Spider Woman's Daughter

by Anne Hillerman

  A black garden hose stretched along the flagstones. Chee followed it to find Mark Yazzie offering water to daylilies.

  “Yá’át’ééh,” Chee called to him.

  “Yá’át’ééh.” Yazzie gave Chee a snaggletoothed grin. “What happened to your uniform? Did you go undercover to arrest me?”

  Chee said, “Your luck holds. I’m off duty. I was at the hospital with a friend. I came to get some photos of this place for Bernie. Then I head home.”

  “Go ahead. All these flowers look pretty good today.”

  “I’d like to get a picture inside the museum, too,” Chee said.

  “I can’t help you there. Ask Dr. Davis about that.”

  “When will she be here?” Chee asked. “I didn’t see another car.”

  “Oh, she parks over at the museum. She’s been putting in a lot of hours getting ready for the new collection.” Mark Yazzie pointed with his lips. “You know how to walk there?”

  “One foot in front of the other. Thanks. Ahééhee’ shínaí.”

  The museum’s front door was locked. Chee walked to the rear of the building and saw Davis’s Lexus in the loading zone. Through the tinted windows, he noticed a stack of boxes and a small navy duffel. The back seats were folded flat.

  He found the building’s back door propped open with a rock.

  “Dr. Davis? Are you here?”

  Inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The only noise was the whirl of what he assumed was the ventilation system. Other than the red EXIT signs, illumination came from a single source, a room at the end of the corridor.

  Chee headed in that direction, his steps reverberating against the cement floor of the museum’s inner sanctum. Unlike the fancy public area, this was a basic, utilitarian work space, with simple metal shelves for open storage and a few plain tables. The environment reminded him of his brief stint as a hotel desk clerk in Albuquerque during his university days. In contrast to the opulent lobby, the staff offices were tiny windowless spaces furnished with castoffs and crammed with excess equipment.

  He turned when he heard the thud of a heavy door close behind him. In the dim light, he could barely see Davis standing in the hallway with a gun in her hand, the muzzle pointed squarely at Chee’s midsection.

  19

  “Hey, there. It’s Jim Chee. Don’t shoot. I just came for a photo.”

  She angled the muzzle to the floor. “Hi. What a surprise.”

  “I guess.”

  “I get a little jumpy here alone,” Davis said. “The security guys hate me for disabling the alarm. Even Yazzie tells me to keep the door locked, but that’s a pain when I’m going in and out for a smoke. You, Mr. Handsome, are the first person who has ever come visiting before official working hours.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you. Are you always here this early?”

  “Come on down. I’ll show you what I’m doing.” She gave him a smile that made him keenly aware he was a man in the prime of life alone in the building with a dangerously attractive woman.

  Chee followed her to a back room with shelves stacked deep with ceramics. Boxes, bubble wrap, and rolls of tape sat on the table.

  “I need to move some of these pots from our collection out of here so we’ll have room for the new ones we’ll be receiving from the McManus gift. Some of these old beauties have to go into off-site storage. Out with the old, in with the older.”

  “How do you decide which ones to box up? Couldn’t you get somebody else to do this for you?”

  “Some of these are similar to the ones included in the gift. It takes an expert like me to know the difference. These are my babies.”

  She perched on the edge of the table where she’d been organizing the pots and set her gun down next to her leg. It reminded Chee that his weapon was locked in his truck.

  “You know, I’m almost sure you and I have met before,” he said. “With Leaphorn at Chaco Canyon, when you were a researcher.”

  “I wondered how long it would take you to put that together,” she said. “Chaco. Place of mystery and magic. These rare beauties are from Chaco, too.” Her perfect lips moved to the hint of a grin. Davis picked up a tall, slender pot painted with vertical lines, perhaps to make it look taller. It reminded Chee of the urn in her office. She wore black cotton gloves. “A masterpiece, isn’t it? Dates to about 1200. Not brought in from an outlier but created in the canyon itself. Among the McManus pots we’ll be getting are a few more of these. So very, very special.”

