A Thief of Time

by Tony Hillerman

  “Even the navy career?”

  “Especially the navy,” Mrs. Luna said. “I asked her about that. She said, ‘Of course, Randall has an uncle who an admiral, and an aunt who’s married to an undersecretary of the navy, and somebody else who’s on the Senate Armed Services Committee. So he starts out with a commission.’ And I said something like, ‘You can hardly blame him for that,’ and she said she didn’t blame him. She said it was just that Randall has never had a chance to do anything himself.” Mrs. Luna shook her head. “And then she said, ‘He might be a pretty good man. Who knows? How can you tell?’ Isn’t that odd?”

  “It sounds odd to me,” Leaphorn said. “In Vietnam, he was evacuating the wounded?”

  “I think so,” Luna said.

  “That was it,” Mrs. Luna said. “I asked Maxie about that. She said, ‘You know, he probably could have done something on his own if he had the chance. But officers give each other decorations. Especially if it pleases Uncle Admiral.’ ‘Uncle Admiral,’ that’s what she said. And then she told me her younger brother was in Vietnam, too. She said he was an enlisted man. She said a helicopter flew his body out. But no uncles gave him any decorations.”

  Mrs. Luna looked sad. “Bitter,” she said. “Bitter, I remember the night we’d been talking about this. I’d said something about Randall flying a helicopter and she said, ‘What chance do you think you or I would have had to be handed a helicopter to fly?’”

  Leaphorn thought of nothing to say about that. Mrs. Luna rose, asked about coffee refills, and began clearing away the dishes. Luna asked if they’d like to spend the night in one of the temporary personnel apartments.

  “We better be getting back home,” Leaphorn said.

  The night was dead still, lit by a half-moon. From the visitor camping area up the canyon there was the sound of laughter. Allen was walking up the dirt road toward his house. As he watched him, it occurred to Leaphorn how everyone knew Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had left so early on her one-way trip.

  “Allen,” Leaphorn called. “What time do you catch the bus in the morning?”

  “It’s supposed to get here about five minutes before six,” Allen said. “Usually about then.”

  “Down by the road?”

  Allen pointed. “At the intersection down there.”

  “Did you see Ellie drive away?”

  “I saw her loading up her car,” Allen said.

  “You talk to her?”

  “Not much,” Allen said. “Susy said hello. And she said something about you kids have a good day at school and we said for her to have a good weekend. Something like that. Then we went down and caught the bus.”

  “Did you know she was going away for the weekend?”

  “Well,” Allen said, “she was putting her stuff in her car.”

  “Sleeping bag, too?” Maxie said she owned one, but he hadn’t found it in her apartment.

  “Yeah,” Allen said. “Whole bunch of stuff. Even a saddle.”

  “Saddle?”

  “Mr. Arnold’s,” Allen said. “He used to work here. He’s a biologist. Collects rocks with lichens on them, and he used to live in one of the temporary apartments. Dr. Friedman had his saddle. She was putting it in her car.”

  “She’d borrowed it from him?”

  “I guess so,” Allen said. “She used to have a horse. Last year it was.”

  “Do you know where this Mr. Arnold lives now?”

  “Up in Utah,” Allen said. “Bluff.”

  “How’d she sound? Okay? Same as usual? Nervous?”

  “Happy,” Allen said. “I’d say she sounded happy.”

  ELEVEN

  FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE—since his early teens at least—knowing that he was smarter than most people had been a major source of satisfaction for Harrison Houk. Now, standing with his back pressed against the wall of the horse stall in the barn, he knew that for once he had not been smart enough. It was an unusual feeling, and chilling. He thought of that aphorism of southern Utah’s hard country—if you want to be meaner than everybody else without dying young, you have to be smarter than everybody else. More than once Harrison Houk had heard that rule applied to him. He enjoyed the reputation it implied. He deserved it. He had gotten rich in a country where almost everybody had gotten poor. It had made him enemies, the way he had done it. He controlled grazing leases in ways that might not have stood grand jury scrutiny. He bought livestock, and sold livestock, under sometimes peculiar circumstances. He obtained Anasazi pots from people who had no idea what they were worth and sometimes sold them to people who only thought they knew what they were getting. He had arranged deals so lopsided that, when daylight hit them, they brought the high councilor of his Latter-day Saints stake down from Blanding to remind him of what was said about such behavior in the Book of Mormon. Even his stake president had written once exhorting him to make things right. But Houk had been smart enough not to die young. He was old now, and he intended to become very, very old. That was absolutely necessary. Things remained for him to do.

  Now more than ever. Responsibilities. Matters of clearing his conscience. He hadn’t stopped at much, but he’d never had a human life on his hands before. Not this directly. Never before.

  He stood against the wall, trying to think of a plan. He should have recognized the car more quickly, and understood what it must mean. Should have instantly made the link between the killing of Etcitty and the rest of it. He would have when he was younger. Then his mind worked like lightning. Now the killings had made him nervous. They could have been motivated by almost anything, of course. Greed among thieves. Malice over a woman. God knows what. Almost anything. But the instinct that had served him so well for so long suggested something more sinister. An erasing of tracks. A gathering in of strings. That certainly would involve him, and he should have seen. Nor should he have thought so slowly when he saw the car turning through his gate. Maybe he would have had enough time then to hobble back to the house, to the pistol in his dresser drawer or the rifle in the closet. He could only wait now, and hope, and try to think of some solution. There could be no running for it, not with the arthritis in his hip. He had to think.

  Quickly. Quickly. He’d left a note for Irene. He thought Irene would be coming back for her squash and she’d wonder where he’d gone. Pinned it on the screen door, telling her he’d be out in the barn working. It was right there in plain view. The worst kind of bad luck.

