When the gathering broke up, Tom Victorio said, “I’m afraid I still need a ride. You want me to hitch a lift with one of those guys?”
“You can ride with me.” Watchman eased the Volvo along between the ranks of parked official vehicles until he cleared the tight bend. Light from the quarter-moon glimmered on the rocks. Watchman said, “You handled those two punks like a pro.”
“I’m an ambulance-chaser at heart. I can use a few clients.”
“Those two haven’t got a dime to rub together. You won’t get rich on the fee.”
“But the word will get around. I stood up for Nels and Danny. Next time some Apache wants himself a lawyer in a hurry maybe he’ll think about calling Tom Victorio instead of Legal Aid.”
The road ran close under the lee of the foothills and the Volvo’s tires slithered on the corners. Victorio added, “Besides I don’t think those two had anything to do with it. Nels’ own brother?”
“He only wanted to take them in for questioning.”
“Then let him get a warrant.”
They emerged from the notch in the hills and Watchman picked up a few late-burning lights of Whiteriver down the valley. “Where can I drop you?”
“My car’s still in town.”
“You live around here?”
“Live with my folks, fifteen miles down toward Cibecue.”
“Where does Kendrick hang his hat?”
“He keeps an apartment in Showlow. He doesn’t live around here full time—matter of fact he’s a partner in a firm in Phoenix. They all specialize in Indian work.”
“But Kendrick’s been concentrating mostly on this area for several years, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah. I imagine if we ever get this water-rights mess straightened out he’ll move on to some other tribe.”
“Leaving you to pick up the baton here.”
“I’m kind of hoping it’ll turn out that way.” Victorio cleared his throat. “Jimmy Oto was nobody’s favorite character but I’d dearly love to find out who killed him. I’d like to find out quick, before everybody in the tribe starts suspecting his neighbor. We’ve never had a sneak murderer in this tribe that I know of and that’s one ancient tradition I’d just as soon keep. I want to find out who did it and I want it not to be an Apache.”
“You could help find out the answer.”
“How?”
Watchman braked at the fork and turned onto the macadam. The headlights swung across poor houses and a windmill tower. “Find out who Kendrick’s client is. The one who laid out the money for Maria.”
“Find out how?”
“You work in the same office. You’ve got keys.”
Victorio didn’t reply right away. Watchman steered into the lot between the trading post and the council house. A night-light burned in the store but the only car on the lot was Victorio’s beetle.
Victorio’s face was tipped toward his knees. “You’re asking me to rifle Dwight’s files.”
“We need that name.”
“I’m no sneak thief. Anyhow if you obtain evidence unlawfully you can’t use it.”
“You can’t use it in court. I don’t give a damn about court. I’m trying to find Joe before we start finding more corpses.”
“I still don’t understand what Jimmy Oto had to do with it.”
“He had a detail map of Florence in the truck.”
After a silence Victorio said, “Yeah, okay.”
“Of course it still could be that Joe killed him.”
“Why should he?”
“Maybe Oto knew where Joe was hiding out. Maybe Joe killed him to keep him quiet.”
“No. That wouldn’t be Joe’s style. Sawing through the steering gear? Never, man. Joe’d use his fists or maybe a gun. A gun’s farfetched enough. He’s not what you’d call a subtle thinker.”
“Then let’s find him before somebody outthinks him and Joe ends up out in the bushes with birds picking over him.”
Victorio bit a knuckle. “I don’t know. I just don’t operate that way. I’m getting the shakes just thinking about it. Suppose I get caught?”
“It’s your own office. You’re not doing anything illegal.”
“They’re not my files, they’re Dwight’s.”
“You’re splitting hairs. It’s the same law office.” Watchman got out of the car. “I’ve got a few calls to make. If you find something I’ll be over in the phone booth.”
15.
He dialed the local number first and Angelina answered on the first ring.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No, I was waiting for you. Where the hell are you?”
“Whiteriver,” he said. “Everything all right?”
“It’s boring out,” she said. “I’ve had more fun watching test patterns.”
“Well you’d better stay where you are for a while yet.”
“Why? Has something happened?”
“Jimmy Oto was killed.”
There was static on the line while she absorbed it. “It wasn’t Joe.…”
“I doubt Joe had anything to do with it. But it looks like Jimmy Oto died because he knew something.”
“Killed,” she said. “You mean really dead. It’s a little hard to believe, just like that.”
“Anything happened there?”
“Not much. I talked to Will Luxan on the phone. He said it would be all right, any time I wanted to come back to work.”
“Did he say anything about Joe?”
“He’s a cagey old man. He didn’t say anything you could pin down. But I do have a feeling. I think he knows something. Maybe he knows where Joe is.”
“Any special reason to think that?”
“I don’t know. You have to know Uncle Will. It’s nothing he said. Except maybe that he told me I shouldn’t worry my head too much about Joe. The way he said it, I took it to mean he knows Joe is all right. How would he know that if he hadn’t seen Joe or something?”
“You could have a point there.”
She said, “It’s awful late. Are you coming back tonight?”
“Maybe in a little while.”
