Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (19 page)

“I confess,” Leaphorn said. “But you know, it’s a small world up
here in this empty country. Work as a cop as long as I did, you know
about everybody who has anything to do with the law.”

“I guess so,” Louisa said. “So he said he’d trot down and look it up
for you?”

“I think it’s just punch the proper keys on his computer and up
comes Jorie, Everett, Plaintiff, and a list of petitions filed under
that name. Something like that. He said this Jorie did a lot of
business with the federal court. And he was also suing our Mr Timms.
Some sort of a claim he was violating rights of neighboring
leaseholders by unauthorized use of BLM land for an airport.”

“Well, now. That’s nice. A Department of Defense spokesman would
call that peripheral damage.”

“Peripheral benefit in this case,” Leaphorn said.

“It’s collateral damage. But how about the suicide note?”

“Remember it wasn’t handwritten on paper,” Leaphorn said. “It was
typed into a computer. Anyone could have done it. And remember that
last manhunt. One of the perps turned up dead and the FBI declared him
a suicide. That might have given somebody the idea
that the feds would go for that notion again.”

Louisa laughed. “You know what I’m wondering? Did the neat little
trick Mr Timms tried to pull off suggest to retired lieutenant Joe
Leaphorn that Gershwin might have seen the same opportunity to deal
with a lawsuit?”

Leaphorn grinned. “As a matter of fact, I think it did."

Near the crest of Washington Pass he pulled off the pavement onto a
dirt track that led through a grove of Ponderosa pines. He pulled to a
stop at the edge of a cliff and gestured eastward. Below them lay a
vast landscape dappled with cloud shadows and late-morning sunlight and
rimmed north and east by the shapes of mesas and mountains. They stood
on the rimrock, just looking.

“Wow,” Louisa said. “I never get enough of this.”

“It’s home country for me,” Leaphorn said. “Emma used to get me to
drive up here and look at it those times I was thinking of taking a job
in Washington." He pointed northeast. “We lived right down there when I
was a boy, about ten miles down between the Two Grey Hills Trading Post
and Toadlena. My mother planted my umbilical cord under a pinon on the
hill behind our hogan." He chuckled. “Emma knew the legend. That’s the
binding the wandering child can never break.”

“You still miss her, don’t you?”

“I will always miss her,” Leaphorn said.

Louisa put her arm around him and hugged.

“Due east,” she said. “That hump of clouds. Could that be Mount
Taylor?”

“It is, and that’s why its other name—I should say one of its other
names—is Mother of Rains. The westerlies are pushed up there, and the
mist becomes rain in the colder air and then the clouds drift on,
dumping the moisture before they get to Albuquerque.”

“
Tsoodzil
in Navajo,”
Louisa said, ”and the Turquoise
Mountain when you translate it into English, and Dark Mountain for the
Rio Grande Pueblos, and your Sacred Mountain of the East.”

“And due north, - maybe forty miles, there’s Ship Rock sticking up
like a finger pointing at the sky, and, beyond, that blue bump on the
horizon is the nose of Sleeping Ute Mountain.”

“Scene of the crime,” Louisa said.

Leaphorn said nothing. He was frowning, looking north. He drew in a
deep breath, let it out.

“What?” Louisa said. “Why this sudden look of worry?”

He shook his head.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Let’s drive on down to Two Grey Hills. I
want to call Chee. I want to make sure the Bureau sent some people in
to check out that old mine.”

“I always wonder why you don’t have a cell phone. Don’t they work
well out here?”

“Until I quit being a cop I had a radio in my vehicle,” Leaphorn
said. “When I quit being a cop, I didn’t have anybody to call."

Which sounded sort of sad to Louisa. “What’s this about a mine?” she
asked, as they got back into the vehicle.

“Maybe I didn’t mention that,” Leaphorn said. “Chee was looking for
an old Mormon coal mine, abandoned in the nineteenth century that maybe
had a canyon entrance and another one from the top of the mesa. Where
they could lift the coal out without climbing out of the canyon
carrying it. I thought that might have been the hideout of Ironhand’s
dad. It would explain that business Old Lady Bashe was telling you
about him disappearing in the canyon and reappearing on top.”

