A Thief of Time jlajc-8

by Tony Hillerman

  'Or call it off altogether.'

  'Right.'

  'Or there's Italy.'

  'Which is warm, I hear,' Chee said, and then he saw she was serious.

  'You hear from your Successful Attorney?'

  'He flew all the way to Chicago, to Albuquerque, to Gallup. I met him at Gallup.'

  Not knowing what to say, Chee said: 'Not exactly meeting him halfway.' It sounded flippant. Chee didn't feel flippant. He cleared his throat. 'Has he changed? Time does that with people. So I'm told.'

  'Yes,' Janet Pete said. But she shook her head. 'But no. Not really. My mother told me a long time ago: `Don't ever expect a man to change. What you see is what you live with.''

  'I guess so,' Chee said. She looked tired, and full of sadness. He reached out and took her hand in his. It was cold. 'Trouble is, I guess you love him anyway.'

  'I don't know,' Janet Pete said. 'I just…' But the sympathy was too much for her. Her voice choked. She looked down, fumbling in her purse.

  Chee handed her his napkin. She held it to her face.

  'Rough life,' Chee said. 'Love is supposed to make us happy, and sometimes it makes us miserable.'

  Through the napkin he heard Janet sniff.

  He patted her hand. 'This sounds like a cliche, or whatever it is, but I know how you feel. I really do.'

  'I know,' Janet said.

  'But you know, I've decided. I'm giving up. You can't go on forever.' As he heard himself saying that, he was amazed. When did he decide that? He hadn't realized it. He felt a surge of relief. And of loss. Why can't men cry? he wondered. Why is that not allowed?

  'He wants me to go to Italy with him. He's going to Rome. Taking over their legal affairs for Europe. And Africa. And the Middle East.'

  'He speak Italian?' As he said it, it seemed an incredibly stupid question. Totally beside the point here.

  'French,' she said. 'And some Italian. And he's perfecting it. A tutor.'

  'How about you?' he said. Why couldn't he think of something less inane. He would be asking her next about her passport. And packing. And airfares. That wasn't what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about love.

  'No,' she said.

  'What did he say? Does he understand now that you want to be a lawyer? That you want to practice it?'

  The napkin was in her lap now. Her eyes dry. But they showed she'd been crying. And her face was strained.

  'He said I could practice in Italy. Not with his company. It has a nepotism rule. But he could line something up for me after I got the required Italian license.'

  'He could line something up. For you.'

  She sighed. 'Yeah. That's the way he put it. And I guess he could. At a certain level in law, the big firms feed on one another. There would be Italian firms doing feed-out work. The word would go into the good-old-boy network. Tit for tat. I guess once I learned Italian I would be offered a job.'

  Chee nodded. 'I'd think so,' he said.

  Lunch came. Mutton stew and fry bread for Chee. Janet was having a bowl of soup.

  They sat looking at the food.

  'You should eat something,' said Chee, who had totally lost his appetite. He took a spoonful of the stew, a bite of fry bread. 'Eat,' he ordered.

  Janet Pete took a spoonful of soup.

  'Made a decision yet?'

  She shook her head. 'I don't know.'

  'You know yourself better than anyone,' he said. 'What's going to make you happy?'

  She shook her head again. 'I think I'm happy when I'm with him. Like dinner last night. But I don't know.'

  Chee was thinking about the dinner and how it had ended, and what happened then. Had she gone to his room with him? Had she spent the night there? Probably. The thought hurt. It hurt a lot. That surprised him.

  'I shouldn't let things like this drag on,' she said. 'I should decide.'

  'We let ours drag on. Mary and I. And I guess she decided.'

  He had released her hand when lunch arrived. Now she reached over and put hers on his. 'I have your napkin,' she said. 'Slightly damp but still' -- she looked at it, a rumpled square of pale blue paper -- 'usable in case of emergency.'

  He realized instantly that this was her bid to change the subject. He took the napkin, dropped it in his lap.

  'Have you realized how lucky you are to have been brought to the only cafe in Shiprock with napkins?'

  'Noted and appreciated,' she said. Her smile seemed almost natural. 'And how are things going with you?'

  'I told you about the Backhoe Bandit. And Etcitty?'

  She nodded. 'That must have been gruesome. How about finding the woman?'

