The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  “It’s Jim Chee, Lieutenant. Do you have time to listen to a report?”

  “It’s Mr. Leaphorn now, Jim,” Leaphorn said. “Or just Joe.” He’d told Chee that a hundred times, but it didn’t seem to stick. “But go ahead.”

  “I guess the bottom line is they’ve arrested Hostiin Peshlakai in the Doherty homicide. Found blood on his clothing that matched Doherty’s type, and they’re checking for a DNA match. They also found another slug at the placer site that matches his caliber. Checking that for everything, too.”

  “Be damned,” Leaphorn said. “What does Peshlakai say?”

  “He says he doesn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t ask for a lawyer, but they assigned him a public defender named Knoblock. A woman. Do you know her?”

  “I’ve met her,” Leaphorn said. “Long time ago. She’s tough.”

  “I couldn’t get in to talk to Peshlakai,” Chee said.

  Leaphorn chuckled. “That doesn’t surprise me. What do you think he’d tell you?”

  “Probably not much. Also, the morning Doherty’s body was found—I think before Bernie found it—Peshlakai contacted a singer and arranged to have a Big Star Way done for him.”

  “Well, now,” Leaphorn said. “That sounds a little like a confession, doesn’t it?” He chuckled. “But can you imagine the U.S. district attorney trying to understand that, and then trying to explain it to a jury in Albuquerque?”

  “Not a confession, more like an implication. Now I’m getting to the part of this that will interest you. Remember that cellphone Bernie noticed in his hogan? Well, he called Wiley Denton on it twice the day Doherty was shot.”

  That surprised Leaphorn. He said, “Well, now.”

  “Two calls. The first one was eleven minutes long. The second one, less than three minutes.”

  Leaphorn sighed and waited. There would be more.

  “Another interesting thing. He’d had the phone a couple of years. Made only thirty-seven calls. The first two he made after he got the phone were also to Wiley Denton.”

  “Sounds like Wiley might have bought it for him, you think?”

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “But why?”

  “I’ll hand that one back to you, Jim. You met the man. Talked to him at his hogan. You think he could be on Denton’s payroll for some reason or other?”

  “Maybe,” Chee said. “But, no, I don’t think so. How about you? Do you think the two of them are involved in some sort of weird conspiracy?”

  “Denton using the old man as a watchman? Maybe I’ve got to think about this.”

  “Well,” said Chee, “if you have any constructive ideas, I hope you’ll tell me about them. I’m going to make another effort to talk to Peshlakai.”

  “Good idea,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’ll go have another visit with Wiley Denton.”

  But Denton’s housekeeper said Mr. Denton was not home, and, no, he probably wouldn’t be back very soon because he had gone over to the Jicarilla Reservation to look at one of the pump jacks he had on a well over there.

  Leaphorn left a message asking Denton to call, that he needed to talk to him. Then he got out his notebook and the map he’d been sketching out of this complicated affair and went over the way his thinking had developed. At the end of the notes he’d jotted after his talk with the Garcias, he found “Deputy Lorenzo Perez. Maybe he took wailing seriously. Is he the Perez I know?”

  The woman who answered the telephone at the sheriff’s office said Deputy Perez had retired a couple of years before. But, yes, Ozzie Price was in.

  “You again, Joe?” Ozzie said. “What now?”

  “I’m looking for Lorenzo Perez,” Leaphorn said. “Didn’t he used to be undersheriff?”

  “That’s him,” Ozzie said. “But that was under a different sheriff, and that was before his wife left him and he got into heavy drinking.”

  “He’s still in Gallup?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ozzie said. “You want to talk to him?”

  Leaphorn said he did, and waited. In a long minute, Ozzie provided three numbers. One was a street address, one was Perez’s phone number there, and the third was the number of the Old 66 Tavern. “Try that last one most evenings,” Ozzie said.

  “Was he sent out on that Halloween call to Fort Wingate? The one we were talking about the other day?”

