Skeleton Man

by Tony Hillerman

  SKELETON MAN

  TONY

  HILLERMAN

  While the collision of airliners central to the plot of this book was real and triggered the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration and its flight safety rules, the story and all of its characters are purely fictional. However, several of these fictional folks use names borrowed from generous donors to a fund to assist children stricken with cancer.

  The author acknowledges the help of fellow writers Scott Thybony, Michael Ghiglieri, and Brad Dimick—three men who know that great canyon as well as anyone alive—and ethnologist Tandra Love, biologist William Degenhardt, and naturalist Ann Zwinger, whose Down Canyon is an American classic. Marty Nelson’s research work, as usual, was a huge help.

  Contents

  1 Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, had been explaining…

  2 As Leaphorn remembered it, the August day he’d been…

  3 The text of the message on Joanna Craig’s answering machine…

  4 Bradford Chandler suddenly swiveled in his beach chair…

  5 Within minutes after getting home from his meeting with…

  6 Almost everyone liked Bernadette Manuelito. Always…

  7 Joanna Craig was determined not to let her impatience…

  8 The thunderstorm that had been moving steadily toward…

  9 The thunderstorm was gone from Gallup now, drifting…

  10 Brad Chandler had pulled his rental Land Rover into the…

  11 The plan, carefully drawn up by Sergeant Jim Chee, involved…

  12 Joe Leaphorn was listening to the coffee perking and…

  13 Joanna Craig had followed Tuve on his homeward trip.

  14 Bradford Chandler had done all the things he needed to…

  15 Joe Leaphorn found he had a way to get in touch with…

  16 “Girl,” the woman said, “you shouldn’t be here. Here it is…

  17 Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale…

  18 Bradford Chandler had come to a series of conclusions.

  19 Sergeant Jim Chee was standing on the rocky shelf overlooking…

  20 Successful skip tracers develop through endless practice…

  21 Bernie Manuelito was still not at the Salt Woman Shrine…

  22 When she had first found her way into it, what seemed to…

  23 “I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something…

  24 Bernie had reacted fast at the first sound of the voices.

  25 “Put it down,” Joanna Craig said.

  26 The flashlight blinded Bernie.

  27 The first time he had been to the bottom of the Grand…

  28 “I think it would be safe enough,” Bernie said. “The…

  29 Captain Pinto returned to the table the Navajo Inn diner…

  About the Author

  Also by Tony Hillerman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, had been explaining how the complicated happening below the Salt Woman Shrine illustrated his Navajo belief in universal connections. The cause leads to inevitable effect. The entire cosmos being an infinitely complicated machine all working together. His companions, taking their mid-morning coffee break at the Navajo Inn, didn’t interrupt him. But they didn’t seem impressed.

  “I’ll admit the half-century gap between the day all those people were killed here and Billy Tuve trying to pawn that diamond for twenty dollars is a problem,” Leaphorn said. “But when you really think about it, trace it all back, you see how one thing kept leading to another. The chain’s there.”

  Captain Pinto, who now occupied Joe Leaphorn’s preretirement office in the Navajo Tribal Police Headquarters, put down his cup. He signaled a refill to the waitress who was listening to this conversation, and waited a polite moment for Leaphorn to explain this if he wished. Leaphorn had nothing to add. He just nodded, sort of agreeing with himself.

  “Come on, Joe,” Pinto said. “I know how that theory works and I buy it. Hard, hot wind blowing gets the birds tired of flying. One too many birds lands on a limb. Limb breaks off, falls into a stream, diverts water flow, undercuts the stream bank, causes a landslide, blocks the stream, floods the valley, changes the flora and that changes the fauna, and the folks who were living off of hunting the deer have to migrate. When you think back you could blame it all on that wind.”

  Pinto stopped, got polite, attentive silence from his fellow coffee drinkers, and decided to add a footnote.

  “However, you have to do a lot of complicated thinking to work in that Joanna Craig woman. Coming all the way out from New York just because a brain-damaged Hopi tries to pawn a valuable diamond for twenty bucks.”