  'How much did I tell you about that?'

  She reminded him.

  He told her about Houk, about the note left for Leaphorn, about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's pistol and how it was the same caliber used in the killings, about Leaphorn's obsessive interest in finding the Utah site to which Friedman's long-lost potter seemed to have moved.

  'You know you have to file for a permit to dig sites like that on the reservation. We have an office in Window Rock that deals with it,' Janet Pete said. 'Did you check that?'

  'Leaphorn might have,' Chee said. 'But apparently she was trying to find out where the stuff was coming from. You'd have to know that before you could file.'

  'I guess so. But I think they're all numbered. Maybe she would just guess at it.'

  Chee grinned and shook his head. 'Back when I was an anthropology student, I remember Professor Campbell, or somebody, telling us there were forty thousand sites listed with New Mexico Laboratory of Anthropology numbers. That's in New Mexico alone. And another hundred thousand or so on other registries.'

  'I didn't mean just pick a number at random,' she said, slightly irked. 'She could describe the general location.'

  Chee was suddenly interested. 'Maybe Leaphorn already looked into it,' he said. He was remembering that probably he would be hearing from Leaphorn soon. He'd left word with the switchboard to relay the call here. 'But would it take long to check?'

  'I could call,' she said, looking thoughtful. 'I know the man who runs it. Helped him with the regulations. I think, to dig on the reservation, I think you have to apply to the Park Service and the Navajo Cultural Preservation Office both. I think you have to name a repository for whatever you recover, and get the archive system approved. And maybe…'

  Chee was thinking how great it would be if, when Leaphorn called, he could tell him the map coordinates of the site he was looking for. His face must have showed his impatience. Janet stopped midsentence. 'What?' she said.

  'Let's go back to the station and call,' he said.

  The call from Leaphorn was waiting when they walked in. Chee gave him what he'd learned from the Madison police and from Bates at the San Juan County Sheriff's Office. 'They're expecting a report from the Utah State Police,' Chee added. 'Bates said he would call when he gets it.'

  'I've got it,' Leaphorn said. 'It was twenty-five-caliber, too.'

  'Do you know if Friedman applied for a permit to dig that site you're looking for?'

  Long silence. 'I should have thought of that,' Leaphorn said finally. 'I doubt if she did. The red tape takes years and it's a double filing. Park Service clearance plus tribal clearance, and all sorts of checking and screwing around gets involved. But I should have checked it.'

  'I'll take care of it,' Chee said.

  The man to call, Janet Pete said, was T. J. Pedwell. Chee reached him just back from lunch. Had he had any applications from Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal to dig on a reserved Anasazi site on the reservation?

  'Sure,' Pedwell said. 'Two or three. On Checkerboard land around Chaco Canyon. She's that ceramics specialist working over there.'

  'How about over on the north side of the reservation? Up in Utah.'

  'I don't think so,' Pedwell said. 'I could check on it. Wouldn't know the site number, would you?'

  `'Fraid not,' Chee said. 'But it might be somewhere near the north e
nd of Many Ruins Canyon.'

  'I know that place,' Pedwell said. 'Helped with the Antiquities survey all up through that part of the country.'

  'You know the canyon the local people call Watersprinkler?'

  'It's really Many Ruins,' Pedwell said. 'It's full of pictographs and petroglyphs of Koko-pelli. That's the one the Navajos call the Watersprinkler yei. '

  'I have a description of the site, and it sounds unusual,' Chee said. He told Pedwell what Amos Whistler had told him.

  `Teah,' Pedwell said. 'Sounds familiar. Let me check my files. I have photos of most of them.'

  Chee heard the telephone click against something. He waited and waited. Sighed. Leaned a hip against the desk.

  'Trouble?' Janet Pete asked.

  Pedwell's voice was in his ear before he could respond.

  'Found it,' Pedwell said. 'It's N.R. 723. Anasazi. Circa 1280-1310. And there's two other sites right there with it. Probably connected.'

  'Great!' Chee said. 'How do you get there?'

  'Well, it ain't going to be easy. I remember that. We packed into some of them on horseback. Others we floated down the San Juan and walked up the canyon. This one I think we floated. Let's see. Notes say it's five point seven miles up from the mouth of the canyon.'

  'Dr. Friedman. She apply to dig that one?'

