Skeleton Man

by Tony Hillerman

  “These days it would probably be something out of a Disney movie,” Louisa said.

  After they clicked off, it occurred to him that he hadn’t told Louisa where to find Chee or Dashee. In fact, he didn’t know himself.

  Where had he jotted down that cell phone number? Back of an envelope maybe. He’d sort through his waste-basket. Hope to get lucky. Or call the NTP office at Shiprock. Maybe someone there would have it.

  13

  Joanna Craig had followed Tuve on his homeward trip. His uncle had put him into a very dusty and much-dented pickup. Pickup trucks in Indian country are as common as taxicabs in Manhattan, but this one helped Joanna’s cause by carrying in its bed a huge box, big enough to house a king-sized refrigerator, with a gaudy red Kitchen Aide label.

  A couple of times she’d needed the help. Tuve’s uncle had ducked into a service station at Ganado, and she would have lost him had she not seen the big box sticking up as she rolled past on the highway. She would have lost him again just past the Polacca settlement when he made a turn she hadn’t anticipated, and then been lured into following another pickup, same shade of blue, same degree of dustiness. But she had again spotted the Kitchen Aide advertisement, did an illegal U-turn across the highway, and followed the box up a narrow road that struggled up the slopes of First Mesa to serve the little stone villages of Walpi, Hano, and Sichomovi and whatever lay beyond them.

  And now there it was, box and truck, parked down a short stretch of weedy track that led to a flat stone house and its supporting storage shed, sheep pen, outhouse, and the rusty remains of an earlier pickup. She saw no sign of Tuve, his uncle, or anyone else, and drove past. She found a cluster of junipers where she could park mostly out of sight and watch the house. She would wait, and worry, and reconsider her strategy for doing what she absolutely had to do, must do, was destined to do. Usually she thought of it as getting justice. When she was angry, she admitted her goal was revenge, but now that she was here, she knew it was fate. Fate had moved her along. This was the only way she could destroy Dan Plymale. And that was her dream and her destiny.

  No need for the car’s air conditioner in the cool, dry air of the Hopi Mesa. She rolled down the window, got her binoculars out of the glove box, and focused on the Tuve home place. The truck was empty. Nothing stirred but a faint plume of smoke that came from the horno oven behind the house. She had already considered and rejected the idea of simply knocking on the door, introducing herself, and explaining to Tuve’s mother and uncle why she had put up bail for Billy Tuve and why she desperately needed his help. She was certain she could sway Billy—had seen the sympathy showing in his face in her hotel room. But mother and uncle were older, would be skeptical, would be more religious, would be impossible to persuade that the Salt Trail rules could be bent. She’d have to wait for an opportunity to get Billy alone. At least wait until after his uncle had left. Without someone there to interrupt her, Joanna was sure she could use that combination of his own self-interest and his sympathy for her own plight to persuade him. And probably his mother, too.

  Whether Tuve could find the man who supplied him his trouble-making gem seemed less likely, and even if he did, whether that would lead her to her father’s bones was another unanswerable question. But she would recover those bones. And they would prove she was heir to the Clarke fortune and bring Dan Plymale and his phony, greed-driven Eternal Peace Foundation crashing down in bankrupt ruins.

  Someone had emerged from the rear of the Tuve house. She shifted to the passenger window, getting a clearer view, and focused on a woman, plump, walking slowly, carrying a basket to a clothesline strung between the storage shed and a nearby tree, hanging out a shirt, a pair of denims, socks, underwear. Probably what Tuve had been wearing when he was taken to jail.

  Joanna dropped the binoculars on the seat and squirmed into a more comfortable position. Ready for more waiting, more planning, more remembering. And for reinforcing the absolute confidence she must have to finish this job. She would because she must. Because it was her fate. Fate had been painfully slow, but it had finally led her here, and it would take her to those bones, and they would give her—finally—the peace of knowing she had done her duty. The peace of taking on her own name, of having it legally changed to Joanna Clarke. Having finally revenged her mother. And her father. And herself.

