Chee must have dozed. He didn’t hear the car coming down the slope, or see the lights. A tapping at the door awakened him, and he found her standing on the step looking up at him.
“It’s freezing,” she said as he ushered her in.
“Hot coffee,” he said. Poured a cup, handed it to her, and offered her the folding chair beside the fold-out table. But she stood a moment, hugging herself and shivering, looking undecided.
“Janet,” he said. “Sit down. Relax.”
“I just need to tell you something,” she said. “I can’t stay. I need to get back to Gallup before the weather gets worse.” But she sat.
“Drink your coffee,” he said. “Warm up.”
She was looking at him over the cup. “You look awful,” she said. “They told me you’d gone up to Mancos. To see the Breedlove widow. You shouldn’t be back at work yet. You should be in bed.”
“I’m all right,” he said. And waited. Would she ask him why he’d gone to Mancos? What he’d learned?
“Why couldn’t somebody else do it?” she said. “Somebody without broken ribs.”
“Just cracked,” Chee said.
She put down her cup. He reached for it. She intercepted his hand, held it.
“Jim,” she said. “I’m going away for a while. I’m taking my accrued leave time, and my vacation, and I’m going home.”
“Home?” Chee said. “For a while. How long is that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to get my head together. Look forward and backwards.” She tried to smile but it didn’t come off well. She shrugged. “And just think.”
It occurred to Chee that he hadn’t poured himself any coffee. Oddly, he didn’t want any. It occurred to him that she wasn’t burning her bridges.
“Think?” he said. “About us?”
“Of course.” This time the smile worked a little better.
But her hand was cold. He squeezed it. “I thought we were through that phase.”
“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You never really stopped thinking about whether we’d be compatible. Whether we really fit.”
“Don’t we?”
“We did in this fantasy I had,” she said, and waved her hands, mocking herself. “Big, good-looking guy. Sweet and smart and as far as I could tell you really cared about me. Fun on the Big Rez for a while, then a big job for you in someplace interesting. Washington. San Francisco. New York. Boston. And the big job for me in Justice, or maybe a law firm. You and I together. Everything perfect.”
Chee said nothing to that.
“Everything perfect,” she repeated. “The best of both worlds.” She looked at him, trying to hold the grin and not quite making it.
“With twin Porsches in the triple garage,” Chee said. “But when you got to know me, I didn’t fit the fantasy.”
“Almost,” she said. “Maybe you do, really.” Suddenly Janet’s eyes went damp. She looked away. “Or maybe I change the fantasy.”
He extracted his handkerchief, frowned at it, reached into the storage drawer behind him, extracted paper napkins, and handed them to Janet. She said, “Sorry,” and wiped her eyes.
He wanted to hold her, very close. But he said, “A cold wind does that.”
“So I thought maybe as time goes by everything changes a little. I change and so do you.”
He could think of nothing honest to say to that.
“But after the other evening in Gallup, when you were so angry with me, I began to understand,” she said.
“Remember once a long time ago you asked me about a schoolteacher I used to date? Somebody told you about her. From Wisconsin. Just out of college. Blonde, blue eyes, taught second grade at Crownpoint when I was a brand-new cop and stationed there. Well, it wasn’t that there was anything much wrong with me, but for her kids she wanted the good old American dream. She saw no hope for that in Navajo country. So she went away.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Janet said. “She wasn’t a Navajo.”
“But I am,” he said. “So I thought, what’s the difference? I’m darker. Rarely sunburn. Small hips. Wide shoulders. That’s racial, right? Does that matter? I think not much. So what makes me a Navajo?”
“You’re going to say culture,” Janet said. “I studied social anthropology, too.”
“I grew up knowing it’s wrong to have more than you need. It means you’re not taking care of your people. Win three races in a row, you better slow down a little. Let somebody else win. Or somebody gets drunk and runs into your car and tears you all up, you don’t sue him, you want to have a sing for him to cure him of alcoholism.”
