Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 08 - A Thief of Time

by A Thief of Time(lit)

  Chee waited, but Leaphorn seemed to have nothing to add.

  "I didn't know any of that," Chee said. "Just knew Nails and a friend stole the backhoe when I was supposed to be watching the maintenance yard."

  "Nice little tangle of strings, and right here is the knot," Leaphorn said.

  And none of it any of Leaphorn's business, Chee thought. Not if he had resigned. So why was he out here, sitting on that stone wall with his legs in the sun, with almost two hundred miles of driving already behind him today? He must enjoy it or he wouldn't be here. So why has he resigned?

  "Why did you resign?" Chee asked. "None of my business, I guess, but."

  Leaphorn seemed to be thinking about it. Almost as if for the first time. He glanced at Chee, shrugged. "I guess I'm tired," he said.

  "But you're using leave time out here, chasing after whatever it is we have here."

  "I've been wondering about that myself," Leaphorn said. "Maybe it's the fire horse syndrome. Lifelong habit at work. I think it's because I'd like to find this Friedman-Bernal woman. I'd like to find her and sit her down and say: `Dr. Bernal, why did you prepare that big dinner and then go away and let it rot in your refrigerator?'"

  To Chee, the answer to why Dr. Bernal let her dinner spoil was all too easy. Especially now. Dr. Bernal was dead.

  "You think she's still alive?"

  Leaphorn considered. "After what we have here, it doesn't seem likely, does it?"

  "No," Chee said.

  "Unless she did it," Leaphorn said. "She had a pistol. She took it with her when she left Chaco."

  "What caliber?" Chee asked. "I heard this one was small."

  "All I know is small," Leaphorn said. "Small handgun. She carried it in her purse."

  "Sounds like twenty-two caliber," Chee said. "Or maybe a twenty-five or a small thirty-two."

  Leaphorn rose, stiffly, to his feet. Stretched his back, flexed his shoulders. "Let's see what we can find," he said.

  They found relatively little. The investigators from the county had taken the bodies and whatever else had interested them, which probably hadn't been much. The victims seemed to be clearly identified, and that would be checked with people who knew them for confirmation. The FBI would be asked to do a run on their fingerprints, just in case. The backhoe had been hauled away and would be gone over carefully for prints in the event the killer had been careless with his hands when he shot Nails. The rental truck would receive the same treatment. So would the two plastic sacks in which Chee had seen the pots carefully packed. And just in case, a cord had been run around the dig site, with the little tags dangling to warn citizens away from a homicide site. If some afterthought brought an investigator back to check on something, nothing would be disturbed.

  What interested Chee was outside the cord-a new cardboard carton bearing the red legend SUPERTUFF and the sublegend WASTEBASKET LINERS, and several other messages: "Why Pay More For Something You'll Throw Away? Six free in this carton. Thirty for the price of twenty-four!"

  The cardboard was smudged with white. Chee squatted beside it and recognized fingerprint powder. Someone had checked it and found the cardboard too rough to show prints. Chee picked it up, extracted the carefully folded plastic sacks. Counted them. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven plus two filled with pots made twenty-nine. He slipped the sacks back into the box and replaced it. One sack unaccounted for. Filled with what? Had the killer taken one set of pots and left the other two? Had Nails's girlfriend, if he had a girlfriend, borrowed one? It was one of those imponderables.

  He watched Leaphorn prowling along the trenches, inspecting digging procedures, or perhaps the human bones. Chee had been avoiding the bones without realizing it. Now almost at his foot he noticed the weathered flat surface of a scapula, broken off below the shoulder joint. Just beyond was a very small skull, complete except for the lower jaw. A child, Chee guessed, unless the Anasazi had been even smaller than he remembered. Beyond the skull, partly buried by the excavation dirt, were ribs, and part of a spinal column, the small bones of a foot, three lower jaws placed in a row.

