notah emphasized her disapproval with a negative shake of her head. “Then I had to go get that goat there.” She pointed at a black and white male that had wandered far down the track. “Maybe a half-hour later, when I moved the goats back up near the butte, I saw somebody moving behind the trees, and then I saw the thing in the white suit.”

  She paused, rewarded them with a wry smile. “I went away for a while then, and on the way back to the goats, I heard a car coming, very, very slowly, up the trail. It was a police car, and I thought, That policeman knows how to drive over rocks. When I came back to the goats, I saw the man who works in that motor home was over at the old Tijinney hogan. He was right in there, and I thought bilagaana don’t know about death hogans, or maybe that’s the skinwalker. A witch, well, he don’t care about chindis.”

  “What was he doing?” Leaphorn asked.

  “I couldn’t see much over the wall from where I was,” she said. “But when he came out, I could see he was carrying a shovel.”

  Chee parked his patrol car on the hump overlooking the Tijinney place. They walked down together, Chee carrying the shovel from the trunk of his car, and stood looking over the tumbled stone. The hard-packed earthen floor was littered with pieces of the fallen roof, blown-in tumbleweeds, and the debris vandals had left. It was flat and smooth except for a half dozen holes and the filled-in excavation where the fire pit had been.

  “That’s where it would be,” Chee said, pointing.

  Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve been doing nothing for about a week but sitting in a car seat. Give me the shovel. I need a little exercise.”

  “Well, now,” Chee said, but he surrendered the shovel. For a Navajo as traditional as Chee, digging for a corpse in a death hogan wasn’t a task done lightly. It would require at least a sweat bath and, more properly, a curing ceremony, to restore the violator of such taboos to hozho.

  “Easy digging,” Leaphorn said, tossing aside his sixth spadeful. A few moments later he stopped, put aside the shovel, squatted beside the hole. He dug with his hands.

  He turned and looked at Chee. “I guess we have found Catherine Pollard,” he said. He pulled out a forearm clad in the whit e plastic of her PAPR suit and brushed away the earth. “She’s still wearing her double set of protective gloves.”

  Dr. Woody opened his door at the second knock. He said: “Good morning, gentlemen,” leaned against the doorway and motioned them in. He was wearing walking shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. It seemed to Leaphorn that the odd pink skin color he’d noticed when he’d first met the man was a tone redder. “I think this is what they call serendipity, or a fortunate accident. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “And why is that?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Have a seat first,” Woody said. He swayed, supported himself with a hand against the wall, then pointed Leaphorn to the chair and Chee to a narrow bed, now folded out of the wall. He seated himself on the stool beside the lab working area. “Now,” he said, “I’m glad to see you because I need a ride. I need to get to Tuba City and make some telephone calls. Normally, I would drive this thing. But it’s hard to drive. I’m feeling pretty bad. Dizzy. Last time I took my temp it was almost one hundred and four. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it out.”

  “We’ll be glad to take you,” Chee said. “But first we need to get answers to some questions.”

  “Sure,” Woody said. “But later. After we get going. And one of you will have to stay here and take care of things.” He leaned forward over the table and ran his hand over his face. Leaphorn now noticed a dark discoloration under his arm, spreading down the rib cage under the undershirt.

  “Hell of a bruise there on your side,” Leaphorn said. “We should get you to a hospital.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not a bruise. It’s the capillaries breaking down under the skin. Releases the blo
od into the tissue. We’ll go to the Medical Center at Flagstaff. But first I have to do some telephoning. And someone should stay here. Look after things. The animals in the cages. The files.”

  “We found the body of Catherine Pollard buried out there,” Chee said, “Do you know anything about that?”

  “I buried her,” Woody said. “But, damnit, we don’t have time to talk about that now. I can tell you about it while we’re driving to Tuba City. But I’ve got to get there before I’m too sick to talk, and these cell phones won’t work out here.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “Sure,” Woody said. “You want to know why?”

  “I think I could guess,” Chee said.

  “Silly woman didn’t give me a choice. I told her she couldn’t exterminate that dog colony and I told her why. They might hold the key to saving millions of lives.” Woody laughed. “She said I’d lied to her once and that was all she allowed.”

