The Sinister Pig
( Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee - 16 )
Tony Hillerman
Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is troubled by the nameless corpse discovered just inside his jurisdiction, at the edge of the Jicarilla Apache natural gas field. More troubling still is the FBI's insistence that the Bureau take over the case, calling the unidentifiedvictim's death a "hunting accident."
But if a hunter was involved, Chee knows the prey was intentionally human. This belief is shared by the "Legendary Lieutenant" Joe Leaphorn, who once again is pulled out of retirement by the possibility of serious wrongs being committed against the Navajo nation by the Washington bureaucracy. Yet it is former policewoman Bernadette Manuelito, recently relocated to Customs Patrol at the U.S. -- Mexico border, who possibly holds the key to a fiendishly twisted conspiracy of greed, lies, and murder -- and whose only hope for survival now rests in the hands of friends too far away for comfort.
Amazon.com Review
Tony Hillerman is a national treasure, having achieved critical acclaim, chart-topping popularity, and a sterling reputation as an ambassador between whites and Indians. Fortunately, he's also still a marvelous writer, much imitated but never equaled. The Sinister Pig--his 16th novel to feature Navajo cops Joe Leaphorn and/or Jim Chee--isn't his best book, but it's still a pleasure from the first page to the last. Its plot is almost too complex to summarize, involving the mysterious shooting of an ex-CIA agent, financial shenanigans around oil-and-gas royalties, disappearing congressional interns, exotic pipeline technology, and the cross-border trade in both drugs and illegal aliens.
Officer Bernadette Manuelito has left the Navajo Tribal Police for the U.S. Customs Service, patrolling the barren borderlands of southern New Mexico. There, her curiosity and smarts land her in a growing peril that provides much of the book's suspense--and invokes the protective instincts of Sergeant Chee, who still hasn't quite been able to tell her how he feels about her. It's impossible not to care about Hillerman's exquisitely drawn repertory characters, nor to overlook the pleasures of his beautifully crafted and relaxed-seeming prose. In the midst of these virtues are a few warts: several sections are a little flat or awkward, and the villainous plutocrat behind it all is short on plausibility (though lots of fun to hate). But even a lesser Hillerman is still a richer, more satisfying read than most authors' top stuff.
THE SINISTER PIG
ALSO BY TONY HILLERMAN
Fiction
The Wailing Wind
Hunting Badger
The First Eagle
The Fallen Man
Finding Moon
Sacred Clowns
Coyote Waits
Talking God
A Thief of Time
Skinwalkers
The Ghostway
The Dark Wind
People of Darkness
Listening Woman
Dance Hall of the Dead
The Fly on the Wall
The Blessing Way
The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (for children)
Nonfiction
Seldom Disappointed
Hillerman Country
The Great Taos Bank Robbery
Rio Grande
New Mexico
The Spell of New Mexico
Indian Country
THE SINISTER PIG
TONY HILLERMAN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A huge thanks goes to Maryanne Noonan, a veteran of the U.S. Customs Service, for her help relative to the efforts of our undermanned and overworked Border Patrol to stem the flood across our borders, and to Marty Nelson (my unpaid research specialist in Denver) for keeping me abreast of the Department of the Interior’s efforts to explain what has happened to $176,000,000 (billions!!!) of Indian oil, gas, coal, timber, etc—royalties which it can’t seem to account for. Henry Schepers, an old friend and veteran pipeliner, also provided valuable aid on the laundering and trapping of pigs and other mysteries of that underground industry.
—Tony Hillerman
1
David Slate reached across the tiny table in Bistro Bis and handed an envelope to the graying man with the stiff burr haircut.
“You are now Carl Mankin,” Slate said. “You are newly retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. You are currently employed as a consultant for Seamless Weld. Along with your new credit card, Carl, that envelope holds a lot of authentic-looking stuff from Seamless. Business cards, expense account forms—that sort of material. But the credit card should cover any expenses.”
“Carl Mankin,” the burr-haired man said, inspecting the card. “And a Visa card. ‘Carl Mankin’ should be easy to remember. And by next Tuesday, I actually will be newly retired from the CIA.” He was older than middle age, well past sixty, but trim, sunburned, and young looking. He sorted through the papers from the envelope and smiled at Slate. “However, I don’t seem to find a contract in here,” he said.
Slate laughed. “And I’ll bet you didn’t expect to find one, either. The senator works on the old-fashioned ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ contract. You know, ‘Your word’s as good as your bond.’ That sounds odd here in Washington these days, but some of the old-timers still like to pretend there is honor alive among the political thieves.”
“Remind me of what that word is, then,” the new Carl Mankin said. “As I remember it, you buy my time for thirty days, or until the job is done. Or failing that, I tell you it can’t be done. And the pay is fifty thousand dollars, either way it works out.”
“And expenses,” Slate said. “But the credit card should cover that unless you’re paying somebody to tell you something.” He chuckled. “Somebody who doesn’t accept a Visa card.”
Carl Mankin put everything back into the envelope, and the envelope on the table beside his salad plate. “Who actually pays the credit card bill? I noticed my Carl Mankin address is in El Paso, Texas.”
