The Sinister Pig jlajc-16

by Tony Hillerman

  Leaphorn smiled.

  “However, not much later the same inquiry comes in from the important direction—from the top instead of the bottom. It hits the same federal roadblock. But this time the bank’s big shots are involved. The kind of folks not used to being told no by the FBI or anyone else. This gets chatted about at their two-martini lunches. One of the power brokers asks his lobby lawyer. People talk to a senator whose campaign they helped finance. Somebody calls the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Department of the Interior, and so it goes. About then I ask myself, What’s making this credit card such a big deal? Why are these busy moguls getting so interested in this homicide way out in San Juan County, New Mexico?”

  Goddard picked up her cup, looked over the rim at Leaphorn, took another sip.

  “That’s the same question I’m asking,” Leaphorn said. He looked at her business card. “U.S. News and World Report. Not the sort of publication that goes after sin, sex, and sensation. And it wouldn’t care much about a murder out here. Not unless it was somehow significant.”

  Goddard clicked her cup back into the saucer.

  “Murder, was it?”

  “Well, now,” Leaphorn said. “I believe the last news account I’ve seen said the FBI reported it still under investigation. But the talk I’ve heard over my enchilada down at the Navajo Inn is about a stranger being shot in the back. Hard to call a back shot a suicide.”

  Goddard nodded. “Yes. Even in Washington. But there they might rule it an accident.”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “If the press gets after the U.S. District Attorney, I suspect that will be suggested.” He shrugged. “It might be true. But then he’d have to explain some—” He stopped, sipped his coffee, gestured toward her cup.

  “No thanks,” she said. “But go on. Explain what? I don’t really know anything about the crime itself.”

  “Should we exchange information?” Leaphorn asked. “If we do I need to make some rules. I want you in a position to tell a grand jury you promised your source confidentiality. That way, I don’t get called and have to protect my sources by being held in contempt and locked away for awhile.”

  “And who are your sources?”

  “Are we off the record?”

  “How about I call you a source close to the Navajo Tribal Police?”

  “How about I’m someone knowledgeable about law enforcement in the Four Corners?”

  She nodded. “Deal,” she said. “Minor change in the syntax, but nothing that would single you out. Now tell me why it’s murder and not an accident.”

  “Body stripped of all identification,” Leaphorn said. “Nothing in pockets except small change and keys to a rental car. Car found miles from the body. Too far to walk.”

  “Murder,” she said, nodding. “Wallet gone, which brings us to the Visa card.”

  “Found by a trash collector cleaning up a park on the Jicarilla Navajo Reservation. The card was used at one of those pay-outside filling stations, and tracked to one of the trash collector’s in-laws. And now we get to my question, still unanswered. What brought you out here?”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Now you have to understand that we’ll be talking about Washington. The big shots are trading information about what could be going on out in Indian country. What is causing someone with the clout to get it done to want to cause the FBI to cover up a shooting like this one. With the victim nobody in particular, and the crime done nowhere in particular. Doing that takes big political muscle. But who’s using that muscle? And why? So I start thinking there could be a big story there.”

  She stopped, peered at Leaphorn. “Does that answer your question?”

  Leaphorn considered. “Part of it, I guess.”

  “Well then,” said Goddard, “I will add that I was already interested because a woman who works in the Security and Exchange Commission has become very, very frustrated because she can’t find out”—Goddard paused again and smiled at Leaphorn—“not to her satisfaction anyway, can’t find out how her husband got killed in San Juan County, New Mexico.”

  She waited for a reaction from Leaphorn.

  “How about some more coffee,” he said, provoking only a negative gesture that, in turn, provoked him to violate one of his rules and show off a little.

  “I understand the FBI has not been very forthcoming in this case,” he said. “What were they telling Mrs. Mankin?” Having asked that, having demonstrated that he already knew the victim’s name, having strutted a bit for this woman, he watched carefully for her reaction. Once again, she surprised him.