  Revenge had been her purpose since she was in high school, living with her mother and her mother’s elderly husband in his lavish summer home in the Montana mountains, and finally learning that Craig was a fiction and that her father was John Clarke.

  The elderly husband had been dying of some variation of cancer, probably had been dying when her mother, just thirty at the time, married him, an old gray man with a chauffeur-driven car. Joanna had been a flower girl at the wedding, only nine but old enough even then to wonder why her mother was the bride of a frail-looking grandfather. It wasn’t until her mother’s death the year after she’d graduated from the University of Montana that she knew the rest of the story. Or knew her real name.

  Her mother’s lawyer had given her the letter—a thick envelope with a stamped wax seal. On it her mother had written: “To be given to my daughter, Joanna Clarke, in the event of my death.”

  A man emerged from the front door of the Tuve house. Joanna refocused the binoculars. Tuve’s uncle, with Tuve standing in the open door saying something to him. Uncle climbed into the pickup, the motor started, the truck backed down the track, turned on to the road, and headed slowly down the way they had come. Billy Tuve disappeared from the doorway, closed the door. Joanna switched her view to the back of the house, located Tuve’s mother at the sheep pen, the gate open now, the sheep emerging. Joanna turned her view to the pickup, disappearing now over the mesa rim. Back to Tuve’s mother. She was following the sheep, presumably to where they would be grazing. The front door was still closed. She would wait about five minutes. Then she would call on Billy Tuve, and persuade him, and take him to the top of the Salt Trail, and down it to realize her destiny.

  Destiny, however, did not allow her a full five minutes. Just as she turned the ignition key to start the engine to drive down to Tuve’s house, to complete this phase of her project, another car emerged over the rim, a white sedan moving fast. Joanna decided she would wait another minute to allow it to pass. It didn’t. It slowed, turned down the track to the Tuve house, stopped there. A man emerged, a big man. Billy Tuve appeared at the front door. They met in the doorway and talked. To Joanna, her binoculars focused, they appeared to be arguing. Billy made a negative gesture. The argument resumed. Billy disappeared inside. The man waited on the doorstep. And waited. Joanna glanced at her watch. Two minutes passed. Four minutes. The man leaned against the door frame, shifted his hat to shade his face from the sun.

  Joanna suddenly felt sick. She knew who this man must be. He would be a man named Sherman. The man who had been at the Park Service Center just before her, asking questions about where victims of that plane crash were buried, and then asking about who had been handing out the sheets offering a reward for information about them.

  “You just missed him,” the clerk had told her. “He was really curious about your reward offer. He said his name was Sherman and he needed to find you. I asked him if he knew anything about the diamonds and he just laughed.”

  The name Sherman might be phony, Joanna thought, but whatever it was, it might as well be Plymale. He’d be bought and paid by that lawyer, just one of the tentacles answering to Dan Plymale. Which meant Plymale had got to Billy Tuve before her.

  As she thought that, Billy Tuve reappeared in the doorway. He was carrying a zippered bag of blue canvas which seemed fairly heavy as he swung it into the back seat of Sherman’s car. They drove away down the mesa road and over the rim.

  Joanna, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Following was easier this time because she was almost sure she knew where they were going and the vehicle was an easy-to-spot white sedan. But what would she have to do when they g
ot there? She pulled her purse over beside her, snapped it open, reached inside, extracted a pistol, and steeled herself for what lay ahead.

  The pistol, like most everything she was doing, as well as her fierce malice, her nightmare dreams, dated back to the letter her mother had left her. She could remember it, word for word.

  Dearest Joanna:

  I have lied to you all these years because I didn’t want you to inherit the pain I have lived through since your father died. But I believe you must know. Lieutenant David Shaw, killed in Vietnam after your conception, was a lie. He didn’t exist. He was my cover story. Your father was John Clarke Jr., killed in that awful airliner collision in Arizona about six months before your birth. He was flying home for our wedding. His father (your grandfather, although he never would have admitted it) was a widower. He had already told John, his only child, that he would not attend the ceremony. He told me in a letter that I was “gold-digging white trash, in no way fit for his family.”