“Be careful who shoots at you this time.” But her voice wasn’t as light as she meant it to be.
“Take care,” he said.
“Yes. You too.”
He held the cradle down with his finger and glanced across the way. Only the front of the council house was visible and he didn’t see Victorio anywhere. He rang Buck Stevens’ home number, collect.
Stevens’ groggy voice was half an octave lower than usual. “The hell time’s it?”
“About one. I couldn’t get to a phone before.”
“Uh.”
“Get a notebook.”
“Okay, wait a minute.… All right. Pencil and all. Speak.”
“We had a murder up here,” Watchman said and kept talking over Stevens’ interjections. “Young fellow name of Jimmy Oto.”
“Otto?”
“Oto. One tee. He’s got a surviving brother named Nelson Oto and there’s a friend name of Danny Sanada. Got the names?”
“Spell Sanada.”
Watchman recalled the spelling from Sanada’s driver’s license. “Now one of them’s dead and the other two are here on the Reservation but I’d like to run R-and-I checks on all three of them, see if they’ve got records. I think Jimmy Oto helped engineer that jailbreak.”
“Not according to what I got,” Stevens said. He sounded a little pleased with himself. “I went down to Florence today. Joe Threepersons had a visitor. Twice. The day before the escape and the day of the escape. Fellow signed in under the name of William Jojolla.”
“Late twenties, big as a house, driving an old grey Ford pickup?”
“They didn’t say anything about what he was driving. But they remembered him because he was big. A big big guy.”
“I don’t suppose they keep fingerprints or mug shots on visitors down there.”
“No. But they’d have a couple of samples of hi
s handwriting from where he signed in both times.”
“I’ll get a handwriting sample,” Watchman said. “Now the next thing, try to find out if the Pinal County Engineer had any customers lately for one-to-five-thousand scale maps of the northeast quadrant of Florence. Oto had one in his truck—maybe somebody bought it for him. They couldn’t have had that many inquiries about that particular quad.”
“This guy got killed just today? How do you know it wasn’t Joe Threepersons that did it?”
“It wasn’t Joe’s modus-O. Somebody hacksawed Oto’s tie rod, it broke on a mountain bend.”
“Christ.”
“Joe stole a three-seven-five magnum last night, ’scope sight. He’s got somebody to kill but it wasn’t Oto.” He glanced up as a car rattled by. It didn’t stop. He said, “Another item. Put out an all-points on a stolen ‘Seventy-one Toyota Land Cruiser, color forest green, noncommercial plates Arthur Bravo Seven Five Niner Seven X-ray. The Agency police had it this morning so it’s probably on the stolen car list already but I’m not much interested in the hot sheet. I’d like an APB, Joe Threepersons appears to be driving it.”
“Yeah? Then he could be in Wyoming by now.”
“I doubt it. It’s a four-wheel-drive, he’s probably back in these mountains right around here. First thing in the morning I’d like you to get an audience with Lieutenant Wilder and see if the department’s willing to spring for a couple of days’ helicopter coverage up here. It probably won’t spot the Land Cruiser but it might caution Joe into keeping his head down a little while until I can get at him. Will you try that?”
“Sure. He might get Captain Custer to go for it, if people are getting murdered right and left up there.”
“Put it to him that way,” Watchman told him. “Now what’s happening at your end?”
“Bits and pieces. I tracked down Maria Threepersons’ doctor. He never prescribed Seconal for her. Never gave her any kind of barbiturates. He said she never went in for that kind of stuff. She hated the idea of drugs. He says she was the type who liked to be at the controls herself. So that confirms one thing, she didn’t have a prescription and it doesn’t look like she’d have drugged herself.”
Stevens went on: “Then I went on down to Florence and asked around about Joe’s visitors. The screws remembered that big guy. He was there twice—I guess I told you that. The second time was two o’clock on the fifth, which is about three hours before they busted out.”
“And he had a map of the area in the truck,” Watchman said. “That’s not a coincidence.”
“Nothing is. Or so you keep telling me. Anyhow then I took a flyer, I drove on back up here and went to see Dwight Kendrick’s wife. You know, the one Charlie Rand was married to before. You were talking about her and I thought maybe she could tell me something.”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know.”
“How’d you find her?”
“Police radar,” Stevens drawled. “I looked it up in the phone book.”
Watchman grinned. “What did she say?”
“She’s not exactly demure.” Stevens’ voice was thin along the wires; there was interference in the circuit. “She looks like she’s run some pretty fast tracks. I told her about the case a little, got her talking about the old days. She sat there on a lawn chair, she kept snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth. I got vibrations from her. She kind of liked Joe Threepersons and she hates old Charlie Rand’s guts. I asked her about Ross Calisher. She said he was kind of a blowhard, always making muscles at girls. Big rodeo hero, all that stuff. She said she wasn’t impressed.”
“She said it. Did you believe it?”
“Yes. I did. Why should she lie about it? It’s all dead and over. She went to some pains to insist Calisher never touched her. He was too loyal to her husband, she said, and she said it with a kind of sneer if you know what I mean—as if anybody that loyal to Charlie Rand had to be too stupid for words. Having an affair with Calisher would have been bad taste, to her. He wasn’t on her level. That was the idea she put across.”
