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

by A Thief of Time(lit)

  It didn't.

  The pause caused L. G. Marcy's smile to become slightly bent. Nothing more. She out-waited him. About his own age, Leaphorn thought, but she looked like a woman in her mid-thirties.

  Leaphorn stirred. Moved the umbrella off his lap. "I believe the FBI notified your company that we are investigating two homicides," he said. "This particular pot seems to figure into it. Your client won't be embarrassed. Not in any way. We simply."

  "I'm not sure the FBI exactly notified us of anything," Ms. Marcy said. "An FBI agent called from." She examined a notebook. ". Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told us that a representative of the Navajo Tribal Police would call today about an artifact we had handled. He said our cooperation would be appreciated. The call was referred to me, and when I questioned him about what the federal government interest might be, this agent, this Mr. Sharkey, he, well." Ms. Marcy hunted politely for a word politer than "weaseled."

  "He made it appear that his call was not official at all. It was intended as a sort of a personal introduction."

  Leaphorn simply nodded. Sharkey hadn't wanted to make the call, had foreseen embarrassment, had been talked into it. Having been caught at it, Sharkey would be angry and hard to deal with. But then in a few more days, nothing like that would matter. Leaphorn would be a civilian. He nodded again.

  "There's a system for dealing with problems like this, of course," Ms. Marcy said. "One petitions the appropriate court for an injunction. You then serve this order on us, and we provide you with the information. The requirement that we make available evidence needed in a judicial proceeding supersedes our own need to maintain a confidential relationship with our customers." Her expression was bland.

  After a moment, Leaphorn said, "Of course that's a possibility. We'd like to avoid it if we could." He shrugged. "The paperwork. We'd like to avoid all the delay." And, he thought, the problem of persuading the court that an item circled in a Nelson's catalog has anything at all to do with anything.

  "That's understandable," Ms. Marcy said. "I think you can also understand our position. Our clients rely on us to keep transactions confidential. For many good reasons." She made an inclusive gesture with small white hands. "Burglars," she said, "for one example. Former wives. Business reasons. So you must understand."

  Ms. Marcy began pushing back her chair. When she rises, Leaphorn thought, she will tell me that without a court order she cannot give me any information. He did something he almost never did. He interrupted.

  "Our problem is time," he said. "A woman's life may be at stake."

  Ms. Marcy lowered herself back into the chair. That little motion brought to Leaphorn's nostrils an awareness of perfume, and powder and fine feminine things. It reminded him, with overpowering force, of Emma. He closed his eyes, and opened them.

  "A woman who was very interested in this particular pot-the woman who drew the circle around it in your catalog-she's been missing for weeks," Leaphorn said. He took out his wallet, extracted his photograph of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, the bride. He handed it to Ms. Marcy. "Did she come in to see you? This autumn? Or call?"

  "Yes," Ms. Marcy said. "She was in." She studied the photograph, frowning. Leaphorn waited until she looked up.

  "Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal," he said. "An anthropologist. Published a lot of papers in the field of ceramics-and of primitive ceramic art. We gather that Dr. Friedman-Bernal believes she has discovered an Anasazi potter whose work she can specifically identify. Did she tell you all that?"

  As he related this, Leaphorn was aware of how mundane and unimportant it must sound to a layman. In fact, it sounded trivial to him. He watched Ms. Marcy's face.

  "Some of it," Ms. Marcy said. "It would be fascinating if she can prove it."

  "From what we can find out, Dr. Friedman-Bernal identified a decorative technique in the finishing of a kind of pottery called St. John Polychrome - a kind made in the last stages of the Anasazi civilization. She found that technique was peculiar to one single specific Anasazi potter."

  "Yes. That's what she said."

  Leaphorn leaned forward. If his persuasion didn't work, he'd wasted two days on airplanes and a night in a New York hotel.

  "I gather that this woman, this Anasazi potter, had some special talent which the doctor spotted. Dr. Friedman-Bernal was able to trace her work backward and forward in time through scores of pots, arranging them chronologically as this talent developed. The potter worked at Chaco Canyon, and her work turned up at several of the villages there. But recently - probably earlier this year - Friedman-Bernal began finding pots that seemed to come from somewhere else. And they were later pots - with the woman's style matured. Your spring auction catalog carried a photograph of one of these pots. We found the catalog in Dr. Friedman-Bernal's room, with the photograph circled."

  Ms. Marcy was leaning forward now. "But those pots, they were so stylized," she said. "So much alike. How. ?" She didn't complete the question.

  "I'm not sure," Leaphorn said. "I think she does it the way graphologists identify handwriting. Something like that."

  "It makes sense," Ms. Marcy said.

  "From what we know, from what Friedman-Bernal told other anthropologists, she seems to have believed that she could find the place to which this potter moved when the Chaco civilization collapsed," Leaphorn said.

  "About right," Ms. Marcy said. "She said she thought this pot was the key. She said she had come across several shards, and one complete pot, which she was sure came from a late phase in this potter's work-an extension and refinement and maturing of her techniques. The pot she'd seen in our catalog seemed to be exactly identical to this work. So she wanted to study it. She wanted to know where she could go to see it, and she wanted to see our documentation."