“Yes,” Louisa said. “You’re thinking that’s where those two are
hiding now?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Just a possibility." He turned the truck
left, down the bumpy dirt road and away from the highway. “This is
rough going,” he said. “But if you don’t break something, its only
about nine miles this way. If you go around by the highway, it’s almost
thirty.”

“Which tells me you’re in a hurry to make this telephone call. You
want to tell me why?”

“I want to make sure he told the FBI,” Leaphorn said, and laughed.
“He’s awful touchy about the Bureau. Gets his feelings hurt. And if he
did tell them, I want to find out if they followed up on it.”

Louisa waited, glanced at him, braced herself as the truck crossed a
rocky washout and tilted down the slope.

“That doesn’t tell me why you’re worried. All of a sudden.”

“Because I’m remembering how interested Gershwin was in the location
of that mine.”

She thought about that. “It seems reasonable. If somebody threatens
you, you’re going to wonder where they’re hanging out.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “Probably nothing to worry about.”

But he didn’t slow down.

Sergeant Jim Chee was in his house-trailer home, sprawled in his
chair with his foot perched on a pillow on his bunk and a Ziploc bag
full of crushed ice draped over his ankle. Bernadette Manuelito was at
the stove preparing a pot of coffee and being very quiet about it
because Chee wasn’t in the mood for conversation or anything else.

He had gone over everything that had happened in Largo’s office,
suffered again the humiliation of Cabot handing him his photos of the
mine, Cabot’s snide smile, being more or less dismissed by Captain
Largo, slinking out of the room without a shred of dignity left. And
then, his head full of outrage, indignation and self-disgust, not
paying attention to where the hell he was walking, losing his balance
tripping over something in the parking lot, and coming down full weight
on his sprained ankle and dumping himself full length on the gravel.

And of course a swarm of the various sorts of cops working on the
casino hunt had been there to see this—two of his NTP officers
reporting in, the division radio gal coming out, three or four Border
Patrol trackers up from El Paso, a BIA cop he’d once worked with, and a
couple of the immense over-supply of FBI agents standing around picking
their noses and waiting for Cabot to emerge. And of course, when he was
pushing himself up—awkwardly trying to keep any pressure off the
ankle—there was Bernie taking his arm.

And now here was Bernie in his trailer, puttering with his
coffeepot. Largo had emerged and, despite Chee’s objections, had
dispatched Bernie to take him to the clinic to have the ankle looked
after. She had done that, and brought him home, and now it was past
quitting time for her shift but here she was anyway, measuring the
coffee on her own time.

And looking pretty as she did it. He resisted thinking about that,
unwilling to diminish the self-pity he was enjoying. But looking at
her, as neat from the rear elevation as from the front, reminded him
that he was comparing her with Janet Pete. She lacked Janet’s
high-gloss glamour, her physical perfection (depending, however, on how
one rated that) and her sophistication. Again, how did one rate
sophistication? Did you rate it by the standards of the Ivy League,
Stanford and the rest of the politically correct privileged class, or
by the Chuska Mountain sheep-camp society, where sophistication
required the deeper and more difficult knowledge of how one walked in
beauty, content in a difficult world? Such thoughts were causing Chee
to feel better, and he turned his mind hurriedly back to the memory of
Cabot returning his photographs, thereby restoking his anger.

Just then the telephone rang. It was the Legendary Lieutenant
himself—the very one whose notions about Ute tribal legends was at the
root of this humiliation.

“Did you report finding that mine to the Bureau?”

“Yes,” Chee said.

Silence. Leaphorn had expected more than that.

“What’s being done about it? Do you know?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Leaphorn’s tone said he couldn’t believe that.

“That’s right,” Chee said. He realized he was playing the same
childish game with Leaphorn that he had played with Cabot. He didn’t
like the feel of that. He admired Leaphorn. Leaphorn, he had to admit
it, was his friend. So he interrupted the silence.

“The Special Agent involved said they’d already searched that mine.
Nothing in it but animal tracks and mice droppings. He handed me back
the photos I’d taken, and they sent me on my way.”

“Be damned,” Leaphorn said. Chee could hear him breathing for a
while. “Did he say when they did their search?”

“He said right after the truck was found. He said they searched the
whole area. Everything.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “How much structure was left on top of the
mesa?”

