Skeleton Man

by Tony Hillerman

Joanna jammed her pistol under his ear, said, “Drop it. Now. Or die.”

  Sherman dropped his pistol. Said, “I’m police. Who the hell are you? Let me get my badge out.”

  “Take that pistol of yours by the end of the barrel with your left hand,” Joanna said, keeping the pressure of her gun against his ear. “Then reach around and hand it to me. Butt first. Otherwise I pull the trigger and you’ve got a bullet in your head.”

  “Be cool,” Sherman said. “Be easy.” He reached over with his left hand, took the pistol barrel between thumb and first finger, and handed it back to her—butt first.

  Joanna had reached her own left hand into her jacket pocket and extracted a dainty little handkerchief. With that she accepted Sherman’s pistol, glanced at it, noticed it wasn’t cocked.

  “I know who you are,” Sherman said. “You’re that woman who’s trying to get her hands on that big Clarke estate,” he said. “Or maybe you’re someone working for her.”

  “And you are a private eye named Sherman,” Joanna said. “What are you doing here?”

  “He was going to kill me,” Billy Tuve said. He had turned and sat facing her, back pressed against his door. “He said if I didn’t take him down our Salt Trail, he’d shoot me and throw me over the edge and let the coyotes eat me.”

  “Little bastard’s lying,” Sherman said. “He promised me. I wasn’t going to shoot him.”

  “Tell me who you’re working for,” Joanna said. “I already know, but I want to confirm it. So don’t lie.”

  Sherman was facing her now, looking into the muzzle of her pistol, held just too far from him to reach if he decided to try.

  “His name’s Chandler,” the man said. “Bradford Chandler. Runs Skippers Agency, I think it is.” Joanna considered this. “Chandler hired you,” she said. “Who hired him? And what’s he supposed to do?”

  Sherman made a face, bit his lower lip, considered. “You probably already know about the lost jewelry,” he said.

  “Keep talking.”

  “Chandler wants it.”

  Joanna nodded. Said, “And…”

  Sherman shrugged. “You think there’s more to it than that?”

  “I know there’s more to it than that. You already mentioned the estate. But you haven’t told me who hired this Bradford Chandler.”

  “Look,” Sherman said, his voice sounding angry now. “I’m an officer of the law. Who the hell do you—”

  Joanna jammed the pistol against his left eye socket.

  “All right, all right,” Sherman squeaked. “Chandler was pretty coy about it. I think it’s a law firm.”

  “Name,” Joanna said.

  “Probably Plymale,” Sherman said. “I think that’s it. And it’s involved with some foundation he’s running.”

  The pistol muzzle was still uncomfortably in Sherman’s eye socket. She had released the pressure, but now she restored it.

  “I hope you don’t want me to believe that old man is just after the diamonds,” she said.

  Sherman’s head was pressed back against the car seat. “No. No,” he said. “Somebody else is after the diamonds, but mostly they’re after some bones. Want to get the bones for the DNA. For proof in some lawsuit. Hell of a lot of money involved. And some woman is after the bones, too, and this Indian here with me, he’s supposed to know where to find them. He was—”

  “What’s the name of the woman?” Joanna asked.

  “Craig,” Sherman said. “Joanna Craig, I think.”

  Joanna removed her pistol from Sherman’s face, cocked Sherman’s pistol, carefully keeping her handkerchief over the hammer.

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “That’s it,” Sherman said. “But I can sure as hell tell you you’re not going to get away with this. Treating an officer—”

  But by then Joanna had thrust Sherman’s heavy pistol through the window, jammed it against his rib cage, and pulled the trigger.

  14

  Bradford Chandler had done all the things he needed to do at the South Rim entrance to the Grand Canyon. He’d checked into a very comfortable suite in the Grand Hotel, made a just-in-case visit to the Grand Canyon airport to check on the availability of charter fliers, reserved a jeep for a guided tour, filled out all the required U.S. Park Service paperwork for touring down into the depths, and collected a little information about the do’s and don’ts of canyon tripping. One of the do’s was a reminder that this was the “monsoon season” in the mountain west, a season of thunderstorms, and that these tended to produce quick, brief, and dangerous flash floods sweeping down the subsidiary canyons leading down to the Colorado River.