  "Did you tell her?"

  "I told her our policy."

  "So you didn't tell her who had bought it? Or how to contact the buyer?"

  Ms. Marcy sighed, allowed her expression to show a flash of impatience.

  "I told her the same thing I am telling you. One of the reasons people have been dealing with Nelson's for more than two hundred years is because of our reputation. They know they can depend, absolutely and without a qualm of doubt, on Nelson's keeping transactions in confidence."

  Leaphorn leaned forward.

  "Dr. Friedman-Bernal flew back to Albuquerque after she talked to you. Then she drove back to Chaco Canyon, where she lives and works. The following Friday she got up very early, put her sleeping bag into her car, and drove away. She'd told her friends she'd be gone for a day or two. We suspect that somehow she found out where this pot had come from and went to see if she could find something to prove it. Probably to see if there were other such pots, or potsherds, at the place."

  He leaned back, folded his hands across his chest, wondering if this would work. If it didn't, he was near a dead end. There was Chee, of course. He'd asked Chee to find the Reverend Slick Nakai - to learn from Nakai everything the man knew about where those damned pots were coming from. Chee seemed interested. Chee would do his best. But how smart was Chee? He should have waited, done it himself, not risked having it all screwed up.

  "She vanished," Leaphorn said. "No trace of the woman, or car, or anything. Not a word to anyone. As if Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had never existed."

  Ms. Marcy picked up the photograph and studied it. "Maybe she just went away," she said, looking up at Leaphorn. "You know. Too much work. Too much stress. Suddenly you just want to say to hell with it. Maybe that was it." She said it as a woman who knows the feeling.

  "Possibly," Leaphorn said. "However, the evening before she left she spent a lot of time fixing a dinner. Marinated the meat entree, all that. The professor she had worked with was coming in from Albuquerque. She fixed this fancy dinner and put it in the refrigerator. And at dawn the next morning she put her sleeping bag and things like that in her car and drove away."

  Ms. Marcy considered. She took the picture of Eleanor Friedman as a bride from the
desk and looked at it again.

  "Let me see what I can do," she said. She picked up the telephone. "Will you wait outside just a moment?"

  The reception room had no view of the rain. Just walls displaying abstract prints, and a receptionist in whom Leaphorn's damp Navajo Tribal Police uniform had aroused curiosity. He sat against the wall, glancing through an Architectural Digest, aware of the woman staring at him, wishing he had worn civilian clothes. But maybe it wasn't the uniform. Maybe it was the damp Navajo inside it.

  Ms. Marcy came out in a little less than ten minutes. She handed Leaphorn a card. It bore a name, Richard DuMont, and an address on East Seventy-eighth Street.

  "He said he would see you tomorrow morning," she said. "At eleven."

  Leaphorn stood. "I appreciate this," he said.

  "Sure," she said. "I hope you'll let me know. If you find her I mean."

  Leaphorn spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through the Museum of Modern Art. He sat, finally, where he could see the patio of sculpture, the rain-stained wall behind it, and the rainy sky above. Like all dry-country people, Leaphorn enjoyed rain - that rare, longed-for, refreshing blessing that made the desert bloom and life possible. He sat with his head full of thoughts and watched the water run down the bricks, drip from the leaves, form its cold pools on the flagstones, and give a slick shine to Picasso's goat.

  The goat was Leaphorn's favorite. When they were young and he was attending the FBI Academy, he had brought Emma to see New York. They had discovered Picasso's goat together. He had already been staring at it when Emma had laughed, and plucked at his sleeve, and said: "Look. The mascot of the Navajo Nation."

  He had an odd sensation as he remembered this, as if he could see them both as they had been then. Very young, standing by this glass wall looking out into the autumn rain. Emma, who was even more beautiful when she laughed, was laughing.

  "Perfect for us Dineh," she'd said. "It's starved, gaunt, bony, ugly. But look! It's tough. It endures." And she had hugged his arm in the delight of her discovery, her face full of the joy, and the beauty, that Leaphorn had found nowhere else. And of course, it was true. That gaunt goat would have been the perfect symbol. Something to put on a pedestal and display. Miserable and starved, true enough. But it was also pregnant and defiant-exactly right to challenge the world at the entrance of the ugly octagonal Tribal Council meeting hall at Window Rock. Leaphorn remembered their having coffee at the museum cafe and then walking out and patting the goat. The sensation came back to him now-wet, cold metal slick under his palm-utterly real. He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair.

  Leaphorn took a cab to the Seventy-eighth Street address, got there a quarter of an hour early, and spent the time prowling the neighborhood-a territory of uniformed doormen and expensive dogs walked by persons who seemed to have been hired for the job. He rang the door chimes at eleven exactly. He waited on the steps, looking at the sky down the street. It would rain again, and soon-probably before noon. An old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit, opened the door and stood silently, looking at him patiently.

  "My name is Leaphorn," he said. "I have an appointment with Richard DuMont."

  "In the study," the man said, motioning Leaphorn in.