  “Mrs. Who?” she asked, looking genuinely puzzled. “I don’t know about her.”

  “The widow,” Leaphorn said, slightly flustered. “Mrs. Carl Mankin.”

  “Do you mean the victim’s widow? The victim’s widow is Mrs. Ellen Stein. Or more formally, Mrs. Gordon Stein.”

  Leaphorn leaned back in his chair, considering this bombshell, deciding he’d get back to it later and in the future would suppress the temptation to show off.

  “But you still haven’t told me why the death of this man, this Mr. Gordon Stein, interests your magazine.”

  “It doesn’t,” Goddard said. “Not unless it connects in some way with what happened to about forty billion dollars that seems to have disappeared from the Indian Trust Fund. A sort of evaporation that the General Accounting Office thinks has been going on since way back when.”

  Leaphorn leaned forward again, said: “Forty billion. I read about that in that suit the lawyer, Covell, wasn’t it, filed against the Secretary of the Interior. I thought maybe that number was a typographical error. Too many zeros on the end of the number. And you think this homicide of ours might be connected?”

  “Maybe. At least indirectly.”

  “Like how?”

  “Look,” Goddard said. “I cover politics, not crime. Although I admit sometimes they’re connected and hard to tell apart. The homicide interests me because this Covell lawsuit could pry the lid off the biggest federal corruption case since President Harding’s great Teapot Dome Scandal. You probably already know this, but I’ll remind you. The General Accounting Office has already established that the Department of the Interior has failed to collect, lost, or let somebody steal billions from the royalties supposed to go into the tribal trust funds. The federal district court has already held both the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of the Treasury in contempt of court for allowing records of trust money to be destroyed. Fined them six hundred thousand dollars, but that’s being appealed.”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “I’ve heard about all that. The Secretary of the Interior got a lot of attention out here when she shut down the department’s computer system for overhaul. A lot of tribal members went three months without their royalty checks.”

  “And were protesting loudly to their congressmen. Especially the delegations from here, and Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, and Texas, to name a few. And that is getting us to the story that really interests me.”

  Goddard waited for Leaphorn to say: “What’s that?” But he had reverted to his traditional Navajo habit of just waiting for the speaker to speak.

  “That story if I can dig it out is politics,” Goddard said. “Huge amounts of blame to be spread here. In politics blame is just as useful as praise. Senators can be defeated, contenders can be elected, resulting power shifts in committees, so forth.” She extracted a notebook from her purse, flipped pages. “Oil,” she said. “Osage, Seminole, and Choctaw fields, etcetera, in Oklahoma, out here the Bisti and Windmill fields and others, and big ones on Indian land in Wyoming, Kansas, elsewhere. Navajo coal, Hopi coal, Zuñi coal. Timber, copper, silver, so forth, from the northern tribes. You Navajos and the Jicarilla Apaches are probably the biggest losers in terms of natural gas, but remember those Four Corners open pit coal mines. And speaking of this territory, that area where Stein was killed, that San Juan Basin field has more than twenty thousand producing wells—mostly methane and natural gas. It’s
the world’s largest source of gas.”

  “I’m going to pour us each a fresh cup of coffee,” Leaphorn said. “Then I want to talk about why our Carl Mankin is your Gordon Stein.”

  With the coffee poured, Leaphorn told Goddard what he knew about the Carl Mankin Visa card, how it had been recovered and how quickly control of the case had shifted from Farmington to Washington. Goddard provided the time Stein’s body had been delivered to a Washington funeral home—five days after Cowboy Dashee had photographed it.

  “And by the way,” she added, “Mrs. Stein got an unofficial and confidential report from someone high in the FBI that an intensive hunt was on for several local Apaches believed to have been hunting deer in the area on the day of the shooting.”

