Threepersons Hunt

by Brian Garfield

  “I’ll look,” she said angrily.

  He stood in the middle of the room and watched her explore. She went into the refrigerator and all the drawers. He said, “The shooting was for your own protection.”

  “I haven’t needed protecting since I was thirteen.” It was flip and automatic and she trailed off at the last word; she stopped and pulled her face around toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “He couldn’t have known I’d be coming behind you. He was waiting up there to impress you, not me.”

  “Impress me?”

  “He probably figures it’s the best way to scare you into getting out of here.”

  “Well he’s right,” she said, “but I don’t really believe you.”

  “Of course the whole theory blows up if it happens your brother’s a lousy shot.”

  She went into the bathroom and he heard the squeak of a medicine-cabinet door. She reappeared empty-handed and looked at him. “He grew up hunting. He’s a good shot.”

  “I know he is.” He spread his hands, palms out, finger-tips down.

  “I suppose you could be right.”

  “Did you look under the phone?”

  “Not yet.” She went to the instrument and lifted it but there wasn’t anything under it. She put it down and smiled a him. It was a bit vindictive. “Thank God. I was starting to think you were always right.”

  “Maybe he figured the rifle shot would be enough of a message. He didn’t want you to think he was the one shooting at you. He wanted you to think it was somebody else, somebody really trying to kill you. That would scare you off.”

  “It would,” she agreed, not without irony.

  11.

  He made a pot of coffee and sat on one of the wooden chairs. It wobbled on an uneven leg. “You might as well try to relax. He won’t come back—especially not as long as my car’s parked out there.”

  “You’re awfully sure it was Joe, aren’t you.”

  “Had to be. But I’ll keep the gun handy if you want.”

  She turned around and looked up into his face. Her head hardly came up to his shoulder. “You’re all right. Have I said thank-you yet?”

  “No point trying to keep books on it.”

  “Well I like you, and that’s not just gratitude.”

  She was offering herself and it made him smile. “I don’t think I ought to ask just yet. You might change your mind.”

  “I’m known for that ”

  “You might decide to say no.”

  “I’m not usually known for that.” She smiled quickly, and her face straightened equally quickly. “I don’t know what made me say that. You get in bad habits, you start talking like that because it’s easier than slapping people’s hands all the time. I’m not a tramp—why do I keep sounding like one with you?”

  “Basic biology. Somebody shoots at you and it makes all the juices run. Why do you think the birthrate goes up in wartime?”

  “You’re weird,” she said. “Weird.” She spent a while looking at nothing in particular before she looked at Watchman, his clothes, his bearing.

  Her eyes betrayed her nervousness. “You’re a long way from your Reservation, aren’t you.”

  “Too far.”

  “There ain’t no such animal.”

  “Wrong,” he said. “It’s no good pretending.”

  “Come off it. I went through that bullshit a long time ago. When my lily-white husband ditched me I came crawling home and swore I’d never leave the Reservation again as long as I lived. Don’t you think I know what it feels like? But you’ll get over it. You’d get bored to death if you had to go back to wherever you grew up and live there again. It’d be like going from college back to second grade.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with race,” she said. “The Reservation’s a small town and you’re a city boy now.”

  “And you’re a city girl?”

  “I’ve been wondering how I’ve stayed out here this long. When this mess is over I’m moving back to Phoenix.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Just like that,” she said. “Now tell me the truth, could you go live at home again?”

  “Things would be a lot simpler.”

  “Things are a lot simpler in the grave,” she said.

  Angelina inspected the clothes closet and left the door open while she wiggled out of her skirt and found a hanger to put it on. She was wearing pink-and-yellow patterned bikini pants. It didn’t embarrass her to have him watch and he didn’t turn away. She hooked both hands inside the collar of her cowboy shirt and wrenched it apart; all the pearl snaps parted and she let it slide down behind her off her wrists, her movement made sensual by her awareness of his attention.

  She grinned suddenly. “One place I worked in Showlow, they asked me if I’d mind going topless. I told the guy I am topless. After that they made me keep my clothes on.”

  He answered her smile in kind.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1.

  SHE STIRRED against him, thrusting her haunch back; she was curled against his belly, her body in the shape of a Z. She made a little sound in her throat and turned over and kissed him drowsily but with great passion. He was only half awake but it roused him.

  She drew back abruptly; a mischievous voice: “Okay. What’s my name?”

  He laughed at her. “I forget. But it’ll be nice to have you around to pick up the soap when I drop it in the shower.”

  “Sam?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “That big red body’s got a sensational vocabulary.”

  “I’m glad you speak the language.”

  “This is a hell of a thing to ask.…”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Am I as good as she was?”

  He sat up on the edge of the bed. “You’re right. It was a hell of a thing to ask.”

  He glanced at the clock. Getting on for five o’clock. He mixed up a can of frozen orange juice and drank half a quart of it sitting on the edge of the bed with sunlight starting to leak in through the slatted venetian blinds. No point going back to sleep now. He started trying to sort out the facts of the case in his head but within five minutes Angelina was getting up with a bed sheet around her like a toga.