  Captain Largo, who had driven down from his Shiprock office to attend a conference on the drunk-driving problem, entered the discussion. “Trouble is, Joe, the time gap is just too big to make you a good case. You say it started when the young man with the camera on the United Airlines plane was sort of like the last bird on Pinto’s fictional tree limb, so to speak. He mentioned to the stewardess he’d like to get some shots down into the Grand Canyon when they were flying over it. Isn’t that the theory? The stewardess mentions that to the pilot, and so he does a little turn out of the cloud they’re flying through, and cuts right through the TWA airplane. That was June 30, 1956. All right. I’ll buy that much of it. Passenger asks a favor, pilot grants it. Boom. Everybody dead. End of incident. Then this spring, about five decades later, this Hopi fella, Billy Tuve, shows up in a Gallup pawnshop and tries to pawn a twenty-thousand-dollar diamond for twenty bucks. That touches off another series of events, sort of a whole different business. I say it’s not just another chapter, it’s like a whole new book. Hell, Tuve hadn’t even been born yet when that collision happened. Right? And neither had the Craig woman.”

  “Right,” said Pinto. “You have a huge gap in that cause-and-effect chain, Joe. And we’re just guessing the kid with the camera asked the pilot to turn. Nobody knows why the pilot did that.”

  Leaphorn sighed. “You’re thinking about the gap you see in one single connecting chain. I’m thinking of a bunch of different chains which all seem to get drawn together.”

  Largo looked skeptical, shook his head, grinned at Leaphorn. “If you had one of your famous maps here, could you chart that out for us?”

  “It would look like a spiderweb,” Pinto said.

  Leaphorn ignored that. “Take Joanna Craig’s role in this. The fact she wasn’t born yet is part of the connection. The crash killed her daddy. From what Craig said, that caused her mama to become a bitter woman and that caused Craig to be bitter, too. Jim Chee told me she wasn’t really after those damned diamonds when she came to the canyon. She just wanted to find them so she could get revenge.”

  That produced no comment.

  “You see how that works,” Leaphorn said. “And that’s what drew that Bradford Chandler fellow into the case. The skip tracer. He may have been purely after money, but his job was blocking Craig from getting what she was after. That’s what sent him down into the canyon. And Cowboy Dashee was down there doing family duty. For Chee, the pull was friendship. And—” Leaphorn stopped, sentence unfinished.

  Pinto chuckled. “Go on, Joe,” he said. “How about Bernie Manuelito? What pulled little Bernie into it?”

  “It was fun for Bernie,” Leaphorn said. “Or love.”

  “You know,” said Largo. “I can’t get over our little Bernie. I mean, how she managed to get herself out of that mess without getting killed. And another thing that’s hard to figure is how you managed to butt in. You’re supposed to be retired.”

  “Pinto gets the blame for that,” Leaphorn said. �
��Telling me old Shorty McGinnis had died. See? That’s another of the chain I was talking about.”

  “I was just doing you a favor, Joe,” Pinto said. “I knew you were getting bored with retirement. Just wanted to give you an excuse to try your hand at detecting again.”

  “Saved your budget some travel money, too,” Leaphorn said, grinning. He was remembering that day, remembering how totally out-it-all he’d felt, how happy he’d been driving north in search of the McGinnis diamond—which he’d never thought had actually existed. Now he was thinking about how a disaster buried under a lifetime of dust had risen again and the divergent emotions it had stirred. Greed, obviously, and hatred, plus family duty, a debt owed to a friend. And perhaps, in Bernie Manuelito’s case, even love.

  Captain Pinto pushed back his chair, got up.

  “Stick around,” Leaphorn said. “I want to tell you how this all came out with Bernie and Jim Chee.”

  “Going to get some doughnuts,” Pinto said. “I’ll be right back. I want to hear that.”

