The Bisti Business

by Don Travis

  JAZZ PENROD phoned early the next morning asking for a meet. When I picked him up on the sidewalk in front of his mom’s house, he was dressed in denim cut-offs so tight he’d had to split the seam up the outside of the thigh in order to sit down. A thin T-shirt with straps—what my mom had called an undershirt—exposed his broad, red-brown shoulders and sheathed his torso like original skin. He wore open sandals, more like shower clogs than shoes, without socks. He grinned and shoved a black-billed cap with a red Captain Morgan logo back on his head.

  “Mr. Vinson,” he said.

  I popped the lock, and he flowed into the passenger’s seat like liquid mercury. “Morning, Jazz. What can I do for you?”

  “Maybe it’s what I can do for you,” he countered, and then laughed aloud at my quick frown. “No, not that. I picked up a rumor. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “Fine. How about some breakfast?”

  “Okay by me.”

  After we gave our order to a waiter in a nearby café, Jazz threw a long arm over the back of the chair next to him. As a trained investigator, I believe I notice things others do not, but I would have erroneously described him as skinny. Not so. He was slender, yes, but buffed with defined muscles—corded muscles. That thin shirt stretching over his torso clearly outlined a six-pack.

  “Okay, now tell me about that rumor.”

  “My brother—you know, Henry Secatero—he called me last night. He was over at the chapter house to meet this girl. I’d told him about those missing guys and one turning up dead, so when he heard there’d been outsiders on the rez where they didn’t have any business, he thought of Lando and Dana.”

  “Did he get any details?”

  “Well, there’s a car, somebody said. Supposed to have been parked out on the rim of Black Hole Canyon. Been there a few days.”

  “Where is Black Hole Canyon?”

  “Sort of a rugged area not too far off the highway. It’s not really a canyon, just a big-assed arroyo. But Henry said the car’s not in it, just pulled up under an overhang where it’s kinda out of sight.”

  My coffee and french toast and Jazz’s bacon and eggs and hash browns with a side of ham arrived. He stopped talking and dug in, eating rapidly while I munched and mulled over what he told me. I was tempted to dismiss the incident. There was nothing to directly tie this to Lando, but I was looking for a car, and Henry had found one. It was worth checking out.

  Jazz put down his knife and fork after his last bite of ham and drained his glass of orange juice. “You wanna go take a look?”

  “Jazz, you’re not out to put your mark on me, are you?” I felt like a fool. There were more attractive fish in the ocean than me, but every look, every gesture seemed to be bait—chum for the sharks.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he admitted, “but I heard you when you said you were taken. Look, I liked Dana and respected Lando. If I can help them out, I’d like to do it.”

  “Fair enough. If you’re finished, let’s go.”

  “Let’s rumble, but first I gotta go home and change. I’d burn up out there in the sun dressed like this.”

  Fifteen minutes later we headed west out of town toward Shiprock with Jazz now clad in a pair of baggy dungarees, a worn, long-sleeved cotton shirt, and walking boots.

  This is not really the red-rock part of New Mexico, but the massive, wind-carved sandstone shelves—some the remnants of ancient barrier reefs—glowed red and orange, striated with layers of black and yellow and brown and white. I identified feldspar and hematite, quartz and dark brown calcite, degraded coal and gypsum embedded in the host rock, all deposited eons ago when the shallow marine sea retreated with the upheaval of mountains in what is now southwestern Colorado. Volcanic eruptions had spewed fire and ash over the entire area. As the water retreated, sand dunes consolidated into cross-bedded Entrada Sandstone. Over the ensuing ages, the ceaseless battle between wind and rock and water chopped the terrain to pieces, creating the present landscape.

  The Shiprock monolith, which lay in the distance ahead of us, was the throat of a volcano that had died long ago. The terrain around it eroded and washed away, leaving a 450-foot pile of black basalt towering over the Navajo Nation.

  Long before we reached Shiprock, Jazz had me turn south on a rocky dirt road. As we began climbing, I threw the car into low gear to make it up the steep inclines of the washboard landscape. The rental sedan wasn’t made for this kind of country, and I was about to give it up as a bad venture when he pointed left.

