The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  “Feedlot?”

  “Where buyers fatten up range cattle before they send them off to become sirloins and hamburgers,” Leaphorn said. And Apache Pipe, I think that’s Denton. Years ago, he went into it with the Jicarilla tribe to finance the gas-collection system for the gas wells, but I heard he bought out the tribe’s interest.”

  “Denton’s,” said Louisa. “How about that.”

  “Tell me,” Leaphorn said.

  “That land on top of Mesa de los Lobos is the typical Checkerboard Reservation jumble, which won’t surprise you. Much of the north slope of the mesa is reserved Navajo land, and a lot of the south side was in the allocation the government gave to the railroad. Some of that somehow went back into public domain ownership—probably some swapping back and forth with private ownership, and you Navajos bought back a piece of it, and other chunks were sold off by the railroad to various private owners. I’ll guess you knew a lot of that already.”

  “Some of it,” Leaphorn said.

  “The parcel I think you and Sergeant Chee might be interested in is a six-section block at the head of the Coyote Canyon drainage. Somebody named Arthur Sanders and Sons bought it from the outfit handling land sales for the railroad in 1878. That must have become Sanders Cattle, because in 1903 William L. Elrod bought it from them. Since then, there’s two more transfers of title, looks like due to deaths and inheritances, but the company with the title to the six sections is still Elrod Land and Cattle Company. You got that?”

  “I’ve got it,” Leaphorn said. “I imagine Chee will want to find out if the Elrod people know what’s going on down at the bottom end of their canyon. And thanks. This must have been a lot of hard work for you.”

  “Hold it. Hold it,” Louisa said. “I haven’t got to the hard-work part yet, where it gets complicated.”

  “Oh?”

  “Elrod also has a grazing lease on a small tract of Bureau of Land Management land adjoining its property. There’s some sort of legal question about whether that lease will be renewed. Argument over whether Elrod overgrazed it, I think it is. Anyway, Elrod dropped its application to renew on that, and the existing lease expires September one.”

  “September one,” Leaphorn said. “Couple more weeks to run then. Any significance to that?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe. There’s an option to buy, contract to sell recorded, which is tied to the Bureau of Land Management lease. Effective when the lease expires. The clerk at the BLM office said Apache would probably apply for the lease, but hasn’t yet. She said the little tract is just a sort of cut-off corner, and she didn’t think anyone else would want it.”

  “The purchase price didn’t happen to be on the record?”

  “They never are,” Louisa said.

  “Let’s see,” Leaphorn said. “Six sections at six hundred forty acres per section would be almost four thousand acres. With dry country grazing land close to worthless, I doubt if the price would matter to Denton.”

  Louisa laughed. “Not for raising cattle anyway. The BLM was calculating you could graze eight units per square mile on it. I guess that’s eight cows per section.”

  “Cow plus its calf,” Leaphorn said.

  “So I guess that you guess that Mr. Denton isn’t buying it for grazing calves. He thinks he can find the old Golden Calf gold mine up there. Am I right about that?”

  “Almost,” Leaphorn said. “I think he found the Golden Calf a long time ago.”

  “Did something you found out today tell you that? Come on home and tell me about it.”

  “I will,” Leaphorn said. “But now I’ve got to go see Wiley Denton and let him know I’m calling off any sort of arrangement he thinks we might have.”

  Louisa took a moment to think about this.

  “Joe,” she said. “I think you should be very careful with this Denton. Don’t you think he must be kind of crazy?”

  “I have been thinking that for quite a while,” Leaphorn said.

  25

  Leaphorn’s next call was to Wiley Denton’s unlisted number. Mrs. Mendoza answered. Yes, Mr. Denton was now home.

  “You finding anything useful?” Denton asked. “And how about giving me some sort of idea how much you’re charging me?”

  “I’ll be out to your place in about thirty minutes,” Leaphorn said. “I have something I want to show you.”

  “Well, how much are you going to charge me?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Leaphorn said, and hung up.