  2

  As Leaphorn remembered it, the August day he’d been pulled into the Skeleton Man affair had been a total downer moodwise. He’d never felt more absolutely retired in the years he’d been practicing it. The young man across the desk from him, Captain Samuel Pinto, had interrupted jotting something into a notebook when Leaphorn tapped at his door. He’d glanced up with that irritated look interruptions produce, gestured Leaphorn into a chair, put aside the notebook, fished through a stack of folders, pulled two out, and looked at them.

  “Ah, yes,” said Captain Pinto, “here we are.”

  Just a few minutes earlier Leaphorn had been hit with the day’s first reminder of how unimportant retirees become. At the reception desk below he’d stood, hat in hand, until the young woman in charge looked up from sorting something. He informed her that Captain Pinto was expecting him. She punched a number into the switchboard and glanced up.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  Leaphorn had nodded.

  She peered at her desk calendar, looked up again at the once-legendary lieutenant, and said, “And you are…?”

  A knife-to-the-heart question when delivered in a building where one has worked most of one’s adult life, given orders, hired people, and become modestly famous for a mile or two in every direction.

  “Joe Leaphorn,” Leaphorn said, and saw the name drew not a glimmer of recognition. “I used to work here,” he added, but the young lady was already back on the telephone. “Long time ago, I guess,” talking to himself.

  “The captain said to send you up,” she said, and waved him toward the stairway.

  Now, in the office marked Special Investigations, where Leaphorn used to keep his stuff and do his worrying, Captain Pinto motioned him to a chair.

  “I hear Sergeant Chee is finally getting married,” Pinto said, without looking up from the paperwork. “What’da you think of that?”

  “High time,” Leaphorn said. “She’s a good girl, Bernie. I think she’ll make Chee grow up.”

  “So we hope,” Pinto said, and handed the two folders to Leaphorn. “Take a look at these, Joe. Tell me what you think. Top one’s the FBI file on that robbery-homicide down at Zuni. Bunch of jewelry taken and the store operator shot, remember that one? Few days later a Hopi, a fellow named Billy Tuve, tried to pawn an unset diamond at Gallup. He wanted twenty dollars. Manager saw it was worth thousands. He asked Tuve to stick around while he got an appraisal. Called the police. They took Tuve in. He said an old shaman down in the Grand Canyon gave it to him years ago. Didn’t know the shaman’s name. McKinley County Sheriff’s Office had that jewelry store robbery on its mind. They held him until they could do some checking. Some witnesses they rounded up had reported seeing a Hopi hanging around the jewelry store before the shooting. Then they got an identification on Tuve, found his fingerprints here and there in the store. So they booked him on suspicion.”

  With all that rattled off, Pinto peered at Leaphorn, awaiting a question. None came. The sound of a Willie Nelson song drifted up from the first floor, a song of lamentation. A piñon jay flew past the window. Beyond the glass Leaphorn saw the landscape that had been his view of the world for half his life. Leaphorn sighed. It all sounded so comfortably familiar. He started reading through the newer folder. On the second page he ran into something that stirred his interest and probably explained why Pinto had wanted to see him. But Leaphorn asked no questions. He’d leave the first questions for Pinto. As a felony committed at Zuni, thus on a federal reservation, this was officially an FBI case. But at the moment it was Pinto’s job, doing the legwork, and Leaphorn’s old office was now Pinto’s office and Leaphorn was merely a summoned visitor.

  He finished his study of the new folder, put it carefully on Pinto’s desk, and picked up the old one. It was dusty, bedraggled, and very fat.

  Pinto waited about five minutes until Leaphorn looked up from his reading and nodded.

  “Have you noticed where this Zuni homicide maybe crosses the path of an old burglary case of yours?” Pinto asked. “It’s a very cold case out at Short Mountain. You remember it?”

  “Sure,” Leaphorn said. “But what brought that one out of the icebox?”

  “Maybe it’s not actually out,” Pinto said. “We just wanted to ask you. See if you could think of any connection between this current case here”—Pinto tapped the new folder—“and this old burglary of yours.”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “You’re thinking of Shorty McGinnis’s diamond?”

  Pinto nodded.