  As was his custom, he had picked the most attractive young female Park Service employee there as his source of information, quickly noted from her ID tag that her name was Mela, and turned on his prep-school charm. He was supposed to meet his aunt here, he told this young lady. She was Mrs. Joanna Craig. But, alas, he was late. Could she tell him if Mrs. Craig had already checked in to get the required permits and some advice? The young lady, trained to be helpful to tourists, probably didn’t need the encouragement of the Chandler charm. She checked.

  Yes, Mela said, a Ms. Joanna Craig had indeed checked in for a visit down into the canyon.

  “It was yesterday,” she said, returning Chandler’s smile. “You’re even later than you thought.”

  “Maybe I can still catch her,” he said. “Is she staying at that big hotel?” He dug his notebook from his jacket pocket, flipped through pages long enough to suggest a search. “We’re planning to go down the Hopi Salt Shrine Trail. Did she say anything about that? Did she say which trail she would be taking?”

  Chandler left with a no to both questions and a warning from the Park Service aide that going down the Salt Trail would require dealing with the Hopi authorities. It was restricted for Hopi religious use and it probably would not be possible for him to go down there. His next stop was the hotel. Yes, a Ms. Joanna Craig was registered. He dialed her room number from the house phone. No answer. No need for his “Sorry, wrong number” excuse. That accomplished, he drove to a tourist parking lot and found himself a place to sit with shade and a view. There he waited for his cell phone to ring and get the word from Sherman that would begin the final phase of this project.

  Sherman had called earlier, reporting success. He had located the home of Tuve’s mother, found Tuve there, identified himself as a deputy sheriff sent to take Tuve back to Gallup to clear up some problem about bonding him out. Then Sherman said he’d told Tuve that he didn’t believe he’d killed the man at the Zuni shop, that he wanted to help Tuve find the old man who had swapped him the diamond and thereby prove his innocence.

  “Cut it short,” Chandler had said. “Where is he now?”

  “Out taking a leak,” Sherman said. “We can talk?”

  “Well, make it quick. Where do we meet?”

  Sherman had said he didn’t know yet. “He says he has to go down something they call the Salt Trail to get close to the place he met this bird, but he says nobody can go down without doing the proper religious things. You need to understand I’m having trouble talking him into it. So far, the best he’ll agree to is to show me the place on the rim where the trail starts. He says he’ll do the blessing thing with us, give us some pollen and prayer sticks to use to protect us from the spirits, but he won’t go down with us.”

  “The hell he won’t! What’s wrong with you, Sherman? I understood you know how to get reluctant people to do what they don’t want to do.”

  “He says it’s not his fault. Says their Guardian Spirits keep people who aren’t supposed to be there from using that trail.” Sherman chuckled. “He says these spirits are sort of like us humans, except they have two hearts, still talk to the animals, have all sorts of powers. And they’ll make us fall over the edge, rocks drop on us, snakes biting us, that sort of thing. Says he’ll help us but he won’t go down with us. Anyway, he’s going to guide me to a parking place at the
rim now, where the climb down starts, and when I get there, I’ll let you know. It can’t be very far from the South Rim entrance. You want me to wait for you there? What’s the plan?”

  “Look, Sherman. It won’t do a damn bit of good to climb down there if he’s not going down with us. We have to have him there to be our guide.”

  “I told him that. Then he said it would be easy for us, and he told me exactly how to get from the end of the trail to the place he was sitting when the man showed up with the diamond, and the other directions we’ll need.”

  “Let’s hear ’em,” Chandler said.

  Sherman explained the directions—the number of feet from water’s edge, number of paces down the river, number of paces around a corner of the cliff to the mouth of a drainage slough where he thinks the old man lives, number of minutes Tuve said it took the man to return.

  “I think we could do it without him,” he said.

  “Maybe we could,” Chandler said, “but there’s too much money riding on this for us to settle for maybe.”

  “I wasn’t intending to settle for any maybe, either,” Sherman said. “He’ll take us down.”

