Skeleton Man

by Tony Hillerman

  “Of course,” he said, and then thought about it awhile. “Then do what? My impression is that your paycheck depends on the other side never getting hold of those bones. At least not long enough to get them into court. Right? So what do we do if the other side gets there first?”

  “I guess that would depend on how much you wanted to earn that big bonus,” Chandler said. “I guess you’d do whatever the situation demanded. You know. To get those bones away from the bad guys.”

  Sherman spent another moment thinking.

  “Arizona is a death penalty state,” he said. “For murder done in commission of a felony, anyway. But I’ll bet you already knew that.”

  “I did,” Chandler agreed. “I also know the bottom of that canyon is loaded with dangerous places. Falling rocks. Folks swept away in the river rapids. Drowning. People slipping and tumbling down the cliffs.”

  Sherman nodded. Grinned at Chandler. “Wouldn’t you hate to be the district attorney trying to prove somebody was pushed instead of just slipped? I mean, when nobody saw what happened?”

  “Sounds like a case of reasonable doubt to me,” Chandler said. “Okay, then. Here’s what I want you to do. And the very first thing, right now, today, is locate Billy Tuve.”

  “Any idea where?”

  “He lives on Second Mesa. You heard his uncle saying he’d come to take him home. He lives with his mama in a little village. Kykotsmovi, however you pronounce it. Shouldn’t be hard to find it.”

  “Find him and what?”

  “Find him and bring him to me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we take him down to the bottom of the canyon, to the area where he got the diamond. Then he shows us how to find where the man he got it from came from. When we find that man, then we find the left arm bones of this Clarke guy and what’s left of the diamonds he was carrying.”

  “And split them?”

  “Well, I presume the man who’s hiring us would want them himself. But I don’t think he has them counted.”

  Sherman laughed. “He wouldn’t miss a few of ’em.”

  11

  The plan, carefully drawn up by Sergeant Jim Chee, involved having Bernie spend the evening with him at his Shiprock trailer, during which they would enjoy themselves and pack up the assorted stuff they needed for the junket into the depth of the Grand Canyon. Then they would head westward to Tuba City. Meanwhile, Cowboy Dashee would have gone to Kykotsmovi on the Hopi Second Mesa and picked up Billy Tuve at his family home there. That done, Dashee would bring Tuve to the grocery store/service station at Tuba, where they’d meet Chee and Bernie. From there, Cowboy would lead the way on a back-road shortcut to Moenkopi, thence westward via an unimproved and unnamed dirt road to a place on the East Rim just north of the Little Colorado Canyon gorge. They would park there. Dashee and Tuve, both members of the prestigious Hopi Bear Clan and thus both Salt Trail initiates, would lead them down, down, down into the depths. Once at the bottom, Tuve would show them exactly where he had traded his folding shovel for the diamond, and the direction he’d seen the owner of gem take to retrieve it.

  As such careful and detailed plans tend to do, this one began falling apart in phase one.

  “I’m not going to drive all the way to Shiprock this afternoon to spend the night with you, Mr. Chee, in that old trailer,” said Bernadette Manuelito. “I have to get my stuff together. Get my boots, and hiking stuff, sleeping bag, all that. You have to meet Dashee anyway. Can’t you pick me up on the way? I’ll meet you over at Yah-ta-hey. At the trading post.”

  Chee sighed. “We’re meeting Dashee at Tuba City at five A.M.,” he said. “So I guess we could meet at Yah-ta-hey. But we’d have to leave Yah-ta-hey about three A.M., I’d say. Can you handle getting up that early?”

  “Hey, man,” Bernie said. “You’re forgetting I’ve been a Border Patrolman.”

  Indeed, Bernie seemed wide awake as well as loaded with water bottles, foodstuff, and luggage when he pulled up at Yah-ta-hey. However, after a hundred miles and a lot of talking of wedding plans, snuggling, and so forth, they saw no sign of Dashee or Billy Tuve at their Tuba City meeting place. Chee looked at his watch and grumbled. “When I’m late, Cowboy always gives me that ‘Navajo time’ complaint,” he said. “As if the Hopis were perfect.”