  “Take that road there.”

  “What road?”

  He laughed. “It’s a road down into Black Hole Canyon. Or at least a track. The car’s not far now if I understood Henry right. If it’s still there, that is.”

  With more than a little trepidation, I followed his directions. My stomach fell along with the road as the earth dropped sharply. To our left there was nothing but open air. The narrow ledge supporting us hugged the wall of the canyon—and it was a canyon, not a big-assed arroyo. We dropped farther down the uncertain trail while tons of mudstone leaned outward above the car, threatening to shove us into the abyss. My knuckles turned white on the steering wheel.

  “This is the worst part,” Jazz said. “The trail curves to the right just ahead, and there’s an overhang. That’s where Henry said the car was parked.”

  “Like someone wanted to hide it,” I rasped, desperate for the sound of my voice one last time before we ran out of road and pitched over into oblivion.

  “Yeah, like that. Me and Henry used to come out here when we were kids and hunt jackrabbits and rattlesnakes.”

  I grunted. It was supposed to be a laugh but didn’t come out that way. “I thought you Native Americans were into preserving the environment, not killing anything that moved.”

  “I’m half white. I guess that part of me’s a killer.”

  The cryptic remark would have earned him a glance if I hadn’t been concentrating on keeping the car on this pitiful excuse of a scree-littered burro trail. “Your brother doesn’t have white blood, does he?”

  “No, but the family ate the jackrabbits. Guess they ate a little snake now and then too.”

  We inched around the curve. I tapped the brake. A car blocked our progress—a brown four-door Ford sedan.

  We didn’t need to get out of the car to know what had happened, but we did it anyway. The stench was overpowering. Something—or somebody—was dead. Without touching a thing, I peered through the windows and determined no one was in the passenger compartment. The odor seemed to come from the rear of the vehicle, so the body was in the trunk. Was it a confidential investigator called Hugo Santillanes or a kid named Lando Alfano?

  “We’ve got to get out of here. Right now.”

  Jazz objected. “Let’s see who it is. I can force the trunk, no problem.”

  “Can’t. This is a crime scene. As soon as we get to solid ground, I’ll call it in—if I can get a signal.”

  “Oughta be able to. There’s a tower at Shiprock. You back out. I’ll give directions.”

  “You just don’t want to be in the car when it goes over the side.”

  “You got it, kemosabe.”

  It took a lot longer to make our way back to the rim of the canyon traveling in reverse than it had coming in, but, strangely, it wasn’t as frightening. That was probably because I had my eyes glued to Jazz’s hand signals in the rearview mirror. Nonetheless, every time the tires shifted on loose rock, my gut clenched. I was drenched in sweat by the time we reached the top. I pulled over onto solid terrain and parked. Now that we were back on level ground, my queasiness abated; my uneasiness did not.

  I probably should have dialed the Navajo Police, but I knew the FBI handled serious crimes on the reservation, so I asked the 911 operator to connect me with that agency. I was dismayed to learn the Farmington resident special agent was actually located in Gallup, approximately ninety miles south of us as the crow flies. The FBI operator advised, however, there was an agent named John
Gaines in the vicinity and promised to contact him.

  I hung up and studied something in the distance. “Jazz, is this part of the reservation used for anything? I mean, do they graze sheep or cows or look for oil or coal?”

  “Nope. There’s no water up here. There’s water in the canyon—not much, but a little. Sometimes people camp down there.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “To get away from other people. Like maybe they want to smoke a little weed or snort something without being bothered.”

  I looked around the desolate landscape. “Lord, everywhere’s away from other people.”

  “You’d be surprised. There are hogans and huts scattered all around the countryside. Somebody might be watching us right now, and we’d never know it.”

  At that moment my cell phone rang. It was Gaines. He heard me out and instructed us to stay put until he got there.

  I hung up and again eyed the dark splotch barely discernable in the distance. “Anything else go on out here? I’m not looking to put the law on anyone, but it might be important to Lando.”

  “Well,” he said uneasily, “people say this is a place where outsiders bring in things they don’t want anybody to know about. You know, it’s close to Shiprock, and it’s not that far from Farmington. Hell, it’s not that far from Colorado or Utah, for that matter.”