  Chandler said, “Yeah?” Emphasis on the skeptical sound.

  “Come on, Chandler,” Sherman said. “You already reminded me I had a rep for getting people to do what they didn’t want to do. You need to remember I ran a police department criminal investigation unit. I haven’t forgotten the old tricks. I learned what would get cooperation out of all sorts of people. People a lot tougher than this dumb little Indian.”

  Hearing Sherman say that restored a lot of Chandler’s confidence. The man did have a reputation, a bad one in some circles, for his skill at getting reluctant suspects to reveal where bodies had been hidden, the identities of cohorts, and other crucial information—facts that helped the cause of law enforcement far more than the prospects of the persons accused.

  “All right, then,” Chandler had said. “How about the other stuff on that list I gave you. What did you find out about the woman who bonded Tuve out?”

  “She’s interesting,” Sherman said. “Her name—the one she’s using, anyway—is Joanna Craig, from New York, and from what I’ve been hearing from various people in the law-and-order business, she was out here a couple of times earlier trying to find her father’s grave.”

  Sherman waited a response to that. Got none.

  “Probably the woman you told me about,” he added.

  “Go on,” Chandler said.

  “Doesn’t that surprise you?”

  “Not much,” Chandler said.

  “It surprised me,” Sherman said. “It makes me uneasy when I don’t know what I’m poking into.”

  “Well, the man we’re working for told me there’s a lawsuit involved in this somehow. An old inheritance dispute. Nothing we need to know about. Just tell me more about the woman.”

  “Well, she said her dad’s name was Clarke and he was killed in that collision of the two airlines that killed so many people back in the 1950s. She told people she was looking for where her daddy was buried. Wanted to visit the grave.”

  “But she didn’t find it?”

  “Guess not,” Sherman said. “I think that collision, and the fires that followed it, left a real mess. Had to gather up body parts in bags. And a lot of them burned.”

  Remembering Sherman’s attitude brightened Chandler’s mood. He relaxed, enjoying the cool shade, enjoying the amazing, incredible view. Like every other adult American, he had seen so many dazzling photographs of this canyon that it had become a cliché. But Chandler was thinking those photographs had never captured what he was seeing now. He was struck by the mind-boggling immensity of this hole worn out of the earth crust, officially 277 miles of it on the guide book map he had bought, from the Glen Canyon Dam to Lake Mead, not just one canyon but hundreds of them, cutting through layers and layers and layers of stone and other minerals, lava flow and ocean-bottom sediment being hurried into the Colorado River and onward toward the Pacific by the inexorable force of gravity and running water. He was thinking suddenly of his terminal year as a college student, just before his macho appetite for sexual adventures got him arrested and then expelled, thinking of the geology class, of old Dr. Delbert projecting color slides of these same cliffs on the screen and trying to lead them upward from the pale yellow strata near the bottom he called Tapeats Sandstone. “Over that,” he said, “is Bright Angel Shale. That gray on top of that is Muav Limestone.” And upward, through other layers, colors, ages, with Dr. Delbert jabbing the screen with his pointer, until they finally reached the dark strip of Hermit Shale, and into the Coconino Sandstone and the Toroweap Formation.

  And thus it would go, with Delbert’s creaky old voice stripping off the layers of the Colorado Plateau from the core of a newly formed planet to the last volcanic age, hardly a millennium past. It was the only class that Chandler had really enjoyed. The only class that had seriously interrupted his preoccupation with the seduction of the daughters of the super-rich. They were always there, all around him, nodding and giggling through these lectures. He thought now he should have become a geologist.

  He was considering that when another cloud formation made its way across the canyon, changing the light pattern, reminding him that time was passing, that Sherman still hadn’t called. Why not?

  Chandler dug his cell phone out of its belt holster and punched in the number Sherman had given him. It rang, and rang, and rang, and rang. He checked the number. It was correct and it was still ringing. Suddenly a voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Sherman?”

  No answer. Then: “Who is this calling?”

  Odd, Chandler thought, but it sounded like Sherman. Sort of. Had that no-nonsense “cop talking” ring to it.