  Chee stared. Why had that happened? He strolled over and looked down at them. One was broken, a small jaw with part of its left side missing. The other two were complete. Adult, Chee guessed. An expert would be able to tell the sex of their owners, the approximate ages at death, something about their diet. But why had someone lined them up like this? One of the pot hunters, Chee guessed. It didn't seem the sort of thing one of the deputies would have done. Then Chee noticed another jawbone, and three more, and finally a total of seventeen within a few yards of the juniper where he was standing. He could see only three craniums. Someone- again surely the pot hunters-had sorted out the jaws. Why? Chee walked over to where Leaphorn was standing, studying something in the trench.

  "Find anything?" Leaphorn asked, without looking up.

  "Nothing much," Chee said. "One of those plastic bags seems to be missing."

  Leaphorn looked up at him.

  "The box said contents thirty. There were still twenty-seven folded in it. I saw two with pots in them."

  "Interesting," Leaphorn said. "We'll ask about that at the sheriff's office. Maybe they took one."

  "Maybe," Chee said.

  "You notice anything about the skeletons?" Leaphorn was squatting now in the shallow trench, examining bones.

  "Somebody seemed to be interested in the jawbones," Chee said.

  "Yes," Leaphorn said. "Now why would that be?" He stood up, holding in both hands a small skull. It was gray with the clay of the grave, and the jaw was missing. "Why in the world would that be?"

  Chee had not the slightest idea, and said so.

  Leaphorn bent into the grave again, poking at something with a stick. "I think this is what they call a Chaco outlier site," he said. "Same people who lived in the great houses over in the canyon, or probably the same. I think there is some evidence, or at least a theory, that these outliers traded back and forth with the great-house people, maybe came into Chaco for their religious ceremonials. Nobody really knows. This was probably one of the sites being reserved for digging sometime in the future." He sounded, Chee thought, like an anthropology lecturer.

  "You have anything pressing to do in Shiprock tonight?" Chee denied it with a negative motion of his head.

  "How about stopping off at the Chaco Center on the way home then," Leaphorn said. "Let's see what we can find out about this."

  Chapter Ten

  ®

  FROM THE DESPOILED OUTLIER SITE to the eastern boundary of the Chaco Culture National Historic Park would be less than twenty-five miles if a road existed across the dry hills and Chaco Mesa. None did. By the oil company roads that carried Leaphorn and Chee back to Highway 44, thence northwest to Nageezi, and then southwest over the bumpy dirt aceess route, it was at least sixty miles. They arrived at the visitors' center just after sundown, found it closed for the day, and drove up to the foot of the bluff where employee housing was located. The Luna family was starting supper - the superintendent, his wife, a son of perhaps eleven, and a daughter a year or two younger. Supper centered on an entree involving macaroni, cheese, tomatoes, and things that Leaphorn could not readily identify. That he and Chee would eat was a foregone conclusion. Good manners demanded the disclaimer of hunger from the wayfarer, but the geography of the Colorado Plateau made it an obvious lie. Out here there was literally no place to stop to eat. And so they dined, Leaphorn noticing that Chee's appetite was huge and that his own had returned. Perhaps it was the smell of the home cooking-something he hadn't enjoyed since Emma's sickness reached the point where it was no longer prudent for her to be in the kitchen.

  Bob Luna's wife, a handsome woman with a friendly, intelligent face, was full of questions about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. After polite feelers established that questions were not out of order, she asked them. The Luna son, Allen, a blond, profusely freckled boy who looked like a small copy of his blond and freckled mother, put down his fork and listened. His s
ister listened without interrupting her supper.

  "We haven't learned much," Leaphorn said. "Maybe the county has done better. It is their jurisdiction. But I doubt it. No sheriff ever has enough officers. In San Juan County it's worse than normal. You're worried to death with everything from vandalism of summer cabins up on Navajo Lake to people tapping distillate out of the gas pipelines, or stealing oil field equipment, things like that. Too much territory. Too few people. So missing persons don't get worked on." He stopped, surprised at hearing himself deliver this defense of the San Juan County Sheriffs Office. Usually he was complaining about it. "Anyway," he added, lamely, "we haven't learned anything very useful."