  George Billie was standing by the garage door as Leaphorn stopped at the entry gate. The entry gate slid open, smooth and silent.

  “He said to bring you right in,” Billie said after Leaphorn parked his car. Billie held the door open and led Leaphorn down the long carpeted hallway to the office. Denton was sitting behind his desk, staring at Leaphorn, his expression blank.

  “I guess we’re even on the ‘hanging up the telephone on one another’ business,” Denton said. “But at least you didn’t call me a son of a bitch.”

  “No,” Leaphorn said. “But I’m going to call you a liar.”

  Denton’s only reaction to that was to continue the stare and, finally, to scratch his ear.

  “Maybe I’ll make that a damned liar,” Leaphorn said.

  “I guess I’ve done a little of that,” Denton said. “This oil-leasing business sometimes requires it. But now you’re going to tell me what you found. And how badly you’re going to rip me off when you bill me for your services.”

  “I found this,” Leaphorn said. He took the envelope from his shirt pocket, extracted the lens, held it out toward Denton on his finger.

  Denton stared at it, frowned. Said, “What is—“ Then he leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, his face a mask of tense muscles. “A lens,” he said. “Is that from Linda’s glasses?”

  “I don’t know,” Leaphorn said, and held it out. “Do you think it is?”

  Denton let out a long-held breath, opened his eyes, leaned forward, and held out his hand. Leaphorn put the lens on his palm. Denton picked it up with finger and thumb, very gently, studied it, held it up to the light, and looked through it for a long moment. Then he laid it carefully on the desk blotter.

  “She had beautiful eyes,” he said. “Blue as the sky. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw.”

  Leaphorn said nothing. Denton’s own eyes were watering, and then he was crying. He didn’t wipe the tears away. No more tension in his face now, but he looked terribly old.

  “Where’d you find her?” he asked.

  “I didn’t find her,” Leaphorn said. “I found the lens under the front seat of the car McKay was driving the day you killed him.”

  “Just that?”

  “That’s all, and a few long blonde hairs caught in the passenger-side front-seat headrest. Peggy McKay has black hair.”

  “That bastard,” Denton said. “That sick son of a bitch.” He rubbed the back of his hand across his face, got up, and walked to the window. He looked out for a moment, then back at Leaphorn. “She had her hair fixed real pretty when she left that morning for that lunch party she was going to. Or said she was going to.”

  “And she was wearing her glasses?”

  “She always did,” Denton said, returning his gaze out the window. “I wanted to get her fitted with some of those contact lenses you wear right on your eyes, but she said she never could read well with them on. And she was reading all the time.”

  “I hear that’s common,” Leaphorn said.

  “She was far-sighted,” Denton said in a choked voice. “Said she just needed longer arms.” He forced what sounded a little like a chuckle. “But she said the ones she had were long enough to wrap around me.”

  “It sounds like you’re certain that lens is from Linda’s glasses.”

  “Yeah. What else,” Denton said, still looking at whatever attracted him outside. “It’s the same oval shape. One of those merged-in trifocal grinds.”

  “Let’s go back to where we started,” Le
aphorn said. “Get back to that day you asked me if I would look for your wife. See if I could find what happened to her, anyway. And I said I would if you wouldn’t lie to me. You’ve been lying to me, so I’m quitting. But I’d still like some straight answers out of you.”

  Denton had turned away from the window. “Lying about what?” The bright backlighting from the window made it impossible for Leaphorn to read his expression, but the tone was hostile.

  “About the maps, for starters. McKay wasn’t trying to sell you a location in the Zuñi Mountains. His was on Mesa de los Lobos. Then there’s the circumstances of how you shot him. He wasn’t just leaving when that happened. He was—“

  “What makes you think that?”

  “McKay was a sort of fancy dresser. He wouldn’t have been walking out of here without his expensive leather jacket, which was hanging on that chair over there with no bullet hole in it, and no blood.”

  Denton walked over and sat behind his desk, studying Leaphorn. He shrugged. “So what?” he said. “Whether he was leaving, or just getting ready to leave.”