  “I don’t know much about pottery,” he said. “Why the gloves?”

  Davis put the pot down and began to wrap it. “They prevent oil from my hands from adhering to the surface. Now, tell me, why are you here? I’d like to think it’s because you knew you’d find me alone.”

  “Nothing like that. I was hoping to get a picture of the Klah blanket for Bernie. The gardener told me you’d come in early. I thought you might bend the no-photography rules an inch or two.”

  “Where is your wife? Waiting in the truck?”

  “She’s at the hospital with Leaphorn.”

  “He’s not dead yet?”

  Chee let the comment hang, wondering what she’d say next.

  “No photos allowed in here, but let me think about it, since you’re so cute.

  “You know, each pot tells a story. Even after years of working with them, pieces like this take my breath away.” Davis picked up some bubble wrap and the tape gun and began to create a transparent cocoon for the pot she’d shown him. “Every time I stand here, I think of the women who made these, mothers and daughters, aunts and grandmothers, old and young. The hours they spent digging clay, cleaning it, tempering it, shaping the pots, painting on the slip. Firing them, decorating them. It humbles me to think that my hands touch what those women’s hands made.”

  Chee caught a glimpse of silver on her right arm. “I bet a man made your pretty watchband.”

  “You’re right about that, but it’s a bracelet.” She put the pot in a box and moved closer to him, close enough that he smelled perfume intermixed with cigarettes. She pulled up her sleeve so he could see the piece. He noticed the way the silver seemed to flow around the procession of open hearts.

  “A jeweler in Gallup, a Navajo, made it,” Davis said. “Tsosie. Maybe you know him?”

  “I met a guy who sells at Earl’s—you mean Garrison Tsosie?”

  “That might be his brother. Notah Tsosie made this. My fiancé asked him to come up with a broader, more masculine one for himself, this for me, and an identical one for Ellie—Eleanor Friedman, used to be Friedman-Bernal. You remember her from those days?”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Oh, a little shorter than I am. Mousy brown hair.” Davis pushed a strand of her own blond hair behind her ear. “I’m not surprised she didn’t make an impression.”

  “I remember her,” Chee said. “She got in some trouble a long time ago, right?”

  “She was trouble,” Davis said. “She told some terrible lies about my boyfriend, my Randall. She claimed he falsified his research data. She meddled where she shouldn’t have, creating a situation that would have ended Randall’s career. Ellie had a bad accident at the ruins where she’d gone to spy on him. She moved to Arizona after that. I lost contact with her, but I never forgot what she did either.”

  Chee felt cold sweat on the back of his neck. This woman made him uncomfortable. “When we asked you about EFB, you said you hadn’t heard of it. But that was Ellie’s business.”

  Davis laughed. “If you remember correctly, I said EFB wasn’t in the AIRC records. It wasn’t, because her startup was older than our files. And she hasn’t applied to do appraisals with us or our donors since she’s set up shop in Santa Fe.”

  “I was called out to Chaco Canyon yesterday. A park worker discovered a w
oman’s body. She seems to have died of a gunshot. The feds think it might have been Ellie.”

  “Really?” Chee noticed the way she asked it, her slight change in tone.

  “No ID, but she’d been reported missing and the body fits her description,” he said. “The animals had been at her, so it’s hard to say how long she’s been dead.”

  “Did she kill herself?”

  The question caught him off guard. “We don’t know for sure yet. Why do you ask?”

  “She was moody. She had a gun. And she probably had a guilty conscience. I think she was the one who shot Leaphorn.”

  “Leaphorn saved her life. Why would she shoot him?”

  Davis picked up a grapefruit-size bowl decorated with black lines and angles on a white background. She began to wrap it. “It goes back to the job Leaphorn had working for Collingsworth, checking on the McManus appraisal. Did Bernie talk to you much about that?”