“That’s the office of Seamless Weld,” Slate said. “The outfit you’re working for.”
“The senator owns it? That doesn’t sound likely.”
“It isn’t likely. It’s one of the many subsidiaries of Searigs Corporation, and that, so I understand, is partly owned and totally controlled by A.G.H. Industries.”
“Searigs? That’s the outfit that built the offshore-drilling platforms for Nigeria,” said Carl Mankin. “Right?”
“And in the North Sea,” Slate said. “For the Norwegians. Or was it the Swedish?”
“Owned by the senator?”
“Of course not. Searigs is part of A.G.H. Industries. What are you getting at, anyway?”
“I am trying to get at who I am actually working for.”
Slate sipped his orange juice, grinned at Carl Mankin, said: “You surely don’t think anyone would have told me that, do you?”
“I think you could guess. You’re the senator’s chief administrative aide, his picker of witnesses for the committees he runs, his doer of undignified deeds, his maker of deals with the various lobbyists—” Mankin laughed. “And need I say it, his finder of other guys like me to run the senator’s errands with somebody else paying the fee. So I surely do think you could make an accurate guess. But would you tell me if you did?”
Slate smiled. “Probably not. And I am almost certain you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“In which case, I should probably make sure to get my pay in advance.”
Slate nodded. “Exactly. When we finish lunch, and you pay for it with your new Visa card, we’ll go down to the bank I use. We transfer forty-nine thousand five hundred dollars into Carl Mankin’s account there, and I present you the deposit slip.”
“And the other five hundred?”
Slate
got out his wallet, extracted a deposit slip, and handed it to Carl Mankin. It showed a Carl Mankin account opened the previous day with a five-hundred-dollar deposit. Mankin put it in his shirt pocket, then took it out and laid it on the table.
“An account opened for an imaginary man without his signature. I didn’t know that could be done.”
Slate laughed. “It’s easy if the proper vice president calls down from upstairs and says do it.”
“We need to be clear about this,” Mankin said. “You want me to go out to that big Four Corners oil patch in New Mexico, look it over, see if I can find out how the pipeline system out there was used—and maybe still is being used—to bypass paying royalty money into the Interior Department’s trust fund for the Indians. Does that about summarize the job?”
Slate nodded.
“That’s a big part of it. The most important information of all is the names of those switching the stuff around so the money for it goes into the right pockets. And who owns the pockets.”
“And the senator understands that this is likely to produce nothing. I presume it is one of a whole bunch of ways he’s looking for some way to pin the blame, or the corruption, on somebody for that four- or five-billion-dollar loss of royalty money from the Tribal Trust Funds. The one the Washington Post has been writing about for the past month. The one the Secretary of Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs honchos are in trouble over.”
Slate was grinning again. “Was that intended as a question? What do the press secretaries say to questions like that?” He slipped into a serious, disapproving expression. “We never comment on speculation.”
“The newspapers say that this ripping off the four billion or so of Tribal royalty money has been going on for more than fifty years. And they’re quoting the government bean counters. Right? I can’t see much hope of me finding anything new.”
“It’s not a mere four billion dollars,” Slate said. “The Government Accounting Office estimated the amount not accounted for may be as high as forty billion. And the law firm for the tribes is now claiming the U.S. gov has stacked up a debt of a hundred and thirty-seven billion bucks on royalties dating back to 1887. I guess what the senator wants to know is if the stealing persists.”
“And he bets somebody’s fifty grand that I’ll be lucky enough to find out.”
“His friends in the State Department tell him you did a great job finding out how Iraqi oil people switched pipelines to avoid those United Nations’ sanctions on exporting their oil. I guess he just wants you to do it again.”
“It’s a very different story out there,” Carl Mankin said. “In the Middle East oil patch you had a small bunch of greasy old pipeline experts surrounded by various groups of Arabs. The Arabs weren’t really members of the Brit-American petroleum club. Which I was. Everybody knew everybody’s business. After twenty years in and out of there, I was just another one of them. People talked to me. I got sneaked into pipeline switching stations, got to see pressure gauges—all the technical stuff. Out in New Mexico, I’ll just be a damned nosey stranger.”
Slate was studying him. He grinned. “In New Mexico, you’ll be Carl Mankin. Right? All this making apologies in advance for not finding anything useful means you’re signing on?”
“Oh, sure. I guess so,” he said. He folded the deposit slip into his wallet, took out the Carl Mankin Visa card, signaled to the waiter, and then handed the card to him when the waiter came to the table.
“A symbolic action,” Slate said, and laughed.
“One more thought I want to pass along,” he said. “What little chance I have out there of picking up any useful information would be multiplied many times over if I had a clearer idea, a more specific idea, of what he wants.”
“Just the truth,” Slate said. “Nothing but the truth.”
“Yeah,” Carl Mankin said. “But I’m entertaining all kinds of thoughts. For example, why connect me directly with this Texas construction outfit? Seamless Weld. Sounds like something in the pipelining business. Does the senator own it?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Slate. “It will be owned by some corporation that is part of a conglomerate in which the senator has a substantial interest. If he actually owned Seamless Weld on any public record, he’d be way too sly to get it involved.”