  "Where could she have gone?" Mrs. Luna said. Obviously it was something she had often thought about. "So early in the morning. She told us she was going to Farmington, and got the mail we had going out, and our shopping lists, and then just vanished." She glanced from Chee to Leaphorn and back. "I'm afraid it isn't going to have a happy ending. I'm afraid Ellie got in over her head with a man we don't know about." She attempted a smile. "I guess that sounds odd-to say that about a woman her age-but at this place, it's so small-so few of us live here, I mean-that everybody tells everybody everything. It's the only thing we have to be interested in. One another."

  Luna laughed. "It's pretty hard to have secrets here," he said. "You have experienced our telephone. You don't get any secret calls. And you don't get any secret mail-unless it happens to show up at Blanco the day you happen to pick it up." He laughed again. "And it would be pretty hard to have any secret visitors."

  But not impossible, Leaphorn thought. No more impossible than driving out to make your calls away from here, or setting up a post office box in Farmington.

  "You just get to know everything by accident even if people don't mention it," Mrs. Luna said. "For example, going places. I hadn't thought to tell anybody when I was going to Phoenix over the Fourth to visit my mother. But everybody knew because I got a postcard that mentioned it, and Maxie or somebody picked up the mail that day." If Mrs. Luna resented Maxie or somebody reading her postcard, it didn't show. Her expression was totally pleasant-someone explaining a peculiar, but perfectly natural, situation. "And when Ellie made that trip to New York, and when Elliot went to Washington. Even if they don't mention it, you just get to know." Mrs. Luna paused to sip her coffee. "But usually they tell you," she added. "Something new to talk about." At that she looked slightly abashed. She laughed. "That's about all we have to do, you know. Speculate about one another. TV reception is so bad out here we have to be our own soap operas."

  "When was the trip to New York?" Leaphorn asked.

  "Last month," Mrs. Luna said. "Ellie's travel agent in Farmington called and said the flight schedule had been changed. Somebody takes the message, so everybody knows about it."

  "Does anyone know why she went?" Leaphorn asked.

  Mrs. Luna made a wry face. "You win," she said. "I guess there are some secrets."

  "How about why Elliot went to Washington?" Leaphorn added. "When was that?"

  "No secret there," Luna said. "It was last month. A couple of days before Ellie left. He got a call from Washington, from his project director I think it was. Left a message. There was a meeting of people working on archaic migration patterns. He was supposed to attend."

  "Do you know if Ellie's going to New York had anything to do with her pots? Is that logical?"

  "Just about everything she did had something to do with her pots," Luna said. "She was sort of obsessive about it."

  Mrs. Luna's expression turned defensive. "Well now," she said, "Ellie was about ready to make a really important report. As least she thought so. And so do I. She pretty well had the proof that would connect a lot of those St. John Polychromes from the Chetro Ketl site with Wijiji and Kin Nahasbas. And more important

  than all that, she was finding that this woman must have moved away from Chaco and was making pots somewhere else."

  "This woman?" Luna said, eyebrows raised. "She tell you her potter was a woman?"

  "Who else would do all that work?" Mrs. Luna got up, got the coffeepot, and offered all hands, including the children, a refill.

  "She was excited, then?" Leaphorn asked. "About something she'd found recently? Did she talk to you about it?"

  "She was excited," Mrs. Luna said. She looked at Luna with an expression Leaphorn read as reproach. "I really do believe that she'd found something important. To everybody else those people are just a name. Anasazi. Not even their real name, of course. Just a Navajo word that means." She glanced at Chee. "Old Ones. Ancestors of our enemies. Something like that?"

  "Close enough," Chee said.