  “So they bring drugs in here?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “Stay here,” I said before walking off to the south. Of course, Jazz ignored me and trailed along in my wake, too curious to remain behind. “Walk in my tracks,” I cautioned.

  Within a hundred yards, I saw what looked to be tire markings of some sort, although they were so windblown, it was impossible to say what kind of vehicle laid them down. When I came to what had caught my eye, the first in a line of dark smudges, I halted. Jazz almost ran up my back.

  “Any reports of planes setting down around here? At night, for instance?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I sighed. My shoulders sagged as I realized my last lead had gone up in thin air—literally.

  We returned to the car and baked in a hot, late summer sun because I didn’t dare burn up gasoline by running the motor so we could have air conditioning. Gaines arrived about an hour later, trailed by a forensics team, the same one that had handled the Bisti business. Apparently they served multiple law enforcement jurisdictions, both federal and local. Before they could get out of their vehicles, a Navajo Police cruiser pulled up. I watched as Gaines unfolded himself from the black SUV he drove and paused to consult with the other officers. He was a tall, gaunt Ichabod Crane caricature with a craggy horse face. His voice, when he came forth to greet me, sounded like it came from a well.

  During my two-minute explanation of the situation and the reason for our interest in it, another vehicle pulled up and disgorged Larry Plainer. Why? So far as I knew, the BLM had no jurisdiction over Indian trust lands. Apparently he and Gaines knew one another.

  “Heard the call and decided to come out and see if this murder ties into the one down at Bisti,” the fair-haired man explained. “I told Detective Joe I was coming,” he added, as if that carried any weight with Uncle Sam.

  Gaines grunted but voiced no objection.

  This time we walked down to the brown Ford—for which I gave silent thanks. I wasn’t about to tempt fate by tackling that rocky ledge in a vehicle again for the FBI or anybody else. As soon as the car came into sight, the leader of the crime scene technicians team had us identify our own tracks and then shooed us away while they took pictures of the car and the entire area around it. We had not retreated far enough to please Plainer; he escorted us back to the top of the rim even though I suspected he didn’t have the authority to do so. Nonetheless, I put up no fuss.

  “Who do you think they’re gonna find in that trunk?” Jazz asked when the BLM agent left us up on top.

  “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Man, that’s cold. It might be Lando in there.”

  “Might be, but there’s nothing we can do to hurry things along. We’ll know soon enough.”

  Jazz shifted his weight a couple of times. “Why don’t they just pop the trunk and find out?”

  “They probably already have, but in this state you can’t move a body without the Office of the Medical Investigator’s okay, and he isn’t on the scene yet. They’ll take a bunch of pictures of everything and measure distances—tire-track widths, positions of footprints, that kind of thing. But nobody’s going to move the car or the body until OMI arrives.”

  “Weird way of doing things,” he said.

  A grim-faced Gaines walked up the road to join us. Realizing he wouldn’t tell us what was going on until he was ready, I pointed out what I thought was a primitive landing strip with burnt-out bonfires for night landings.

  “Whoever killed Hugo Santillanes—” I started.

  Gaines turned his long-nosed, narrow visage on me. “How do you know it’s Santillanes?”

  “Agent Gaines, you’re probably a by-the-book kind of guy, but even so, you wouldn’t withhold the fact it’s my client’s son in the trunk of that car. You obviously don’t believe it’s Lando Alfano. And since that car matches the description of the one I’ve been hunting, that leaves Santillanes.”

  He handed over a Polaroid, and Jazz crowded in to catch a look.

  “Ugh!” the kid exclaimed.

  I didn’t blame him. The body was in pretty poor condition. Nonetheless, the dead man matched the description of Santillanes. “What do you think?” I asked Jazz.

  “I don’t recognize nothing but the forehead. That dude had one big forehead. Yeah, that’s Chrome Dome. You know, the guy I saw at Salmon Ruins.”

  I explained the domed forehead description to Gaines and then continued with my original thought. “Whoever killed him left the area in a small plane. Something like a Piper Cub.”