They were on the sidewalk now, hailing a cab, a warm breeze moving dust along the street, the smell of rain in the air.
“So why stick me with that company? And don’t tell me it’s to make my expenses tax deductible. What’s the reason?”
A cab stopped for them. Slate opened the door, ushered Mankin in, seated himself, gave the driver the bank’s address, settled back, arid said: “Looks like rain.”
“I’m waiting for an answer,” Mankin said. “And it’s not just out of curiosity. “I’m going to be asking a lot of questions, and that means I’ll have to answer a lot of them myself. I can’t afford to be caught lying.”
“OK,” Slate said. He took a little silver cigarette box out of his coat pocket, opened it, offered one to Mankin, took one himself, looked at it, put it back in the box, and said: “Well, I guess you know that everyone in this town has at least two agendas. The public one, and their own personal causes. Right?”
Mankin nodded.
“OK, then. Let’s say you called your broker and asked him who owned Seamless Weld. He’d call you back in a few days and tell you it was a subsidiary of Searigs Inc. And you’d say, who owns Searigs, and after the proper period for checking, he’d tell you the principal stockholder was A.G.H. Industries Inc. And the answer to your next question is that the majority stock holder in A.G.H. is a trust, the affairs of which are entrusted to a Washington law firm, and the law firm lists four partners, one of whom is Mr. Rawley Winsor of Washington, D.C. End of answer.”
“I’ve heard that name. But who is Rawley Winsor?”
“No genuine Washington insider would have to ask that,” Slate said. “Nor would anyone on Wall Street. Rawley Winsor is ... How do I start? He’s a many-generations blue blood, echelons of high society, Princeton, then Harvard Law, famous Capitol deal doer, fund-raisers, top-level runner of lobby campaigns, and might make the top of Fortune magazine’s most-wealthy list if his investments weren’t so carefully hidden.”
“So if I was free to speculate, I might guess that your senator is either doing a deal for this Winsor plutocrat, or seeking a way to link him with evildoing. For example, maybe finding how to prove this guy is getting a slice of the suspected rip-off of tribal royalty funds. Or maybe a way for the senator to get his own cut of that graft.”
Slate laughed. “I am not free to comment on speculation.”
“But if he is so incredibly rich, why go to all this trouble for what must be just small change for him?”
“Joy of the game, maybe,” Slate said. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe Winsor just can’t stand seeing some other power broker getting easy money that he’s not sharing. Right now, for example, everybody knows he’s running the lobby against a bill to legalize medical use of marijuana. Why? Because he’s afraid it would lead to legalizing drugs—making them government licensed, taxed, et cetera. Why is he against that? Lot of people are, because it has proven to be a counterproductive waste of public money. But that wouldn’t be Winsor’s motive. Nobody knows what that is. Not for sure. But we Washington cynics think it’s because he has a finger in the narcotics import trade. Legalizing and licensing knocks out the profits. Government sells it at fixed prices, grows it in the farm belt, taxes the hell out of it. No more recruiting of new addicts by your teenaged salesmen, no more knife fights and gun battles for market territory.” Slate sighed. “Not that any of that matters.”
“Come on, now,” Mankin said. “This guy is a multi-billionaire. Dabbling in the drug trade isn’t just a fun competition. I can’t believe he’d be that dumb.”
“Probably not,” Slate said. “Maybe it’s psychological. My wife has three pet cats. One of them will eat all he c
an hold, and then stand guard at the bowl to keep the other two from having their dinner. Snarl, and claw to fight ’em off. Are humans smarter than cats?”
Mankin nodded. “You know any farmyard French?”
“Just English for me,” Slate said.
“Anyway, French farmers have a phrase for the boss pig in the sty—the one that would guard the trough and attack any animal that tried to steal a bite. Translate it to French and it’s pore sinistre. We used to use that for Saddam—for trying to take Iran’s oil fields when he had more oil than he could use, and then invading Kuwait for the same reason.”
“ ‘Sinister pig,’ right?” Slate asked. “But isn’t it cochon sinistre. I think that makes a better insult. And it would fit Rawley Winsor, from what I hear about him.”
That lunch and conversation had been on Monday. The newly named Carl Mankin called his wife to tell her he’d be going to New Mexico for several days. Then he took a taxi to the Department of Energy, called on the proper friend, and collected the information he needed about who managed which pipelines and the ebb and flow, sales and resales, of oil and gas in and out of the San Juan Basin fields. He left the building with his pocket recorder full of notes about the San Juan Basin fields— about nineteen hundred oil, gas, and methane wells actively producing in just the New Mexico section of that field, and drilling rigs adding new ones every year, with geologists estimating that more than a hundred trillion cubic feet of gas is under the rocks there, and about twenty different oil, gas, and pipeline companies fighting for a share of the treasure. Making the job look even more impossible, his notes confirmed what he’d guessed would be true. The records kept by the Department of the Interior were in shambles, and had been a total mess dating back as far as his sources had looked—which was into the 1940s. It was hopeless, he thought, but for fifty thousand dollars whether he learned anything or not, it would be an interesting project.
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