  “Then there’s the gun. Big, clumsy long-barrel thirty-eight revolver. He wouldn’t have been carrying a gun like that in the pocket of his jacket. It wouldn’t fit anyway. Hell of a job to get it in your pants pocket. Or out of them.”

  Denton shrugged again. “You’re sounding like a damned lawyer.”

  “Peggy McKay says he didn’t have a gun.”

  Now Denton leaned forward. “What are you saying? You saying I just shot the bastard down and planted the gun on him? Like you police sometimes do?”

  “Something like that. Am I close?”

  A long minute of silence followed that question. Leaphorn remembered Louisa’s warning to him to be careful—that Denton might be a little crazy. He’d always figured Denton to be a little crazy. Who wasn’t? But he was conscious of how Denton had moved behind the desk, of desk drawers with pistols in them.

  Denton had come to some sort of decision. He exhaled, shook his head, said: “What you’re suggesting is I had that pistol in here all ready to plant on him. You’re suggesting I invited him here just to execute him. Right? Now why in the world would I do that? The man’s trying to sell me what I’ve been trying to buy. The location of the Golden Calf.”

  “Because,” Leaphorn said, and hesitated. Perhaps it was time for him to lie himself. Time to avoid standing right where Marvin McKay had stood. But he was already past that point. “Because you already knew where this legendary gold deposit is located. You’d already found it. When you learned McKay knew the location, you didn’t want him around spreading the word.”

  “Hell,” Denton said. “That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why would I give a damn if he talked about it? People been talking about finding the Golden Calf for a hundred years. More than that. And nobody would believe them. Why would they believe a con artist? And why would I care anyway?”

  “Because at the end of the month, an option you have with Elrod Land and Cattle to buy that land at the head of Coyote Canyon goes into effect,” Leaphorn said. “If the word gets out before then, the deal can be canceled.”

  Denton’s swivel chair creaked as he leaned back in it, studying Leaphorn. His hands were out of sight, under the table. Then the left one reappeared. He rubbed the crooked hump of his broken nose. Made a wry face.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “It’s public record,” Leaphorn said. “The contract’s tied in with the Bureau of Land Management lease.”

  “So what,” Denton said. “What if you’re guessing right? So you think that gives me a motive for murder. Hell, man, I’ve already been to court on this thing. Found guilty of killing McKay. Already served my time in prison. You know the law. It’s over with. No double jeopardy. And what’s any of this have to do with finding Linda? That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.”

  “That brings us to one of your deceptions that has a lot to do with finding Linda. Let’s see if you’ll tell the truth about that.”

  Denton produced a hostile grin. “It’s deception now, is it, instead of lie? Well, go ahead. Let’s hear it.”

  “Before McKay came out here that evening he called his wife. Told her he was bringing you your map and all that. He said that from the questions you’d been asking him, he thought you might be planning to cheat him. Take the map and his information and not give him the fifty thousand. He said in case that happened, he had a back-up plan, insurance, something to make you pay.”

  “She told you that, did she?”

  “She did, and with nothing to gain from lying about it.”

  “What was this insurance? This back-up plan?”

  “You tell me,” Leaphorn said. “McKay didn’t tell her what he had in mind. So now you tell me what he said. It might help us find your wife.”

  Denton said nothing. He looked away from Leaphorn, at the window. When he looked back, the bravado had slipped away. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Denton, stop wasting our time,” Leaphorn said. “You know now Linda must have been in McKay’s car out at Fort Wingate that afternoon. That would have been just before he came here. Just before he called his own wife and told her about his ‘insurance.’ Why not quit kidding yourself?”

  Denton had lowered his head into his hands, and was shaking it back and forth. He didn’t look up. “Shut up,” he said. “Shut up, damn you, and get out of here. And don’t ever come back.”

  26

  Lorenzo Perez was in his front yard holding a garden hose with a high-pressure nozzle when Leaphorn drove up—and was doing what seemed eccentric to Leaphorn.