  “Or a Mitsubishi.”

  That took me by surprise. He’d managed to learn a lot in a short period of time. He had obviously been fully briefed by Lonzo Joe. Better not underestimate this guy.

  “Could be,” I agreed. “It’s a short-takeoff, short-landing craft, but look here.” I pointed to a thin scratch on the rocky ground. “I’m no expert, but that looks like a tail dragger. The Mitsu has a nose wheel. I’d say a much smaller plane landed here. And if you’re suggesting Aggie Alfano, I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why? It fits. Lando Alfano kills his lover and calls on his brother to save his ass. A. F….” He paused to consult his notes. “Uh, Aggie Alfano already has a PI on Orlando and has the guy pick up his brother. Santillanes knows Orlando killed Norville, so the Alfanos take care of him and fly out.”

  Mentally calling up the calendar I had created of Lando’s movements, I nodded. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  With my own suspicions of Aggie in the forefront of my mind, I had trouble answering. “If you’re right about Lando killing Dana Norville, he would have headed straight for California in the Porsche. Abandoning his vehicle across town and hanging around on the desert hardpan waiting for his brother to come for him makes no sense. And I’m sure Detective Joe told you there were bullet holes in the Porsche.”

  “As I understand it, that car sat on a back road for at least two days, Vinson. Kids could have done that out of mischief. It happens all the time. Well, occasionally,” he amended. “And Alfano could have abandoned the car to cast doubt on his involvement in Norville’s killing. It worked for you. What’s a hundred-thousand-dollar car to a rich kid?”

  “Maybe it’s because I never hire out to anyone except solid citizens,” I said with a sarcasm apparently lost on FBI agents. “But I read it another way. Somebody, probably Santillanes, was stalking Lando and Dana. He caught up with them down in Bisti. For some reason he confronted the two men, killing one of them. Lando got away with Santillanes hot on his tail.”

  “
That doesn’t hold water, and you know it. Whoever killed Norville took the time to hide the body in a natural cavity and cover him with rocks and dirt, not to mention getting down and dirty with him before or after strangling him to death.”

  “Maybe there were two of them,” I said.

  “Two of them? You mean someone with Santillanes? In two different cars?”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe one left the other behind to hide the body and came back later to pick up his partner after he took care of Lando.”

  “Took care of? You mean killed?” Gaines, his big hands jammed deep into his pockets, drew random marks in the sand with the toe of a size twelve cowboy boot.

  I shook my head. “No, I think there’s evidence Lando was alive after the car was abandoned.”

  “The stolen pie? You sure paint an elaborate picture with a little dab of paint.”

  Man, this guy had a grasp of the smallest details. He rose another notch or two in my estimation. “I’ll admit it’s thin. It could be the way you say, but I don’t believe it. I think he’s out there and needs our help.”

  “Then why hasn’t the kid made contact?”

  “He could be hurt. Or seeing his friend killed might have sent him around the bend.”

  Gaines stretched his long torso as if his back was giving him trouble. “Either way, we need to find him. I take it you’re going to keep looking.”

  “Right. I’ll keep you posted. Appreciate it if you’d give me the same courtesy. I’d like to know how and when Santillanes died.”

  “I think we can share that information with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gaines passed two Navajo cops walking up out of the canyon as he headed back down to the crime scene. Jazz moseyed over to the two policemen to exchange a few words before they got into the cruiser and pulled away.

  “They don’t know anything,” Jazz said as he rejoined me. “They kinda get their noses out of joint when the FBI treats them like intruders. They say Gaines isn’t as bad as some of the agents, but they still feel froze out. But they did say the guy in the trunk had been shot.”

  “Thanks.”

  The EMTs beat the OMI to the site by about thirty seconds—which must have set some sort of time record. Hard on their heels, a wrecker arrived from Farmington. Another half hour passed before they winched the Ford back up onto the rim of the canyon. Jazz and I watched as the medics lifted the body out of the trunk, laid it on a gurney, and took more pictures. We were a little distance removed, but I clearly heard the doctor give a preliminary opinion, which confirmed what the Navajo cops had told Jazz. The victim had been shot in the head, probably by a handgun.