  She wrapped the bowl as she talked. “Ellie did the evaluations Leaphorn questioned. She told me she was scared that he’d expose her shady appraisal business.”

  “So you talked to her?” Chee swallowed his surprise.

  “She called me when she found out the AIRC had acquired the McManus collection. She knew some of those pots were not what the McManuses had assumed they were. She thought Leaphorn would find out.”

  “Why would she fake the appraisal?”

  Davis chucked. “You’re cute. You don’t understand how evil works.”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “Usually, people fake appraisals to get more money,” Davis said. “But Ellie hated the idea of Indian pots going outside the country, and she especially detested the fact that her favorite rare pots from Chaco Canyon would be exiled to some rich guy’s house in Asia. After she’d had a few drinks, she’d get maudlin about it and say idiotic things like ‘The poor Anasazi clay babies, forever refugees.’ So she liberated the ancient pots and sent substitutes to take their places.”

  “Where did she get fake pots?”

  “They weren’t fake pots.” Davis had one of those disdainful expressions Chee had observed on people who considered themselves smarter than average. “They were exact replicas Ellie made using photos from the appraisal material. She shaped them by hand in her little apartment, so she could honestly say they were created at Chaco Canyon.”

  “That’s complicated,” Chee said.

  Davis smiled. “Not for Ellie. She’d started making pots in high school, before she became an archaeologist. She’d studied Anasazi technique in grad school. Ellie found a source in the canyon for good clay and ground shards as the temper, to give hers aged authenticity.”

  She winked at Chee. “I know you’re thinking destroying those old shards, that’s illegal. It wasn’t as suspect as it sounds. Ellie had a huge collection of broken pieces, authorized for the work she was doing, tracking a certain family of Chaco potters. She only destroyed the ones she didn’t need, and I had already helped her photograph and document them. We could argue the morality of destroying those shards, but Ellie had a greater purpose in mind.”

  “And you approved?”

  Davis ignored the question. “We used to joke that Ellie was part Anasazi, the way she could copy the old designs, the details. She was a whiz at the painting, too.”

  “So she stole the real pots, substituted hers in the McManus collection. The lieutenant figured this out—”

  “ ‘Stole’ sounds too harsh. I called it rescue,” Davis said. “The McManus collection set her off because it had rare cylindrical jars. Pots like this one.” Davis held up a jar painted with linked rectangles over a white base. It reminding Chee of one of the sketches he’d seen in the lieutenant’s little notebook.

  “Making the substitutions hadn’t occurred to Ellie before she encountered these and fell in love with them,” Davis said. “But the good-girl part of her got nervous about the values, so she lowered them in the appraisal to what the pots she made would have been worth. The McManuses had so many items, they never noticed. Or if they did, they were glad to pay lower insurance. Ellie thought everything was fine until Leaphorn started nosing around.”

  “And that’s why she tried to kill him,” Chee said. “Do I have that straight?”

  “Kill him, then kill herself. The world of Native American art appraisers is a small, closed circle. Word gets out that her evaluations can’t be trusted, and it’s over. The problems with that old job would have ruined her future. She was done either way.”

  Chee thought about it. “Ellie probably did the same with other appraisals, too. Why didn’t she just take the proceeds from selling the stuff and disappear, move to an island somewhere? Why come back here?”

  Davis put the wrapped cylinder in a box. “She kept the pots, never sold any of them. After the McManus collection, she never agreed to another job that involved Indian art if it was being sold outside the United States. She said the intrigue made her too nervous.”

  “So the McManus pots were the only ones she switched? You believe that?”

  Davis smiled. “I hated her for the lies she told about my Randall. But she didn’t lie about that.”

  Chee took a breath. “So Ellie has a secret stash of rare pots, and she shoots the man who saved her life to preserve her business reputation?”

  “You got it.”

  “Why didn’t she just talk to Leaphorn, explain what happened? If she still had the pots—”

  “Actually, she made an appointment to have lunch with him. Then she got cold feet.”