  “It’s Chandler, dammit. Who were you expecting? And where the hell are you? We’re wasting too much time. Is Tuve cooperating?”

  “What is your business with Mr. Sherman?” the voice said. “Identify yourself.”

  “Just a moment,” Chandler said. “Can you hear me all right? I can barely hear you.” He rechecked the number he’d punched. It was Sherman’s. But he was, almost certainly, talking to a cop. Which meant something had gone very wrong.

  “Can you hear me now?” Chandler asked.

  “Perfectly,” the voice said.

  “Well, I’m very curious about this. You seem to have Sherman’s phone. Where’s Sherman?”

  “You were going to tell me who you are. And where you’re calling from.”

  “Oh, yes,” Chandler said. “I’m Jim Belshaw. And I’m calling from the Best Western at Flagstaff. Sherman was supposed to come and meet me here. How come you have his telephone?”

  “How come you have his number?”

  Chandler thought for a moment about how to make his voice sound angry. “Well, you just better ask him that. But let me talk to him. What the hell’s going on? He was supposed to be here an hour ago. Is he all right?”

  “You a friend?”

  “Yes. Yes I am. Has something happened to him?”

  “I’m Officer J. D. Moya, Arizona State Police. And Mr. Belshaw, I want you to stay right where you are until I can get someone there to talk to you.”

  “Sure. I’ll be here at the Best Western. Did something happen to him? Can I do something to help?”

  “I hate to tell you this,” Officer Moya said, “but the man in the car is in critical condition.”

  “Critical condition?” Chandler said. “Car accident? Or what?”

  “Shot,” Moya said. “Do you know why he carried a gun?”

  That left Chandler speechless. But only for a moment.

  “Somebody shot him? Carjacking, was it? Or maybe an accident. But I didn’t even know he had a gun.”

  Moya didn’t respond to that. He said, “What was he doing parked out by the rim of the Grand Canyon?”

  “I have no idea,” Chandler said. “Was he alone? Have you caught whoever shot him? I’d b
e surprised if he’d be picking up a hitchhiker. Or does it look like he shot himself?”

  “This investigation has just started, Mr. Belshaw. I’m not in a position to release any information.”

  Chandler considered this for a moment. How long would it take Arizona State Police to discover there was no Jim Belshaw at the Flagstaff Best Western? Probably just a few minutes. Moya would radio the state cop office in Flagstaff, tell them to send someone over. Then what? When the crime scene crew arrived, and a regular criminal investigator got there, they’d be looking at that little notebook Sherman carried. Would they find Brad Chandler’s name written in it? Would they find Chandler’s cell phone number? An awfully good chance of that. And maybe the Grand Hotel number.

  “Officer Moya,” Chandler said. “If somebody shot Sherman, I want to see him punished. I probably don’t know anything that would help, but if I knew more about what you found, maybe that would trigger a memory. For example, I think he was planning to take a hike down into the canyon. Was there any hiking stuff in his vehicle? For example, he told me once he knew an Indian who he was going to hire as a guide if he went. So if he was doing that, maybe there would be two sets of camping stuff, or hiking stuff, in the car.”

  This caused a moment of silence on the Moya end of the conversation.

  “Well, thank you for the offer, Mr. Belshaw. But you were wrong about that. I saw what seemed to be just one backpack in the car. But then we don’t mess around with the scene of a violent crime like this until the crime scene crew gets here with all its stuff. I just reached in to get a look at his billfold for an identification, and noticed the blood and that big pistol down on the floor. That’s about all. Hold on just a minute.”

  Chandler held on, nervously, hearing the sounds of Moya using his radio.

  “Mr. Belshaw, you sure you gave me that Flagstaff hotel right? We radioed in. Our Flagstaff office said Best Western doesn’t have any Belshaw registered.”

  Chandler managed a laugh. “That because I just pulled into the front entrance here, decided to call Sherman before I checked in, and got all this bad news. I’ll go in now and see if they’re still holding my reservation. I’ll check in and wait. But with Sherman in bad shape, I may not want to stay here in Flagstaff.”