“That doesn’t get you admitted into law school,” Janet said. “Or pull you out of poverty.”
“Depends on how you define poverty.”
“It’s defined in the law books,” Janet said. “A family of x members with an annual income of under y.”
“I met a middle-aged man at a Yeibichai sing a few years ago. He ran an accounting firm in Flagstaff and came out to Burnt Water because his mother had a stroke and they were doing the cure for her. I said something about it looking like he was doing very well. And he said, ‘No, I will be a poor man all my life.’ And I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Nobody ever taught me any songs.’”
“Ah, Jim,” she said. She rose, took the two steps required to reach the bunk where he was sitting, put her arms carefully around him and kissed him. Then she pressed the undamaged side of his face against her breast.
“I know having a Navajo dad didn’t make me a Navajo,” she said. “My culture is Stanford sorority girl, Maryland cocktail circuit, Mozart, and tickets to the Met. So maybe I have to learn not to think that being ragged, and not having indoor plumbing, and walking miles to see the dentist means poverty. I’m working on it.”
Chee, engulfed in Janet’s sweater, her perfume, her softness, said something like “Ummmm.”
“But I’m not there yet,” she added, and released him.
“I guess I should work on it from the other end, too,” he said. “I could get used to being a lieutenant, trying to work my way up. Trying to put some value on things like—” He let that trail off.
“One thing I want you to know,” she said. “I didn’t use you.”
“You mean—”
“I mean deliberately getting information out of you so I could tell John.”
“I guess I always knew that,” he said. “I was just being jealous. I had the wrong idea about that.”
“I did tell him you’d found Breedlove’s body. He invited Claire and me to the concert. Claire and I go all the way back to high school. And we were remembering old times and, you know, it just came out. It was just something interesting to tell him.”
“Sure,” Chee said. “I understand.”
“I have to go now,” she said. “Before you guys close the highway. But I wanted you to know that. Breedlove had been his project when the widow filed to get the death certified. It looked so peculiar. And finally, now, I guess it’s all over.”
Her tone made that a question.
She was zipping up her jacket, glancing at him.
“Lieutenant Leaphorn gave Mr. Shaw that photograph of the climber’s ledger,” she said.
“Yeah,” Chee said. The wind buffeted the trailer, made its stormy sounds, moved a cold draft against his neck.
“She must have thought that terribly odd—for him to just leave her at the canyon, and then abandon their car, and go back to Ship Rock to climb it like that.”
Chee nodded.
“Surely she must have had some sort of theory. I know I would have had if you’d done something crazy like that to me.”
“She cried a lot,” Chee said. “She could hardly believe it.”
And in a minute Janet was gone. The goodbye kiss, the promises to write, the invitation to come and join her. Then holding the car door open for her, commenting on how it always got colder when the snowing stopped, and watching the headlights v
anish at the top of the slope.
He sat on the bunk again then, felt the bandages around his eye, and decided the soreness there was abating. He probed the padding over his ribs, flinched, and decided the healing there was slower. He noticed the coffeepot was still on, got up, and unplugged it. He switched on the radio, thinking he would get some weather news. Then switched it off again and sat on the bed.
The telephone rang. Chee stared at it. It rang again. And again. He picked it up.
“Guess what?” It was Officer Bernadette Manuelito.
“What?”
“Begayaye just told me,” she said. “He detoured past Ship Rock today. The cattle were crowded around our loose-fence-post place, eating some fresh hay.”
“Well,” Chee said, and gave himself a moment to make the mental transition from Janet Pete to the Lone Ranger competition. “I’d say this would be a perfect time for Mr. Finch to supplement his income. The cops all away working weather problems, and everybody staying home by the fire.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
“I’ll meet you there a little before daylight. When’s sunup these days?”
“About seven.”
“I’ll meet you at the office at five. Okay?”
“Hey,” Bernie said. “I like it.”
“I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU SOME PICTURES,” Leaphorn said to Amos Nez, and he dug a folder out of his briefcase.