  “Lied,” Chee said. “You told her the rodents weren’t infected. Was that it?”

  Woody nodded. “She put on her protective suit and was getting ready to pump cyanide dust into the burrow when I stopped her. And then the cop saw me burying her.”

  “You killed him, too?” Chee said.

  Woody nodded. “Same problem. Exactly the same. I can’t let anything interfere with this,” he said, gesturing around the lab. Then he produced a weak chuckle, shook his head. “But something is. It’s the disease itself. Isn’t that ironic? This new, improved, drug-resistant version of Yersinia pestis is making me another lab specimen.”

  He was reaching into a drawer as he said that. When his hand came out it held a long-barreled pistol. Probably .22 caliber, Chee guessed. The right size for shooting rodents, but not something anyone wanted to be shot with.

  “I just don’t have time for this,” Woody said. “You stay here,” he said to Leaphorn. “Look after things. I’ll ride with Lieutenant Chee. We’ll send somebody back to take over when I get to the telephone.”

  Chee looked at the pistol, then at Woody. His own revolver was in the holster on his hip. But he wasn’t going to need it .

  “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” Chee said. “We’re going to take Mr. Leaphorn with us. As soon as we get out of this radio blind spot, we’ll call an ambulance to meet us. I’ll send out a patrolman to take care of this place. We’ll turn on the siren and get to Tuba City fast.”

  Chee stood and took a step toward the door and opened it. “Come on,” he said to Woody. “You’re looking sicker and sicker.”

  “I want him to stay,” Woody said, and waved the pistol toward Leaphorn. Chee reached and grabbed the gun out of Woody’s hand and handed it to Leaphorn. “Come on,” he said. “Hurry.”

  Woody was in no condition to hurry. Chee had to half-carry him to the patrol car.

  They raised the dispatcher just as they bounced away from the radio shadow of Yells Back Butte. Chee told him to send an ambulance down the road to Goldtooth and an officer to guard Woody’s mobile lab at the butte. Leaphorn sat in the back with Woody, and Woody talked.

  He’d found two fleas in his groin area when he awakened the day before and immediately redosed himself with an antibiotic, hoping the fleas, if infected at all, were carrying the unmutated bacteria. By this morning a fever had developed. He knew then that he had the form that resisted medication and had killed Nez so quickly. He had hurriedly compiled his most recent notes in readable form, put away breakable items, stored the blood samples he’d been working on in the refrigerator for preservation and started the engine. But by then he felt so dizzy that he knew he couldn’t drive the big vehicle out. So he’d begun a note explaining where he stood in the project, to be passed along to an associate at the Center for Control of Infectious Diseases.

  “It’s there in the folder on the desk with his name on it—a microbiologist named Roy Bobbin Hovey. But I forgot to mention that he’ll want an autopsy. The name and number are in my wallet in case I’m out of it before we get to a telephone. Tell him to do the autopsy. He’ll know what organs to check.”

  “Your organs?” Leaphorn asked.

  Woody’s chin had dropped down to his breastbone. “Of course,” he mumbled. “Who else?”

  Chee was driving far too fast for the washboard road and watching in the rearview mirror.

  “How were you able to hit Officer Kinsman on the head?” he asked. “Why didn’t he cuff you?”

  “He was careless,” Woody said. “I said, Aren’t you going to put those handcuffs on me, and when he twisted around to reach for them, that’s when I hit him.”

  “Then when we left with Kinsman, you drove the Jeep out and abandoned it and poured the blood on the seat so it would look like a murder-kidnapping? Right? And took your bicycle along so you could ride it back from there? Is that right?”

  But by then, Dr. Woody had drifted off into unconsciousness. Or perhaps he didn’t think the answer mattered.

  They met the ambulance about ten miles from Moenkopi, warned the attendants that Woody was probably in the final stages of bubonic plague and sent it racing off toward the Northern Arizona Medical Center. At his station, Chee fished out the note from Woody’s wallet, left Leaphorn talking with Claire, and disappeared into his office to make the telephone call.

  He emerged looking angry, flopped into a chair across from Leaphorn, wiped his forehead, and said: “Whew, what a day.”

  “Did you get the man?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Yeah. Dr. Hovey said he’ll fly out to Flagstaff today.”