  “He was,” Ozzie said. “And he got all wrapped up in it. I think that was when he was having wife troubles, and maybe it gave him something else to think about. Anyway, he kept nagging at the sheriff to look into it more. He thought Denton had killed his wife out there. Kept thinking it even after it was so damned obvious Denton couldn’t have done it.” Ozzie laughed. “Denton was busy at home killing McKay.”

  Now Leaphorn’s phone call found Lorenzo Perez at home, and Perez remembered Lieutenant Leaphorn.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, now. Talking to you takes me back a ways. You remember that time we caught that rustler that had rebuilt his house trailer so he could drive calves into it?”

  Leaphorn remembered it, but he managed to steer Perez into the Halloween call. “They say you took the call on that one. It always seemed funny to me. Like more than a prank.”

  This produced a silence. Leaphorn cleared his throat. “Lorenzo. You still there?”

  “I hope you’re not just joking me,” Perez said, sounding grim. “I’ve had enough of that.”

  “I’m not. I think something serious was going on out there that night.”

  “Well, I got joked about it, and made fun of, until I got just damn sick of it,” Perez said. “I kept looking into it when I could. Kept trying to get the sheriff to get the army to do some sort of a general search. We didn’t have the manpower to do it, of course, hundred and something thousand acres, lots of old empty buildings and damn near a thousand of those huge old bunkers. But the army could have done it. Would have, I’ll bet you, if the sheriff had just got serious about it and made some sort of demand. But he just laughed. Said they didn’t even have a missing person report. Nothing at all to go on.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about it,” Leaphorn said.

  They met at the coffee shop in the Gallup Mall.

  Perez was one of those New Mexico Hispanics whose face suggests Castile and the Conquistadores more than Mexico. His gray hair was cut bristle-short, as was his mustache, and his very dark eyes examined Leaphorn as if looking for some sort of understanding.

  “Driving over,” he said, “I was thinking I don’t know what I can tell you that’s going to help whatever you’re doing. I just talked to the kids that night, talked to them several other times, in fact, and kept going out there and nosing around. But I don’t know how I can convince you that we had a murder, or something like it, committed out there that night.”

  Having said that, he picked up his menu, glanced at it, put it down, and shook his head. “I hate things I can’t understand,” he said.

  “Me, too,” Leaphorn said. He told Perez of his arrangement with Wiley Denton, of what the students he’d talked to had told him, and of his own hunch that Linda Denton might have been the wailing woman.

  “About the only thing I can tell you that you might not know is that Wiley Denton told me he’d given Linda an expensive little disk player. One of those things with headphones that you carry around with you. When she left that morning to go to a lunch with some women friends, she took it with her.”

  “No,” Perez said. “I didn’t know that. The kids thought they heard music. At least Gracella Garcia did.”

  “And Mrs. Hano out at the Fort Wingate archives office told me McKay was out there that morning checking on something or other and that he had a woman in the car with him.”

  “Hey,” said Perez, leaning forward. “Mrs. Denton?”

  “She said she didn’t know who it was. She just noticed a woman seemed to be sleeping in the car, and that McKay told her it was his wife.”

  “Did you check on that?”

  “It wasn’t McKay’s wife,�
�� Leaphorn said. “She was at work in Gallup. McKay called her there.”

  “So he was lying to Mrs. Hano.”

  “So it would seem,” Leaphorn said.

  “Gracella was the one who seemed so certain about hearing music,” Perez said. “A couple of the others thought it might have been the wind whistling, or maybe their imagination.”

  “I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.

  “She seemed like a pretty level-headed—“ Perez stopped. “Wait a minute. When did Mrs. Hano talk to McKay? See the woman sleeping in his car?”

  “About noon, I think,” Leaphorn said. “I’ve got it in my notes.”

  “Gracella told me she’d noticed a car out there middle of the afternoon. She said they see army vehicles and trucks out there now and then, but this was a light-colored civilian sedan. What color was McKay’s car?”

  “I have no idea,” Leaphorn said. “But I’ll see if I can find out.”