“Pretty women in bikinis,” old man Nez said, grinning at his mother-in-law. Mrs. Benally, who didn’t much understand English, grinned back.
“Pictures which I should have showed you eleven years ago,” Leaphorn said, and put a photograph on the arm of the old sofa where Nez was sitting. The old iron stove that served for heating and cooking in the Nez hogan was glowing red from the wood fire within it. Cold was in the canyon outside; Leaphorn was sweating. But Nez had kept his sweater on and Mrs. Benally had her shawl draped over her shoulders.
Nez adjusted his glasses on his nose. Looked. He smiled at Leaphorn, handed him back the print. “That’s her,” he said. “Mrs. Breedlove.”
“Who’s the man with her?”
Nez retrieved the print, studied it again. He shook his head. “I don’t know him.”
“That’s Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “You’re looking at a photograph the Breedloves had taken at a studio in Farmington on their wedding anniversary—the summer before they came out here and got you to guide them.”
Nez stared at the photograph. “Well, now,” he said. “It sure is funny what white people will do. Who is that man she was here with?”
“You tell me,” Leaphorn said. He handed Nez two more photographs. One was a photocopy he’d obtained, by imposing on an old friend in the Indian Service’s Washington office, of George Shaw’s portrait from the Georgetown University School of Law alumni magazine. The others had been obtained from the photo files of the Mancos Weekly Citizen—mug shots of young Eldon Demott and Tommy Castro wearing Marine Corps hats.
“I don’t know this fella here,” Nez said, and handed Leaphorn the Shaw photo.
“I didn’t think you would,” Leaphorn said. “I was just making sure.”
Nez studied the other photo. “Well, now,” he said. “Here’s my friend Hal Breedlove.”
He handed Leaphorn the picture of Eldon Demott.
“Not your friend now,” Leaphorn said, and tapped Nez’s leg cast. “He’s the guy that tried to kill you.”
Nez retrieved the photo, looked at it, and shook his head. “Why did he do—” he began, and stopped, thinking about it.
Leaphorn explained about ownership of the ranch depending on the date of Breedlove’s death, and now depending upon continuing the deception. “There were just two people who knew something that could screw this up. One of them knew the date Hal Breedlove and Demott climbed Ship Rock—a man named Maryboy who gave them permission to climb. Demott shot him the other day. That leaves you.”
“Well, now,” Nez said, and made a wry face.
“A policeman who is looking into all this sent me a message that Demott loaded up his rifle this morning and headed out. I guess he’d be coming out here to see if he could get another shot at you.”
“Why don’t they arrest him?”
“They have to catch him first,” Leaphorn said, not wanting to get into the complicated explanation of legalities—and the total lack of any concrete evidence that there was any reason to arrest Demott. “My idea was to take you and Mrs. Benally into Chinle and check you into the motel there. The police can keep an eye on you until they get Demott locked up.”
Nez gave himself some time to think this over. “No,” he said. “I’ll just stay here.” He pointed to the shotgun in the rack on the opposite wall. “You just take old lady Benally there. Look after her.”
Mrs. Benally may not have been able to translate “bikini” into Navajo, but she had no trouble with “motel.”
“I’m not going into any motel,” she said.
For practical purposes, that ended the argument. Nobody was moving.
Leaphorn wasn’t unprepared for that. Before he’d parked at the Nez hogan, he had scouted up Canyon del Muerto, examining the south-side cliff walls below the place where the ranger had reported seeing the man with the rifle. Sergeant Deke had said it was just five or six hundred yards up-canyon from the Nez place. Leaphorn had seen no location within rifle range where the top of the south cliff offered a fair shot at the Nez hogan. But about a quarter mile up-canyon a huge slab of sandstone had given way to the erosion undercutting it.
The cliff had split here. The slab had separated from the wall. He’d studied it. Someone who knew rock climbing, had the equipment, and didn’t mind risking falling off a forty-story building could get down here. This must have been what Demott had been doing here—if it was Demott. He was looking for a way in and out that avoided the bottleneck entrance.