  Leaphorn laughed. “Out of season of course,” he said. “Deer poachers. Ideal suspects when you need suspects. So I guess the top folks in the FBI intend to put it in the books as another hunting accident with the culprits fleeing the scene to avoid a game-law violation rap.” He shook his head. “But Miss Goddard, I want you to know this isn’t the way the local agents operate. Some of them are pretty green at normal criminal work, but what you’re dealing with in this case is beyond their control. Don’t give them the blame. It’s Washington.”

  She nodded. “I can add that Stein had both a B.S. and” an M.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Oklahoma. He’d worked for Welltab, and briefly for El Paso Natural, and for the Williams Company, one of the really big ones in pipelining everything, from oil to everything else.”

  She sipped her coffee again. Studied Leaphorn. Sighed. “I think I will go ahead and tell you something I’m not supposed to know because I was told it in confidence by someone who wasn’t supposed to know it either.”

  “So I have to promise it stops with me,” Leaphorn said.

  Goddard nodded.

  “OK, I promise.”

  “Stein also worked a lot in the Middle East. In Yemen, for example, and in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Oil field and pipeline stuff, officially,” Goddard said. “But most likely with the Central Intelligence Agency paying a share of his expenses and getting its share of what he was learning.”

  Leaphorn sat with his hands folded on his stomach, intertwining the fingers, making roofs of them, making fists, while he thought. “To sum it up, would it be fair to say you think Stein might have been sent out here to see how this great network of pipelines we have all around us might have been used to siphon off some of that forty billion bucks?”

  “Who knows? But wouldn’t that make a wonderful story?”

  “And also fair to say that Stein might also still be doing some CIA work? What’s the CIA interest?”

  “Maybe some sort of money-laundering scheme. You know, the theory is that Saudi oil money is sponsoring the Al Qaeda terrorist operation. Don’t ask me to guess at that connection. Swapping oil, maybe, so the money can’t be traced?”

  Leaphorn nodded. “And if Stein was out hunting the way oil and gas was pipelined out to folks not paying for it, maybe that hunter wasn’t careless,” Leaphorn said.

  “Maybe he was hunting Stein,” Goddard said. “Maybe it was Osama bin Laden or one of his terrorists. An even better story.”

  “You think Stein was working for the CIA? As I used to understand the law, the Agency is supposed to leave the inside the U.S.A. stuff to the FBI. Not that those security people paid much attention to that sort of red tape.”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Goddard said. “But I think it’s more likely the motivation was politics. Maybe the Department of Justice, maybe Interior, or one of its divisions. Or more likely one of the big-money operatives in either the Republican or Democratic Party, hunting for campaign ammunition, or one of the environmental protection outfits with a different ax to grind. Maybe even the Libertarian Party wanting to prove how hopelessly inept the federal government is these days.”

  “Another question,” Leaphorn said. “Who wanted Stein shot?”

  Goddard grinned at him. “Let me know if you find out.” The grin faded away. “And if you do find out, remember it has to be someone with connections powerful enough to force the FBI brass to cover it up.”

  14

  Customs Patrol Officer Bernie Manuelito was no longer feeling like an utter novice in this business of guarding the Republic’s boundary line. She had learned the language of her new profession, taken part in two “nettings” of illegals, and had personally detected a “mule track” down which “carpet people” had been carrying loads of illegal skag, coke, and refined pot. She understood the difference between mere illegal immigrants and mules who were also illegals but were hired to haul bales of controlled substances in on their backs—sort of like FedEx deliveries. Near the dangerous top of all this were the “coyotes” and the buyers. The coyotes were the travel agents and tour guides of those who came to cross the border into the land of milk and honey, promising to get them safely past Bernie and her fellow CPOs to some community where the phony credentials the coyotes sold them would qualify them for minimum-wage jobs. The receivers, of course, were those who met the mules and warehoused the cocaine, heroin, and pot until it could be delivered to dealers who, in turn, delivered it to their customers in country clubs, corporate boardrooms, honky-tonk bars, chic nightclubs, sorority and frat houses, and bar-association meetings where those who could afford the stuff bought it and used it.