Watchman gnawed on it. “What did she say about her husband?”
“Which one?”
“Both, I suppose.”
“Well she hates Rand. She said he courts them like a royal prince and then as soon as he marries them he files them away someplace and forgets they exist. She got tired of being ignored, and looking at her you can understand that. She’s one of those hearty types, you know, probably drinks more than she needs to, kind of bawdy, I guess she’s a natural blonde. By the time Kendrick came along she was looking around for ways to get even with Charlie Rand. She said she thought about Calisher but he was just too big and stupid and crude to be believed. All he ever knew about was rodeoing and bossing crews. She met Kendrick on account of that water-rights case they were starting and she says she took up with him to spite her husband but after a while it got sticky because they both got serious about each other. Finally she divorced Rand and a little while after that Kendrick married her.”
Stevens paused. “I’m looking at my notes.” Then he resumed. “I asked her about the murder. She didn’t seem to know much about it. She sort of liked Joe Threepersons but he was just a hired hand. She hadn’t liked Calisher anyway, she thought it was good riddance and she’s not too bashful to say so.”
“She have any opinion? On Joe’s guilt?”
“I asked her. She said she just didn’t know much about it.”
“Rand never talked to her about the case?”
“Rand never talked to her about much of anything.”
“What about Kendrick?”
“I don’t know. She’s a little murky on that subject. She didn’t want to talk to me about him. Maybe she thinks it would be disloyal.”
“Did you get the feeling she thought she had something to hide?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, Sam. She didn’t say it in so many words but she left the possibility open. But hell she left any possibility open. She just didn’t say anything.”
“So the significant thing isn’t what she said, it’s what she didn’t say.”
“Could be. I’m new at this game, maybe I didn’t ask the right questions. She’s polite but she’s holding a lot back. I don’t know if that means she knows anything about the case. It could just be she doesn’t want anybody prying into her private affairs. You can’t blame her for that.”
“Okay,” Watchman said. “Have you got anything else?”
Stevens didn’t. Watchman reminded him about the helicopter in the morning. Stevens said, “First thing. Listen, shouldn’t we report on that Oto murder to Lieutenant Wilder?”
“Tell him in the morning. It’s a county case, we haven’t got any official business mixing into it.”
“But that map you found in his truck, on top of that description of him down at Florence—it ties him right in.”
“We’re not supposed to investigate murders,” Watchman said, very dry. “The assignment is Joe Threepersons. That’s what we’re doing. That’s all we’re doing.”
“Okay, I’ve got it.”
“When you get done talking to Wilder in the morning, drive on up here. I’ll meet you at the trading post around noon.”
“Fine. You got a place to stay?”
“Yes. See you.” Watchman hung up and opened the booth door. He went across to the front corner of the porch and tipped his shoulder against the post. Victorio was still inside the law offices at the back of the council house; he saw light in the high window and shadows moving across it.
The moon was way over west, it was well after one o’clock and he’d been up since five. He was a little hungry and very tired. The pale silver earth stretched away past the trees of the settlement, breaking up against the foothills; the mountains were vague heavier masses against the stars. He stepped off the porch and walked fretfully up the shoulder of the road, unable to keep still, disquieted by the uncertainty of this case and his place in it. He was deliberately t
rying to keep Wilder and Captain Custis at arm’s length, not reporting directly to them and it was largely because he was doing everything intuitively. There was no science to it, only innuendoes, and in Phoenix they wouldn’t buy any of it. The moment Watchman had begun to believe it possible that Joe Threepersons was innocent he became one Indian trying to protect another Indian and there was no way to expect support from Phoenix; at the same time he was a Navajo hunting an Apache and the Apaches weren’t helping, except for Victorio and it was hard to get a clear impression of Victorio’s motives in the scheme of things.
The frustration was in the way they were all protecting Joe, each in his own way: the department by refusing to reopen the old case officially, the tribe by preventing Watchman from getting near Joe. If he could reach Joe he might reason with him: if it could be proved that Joe hadn’t murdered Calisher in the first place then Joe was home free—but not if he proceeded to kill someone for real.
There were so many vulnerable parties; why hadn’t any of them cracked? Or if they had why hadn’t Watchman spotted it? It had to be his own identity: they couldn’t talk to him, they couldn’t be sure if he was red or white, they had no way of knowing whose side he was really on. So all of them from Luxan down to Danny Sanada and Pete Porvo presented faces as hostile and protective as the face of a dog guarding a bone.
He turned and began to retrace the route to the center of town. A big jack bounded across the road, ears erect. He heard a toilet flush nearby; a light went off in a small window across a weedy lot and a moment later he heard water pipes bang. He crossed the apron of the filling station and kept walking toward the intersection but a car came up the south road and made a right turn past him and he recognized the two men inside it. He changed course with an abrupt jerk and ran across the parking lot probing his pocket for car keys.
Threepersons Hunt Page 16