  'Not her,' Pedwell said. 'Another of those people out at Chaco did. Dr. Randall Elliot. They working together?'

  'I don't think so,' Chee said. 'Does the application say he was collecting St. John's Polychrome pots?'

  'Lemme look.' Papers rustled. 'Doesn't sound like pots. Says he is studying Anasazi migrations.' Mumbling sounds of Pedwell reading to himself. 'Says his interest is tracing genetic patterns.' More mumbling. 'Studying bones. Skull thickness. Six-fingeredness. Aberrant jaw formation.' More mumbling. 'I don't think it has anything to do with ceramics,' Pedwell said, finally. 'He's looking at the skeletons. Or will be if your famous Navajo bureaucracy, of which I am a part, ever gets this processed. Six-fingeredness. Lot of that among the Anasazi, but hard to study, because hands don't survive intact after a thousand years. But it sounds like he's found some family patterns. Too many fingers. An extra tooth in the right side of the lower jaw. A second hole where those nerves and blood vessels go through the back of the jaw, and something or other about the fibula. Physical anthropology isn't my area.'

  'But he hasn't gotten his permit yet?'

  'Wait a minute. I guess we weren't so slow on this one. Here's a carbon of a letter to Elliot from the Park Service.' Paper rustled. 'Turndown,' Pedwell said. 'More documentation needed of previous work in this field. That do it?'

  'Thanks a lot,' Chee said.

  Janet Pete was watching him.

  'Sounds like you scored,' she said.

  'I'll fill you in,' he said.

  'On the way back to my car.' She looked embarrassed. 'I'm normally the usual stolid, dull lawyer,' she said. 'This morning I just ran off in hysterics and left everything undone. People coming in to see me. People waiting for me to finish things. I feel awful.'

  He walked to the car with her, opened the door.

  'I'm glad you called on me,' he said. 'You honored me.'

  'Oh, Jim!' she said, and hugged him around the chest with such strength that he caught his breath. She stood, holding him like that, pressed against him. He sensed she was about to cry again. He didn't want that to happen.

  He put his hand on her hair and stroked it.

  'I don't know what you'll decide about your Successful Attorney,' he said. 'But if you decide against him, maybe you and I could see if we could fall in love. You know, both Navajos and all that.'

  It was the wrong thing to say. She was crying as she drove away.

  Chee stood there, watching her motor pool sedan speed toward the U.S. 666 junction and the route to Window Rock. He didn't want to think about this. It was confusing. And it hurt. Instead he thought of a question he should have asked Pedwell. Had Randall Elliot also filed an application to dig in that now-despoiled site where Etcitty and Nails had died?

  He walked back into the station, remembering those jawbones so carefully set aside amid the chaos.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ť ^ ť

  TO LEAPHORN, the saddle had seemed a promising possibility. She had borrowed it from a biologist named Arnold, who lived in Bluff. Other trails led to Bluff. The site of the polychrome pots seemed to be somewhere west of the town, in roadless country where a horse would be necessary. She would go to Arnold's place. If he could loan her a saddle, he could probably loan her a horse. From Arnold he would learn where Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had headed. The first step was finding Arnold, which shouldn't be difficult.

  It wasn't. The Recapture Lodge had been Bluff's center of hospitality for as long as Leaphorn could remember. The man at the reception desk loaned Leaphorn his telephone to call Chee. Chee confirmed what Leaphorn had feared. Whether or not Dr. Friedman was killing pot hunters, her pistol was. The man at the desk also knew Arnold.

  'Bo Arnold,' he said. 'Scientists around here are mostly anthropologists or geologists, but Dr. Arnold is a lichen man. Botanist. Go up to where the highway bends left, and take the right toward Montezuma Creek. It's the little redbrick house with lilac bushes on both sides of the gate. Except I think Bo let the lilacs die. He drives a Jeep. If he's home, you'll see it there.'

  The lilacs were indeed almost dead, and a dusty early-model Jeep was parked in the weeds beside the little house. Leaphorn parked beside it and stepped out of his pickup into a gust of chilly, dusty wind. The front door opened just as he walked up the porch steps. A lanky man in jeans and faded red shirt emerged. 'Yessir,' he said. 'Good morning.' He was grinning broadly, an array of white teeth in a face of weathered brown leather.