  Much of the rest of that first page recounted other such insults. It told how the elder Clarke, already the victim of two heart attacks, had suffered a stroke during those days when the hunt was on for the bodies of airline crash victims. He died without recovering from the coma and his affairs were taken over by his law firm, the Plymale firm, which represented a tax-exempt foundation the old man had started.

  The law firm was Plymale, Stevens, Ebersten, and Daly, and one of its junior members was Dan Plymale Jr., son of the senior partner. The firm seemed to have suspected that Joanna’s mother had conceived young Clarke’s child. The senior Plymale contacted her, told her she had no claim to any share of the estate, but offered her ten thousand dollars to sign a legal disclaimer. She had discussed this with Hal Simmons, who told her that the senior Clarke’s will left the bulk of his estate to John, or descendants of John if John preceded him in death. If no such descendants existed, the bulk of the estate went to the foundation he had initiated with the guidance of Dan Plymale. The executor of the estate, and the director of the charity foundation, was to be Plymale’s law firm.

  She had given Hal Simmons copies of the love letters John had written her, including those discussing her pregnancy, along with the final letter. In that, Clarke said he would be “home tomorrow to hold you in my arms, and take you down to the church and thereby make that little child we have conceived legal and respectable—and to hell with what Daddy Clarke thinks of it.”

  Simmons met with the Plymales, father and son. He showed them the letters and proposed a negotiated settlement. The Plymales refused, saying the letters were not sufficient evidence. However, in view of the pregnancy, they offered to increase the ten-thousand-dollar settlement offer to thirty thousand dollars, providing that the fetus would be aborted, and proof of the abortion provided.

  Joanna remembered precisely what her mother had written: “Remember, Joanna, the twenty thousand dollars they added to the offer. That was the value they put on your life. Twenty thousand dollars the fee for killing you in my womb.”

  Twenty thousand dollars! When she heard that was the estimated value of her father’s diamond, the diamond poor Billy Tuve had tried to pawn for twenty dollars, the irony struck deep. She had laughed and then she’d cried, and then she’d wondered if that had been the very diamond her father had been bringing home to her mother as a wedding gift, and then she had cried again. And now it turned out to be that this diamond, or another one just like it, was leading her to her destiny.

  Simmons told her mother that the Plymales probably had the right reading of the laws. They would need more evidence to prove that her unborn child was the product of Clarke’s seed. With some of the money her mother had inherited from her husband’s estate and perhaps the promise of a generous contingency agreement, Simmons retained a national private investigation firm to learn everything possible about John Clarke, his jewelry business, the last months of his life, and the circumstances of his death.

  The information had come in slowly. First the knowledge that her father had been bringing a package of specially cut diamonds back to New York from Los Angeles. That information had come from a dealer in Manhattan’s diamond district who had been awaiting them. Seventy-four stones, ranging in weight from 3.7 carats to 7.2, all of them perfect blue-whites, one specially cut for her mother—just as John Clarke had told her in his terminal letter. And in that final letter, her father had drawn a neat little sketch of the gem, showing how the cutter had shaped it for her.

  From airline employees in Los Angeles, the agency collected statements confirming that Clarke had boarded the aircraft with the diamond case locked to his left wrist, and that he had fended off security people who wanted to open it for inspection, explaining that those carrying diamonds—like security messengers—couldn’t unlock such cases. The key to do that had been delivered by another messenger to the person who would receive them, count them, weigh them, and sign receipts for them.