  The study was a long, high-ceilinged room down a long, high-ceilinged hall. A man in a dark blue dressing gown was sitting at the end of a long library table. Light from a floor lamp beside his chair reflected off the white of a breakfast cloth, and china, and silver.

  "Ah, Mr. Leaphorn," the man said, smiling. "You are most punctual. I hope you will excuse me for not getting up to greet you." He tapped the arms of the wheelchair in which he was sitting. "And I hope you will join me for some breakfast."

  "No thank you," Leaphorn said. "I've eaten."

  "Some coffee, then?"

  "I have never refused coffee. Never will."

  "Nor I," DuMont said. "Another of my vices. But seat yourself." He gestured toward a blue plush chair. "The woman at Nelson's told me you are hunting a missing woman. An anthropologist. And that murder is involved." Du-Mont's small gray eyes peered at Leaphorn, avid with interest. Unusual eyes set in a pinched, narrow face under eyebrows almost identical in color to his pale skin. "Murder," he repeated, "and a missing woman." His voice was clear, precise, easy to understand. But like his face it was a small voice. Any background noise would bury it.

  "Two pot hunters were killed," Leaphorn said. Something about DuMont was unpleasant. Too much interest? But interest in such a man seemed natural enough. After all, he was a collector. "Including the man who found my pot," DuMont said, with what seemed to Leaphorn to be a sort of pleasure. "Or so that woman at Nelson's told me."

  "We think so," Leaphorn said. "Ms. Marcy told me you would be willing to let me see the documentation he sent in. We want to know where he found the pot."

  "The document," DuMont said. "Yes. But tell me how the man was killed. How the woman is missing." He raised his arms wide apart, his small mouth grinning. "Tell me all of that."

  Behind DuMont, on both sides of a great formal fireplace, shelves formed the wall. The shelves were lined with artifacts. Pots, carved stone images, baskets, fetishes, masks, primitive weapons. Just behind the man, a pedestal held a massive stone head - Olmec, Leaphorn guessed. Smuggled out of Mexico in defiance of that country's antiquities act.

  "Mr. Etcitty and a companion were digging up an Anasazi ruin, apparently collecting pots. Someone shot them," Leaphorn said. "An anthropologist named Friedman-Bernal was specializing in this sort of ceramics. In fact, she was interested in this pot you bought. She disappeared. Left Chaco Canyon - she worked there - for a weekend and hasn't come back."

  Leaphorn stopped. He and DuMont looked at each other. The stooped, gray man who had admitted Leaphorn appeared at his elbow, placed a small table beside his chair, spread a cloth upon it, put a silver tray on the cloth. The tray held a cup of paper-thin china sitting on a translucent saucer, a silver pot from which steam issued, two smaller silver containers, and a silver spoon. The gray man poured coffee into Leaphorn's cup and disappeared.

  "One doesn't buy merely the object," DuMont said. "One wants what goes with it. The history. This head, for example, came out of the jungles in northern Guatemala. It had decorated the doorway to a chamber in a temple. The room where captives were held until they were sacrificed. I'm told the Olmec priests strangled them with a cord."

  DuMont covered the lower part of his small face with his napkin and produced a small cough, his avid eyes on Leaphorn.

  "And this Anasazi pot of yours. Why is it worth five thousand dollars?" He laughed, a small, tinkling sound. "It's not much of a pot, really. But the Anasazi! Such mysterious people. You hold this pot, and think of the day it was made. A civilization that had grown a thousand years was dying." He stared into Leaphorn's eyes. "As ours is surely dying. Its great houses were standing empty. No more great ceremonials in the kivas. This is about when my pot was made - so my appraisers tell me. Right at the end. The twilight. In the dying days."

  DuMont did something at the arm of his wheelchair and said: "Edgar."

  "Yes sir." Edgar's voice seemed to come from under the table.

  "Bring me that pot we bought last month. And the documents."

  "Yes sir."

  "So stories are important to me," DuMont said to Leaphorn. "What you could tell me has its value here. I show my new pot to my friends. I tell them not just of the Anasazi civilization, but of murder and a missing woman." He grinned a small, prim grin, showing small, perfect teeth.

  Leaphorn sipped his coffee. Hot, fresh, excellent. The china was translucent. To the right of DuMont a row of high windows lined the wall. The light coming through them was dim, tinted green by the vines that covered them. Rain streamed down the glass.

  "Did I make my point?" DuMont said.

  "I think so," Leaphorn said.

  "Tit for tat. You want information from me. I
n exchange it seems to me only fair that you give me my story. The story to go with my pot."

  "I did," Leaphorn said.

  DuMont raised two white hands, fluttered them. "Details, details, details," he said. "All the bloody details. The details to pass along."

  Leaphorn told him the details. How the bodies were found. How the men had been killed. Who they were. He described the scene. He described the bones. DuMont listened, rapt.

  ". and there we are," Leaphorn concluded. "No leads, really. Our missing woman might be a lead to the killer. More likely she's another victim. But it's all vague. We know just that she was interested in the same pots. Just that she's missing."

  Edgar had returned early in this account and stood beside DuMont, holding a pot and a manila folder. The pot was small, about the size of a man's head. A little larger than DuMont's skull.