  “Sam? I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it.” He managed to smile. Dishevelment suited her, she looked childlike and drowsy and so desirable that he went to her and gathered her against him. Her voice came up, muffled against his chest:

  “I really am. It was a rotten thing to say.”

  “If you still want the answer.…”

  “I hate to admit it but I do.”

  “You have a lot more fun than she had,” he said. “That means we both have a lot more fun.”

  “I’m glad.” She disengaged herself and palmed the hair back from her temple. “Do you want to come back to bed or should I make us some breakfast?”

  “Breakfast. I’ve got to hit the road.”

  She went to the kitchen. “What do you like?”

  “Fried eggs, piece of toast, a lot of black coffee.”

  “A man after my own heart.”

  He looked straight at her. “I may turn out to be exactly that.”

  She gave him once again her brief unfinished smile. “Let’s not talk like that yet.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He showered and dressed in yesterday’s Levi’s and shirt. The coffee made a good smell and he followed his nose to it.

  “I’ll call Will Luxan and tell him I’ll be away from work for a while. He won’t ask questions, he never does. He’s a good man.”

  “I expect he is,” Watchman said. “I also expect he knows more about Joe than he’s willing to tell me.”

  “He might talk to me. I’ll ask him on the phone. Where can I reach you if I find out anything?”

  “I’ll have to reach you,” he said. He got the scratch pad from the phone stand and scribbled on it. “That’s my partner. If you need anything t
hat’s his home number. During the day you can leave a message for him at Highway Patrol headquarters. I think you’d better stick close to this house until we’ve got things straightened out up here.”

  “I get the feeling you’re beginning to believe me about Joe,” she said. “I hope it isn’t just because of—sleeping together.”

  He shook his head. “It’s because I trust you.”

  She was sitting across the table from him. Her eyes squeezed out tears very abruptly and she reached for his hand. “I think that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in a hell of a long time,” she said and then she began to blubber. “Look at me, I can’t stop!”

  He laughed at her.

  2.

  On the phone Wilder said, “God damn it this isn’t a homicide investigation. Just find the son of a bitch. Let his lawyer worry about whether he got a raw deal.”

  Watchman was a little angry. “There are guns going off, man. People are going to get hurt.”

  “Why? Because somebody took a warning shot to, scare you off the Reservation? Come off it, they may be tough up there but they’re not killers. They gave up massacring wagon trains a hundred years ago.”

  “You don’t get this,” Watchman said stubbornly. “Joe Threepersons has a rifle. Now why would a man get himself a rifle unless he had it in mind to shoot somebody?”

  “You said yourself he’s hiding in the hills up there. Living off a few cans of food. He’s probably figuring to shoot himself some game. Besides, a lot of those guys would rather go down shooting than get arrested. It doesn’t mean he’s out to murder somebody.”

  “I think it does. I think he took the rap for the real killer and for some reason he thinks that real killer murdered his wife and son and now he’s up here with a rifle waiting to get his sights on the killer. And I think he’s got a pretty good chance of doing it if we don’t find the killer first.”

  “Or find Threepersons first. But that’s assuming I buy your story right off the shelf, which I don’t. You’re basing your whole theory on what the man’s own sister tells you. My God, Sam.”

  “She’s telling the truth.”

  “Why? Because you can’t find it in your heart to believe she’d lie to you? Christ the girl must be a hell of a siren.”

  Watchman let air into the phone booth. “Let’s put it this way. I think my best chance of finding Threepersons fast is to reopen the original murder case. Will that satisfy you?”

  “Nuts. Even if it’s all true the trail’s stone cold.”

  “I doubt it. Those people don’t move around much. Whoever it was, he’s still there. Otherwise Joe wouldn’t be there.”

  Wilder took a deep breath. “Sam you tracked Leo Hargit through a full-out blizzard. You ought to be able to track one half-witted Indian to his hidey-hole in those hills. You know where he was last night when he took a potshot at you. Follow the sonofabitch’s tracks, find him, bring him in. We’ll question him and see about the rest of this. Now that’s your job and those are your orders and I don’t want to see your God damned red face again until you’ve got handcuffs on him.”

  3.

  Buck Stevens’ voice hammered his ear through the telephone. “Well where does this get you, this autopsy business?”

  Watchman said, “You don’t self-administer a massive dose of barbiturates and then take your kid and get in the car and go out and drive into a truck on the highway.”

  “People commit suicide on the highway all the time.”

  “But they don’t drug themselves to the gills first.”

  “I wouldn’t swear to that. Who knows what people will do.”

  Watchman said, “You searched the house, right? You didn’t find any barbiturates.”

  “Maybe she threw the bottle away after she took all the pills.”

  “Call her doctor. Find out if he ever gave her a prescription for the stuff.”

  “What’ll that prove?”

  “It’ll prove something if she had no prescription. It’ll mean somebody else put the stuff in her grapefruit juice or her coffee.”

  “Somebody else. You’re thinking about that Volkswagen that was at her house that morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think somebody tried to murder her with drugs.”