  “If I were you I’d just call him. Find out what happened.”

  Chee extracted his cell phone, dialed Dashee’s cell number, let it ring, heard Dashee’s voice.

  “Is this Chee?” Dashee said. “I was just going to call you. Tuve’s gone.”

  It wasn’t a good connection.

  “Tuve’s what? Gone where?”

  “When I got to his place, his mother was there. She said a car drove up yesterday about suppertime. She was out seeing about the sheep, but she saw Billy out in front talking to somebody. When she got back to the house, the car was driving away. She went on in, looking for Billy, but he was gone.”

  Chee considered that. Said, “What do you think?”

  “Now I don’t know what to think,” Dashee said. “But then I told Billy’s mother maybe the sheriff had come to get him. Needed some more information from him. Or maybe the bail bond business had been canceled.”

  “That sounds reasonable,” Chee said.

  “Sure does, but it wasn’t. On the way down off Second Mesa I met a McKinley County Sheriff’s car going up the slope. Flagged him down. He said he was going out to Tuve’s place to pick him up. Said more evidence had come in and Tuve’s bail had been revoked.”

  “This is interesting,” Chee said. “So what do you think happened to him?”

  “I don’t have a clue. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. But I’ve got an idea.”

  Bernie tapped Chee on the arm, said, “What’s interesting, and who is the ‘him’ that something happened to? Was it Billy Tuve?”

  Cowboy was talking into Chee’s other ear.

  “Hold it a second, Cowboy. I’ll bring Bernie up to date on this.”

  “My idea,” said Cowboy, “is that Craig woman who bailed him out came and got him. Remember, she wanted him to take her down into the canyon. Show her where he got the diamond.”

  “I remember,” Chee said. “But I also remember he told her he wouldn’t do it. And then she said, well, she’d go anyway. Or something like that.”

  “What’s he telling you?” Bernie asked.

  “Shut up a minute, will you, Cowboy?” Chee said. He put the phone on his lap, told Bernie what Cowboy had told him, and reclaimed the telephone.

  “Well, anyway, I don’t have any better ideas. Where are you? And what do we do now?”

  Cowboy, it developed, was just rolling over the hump on 264 and dropping down into the Moenkopi draw. “I’ll be with you there in Tuba in about twenty minutes.”

  And he was. As Chee had suggested, he parked his pickup in the Tuba City police station lot. Then he climbed out, took off his hat, nodded to Bernie and Chee.

  “Well,” he said. “As Jim was just asking us, what do we do now?”

  12

  Joe Leaphorn was listening to the coffee perking and deciding whether he would double his fried egg ration this morning and cut back on other food later in the day. His rationale for that indulgence was having slept later than usual this morning, having been up past eleven the night before on the phone with Louisa. It had been a long conversation, starting with her report on her interview with the old lady at the Havasupai settlement. He had responded with his own report on his Shorty McGinnis encounter, and McGinnis’s tale of trading the cowboy for a diamond. That had triggered a bunch of questions, most of which he couldn’t answer, and that had led backward into the whole business of Cowboy Dashee’s cousin Billy Tuve, the problem he’d brought crashing down on himself by trying to pawn such a diamond, and Jim Chee’s involvement in the whole Billy Tuve mess.

  “When did Tuve get it?” Louisa had asked.

  “Several years ago is about the best I can tell you. Tuve’s very vag
ue on chronology. He did some rodeo riding, and his horse fell on him, and he suffered some brain damage.”

  “I’ve always thought rodeo riders are brain damaged before they get on the horse,” Louisa said. “But how about the other man? I mean McGinnis’s cowboy. The one who swapped his folding shovel for the diamond. Do you have any specific date when that happened?”

  “Well, the burglary in which Shorty claimed the thing was stolen was twelve years ago, but Shorty said he couldn’t remember how many years he’d had the diamond before that. I think he said ‘several.’ I guess it would be about the same with Billy Tuve.”