  Leaphorn smiled, shook his head, picked up the new file, and opened it. “I must have misread that. I thought the diamond the Hopi fella tried to pawn was valued at…” He turned to the second page. “Here it is: ‘Current market value of gem estimated at approximately twenty thousand dollars.’”

  “That’s the figure the appraiser gave the FBI. Said it was three-point-eight carats. The fed jewelry man called it a ‘brilliant white with a memory of the sky in it’ and said it was ‘a special Ascher version of the Emerald Cut,’ whatever that means. It’s all in that report there.”

  Leaphorn shook his head again, still grinning. “And mention is made in that new federal file of an expensive unset diamond taken in that old burglary of the Short Mountain Trading Post. I’ll bet the FBI man who wrote that is new out here. Can you imagine an expensive diamond at the Short Mountain Trading Post? Or McGinnis actually having one?”

  “Well, no,” Pinto said. “It would be hard to imagine that. It would strain the mind.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t mention any diamond among the stolen stuff when we investigated that burglary. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t believe him. I’m sure you noticed that this note that the diamond should be added to the loot was stuck in the report about a year late. That was after the insurance company complained to the FBI that our burglary report didn’t match McGinnis’s list of losses.”

  Pinto was smiling, too. “Maybe he just forgot it. Didn’t remember it until he filed his insurance claim.”

  “Have you asked McGinnis about this?”

  “McGinnis is dead,” Pinto said. “Long time I think.”

  Leaphorn sucked in a breath. “Shorty’s dead!” he said. “Be damned. I hadn’t heard that.”

  He rubbed his hand across his forehead, trying to accept it. It was hard to believe that tough, wise, grouchy old man had been just another mortal. And now he had to be added to that growing list of those who had made Leaphorn’s past interesting—if not always fun—and left a special vacuum in his life when they died. He looked past Pinto out the window behind him, at the vast blue sky, the thunder-head forming over the Chuskas to the north, remembering sitting with McGinnis in his cluttered trading post, the old man in his rocking chair, sipping whiskey out of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola glass, passing along just as much gossip as he wanted Officer Joe Leaphorn to know and not a word more. Leaphorn looked down at his hands, remembering how McGinnis would hold his glass, tilting
it back and forth as he rocked to keep the whiskey from splashing.

  “You know,” Leaphorn said, and produced a wry chuckle, “I’d forgotten about that burglary.”

  “I wish the FBI had forgotten it,” Pinto said. “Apparently the old man listed the diamond on his insurance claim at ten thousand dollars—which I guess would make it worth twice that these days. And the insurance company complained, objected, and the feds looked into it as maybe a fraud case way back then. And now somebody did a sort of diamond-diamond match in their computer files. It looked strange and they wanted us to check it out.”

  “Now, doesn’t that sound easy? Did they say how to do it?”

  “They want to know where that McGinnis diamond came from. Was it recovered? So forth. They seem to have a fairly good witness identification on the Hopi, prints in the store, all that stuff, but the only material evidence is that diamond he was trying to pawn. The theory of the crime seems to be the Hopi took it when he did the Zuni robbery. And it’s the only material evidence available so far. So they’d like to know if McGinnis got his diamond back, and did he have one of those jewelry certification forms describing its cut and weight and size and so forth.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “So we sent a man out from Tuba City to the store. He said the place had a ‘Closed’ sign on the door and looked deserted. Said he stopped at a place down the road and they’d heard the old man had a heart attack. Thought he’d been hauled off to Page. Never came back. Checked the hospital. He wasn’t there. No record of him. Maybe died in the ambulance or something. Probably his family came and took care of the funeral somewhere.”

  Leaphorn let that pass without comment. Did Shorty have a family? He couldn’t quite imagine that. After a while, Pinto would get to the reason he’d asked Joe to drop in. No hurry. Pinto shuffled some papers, put them back into a folder, looked across the desk at Leaphorn.

  “Joe,” he said, “did McGinnis tell you where he got that damned diamond? Anything about that?”