  “Quite a shock, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “Learning your associate is a double murderer.”

  “That didn’t seem to bother him. He asked about Woody’s condition, and his notes, and who was looking after his papers, and where he could pick them up, and were they being cared for, and how about the animals he was working with, and was the prairie dog colony safe.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  “Pissed me off, to tell the truth,” Chee said. “I said I hoped we could keep the sonofabitch alive until we can try him for killing two people. And that irritated him. He sort of snorted and said: ‘Two people. We’re trying to save all of humanity.’”

  Leaphorn sighed. “Matter of fact, I think Woody was trying to save humanity”

  For Chee, the next hours were occupied by the work of wrapping it up. He called the Northern Arizona Medical Center, got the emergency room supervisor, and told the woman Woody was en route in an ambulance and what to expect. Then he called the FBI office in Phoenix. Agent Reynald was occupied. He got Agent Edgar Evans instead.

  “This is Jim Chee,” he said. “I want to report that the man who killed Officer Ben Kinsman is in custody. His name is Woody. He is a medical doctor, and a—”

  “Hold it! Hold it!” Evans said. “What’re ya talking about?”

  “The arrest this morning of the man who killed Kinsman,” Chee said. “You better take notes because your boss will be asking questions. After being read his rights, Dr. Woody made a full confession of the assault on Kinsman to me, in the presence of Joe Leaphorn. He also confessed to the murder of Catherine Pollard, a vector control specialist employed by the Indian Health Service. Woody is critically ill and is now en route to the hospital at Flag in an amb—”

  “What the hell is this?” Evans said. “Some kind of joke?”

  “In an ambulance,” Chee continued. “I recommend you pass this information along to Reynald, so he can get it to Mickey, so Mickey can drop the charges against Jano,” Chee said. “If you want to do a television spectacular with this, the Navajo Police office at Tuba City can tell you where you can find the Pollard body and the details you need about how you, the FBI, solved this crime.”

  “Hold it, Chee,” Evans said. “What kind of—”

  “No time for silly questions,” Chee said, and hung up.

  Next he worked his way down the list of law enforcement agencies put to work by J. D. Mickey on the Kinsman case and gave the
m the pertinent information. Then he called the Public Defender Service in Phoenix. He got, the office secretary. Ms. Pete was not in. Ms. Pete had left about an hour ago en route to Tuba City. Yes, there was a telephone in her car. Yes, she would notify Ms. Pete that she should contact him at Tuba City to receive information critical to the Jano case.

  “I think she was going to Tuba to talk to you, Lieutenant Chee,” the secretary said. “But this ‘critical information.’ She’ll ask me about that.”

  “Tell Ms. Pete she was right about the Kinsman case. I arrested the wrong man. Now we have the right one.”

  Then he called Leaphorn’s room at the motel. No answer. He called the desk.

  “He’s over at the diner,” the clerk said. “He said if you called to come on over and join him.”

  Leaphorn had been busy, too. First he had called the law firm of Peabody, Snell and Glick and persuaded a receptionist that he should be allowed to talk to Mr. Peabody himself. He’d told Peabody the circumstances and suggested that, in view of Mrs. Vanders’s fragile health, someone close to her should break the news to her. He’d explained that Miss Pollard’s body would not be released to the family until the crime scene crew exhumed it properly and the required autopsy had been completed. He’d given him the names of those who could provide further information.

  That done, he had called Louisa and recited into her answering machine the details of what had happened. He’d told her he was checking out, would drive back to Window Rock, and would call her from there tomorrow. Then he’d taken a shower, rescued what was left of the soap and shampoo from the bathroom to add to his emergency supply, packed, left a message for Chee at the desk, and strolled over to the diner to eat.

  He was enjoying the diner’s version of a Navajo taco and watching a Nike commercial on the wall-mounted television when Lieutenant Chee walked in, spotted Leaphorn and came over. He moved Leaphorn’s bag from a chair and sat.

  “You leaving town?”

  “Home to Window Rock,” Leaphorn said. “Back to washing my own dishes, doing the laundry, being a housewife.” He bad to speak up because the Nike ad had been followed by a used-car commercial, which involved noise and shouting.