  “Except with Tuve, I guess we could find out the year he went down that Hopi Salt Trail for his Bear Clan initiation rite.”

  “Good idea,” Leaphorn said. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Probably because he was retired. It was none of his business. “But why is the timing important?”

  “Well, it probably isn’t,” Louisa said. “But it helps me understand what I’ve been hearing down here in the canyon. Both of these old people I’ve been trying to collect origin stories from are full of tales of some huge airplane disaster that happened when they were young. Bodies falling out of the sky. Fires in the canyons. All sort of stuff raining down. Clothing. Suitcases. Dishes. Everything. The Park Service people here tell me it happened in 1956, two airlines collided over the canyon. Everybody killed.”

  “Does seem to be the sort of thing that might produce some new legends,” Leaphorn said.

  “Or get mixed in with the original ones,” Louisa said. “That’s my worry. I’m already noticing a mixing of the stories of the various Yuman tribes you have around here with what must have been seen in that disaster. Mixing was already a problem. The Hualapai, the Supai, and some Mohave branches, and even Paiutes—even the Utes and the Piautes are borrowing bits and pieces of legends from each other. Now we find them mixing in stories about stuff being found.”

  Leaphorn’s interest abruptly sharpened. “Are you hearing things about diamonds?”

  “Not specifically, but lots about the stuff found when people were out helping the rescue crews locate missing parts of bodies and airplane parts. And there’s one about a Hualapai man from Peach Springs who came down to the river to see what was going on and saw something that might be diamond-connected. The way the most common version of that story goes, he saw some clothing items, or something, caught in a drift of debris, and in this pile of jetsam he saw a human arm.” Louisa paused a moment for Leaphorn’s reaction to that. Got none. “Is there some reason that doesn’t surprise you?”

  “Couple of reasons,” Leaphorn said. “Body parts were scattered all over in that crash—across the mesa top, down the canyon walls, down into the river itself. Rescue crews were collecting body bits in bags. And besides, I heard the arm story before.”

  “Did the arm you’re hearing about have some sort of attaché case connected to it? Maybe with a chain and a handcuff?”

  “Yep,” Leaphorn said. “That’s the one. But the man who spotted it in my story couldn’t reach it without drowning. When he got back with some helpers, the river had swept it away. Long ago, of course. I would have thought it would be pretty well forgotten by now.”

  Louisa laughed. “Joe! Who’s going to forget seeing an arm sticking out of debris in their river? That’s good enough to make a Greek myth. It’s one of the problems for us seekers of undiluted, genuine legends, ancient and uninfected by our unromantic modern times.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Besides, if that arm with the case chained to it had been forgotten, somebody has stirred it up again.”

  “How?” Leaphorn asked. “And who? And why would they?”

  “They printed a sheet offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for just such a set of arm bones. Someone distributed them at the Grand Canyon Hotel, the private one, and at the National Park Service hotel, and visitor centers, and got them spread around among the professional guide and float trip outfits, and at Peach Springs. There’s a number to call—I think it’s in Flagstaff—if you find the arm and want to collect.” Louisa laughed. “I should have saved one for you.”

  “Get one for me if you can, Louisa. What did it say?”

  “Well, a big headline across the top said ‘Ten-Thousand-Dollar Reward.’ And under that—in smaller type—it said something like ‘Family of 1956 airline crash victim seeks bones of the left arm of John Clarke, so that they can be placed with his body in the family’s burial crypt.’ And then it went on to explain the arm had been torn from his body when those two airlines collided over the Canyon and had never been recovered. It said the bones could be identified because the forearm had been broken previously and repaired with a surgical pin when this Clarke was young, or the forearm might still be attached by a metal and cuff to which a leather case was secured.”

  “I’d really like to have a couple of those flyers,” Leaphorn said. “One for Jim Chee. I think he and Dashee are going to take Tuve down in the Canyon and try to find the man he got the diamond from.”

  That produced a long pause.