  23

  Learning the color of Marvin McKay’s sedan proved to be so easy that Leaphorn found his whole attitude toward this dismal affair with Denton brightening. Deputy Price had told him no one had claimed McKay’s few personal belongings. Not surprising since, aside from the few dollars in his wallet, they had little if any value. And then Price had described Peggy McKay as a common-law wife—which meant that, sans any proof of her relationship, getting personal items back would be complicated. But the car was another matter.

  It had been parked at Denton’s place, and it almost certainly remained parked there for days since this homicide wasn’t one that received any normal criminal investigation. McKay wasn’t charged with anything. His role was victim. Who cared about his car? Sooner or later, George Billie might have gotten tired of looking at it, called the sheriff, and had it towed away. Or maybe wired the ignition, drove it away himself, and sold it to the car strippers.

  Leaphorn made another call to Denton’s place.

  “No,” said Mrs. Mendoza, “he’s still not home. Like I told you.”

  “Maybe you could help me, then,” Leaphorn said. “Do you remember the car Mr. McKay drove? What color it was?”

  “I don’t pay much attention to cars,” said Mrs.Mendoza, sounding out of patience.

  “I just thought you might have remembered what color it was.”

  “Why don’t you ask his lady about that car? I think she has it. Anyway, she came up here and drove it off.”

  “Well, thank you,” Leaphorn said. “I will.” And he put down the phone and sat a moment feeling stupid. Of course. There would be no reason for the police to impound that vehicle. Judging from what he knew about McKay, the car was probably owned by Peggy. And judging from what he knew about public officials in general, there was no reason to believe anyone would have taken on the authority of having it towed into storage.

  Peggy McKay answered the telephone on the first ring. Yes, she remembered Leaphorn, and yes, she had gotten a friend to drive her out to Denton’s place to recover her car. What kind of car was it? A pale-blue Ford Escort. Yes, she still had it.

  Leaphorn thought of the remarkable messiness of Mrs. McKay’s house. “Do you know if the car has been through a car wash since your husband’s death?”

  Hesitation now, while Peggy McKay considered that.

  “Not really,” she said. “I hosed it off myself last spring after a muddy spell.”

  “I’d like to come over and take a look at it, if that’s all right with you,” Leaphorn said.

  “Sure. Why not? I’ll be home all day.”

  Just out of the driveway, he saw Louisa’s car rolling up the street and stopped. So did she, and rolled down her window.

  “I’m going into Gallup to talk to Mrs. McKay again,” he shouted. “Then maybe if he’s home, I’ll go see Denton.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to tell him he’s a liar and I don’t want anything to do with him,” Leaphorn said.

  “Good for you,” said Louisa. “And when you get back I’ve got some information for you.”

  “Like what?” Leaphorn said. But she had closed the window and was parking her car under her favorite tree across the street.

  Peggy McKay hadn’t bothered to park her Ford Escort in the shade. It sat in her drive, with its windows rolled down and its grimy pale-blue finish bearing evidence that it hadn’t been through a car wash since its hosing last spring. Mrs. McKay appeared in her doorway as Leaphorn got out of his pickup.

  “Feel free,” she said, pointing to the car and laughing, “but don’t get it dirty.”

  “Thanks,” Leaphorn said.

  “Have you had any luck? I mean, finding Mrs. Denton?”

  “Not yet,” Leaphorn said. He opened the passenger’s-side door of the Escort. The interior reminded him of Mrs. McKay’s living room.

  “I’m not sure whether I told you,” she said, coming down from the porch into her driveway. “I think Denton got off way too easy for shooting Marvin. I think it was a plain premeditated murder.”

  She was staring at Leaphorn, awaiting a response.

  “The whole thing left a lot of unanswered questions,” he said. And, when that didn’t seem adequate, added: “Some pieces left out of the puzzle.”

  “What are you looking for in my car?”

  “I guess you could say I’m just hoping to find one of the missing pieces.”

  “To find Linda Denton?”

  “Yes,” Leaphorn said.

  “Not in that car, you won’t,” Mrs. McKay said. She walked back into her house and shut the door.