  From National Park Service employees, guides who worked in the canyon, from Arizona police, from a half-dozen Havasupai citizens who had been involved in recovering bodies and parts of the shattered aircraft, the agency learned that Clarke’s body had not been recovered for identification. They also learned that one of a party of tourists who had been on a guided raft float down the Colorado eleven days after the disaster had seen a body part, a forearm, in driftwood debris below one of the rapids. He had not been able to reach the driftwood through the current but had taken photographs from a nearby outcrop. When a party of guides managed to be back there two weeks later to recover the arm, it was gone, as was part of the collected flotsam the man had seen with it. A search downstream proved fruitless.

  The agency reported that the man who shot the photographs was now dead but his family had kept prints and negatives as a sort of macabre souvenir of what had been, at the time, the worst airline disaster in history. Copies were made and provided to Simmons and her mother, and now Joanna kept copies in her purse. They were the only photographs she had of her father. The Clarke family relatives had refused her requests for old family pictures.

  In the final report, the agency provided a collection of interviews with a number of people—mostly Havasupai, some Grand Canyon National Park employees, some professional guides, some tourists passing through—who spoke of reports about a man, described generally as having long gray or white hair, being slender, wearing worn or ragged clothing, having claimed to have found a severed arm in the Colorado River, or recovered it from a drift of flotsam. While these stories varied in many details, most of those interviewed agreed that the man had been on what is called the “south side” of the river—below the most tourist-popular South Rim—and downstream from where the Little Colorado River Canyon connects to the Grand Canyon. They also seemed in various ways to suggest that he was a hermit, some sort of eccentric, perhaps a religious fanatic. Two of these proposed that he was a Havasupai shaman who had disappeared about twenty years earlier and was remembered as a visionary with a talent for finding lost children, missing animals, anything lost.

  The way Joanna saw it, an important element of these fragmentary “hermit reports” was the mention in three of them that this strange fellow had considered himself either a priest or the guardian of a shrine. One report included his description of what happened when sunlight reached this shrine: “He said when this happened it ‘responded to the Father Sun with a dazzling light,’ but he said this occurred only late in the morning with the sun almost overhead.”

  To Joanna, “dazzling light” suggested the sun striking diamonds, which perhaps decorated this odd man’s shrine. But more important was the dating of these third-hand reports. In one the person being interviewed said he had met this hermit only three years earlier. Another had placed his conversation with the man “probably about July, two years back.”

  Thus it was reasonable to think he was still alive. And the man who could help her find this hermit was just ahead. The white sedan was slowing, turning down tracks t
hat led to the rim of the mesa, led to the edge of the long, long drop down into the canyon. Probably led to the starting point of the Hopi trail that headed down to the Salt Shrine.

  Joanna stopped at the turnoff point, watched and waited until the white sedan disappeared behind a screen of junipers. Then she followed slowly. Give them just enough time to get their bottom-of-the-canyon gear out of the car. Her plan was to get there just before they started their descent. What then? She would decide when she had to.

  But there was the white sedan, parked. The two men still in it. The passenger-side door opened, was jerked closed again. Joanna parked, snatched up her binoculars, and stared. Some sort of struggle seemed to be going on. Then it ended. She could make out what must be Tuve’s head against the passenger-side window, and part of the driver’s face. He was talking.

  Joanna got out, holding her pistol behind her. She walked slowly to the rear of the white sedan, keeping to the driver’s side, keeping out of the line of sight of the man she presumed was Sherman, glad for the silence of the hiking shoes she was wearing. She could hear his voice now through the open car window, loud and angry. She slid along against the side of the sedan now, seeing Billy Tuve huddled against the opposite door, face down.

  Sherman was moving his right hand up and down, a gesture of some sort. He was staring at Tuve, still talking. The right hand held a pistol. Joanna looked down at her own pistol, smaller than the police model Sherman was waving. She cocked it, made certain the safety was off. Very quietly she took the required two more steps, stood at the open car window, thrust her pistol through it, pressed the muzzle against Sherman’s neck, said, “Mr. Sherman, drop that pistol on your lap.”

  “What?” Sherman said, in a strangled voice. He tried to turn his head.