  'Good morning,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm looking for Dr. Arnold.'

  'Yessir,' the man said. 'That's me.' He stuck out a hand, which Leaphorn shook. He showed Arnold his identification.

  'I'm looking for Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal,' Leaphorn said.

  'Me too,' Arnold said enthusiastically. 'That biddy got off with my kayak and didn't bring it back.'

  'Oh,' Leaphorn said. 'When?'

  'When I was gone,' Arnold said, still grinning. 'Caught me away from home, and off she goes with it.'

  'I want to hear all about that,' Leaphorn said.

  Arnold held the door wide, welcomed Leaphorn in with a sweep of his hand. Inside the front door was a room crowded with tables, each table crowded with rocks of all sizes and shapes--their only common denominator being lichens. They were covered with these odd plants in every shade from white through black. Arnold led Leaphorn past them, down a narrow hall.

  'No place to sit in there,' he said. 'That's where I work. Here's where I live.'

  Where Arnold lived was a small bedroom. Every flat surface, including the narrow single bed, was covered with boards on which flat glass dishes were lined. The dishes had something in them that Leaphorn assumed must be lichens. 'Let me make you a place,' Arnold said, and cleared off chairs for each of them.

  'Why you looking for Ellie?' he asked. 'She been looting ruins?' And he laughed.

  'Does she do that?'

  'She's an anthropologist,' Arnold said, his chuckle reduced again to a grin. 'You translate the word from academic into English and that's what it means: ruins looter, one who robs graves, preferably old ones. Well-educated person who steals artifact in dignified manner.' Arnold, overcome by the wit of this, laughed. 'Somebody else does it, they call `em vandals. That's the word for the competition. Somebody gets there first, gets off with the stuff before the archaeologists can grab it, they call 'em Thieves of Time.' His vision of such hypocrisy left him in high good humor, as did the thought of his missing kayak.

  'Tell me about that,' Leaphorn said. 'How do you know she took it?'

  'She left a full, signed confession,' Arnold said, fumbling in a box from which assorted scraps of papers overflowed. He extracted a small sheet of line
d yellow notepaper and handed it to Leaphorn.

  Here's your saddle, a year older but no worse for wear. (I sold that damned horse.) To keep you caring about me, I am now borrowing your kayak. If you don't get back before I do, ignore the last part of this note because I will put the kayak right back in the garage where I got it and you'll never know it was gone.

  Don't let any lichens grow on you! Love, Ellie

  Leaphorn handed it back to him. 'When did she leave it?'

  'I just know when I found it. I'd been up there on Lime Ridge collecting specimens for a week or so and when I got back, the saddle was on the floor in the workroom up front with this note pinned on it. Looked in the garage, and the kayak was gone.'

  'When?' Leaphorn repeated.

  'Oh,' Arnold said. 'Let's see. Almost a month ago.'

  Leaphorn told him the date Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had made her early-morning departure from Chaco Canyon. 'That sound right?'

  'I think I got back on a Monday or Tuesday. Three or four days after that.'

  'So the saddle might have been sitting there three or four days?'

  'Could have been.' Arnold laughed again. 'Don't have a cleaning lady coming in. Guess you noticed that.'

  'How did she get in?'

  'Key's over there under the flower box,' Arnold said. 'She knew where. Been here before. Go all the way back to the University of Wisconsin.' Abruptly Arnold's amusement evaporated. His bony, sun-beaten face became somber. 'She's really missing? People worried about her? She didn't just walk off for a few days of humanity?'

  'I think it's serious,' Leaphorn said. 'Almost a month. And she left too much behind. Where would she go in your kayak?'

  Arnold shook his head. 'Just one place to go. Downstream. I use it to play around with. Like a toy. But she'd have been going down the river. Plenty of sites along the river until you get into the deep canyon where there's nothing to live on. And then there's hundreds of ruins up the side canyons.' There was no humor at all left in Arnold's face. He looked at least his age, which Leaphorn guessed at forty. He looked worn and worried.

  'Ceramics. That's what Ellie would be looking for. Potsherds.' He paused, stared at Leaphorn. 'I guess you know we had a man killed here just the other day. Man named Houk. The son of a bitch was a notorious pot dealer. Somebody shot him. Any connection?'