“Some stone walls, partly fallen down, roof gone from part of it.
Then there was a framework of timbers, sort of a triangle structure,
sticking out of it.”

“Sounds like the support for the tipple to lift the coal out and
dump it.”

“I guess so,” Chee said, wondering about the point of all this. The
feds had looked, and nobody was home.

“Searched the whole area, you said? That day?”

“Yeah,” Chee said, sensing Leaphorn’s point and feeling a faint
stir of illogical optimism.

“Didn’t Deputy Dashee say they found the truck about middle of the
day?”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “And they’d be searching the Timms place, house,
barns, outbuildings, and all those roads wandering around to those
Mobil Oil pump stations, and -" Chee ran out of other examples. Casa
Del Eco Mesa was huge, but it was almost mostly empty hugeness.

“The best they would have had time to do would be to give it a quick
glance,” Leaphorn said.

“Well, yes. Wouldn’t that be enough to show it was empty?”

“I think I’ll take a drive up there and look around for myself. Is
that area still roadblocked?”

“It was yesterday,” Chee said. Then he added exactly what he knew
the Legendary Lieutenant hoped he would add. “I’ll go with you and show
’em my badge.”

“Fine,” Leaphorn said. “I’m calling from Two Grey Hills. Professor
Bourebonette is with me, but she’s run into a couple of her fellow
professors dickering over a rug. Hold on. Let me find out if they can
give her a ride back to Flagstaff.”

Chee waited.

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll pick you up soon as I can get there.”

“Right. I’ll be ready.”

Bernadette Manuelito was staring at him. “Wait a minute,” she said.
“Go where with whom? You can’t go anywhere with that ankle. You’re
supposed to keep it elevated. And iced.”

Chee relaxed, closed his eyes, recognized that he was feeling much,
much better. Why did talking to Joe Leaphorn do that for him? And now
this business with Bernie. Worrying about his ankle. Bossing him
around. Why did that make him feel so much better? He opened his eyes
and looked up at her. A very pretty young lady even when she was
frowning at him.

Sergeant Jim Chee kept his ankle elevated by resting it on pillows
on the rear seat of Officer Bernie Manuelito’s battered old Unit 11. He
kept it iced with a plastic sack loaded with ice cubes. The ankle was
feeling better, and so was Chee. Going to the clinic and having it
expertly wrapped and taped had done wonders for the injury. Having his
old boss showing him some respect had been good for bruised morale.

Bernie was tooling westward on U.S. 160, past the Red Mesa School,
heading toward the Navajo 35 intersection at Mexican Water, Chee was
behind her, slumped against the driver’s side of the car, watching the
side of Leaphorn’s graying burr haircut. The lieutenant was not nearly
as taciturn as Chee remembered him. He was telling her of the names
Gershwin had left on the note at the Navajo Inn coffee shop, and how
that had led to Jorie’s place and about learning Jorie was suing
Gershwin and the rest of it. Bernie was hanging on every word, and
Leaphorn was obviously enjoying the attention. He’d been explaining to
her why he had always been skeptical of coincidence, and Chee had heard
that so often when he was the man’s assistant in the Window Rock office
that he had it memorized. It was bedrock Navajo philosophy. All things
interconnected. No effect without cause. The beetle’s wing affects the
breeze, the larks’ song bends the warrior’s mood, a cloud back on the
western horizon parts, lets light of the setting sun through, turns the
mountains to gold, affects the mood and decision of the Navajo Tribal
Council. Or, as the Anglo poet had put it, “No man is an island.”

And Bernie, in her kindly fashion, was recognizing a lonely man’s
need and asking all the right questions. What a girl. “Is that sort of
how you use that map Sergeant Chee tells me about?” And of course it
was.

“I think Jim’s mind works about the way mine does,” Leaphorn said.
“And I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. This casino business, for
example. The casino’s by Sleeping Ute Mountain. The escape vehicle is
abandoned a hundred miles west on Casa Del Eco Mesa. Nearby a barn with
an aircraft in it. The same day the aircraft is stolen. Closeness in
both time and place. Nearby is an old mine. The Ute legends suggest the
father of one of the bandits used it as his
escape route. A little cluster of coincidences.”