  “You know a lot about this,” Chee said.

  “We used to be friends.”

  Chee nodded. “The FBI will need to talk to you.”

  Davis looked surprised. “You take care of it. You’re a cop. You do your job.”

  Chee shook his head. “I’m not convinced that a few old pots gave her enough motive to try to kill a good man who had saved her life.”

  Davis stared at him. “You don’t understand a thing. That Leaphorn is pure evil. He left my Randall on that mesa. Left his body for the coyotes.”

  “You’re wrong about Leaphorn,” Chee said. And you’re wrong about Ellie, he thought. “I should let you focus on your work. I’ve got to get back to Bernie. We have a long drive home.”

  “Which way do you go?”

  “Through Cuba.”

  “Cuba? Someone was recommending a restaurant to me there. El Bruno’s? Ever heard of it?” Davis asked.

  “It’s on the main street, down from a rent-a-garage place, commercial storage units.”

  “Storage units? I didn’t know Cuba had a business like that.”

  “It’s been there as long as I can remember,” Chee said. “They’ve got a big yard for RVs and camping trailers there because it’s not that far from Chaco.”

  Davis picked up another bowl. “I’ll have to let you out. The back door locked when I closed it. Give me a minute to finish these last pots. You mentioned a photo of the Klah tapestry? You know where the rug room is. Go get your picture. Enjoy it. I’ll find you there.”

  As soon as he reached the hallway, Chee took out his phone. No signal, probably because of the building. He texted Cordova: asap re Leaphorn. He quietly tried the back door. Locked, as Davis had said.

  He found the rug room unlocked, and the light came on automatically when he entered. He closed the door behind him and tried his cell again, same result.

  He looked at the Klah rug, took some photos for Bernie, a long view and then close-ups of the various design elements. He told himself to enjoy the moment. If Davis tried anything, he could overpower her, keep her there until Cordova sent backup.

  When he tried to open the rug room door, the handle wouldn’t budge, and he recalled Marjorie punching a code into the keypad next to it. He unsuccessfully entered the most common combinations of numb
ers, then several variations.

  Through the window he saw her approach, pushing a dolly. In one smooth move she opened the door, stationed the dolly to block his exit, and pointed a weapon at him.

  “Thanks for telling me about the storage lockers,” she said. “Let’s go see what’s in Ellie’s.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  She fired, and as the pain from the Taser hit, he realized he had given her the information to get away with murder.

  Bernie opened her eyes, saw the white ceiling, heard the rhythmic sounds of the equipment monitoring breathing and heartbeat. Were they keeping the lieutenant alive, or was it his own deep resilience? She felt another presence in the hospital room, someone at the bed looking at the man, not the machines.

  “Louisa! When did you get here?”

  “A while ago.” Her normally plump face was drawn, her skin sallow. “I told the hospital admissions people I was his wife. I guess I am, unofficially at least. They told me my niece and nephew were here. I guess that’s you and Jim?”

  Bernie nodded. “Largo asked me to track down his family. I only found one man, Austin Lee, and I haven’t been able to talk to him directly.”

  “Joe never mentions relatives.” Louisa took a breath in and released it slowly. “You and Chee and me and the Navajo Police Department. We’re his family.”

  Louisa eased herself from standing into the bedside chair with a grimace.

  “Are you feeling well?” Bernie asked.

  “Better now that I’m here with him, not in Houston.”

  “You look tired. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Louisa nodded. “I’m fine. I was at MD Anderson, you know, the big hospital in Houston. They don’t let you go until they’ve checked every inch inside and out.”

  “I didn’t realize that’s where you were. You told me you were at a conference.” Bernie knew MD Anderson specialized in cancer.

  “It was a sort of conference. Lots of conferring with doctors. I needed some tests, consultations, more tests, experts. I didn’t tell Joe, didn’t want him to worry after what he’d been through with Emma. That’s what the argument was about.”