  “Watering your rosebush?” he asked. “Looks like you’re trying to knock the leaves off.”

  “No,” said Perez, “I’m trying to get rid of the damned aphids.”

  “They don’t like water?”

  Perez laughed. “You try to knock them off the stems,” Perez said. “It’s better than using poison. That kills the ladybugs, and the birds, and all your other helpers. If you can knock the aphids off with the water, they can’t climb back up again.” He turned off the hose. “But it’s a lost cause anyway, trying to grow roses in Gallup. Wrong climate.”

  “I need a favor, if you have time.”

  “When you catch me out squirting water on aphids, you know I’m not terrible busy.”

  “I’m still on that wailing woman business out at the fort,” Leaphorn said. “I wanted to see if you could give me a clearer picture of just where those kids were when they heard it, and from which direction they said the sounds were coming.”

  “You mean go on out there and sort of try to re-create it for you?”

  “That’s what I had in mind. And maybe see if we could get Gracella Garcia to come along.”

  “I guess we could handle that. When you want to do it?”

  “How about right now?”

  “I can’t do it today,” Perez said. “You in a hurry?”

  “Sort of,” said Leaphorn. “But I guess it could wait.”

  “I could pretty well tell you just where it was, if you’re in a rush,” said Perez as he walked over to his fence. “You know they have those bunkers blocked off? Well, they were—“

  “Well, no, I don’t. I never had very much business out there, and when I did I wasn’t paying that sort of attention.”

  “You know the military, though,” Perez said. “The army divided all those bunkers off into ten blocks, and lettered the blocks from A to J, and then numbered the bunkers. Like, for example, B1028.”

  “Divided them off by what they had in them?” Leaphorn asked.

  “God knows.” Perez said. “I think they did it during the Vietnam War when they added some new ones. They were running virtually all the munitions and explosive stuff through Wingate then. Busy, busy. Artillery shells, rockets, mines, everything. Big boom for Gallup. New rail lines had to be built, everything.” Perez laughed. “They even built concrete
shelters every so often so people working could run in them for shelter in case lightning might strike something and blow things up.”

  Leaphorn had stopped paying close attention to the rest of this report after Perez cited the bunker-labeling system.

  “Each bunker had its own number?”

  “Letter and number.”

  “How many bunkers in each block?”

  “I don’t know. They used ten letters, A through J, and there’s about eight hundred bunkers, so I’d guess a hundred to a block, but maybe they lettered ’em by what’s stored inside. Like ‘A’ for artillery, and ‘B’ for bombs, and—“ Perez paused, unable to think of anything that exploded that started with a “C.” “These days, ‘E’ for empty would be the letter they’d need for most of the blocks. Anyway, the army rule was no bunker could be closer than two hundred yards to another one, and they used about twenty-four-thousand acres scattering them out. Had to build a hell of a lot of railroad track.”

  “How about the numbers?” Leaphorn asked. “I noticed some of them had four numbers after the letter.”

  Perez frowned. “I think maybe all of them did,” he said. “No idea why, except they seemed to be in order. Like B1222 would come after B1221.”

  “What block were the kids in?”

  “I think it was ‘D,’” Perez said. “Or maybe ‘C.’”

  “I’m going on out there and look around,” Leaphorn said. “If I learn anything, I’ll call you.”

  But now Leaphorn found he couldn’t remember the number on the card with Doherty’s stuff. He was sure it began with a D, but his usually fine memory had jumbled together Peshlakai’s cellphone number, Denton’s unlisted number, his advertisement number, and Doherty’s four digits. But he did remember telling the number to Chee, and Chee jotting it into his notebook.

  Chee was probably still in Gallup. Leaphorn called the FBI office there. Chee wasn’t there, but Bernie was. She said Chee would be in any minute for a meeting with Osborne. Did he want to leave a message?

  “I wanted to ask him if he had that number found on the back of that business card in Doherty’s stuff. I remember he wrote it down.”