  “After God knows how many years?” Louisa said. “How in the world are they going to find him? No name or anything. That sounds impossible.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “All they know is where the swap was made and that the old fellow with the diamonds was an Indian, but not a Hopi or Navajo, and after the swap deal was agreed on, he had to go down the canyon maybe a half-mile to get the stone. Their guess is he must have been some sort of hermit—maybe a Havasupai shaman—who had the diamonds cached in a cave.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “My guess is they won’t find anyone, but you know them both. Jim will feel better because he did what he could to help his old friend, and Cowboy will rest easier because he did his duty to his family and his fellow Bear Clan member.”

  Louisa sighed. “Sure,” she said. “You’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

  Before he could think of an honest answer to that, Louisa had something to add.

  “Hermit, you said. That old woman I talked to yesterday was telling about the last shaman they had—he died back in the 1960s, I think it was—and how a man from the Kaibab Paiute Reservation was a friend of the shaman and was always hanging around Peach Springs. From what she told me, he was living on a sort of part-time basis with a Havasupai woman. She said he was a ‘far-looking man,’ the Supai name for people who can see into the future, find things, all that. Sort of like your Navajo crystal-gazer shaman. Anyway, he got into some sort of trouble and left Peach Springs and went away somewhere and disappeared. Supposed to have made himself some sort of nest in one of those undercut places up a side canyon and was living off crawdads, frogs, and stuff he could get off of the tourist rafters who are always floating down the river through there. She said people sometimes crossed the river there to learn things from him. Get him to take a peek into the distant future for them.”

  “Hmmm,” Leaphorn said.

  Louisa laughed. “Too bad they didn’t ask him how to find those diamonds you and Chee seem so interested in. My source at Peach Springs said he seemed to do a lot of business with people after that airplane disaster. Lots of lost things to be found.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Such as friends and relatives. And including a torn-off left arm with a package of diamonds attached.”

  “I could bring you a couple copies of that flier,” Louisa said. “But if you need it faster, I heard whoever did it ran the same message as little advertisements in the Navajo News, and the Flagstaff paper, and other papers around there. Easy to find out and easy to get a copy.”

  “Really?” Leaphorn said. He was thinking of how much it must have cost to get all this printing and advertising done, thinking about what Captain Pinto had said, of Pinto’s speculation about the importance Washington was putting on the federal part of this peculiar situation. He was thinking this was getting much more interesting.

  “Joe? Y
ou still there?”

  “Can you do me a favor, Louisa? Could you find out everything you can learn about this possible hermit? His name? Is he still alive? Did he stay on the Peach Springs side of the river? Does anyone know where he might be? Anyway, just let me know anything you can find out about him.”

  “Okay, Joe. But if I do, you’re going to have to promise me you’ll keep me informed. I don’t want to read about something spectacular in the Farmington Times or the Gallup Independent.”

  “Okay,” Leaphorn said. “I promise.”

  “One other thing you might be interested in. Among the various new legends and revisions of old ones that disaster spread around is a renewed interest in Masaw. You remember him?”

  “The Hopi kachina spirit who is a sort of guardian of this world. The one who greeted them when they came up out of the fourth world, and told them where to live, and not to be afraid of death. Masaw, or Skeleton Man, or Maasau’u, or—”

  “Or two or three other names,” Louisa said. “Anyway some old man, maybe that hermit I mentioned, was supposed to be trying to start a sort of Skeleton Man sect. To get people to quit being so obsessed with having those one hundred and twenty-seven bodies showering down on them.”

  “Sort of like all that therapy business in Colorado after all those kids got shot at the school, I guess,” Leaphorn said.

  “Sort of,” Louisa agreed. “And listen, if Chee and Officer Dashee are coming down here, let me know where I can find them. Cell phones are pretty chancy, but sometimes they work. I’m talking to you on mine right now.”

  “Fair enough,” Leaphorn said. “And when you’re back here, I want to show you the little leather pollen pouch that the diamond Shorty McGinnis showed me had been kept in. It has an animal-looking symbol sewed into it. New to me but I thought you might recognize it.”