  "But Ellie has identified a single human being in what has always just been statistics. An artist. Did you know that she'd arranged her pots chronologically. showing how her technique developed?"

  The question was aimed at Luna. He shook his head.

  "And it's very logical. You can see it. Even if you don't know much about pots, or glazing, or inscribing, or any of those decorative techniques."

  Luna seemed to have decided about then that his self-interest dictated a change in posture on this issue.

  "She's done some really original work, Ellie has," he said. "Pretty well pinned down where this potter worked, up Chaco Wash at a little ruins we call Kin Nahasbas. She did that by establishing that a lot of pots made with this potter's technique had been broken there before they were fully baked in the kiln fire. Then she tied a bunch of pots dug up at Chetro Ketl and Wijiji to the identical personal techniques. Trade pots, you know. One kind swapped to people at Chetro Ketl and another sort to Wijiji. Both with this man's-this potter's peculiar decorating strokes. Hasn't been published yet, but I think she has it pinned."

  It gave Leaphorn a sense of deja vu, as if he remembered a graduate student over some supper in a dormitory at Tempe saying exactly these same words. The human animal's urge to know. To leave no mysteries. Here, to look through the dirt of a thousand years into the buried privacy of an Anasazi woman. "To understand the human species," his thesis chairman liked to say. "To understand how we came to behave the way we do." But finally it had seemed to Leaphorn he could understand this better among the living. It was the spring he'd met Emma. When the semester ended in May he'd left Arizona State and his graduate fellowship and his intentions of becoming Dr. Leaphorn, and joined the recruit class of the Navajo Tribal Police. And he and Emma.

  Leaphorn noticed Chee watching him. He cleared his throat. Sipped coffee.

  "Did you have any clear idea of what she was excited about?" Leaphorn asked. "I mean just before she disappeared. We know she drove over to Bluff and talked to a man over there named Houk. Man who sometimes deals in pots. She asked him about a pot she'd seen advertised in an auction catalog. Wanted to know where it came from. Houk told us she was very intense about it. He told her how to get the documentation letter. Did she say why she was going to New York?"

  "Not to me, she didn't," Mrs. Luna said.

  "Or why she was excited?"

  "I know some more of those polychrome pots had turned up. Several, I think. Same potter. Some identical and some with a more mature style. Later work. And it turned out they came from somewhere else - away from the Chaco. She thought she could prove her potter had migrated."

  "Did you know Ellie had a pistol?"

  Luna and his wife spoke simultaneously. "I didn't," she said. Luna said: "It doesn't surprise me. I'd guess Maxie has one, too. For snakes," he added, and laughed. "Actually it's for safety."

  "Do you know if she ever hired Jimmy Etcitty to find pots for her?"

  "Boy, that was a shock," Luna said. "He hadn't worked here long. Less than a year. But he was a good hand. And a good man."

  "And he didn't mind digging around graves."

  "He was a Christian," Luna said. "A fundamentalist born-again Christian. No more chindi. But no, I doubt if he worked for Ellie. Hadn't heard of it."

  "Had you ever heard
he might be a Navajo Wolf?" Leaphorn asked. "Into any kind of witchcraft. Being a skinwalker?"

  Luna looked surprised. And so, Leaphorn noticed, did Jim Chee. Not at the question, Leaphorn guessed. That fooling around with the bones they'd found at the ruins would suggest witchcraft to anyone who knew the Navajo tradition of skinwalkers robbing graves for bones to grind into corpse powder. But Chee would be surprised at Leaphorn's thinking. Leaphorn was aware that his contempt for the Navajo witchcraft business was widely known throughout the department. Chee, certainly, was aware of it. They had worked together in the past.

  "Well," Luna said. "Not exactly. But the other men who worked here didn't have much to do with him. Maybe that was because he was willing to dig around the burials. Had given up the traditional ways. But they gossiped about him. Not to me but among themselves. And I sort of sensed they were wary of him."