  “It looks like it to me. And when she started to feel herself go under she knew what had happened so she tried to drive to the hospital. The drugs hit her too fast and she didn’t make it.”

  “Why take the kid?”

  “Somebody’s trying to kill you, you don’t leave your kid behind in an empty house.”

  “But I thought you said this Victorio was in love with her. Would he murder her?”

  “I don’t have answers to everything, Buck. If I did the case would be solved.” Watchman had his notes in front of him on the phone-booth shelf. “Victorio’s not the only man in the world who owns a blue Volkswagen.”

  “Then you’re right back to square one.”

  “Not quite. It just enlarges the circle of suspects.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me. You’re saying she was murdered. Now if you were the guy who supposedly killed Calisher in the first place—the guy Joe was taking the rap for—presumably you agreed to support Joe’s family in style while Joe went to jail for you. You’re assuming that was the deal, aren’t you?”

  “It’s one way to explain why Maria and Joe Junior got rich right after Joe went to prison. Somebody was paying the bills and she didn’t have a regular boyfriend, not the kind who could pay her bills the way they were paid. Look at it from Joe’s point of view. He’s always been a loser. He’s living out there in a line shack watching his kid grow into a duplicate of himself. He must have decided his own life was pretty well wasted, it was too late for him to make something of himself, but wouldn’t it be great if the kid had a crack at a good education and all the frills. Somebody knew him well enough to offer him the deal—his own freedom in exchange for all the things he wanted money to buy for his son.”

  “But it doesn’t explain why anybody would want to screw up the whole thing by killing Maria. They kill Maria, they’ve got to expect trouble from Joe. He wouldn’t go on keeping his mouth shut and taking the rap.”

  “That’s two questions. I think I can answer both of them,” Watchman said. “Question one, why did they kill Maria. What if she got greedy, decided to blackmail them, held out for more money than they’d agreed to? If they felt she was getting too expensive or too risky, they might kill her. But that brings us to question two. As soon as they kill Maria they’ve got to expect trouble. Joe wouldn’t automatically react to the news by breaking out of slam. More likely they’d expect him to go to the police and tell them everything he knew about the case. So it only makes sense one way. If they helped Joe break out of jail, so that they could get at him. To kill him. Wipe him and Maria and the kid off the books, all at the same time.”

  Stevens said, “Then it’s not just that Joe’s out gunning for this killer. The killer’s also gunning for Joe. Maybe setting a trap and waiting for Joe to walk into it.”

  “And Joe doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “It’s farfetched,” Stevens said.

  “Most things people do are far fetched.”

  “Well where do we go from here?”

  “I keep hunting around here in Whiteriver. You go down to Florence and find out if Joe had any outside contacts the day Maria died—visitors, phone calls, telegrams, anything. Keep digging until you get us a name.”

  “That’s assuming the name belongs to the guy that helped him break out. That’s the theory?”

  “I’m taking an option on it. Maybe even a down payment. When we find out more we’ll know if we’re ready to buy it.”

  “And you’re staying in Whiteriver.”

  “Aeah,” Watchman said. “I think I’ll find out if the department’s willing to spring for a couple of hounds and a handler. Try and nail Joe before the shooting starts.”


  “Dogs. Where’s the fun in that?”

  “It’s not a game,” Watchman murmured.

  4.

  He coaxed the ailing Volvo into Whiteriver at one in the afternoon after a fruitless half-day of scouting and found the dog handler waiting at the trading post with three mournful hounds in his camper-pickup. The handler introduced himself, “Leroy Flagg,” and gave Watchman a smile as doleful as a Basset’s. “I hate man-trackin’, it ain’t natural sport.”

  “It could save somebody’s life,” Watchman said and saw a kid in a bright crimson shirt wobbling up the road on a bike. The flash of color drew his eyes in that direction and he saw the screened back door of the council house fly open.

  Tom Victorio came through the door quickly, his drugstore-cowboy jacket awry; he was waving in Watchman’s direction and ran toward him full of excitement.

  “He showed up. He was here.”

  “Joe?”

  “Last night.” Victorio was a little out of breath. “He busted into Rufus Limita’s house.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “No—no. But he ripped off Rufus’ best rifle. And the Land Cruiser.”

  Watchman made a face. “What time last night?”

  “Two, two-thirty. Pete Porvo said—”

  “Hang onto it a minute.” Watchman turned to Leroy Flagg and spread his hands. “I’m sorry we wasted your time.”

  “It’s okay, I’ll get hourly and mileage for it. Just as soon not have to man-track anyway. Nice meeting you.” Flagg shook hands and climbed into the pickup.

  Watchman turned back to Victorio. “You want a Coke?” He went up the trading post steps without waiting an answer.

  Victorio hurried in after him. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “If he’s been gone eleven hours another five minutes won’t make much difference. Maybe you’d like to calm down and tell me what happened. Want a Coke?”

  “Root beer.”

  Watchman bought a couple of cans and they carried them outside. They talked in the car.

  “Where’s this Limita’s place?”

  “About six miles. Take the road down toward Fort Apache, hang a left where it says East Fork.”