  Bernie’s dream was to nab a receiver and follow him all the way back to the high-rise, glass-walled, deep-carpeted office of the banker who financed the operation and haul them both to jail in the banker’s limo. But that wouldn’t happen soon. From what she had seen as a cop, the so-called War on Drugs filled the jails with addicts and the nickel-and-dime peddlers, but left the drug czars unmolested. And from what she was seeing now, as a Customs patrol officer, she wouldn’t change that soon. If she made an arrest today it would be a little family of destitute Mexicans.

  She was standing on one of the numerous ridges of Big Hatchet Mountain looking southward into the gap between her ridge and an adjoining volcanic outcrop identified on her map as Bar Ridge. She saw an old-model school bus converted into a sort of van—its windows Covered with plywood and its top loaded with bundles, boxes, and rolls of bed clothing and two mattresses.

  A man in stained coveralls was squatting beside the bus doing something to the front wheel. Nearby, sitting, standing, or prone, she could count five others taking cover from the sun in the sparse shade of the mesquite brush growing beside the outcrop.

  Bernie reached into the cab of her pickup, got the mike, pushed the proper buttons. “Manuelito again,” she said. “I count five people now. Man trying to fix the bus. Another man, a woman, toddler-sized boy, and a girl, maybe six or seven.”

  “That global positioning you gave me put you at Big Hatchet Mountain,” the dispatcher said. “That look right?”

  “It does to me. But not much of a mountain to be called big.”

  “Smaller down here, but rougher. The nearest backup I could find for you is a unit south of Road Forks and he’s tied up for a while. If you think they’re running dope I could send down a chopper from Tucson. What do you think?”

  “I think we’re looking at a family of starved-out farmers. I think they got off on the wrong track and ruined their front suspension.”

  “OK, then. Keep an eye on ’em. Let me know if they’re moving out, or if anyone shows up to haul them away.” He paused. “And remember, Miss Manuelito, they’re illegals. That’s criminals. C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L-S. Don’t do anything dumb.”

  Whereupon, after a few more minutes of watching the driver struggling with the front wheel, after remembering the painful plight of the half-starved and dehydrated illegals she had helped round up a week earlier, Bernie decided she’d rather do something dumb than be ashamed of herself. It was standard practice for Customs officers patrolling in desert country to carry oversized canteens. Since a painful arrest of last week in which the illegals had been almost de
ad of dehydration, Bernie had also been taking along two big plastic jugs of water just in case.

  She drove down the ridge, circled carefully through the brush and cactus, and found the still-fresh tracks the bus must have left. She followed them around the corner of the Big Hatchet toward the Bar Ridge outcrop. The bus was there, but no humans were in sight. Bernie wasn’t surprised. They would have heard her coming, seen the Customs vehicle, and would be hiding somewhere.

  She parked behind the bus, got her pistol out of the glove box, and put on her holster, took the battery megaphone from its rack, and stepped out of her pickup.

  “Amigos,” she shouted. “Tengo agua para ustedes.” She listened, heard no response, and repeated the call, with one small revision in her classroom-and-border Spanish, changing amigos to amiga, to appeal to the woman she’d seen. “I’m Border Patrol,” she shouted, “but you have nothing to fear from me. I will give you water. I will help you.” Then she put the megaphone on the truck roof, studied the brushy ridge, listened, and heard nothing.

  Bernie dropped the truck’s tailgate, extracted her water jugs, and put them on the hood. “Agua para usted. For la niña y el niño.”

  Again, no answer. What now?

  A man was hurrying through the brush toward her, waving. She had the sudden thought that perhaps she had been stupid and felt for the snap on her holster flap. Then she saw the man seemed to be crying. Or was he laughing? Whatever, he didn’t seem threatening. And he was babbling something in Spanish. It was, “Thank God you found us.”

  Bernie raised her hand. “Hold it,” she said. “Do you speak English? Who are you?”

  “I was coming to get these people,” he said in fluent English. He pointed to the bus. “But it broke. Going over a rock.”