  Leaphorn made another quick inspection of the front-seat area, looked into the back-seat space, opened the trunk of his own car and extracted the cardboard box he kept there to stash his grocery purchases and prevent them from rattling around. He put the box on the driveway and began extracting odds and ends from Mrs. McKay’s floorboards—starting with a Baby Ruth wrapper, a crumpled tissue, a paper cup, a wrapper from a McDonald’s hamburger, and a cigarette butt. Leaphorn inspected each item, at least with a glance, before adding it to his pile. By the time he had completed his search of both sides of the front seat and moved to the back, his box was almost half filled with wildly assorted trash, evidence that Mrs. McKay was a regular customer of various fast-food establishments and a person who saved Wal-Mart advertising sections, discount coupons, empty cigarette packages, and even the high heel from a black slipper. The only thing he found under the floor mats was a torn section from an Arizona road map, and it seemed to have no relevance.

  Some of the stuff he set aside on a handkerchief he’d spread on the front seat—but very little. That included the quarter and dime he’d extracted from behind the passenger’s-side seat, an assortment of long blonde hairs he’d carefully picked from under the passenger’s-side headrest, a set of pliers he’d extracted from the glovebox, and a Chase Hardware sack and the sales slip he’d found crumpled inside it.

  Leaphorn took time now to inspect the pliers and the slip. The slip had been issued the day before McKay was killed and covered the pliers (an expensive $24.95 set), a crowbar, and a roll of plumber’s tape. He had found neither the tape nor the crowbar in the car. Leaphorn found himself imagining Linda Denton being hit on the head with one and bound with the other, and he made a mental note to ask Mrs. McKay about the purchases.

  With the larger trash items out of the way, he removed the rear seat. Under it he found more trash, but nothing more interesting than an advertising flier for last year’s Navajo Tribal Fair. Then he borrowed the flashlight from the glovebox, slid belly down onto the front floorboards, and pursued a close-up search there. The light and his probing hand harvested three business cards he’d missed (all from a State Farm Insurance salesman), a sock, another lost dime, what seemed to be a white marble but was actually a gum ball, a bright-red bead, and a small disk of clear glass that Leaphorn presumed at first was the lost face of a cheap watch.

  He was wrong about that. When he held it up for inspection, he saw it was a lens.
In fact, it was a progressive-focus lens prescribed and ground for those who need one focal length for reading, another for driving and other distances. Leaphorn slipped it into an envelope he saved from the trash, added the strands of hair, and sat awhile thinking. He was remembering one of the photographs on Wiley Denton’s wall. Beautiful young Linda, her long blonde hair disheveled by the breeze, smiling at the photographer, wearing silver-rimmed glasses.

  24

  Leaphorn gave Mrs. McKay the coins, showed her the lens he’d found, asked her if she or any of her friends wore such glasses, and when she could think of none, he avoided her obvious question by refusing to speculate and saying he’d try to find out. Then he showed her the sales slip from the hardware store.

  “Any idea what these were for?”

  “What’s this,” Mrs. McKay said, peering at the slip. “Is that ‘crowbar’?”

  “That’s the way I read it.”

  “We don’t have one. I don’t even know what it is.”

  “It’s a steel bar with a sort of hook end used for prying things,” Leaphorn said. “How about the other items?”

  “I can hardly believe it,” she said, and laughed. “We have a drip under the sink. For months we had a drip, and Marvin said not to worry, he’d fix it. I guess he finally got around to it.” But as she tried to go on, her voice broke. She looked away. “I mean, I guess he was going to.”

  Leaphorn had intended to borrow Mrs. McKay’s telephone to call home, but grief prefers privacy. He drove out to a motel parking lot on old U.S. 66 and called his Window Rock number from the pay phone. Louisa answered.

  “Are you at Wiley Denton’s house?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “That’s my next stop.”

  “He’s in oil and gas leases, that sort of thing, isn’t he? If he is, ask him if he knows anything about the ownership of Mock Land and Cattle Company or Apache Pipe.”

  “What’s up?” Leaphorn asked. “I think that cattle company is Bill Mock’s outfit. Or used to be. Probably owned by his heirs now. He operated a good-sized feedlot operation in Sandoval County, and a ranch.”