It was certainly conveniently close for a climber. Or a bird. Being neither meant Leaphorn would have to drive about fifteen miles down Canyon del Muerto to its junction with Canyon de Chelly, then another five or six to the canyon mouth to reach the pavement of Navajo Route 64. Then he’d have to reverse directions and drive twenty-four miles northeastward along the north rim of del Muerto, turn southwestward maybe four miles toward Tsaile, then complete the circle down the brushy dirt-and-boulder track that took those foolhardy enough to use it down that finger of mesa separating the canyons. The last six or seven miles on that circuit would take about as long as the first fifty.
Leaphorn hurried. He wanted enough daylight left to check the place carefully—to either confirm or refute his suspicions. More important, if Demott was coming Leaphorn wanted to be there waiting for him.
He seemed to have managed that. He stopped across the cattle guard where the unmarked track connected with the highway, climbed out, and made a careful inspection. The last vehicle to leave its tracks here had been coming out, and that had been shortly after the snowfall began. Eight or nine jolting miles later, he pulled his car off the track and left it concealed behind a cluster of junipers. The wind was bitter now, but the snow had diminished to occasional dry flakes.
The west rim of Canyon del Muerto was less than fifty yards away over mostly bare sandstone. If he had calculated properly, he was just about above the Nez home site. In fact, he was perhaps a hundred yards below it. He stood a foot or two back from the edge looking down, confirming that the Nez hogan was too protected by the overhang to offer a shot from here. He could see the track where Nez drove in his truck, but the hogan itself and all of its outbuildings except a goat pen were hidden below the wall. But he could see from here the great split-off sandstone slab, and he walked along the rim toward it. He was almost there when he heard an engine whining in low gear.
Along the cliff here finding concealment was no problem. Leaphorn moved behind a great block of sandstone surrounded by piñons. He checked his pistol and waited.
The vehicle approaching w
as a dirty, battered, dark green Land-Rover. It came almost directly toward him. Stopped not fifty feet away. The engine died. The door opened. Eldon Demott stepped out. He reached behind him into the vehicle and took out a rifle, which he laid across the hood. Then he extracted a roll of thin, pale yellow rope and a cardboard box. These two also went onto the hood. From the box he took a web belt and harness, a helmet, and a pair of small black shoes. He leaned against the fender, removed a boot, replaced it with a shoe, and repeated the process. Then he put on the belt and the climbing harness. He looked at his watch, glanced at the sky, stretched, and looked around him.
He looked directly at Joe Leaphorn, sighed, and reached for the rifle.
“Leave it where it is,” Leaphorn said, and showed Demott his .38 revolver.
Demott took his hand away from the rifle, dropped it to his side.
“I might want to shoot something,” he said.
“Hunting season is over,” Leaphorn said.
Demott sighed and leaned against the fender. “It looks like it is.”
“No doubt about it. Even if I get careless and you shoot me, you can’t get out of here anyway. Two police cars are on their way in after you. And if you climb down, well, that’s hopeless.”
“You going to arrest me? How do you do that? You’re retired. Or is it a citizen’s arrest?”
“Regular arrest,” Leaphorn said. “I’m still deputized by the sheriff in this county. I didn’t get around to turning in the commission.”
“What do you charge me with—trespass?”
“Well, I think more likely it will start out being attempted homicide of Amos Nez, and then after the FBI gets its work done, the murder of Hosteen Maryboy.”
Demott was staring at him, frowning. “That’s it?”
“I think that would do it,” Leaphorn said.
“Nothing about Hal.”
“Nothing so far. Except that Amos Nez thinks you’re him.”
Demott considered that. “I’m getting cold,” he said, and reopened the car door. “Going to get out of the wind.”
“No,” Leaphorn said, and shifted the pistol barrel before him.
The Fallen Man Page 20