  He looked around him for a hiding place. Houk was not a man subject to panic. He could climb into the loft but there was no cover there. Behind him bales of alfalfa were stacked head-high. He could restack some of them, leave himself a cave. Would there be time? Not without luck. He began a new stack against the wall, leaving a space just wide enough to hold him, groaning as he felt the weight of the heavy bales grinding his hip socket. As he worked, he realized the futility. That would only delay things a few minutes. There was really no place to hide.

  He noticed the pitchfork then, leaning beside the door where he’d left it. He limped over, got it, limped back to the horse stall. Maybe there would be some chance to use it. Anyway, it was better than hiding and just waiting.

  He gripped the fork handle, listening. His hearing wasn’t what it once had been but he could detect nothing except, now and then, the breeze blowing through the slats. The smell of the barn was in his nostrils. Dust. Dry alfalfa. The faint acid of dried horse urine. The smell of a dry autumn.

  “Mr. Houk,” the voice called. “You in the barn?”

  Add it all together, average it out, it had been a good enough life. The first fifty years, close to wonderful, except for Brigham being sick. Even that you could live with, given the good wife he’d been blessed with. Except for the downswings of the schizophrenia, Brigham had been happy enough, most of the time. The rages came and went, but when he was out in the wild country, hunting, living alone, he seemed full of joy. Thinking back, Houk was impressed again with the memory. He’d been pretty good himself outdoors
as a kid. But not like The Boy. By the time he was ten, Brigham could go up a cliff that Houk wouldn’t have tried with ropes. And he knew what to eat. And how to hide. That brought back a rush of memories, and of the old, old sorrow. The Boy, the summer he was seven, missing long after suppertime. All of them hunting him. Finding him in the old coyote den under the saltbush. He’d been as terrified at being found as if he had been a rabbit dug out by a dog.

  That had been the day they no longer lied to themselves about it. But nothing the doctors tried had worked. The piano had helped for a while. He had a talent for it. And he could lose himself for hours just sitting there making his music. But the rages came back. And putting him away had been unspeakable and unthinkable.

  “Houk?” the voice said. Now it was just beyond the barn wall. “I need to talk to you.”

  And now he could hear footsteps, the door with the draggy hinge being pulled open.

  One thing he had to do. He couldn’t leave it undone. He should have handled it yesterday, as soon as he found out about it. Yesterday—personally. It had to be taken care of. It wasn’t something you went away and left—not a human life.

  He took out his billfold, found a business card from a well-drilling outfit in it, and began writing on its back, holding the card awkwardly against the billfold.

  “Houk,” the voice said. It was inside the barn now. “I see you there, through the slats. Come out.”

  No time now. He couldn’t let the note be found, except by the police. He pushed it down inside his shorts. Just as he did, he heard the stall door opening.

  TWELVE

  IT WAS RAINING IN NEW YORK. L. G. Marcy, the director of public affairs to whom Joe Leaphorn was referred, proved to be a slender, stylish woman with gray hair, and eyes as blue as blade steel. On drier days, the expanse of glass behind her desk looked out upon the rooftops of midtown Manhattan. She examined Leaphorn’s card, turned it over to see if the back offered more information, and then glanced up at him.

  “You want to see the documentation on an artifact,” she said. “Is that correct?” She glanced down at the open catalog Leaphorn had handed her.

  “That’s all. Just this Anasazi pot,” Leaphorn said. “We need to know the site it came from.”

  “I can assure you it was legal,” Ms. Marcy said. “We do not deal in pots collected in violation of the Antiquities Preservation Act.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” said Leaphorn, who was equally sure no sane pot hunter would ever certify that he had taken a pot illegally. “We presume the pot came from private land. We simply need to know which private land. Whose ranch.”

  “Unfortunately, that pot sold. All pots went in that auction. So we don’t have the documentation. The documentation went to the buyer. Along with the pot,” L. G. Marcy said. She smiled, closed the catalog, handed it to Leaphorn. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Who was the buyer?”

  “We have a problem there,” she said. “It is Nelson’s policy to cooperate with the police. It is also Nelson’s policy to respect the confidence of our customers. We never tell anyone the identity of buyers unless we have their advance clearance to do so.” She leaned across the desk to return Leaphorn’s card. “That rarely happens,” she said. “Usually, none of the parties concerned wants publicity. They value privacy. On rare occasions, the object involved is so important that publicity is inevitable. But rarely. And in this case, the object is not the sort that attracts the news media.”

  Leaphorn put the card in the pocket of his uniform shirt. The shirt was damp from the rain Leaphorn had walked through from his hotel toward this office building before ducking for shelter into a drugstore. To his surprise, the store sold umbrellas. Leaphorn had bought one, the first he’d ever owned, and continued his journey under it—tremendously self-conscious—thinking he would own the only umbrella in Window Rock, and perhaps the only umbrella on the reservation, if not in all of Arizona. He was conscious of it now, lying wetly across his lap, while he waited silently for L. G. Marcy to add to her statement. Leaphorn had learned early in his career that this Navajo politeness often clashed with white abhorrence for conversational silences. Sometimes the resulting uneasiness caused belagana witnesses to blurt out more than they intended to say. While he waited, he noticed the prints on the wall. All, if Leaphorn could judge, done by female artists. The same for the small abstract sculpture on the Marcy desk. The silence stretched. It wasn’t going to work with this belagana.

  It didn’t.

  The pause caused L. G. Marcy’s smile to become slightly bent. Nothing more. She outwaited 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 Anasa
zi 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.