Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (4 page)

Emma was a true Navajo traditional with the traditional’s need to
greet the new day. That was one of the countless reasons Leaphorn loved
her. Besides, while Leaphorn was no longer truly a traditional, no
longer offered a pinch of pollen to the rising sun, he still treasured
the old ways of his people.

This morning, however, he had a good reason for sleeping late.
Professor Louisa Bourebonette was sleeping in the quieter bedroom, and
Leaphorn didn’t want to awaken her. So he lay under the sheet, watched
the eastern horizon turn flame red, listened to the automatic
coffeemaker go to work in the kitchen, and considered what the devil to
do with the names Gershwin had given him. The three had stolen
themselves an airplane and flown away, which took some of the pressure
off. Still, if Gershwin was right, having their identities would
certainly be useful to those trying to catch them.

Leaphorn yawned, stretched, smelled coffee, wondered if he could get
to the kitchen and pour a cup quietly enough not to disturb Louisa.
Wondered, too, what solution she would offer for his dilemma if he
presented it to her. Emma would have told him to forget it. Locking
robbers in prison helped no one, she’d say. They should be cured of the
disharmony that was causing this bad behavior. Prison didn’t accomplish
that. A Mountain Way ceremony, with all their friends and relatives
gathered to support them, would drive the dark wind out of them and
restore them to
hozho
.

A clatter in the kitchen interrupted that thought. Leaphorn jumped
out of bed and put on his bathrobe. He found Louisa standing at the
stove, fully dressed and cooking pancakes.

“I’m using your mix,” she said. “They’d be a lot better if you had
some buttermilk.”

Leaphorn rescued his mug from the sink, rinsed it, poured himself a
cup, and sat by the table watching Louisa, remembering the ten thousand
mornings he had watched Emma from the same chair. Emma was shorter,
slimmer, and always wore skirts. Louisa had on jeans and a flannel
shirt. Her hair was short and gray. Emma’s was long and a luminous
black. That hair was her only source of vanity. Emma had hated to have
it cut even for the brain surgery that killed her.

“You’re up early,” Leaphorn said.

“Blame it on your culture,” Louisa said. “These old-timers I need to
talk to have been up an hour already. They’ll be in bed by sundown.”

“How about your translator? Did you ever manage to get hold of him?”

“I’ll try again after breakfast,” Louisa said. “Young people have
more normal sleeping habits.”

They ate pancakes.

“Something’s on your mind,” Louisa said. “Right?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it’s true,” Louisa said. “I could tell last night when we
were having dinner down at the Inn. Couple of times you started to say
something, but you didn’t.”

True enough. And why hadn’t he? Because it would have taken him too
close to his relationship with Emma—this hashing over of something he
was working on. But now in the light of morning he saw nothing wrong
with it. He told Louisa about Gershwin, the three names and his promise
— ambiguous and vague.

“Did you shake hands on it? Any of that male-chivalry stuff?”

Leaphorn grinned. Louisa’s way of striking right to the heart of
matters was something he liked about her.

“Well, we shook hands, but it was sort of a 'goodbye, glad to see
you again,' handshake. No cutting our wrists and mixing blood,” he
said. “He had the identification information written on a piece of
paper, and he just left that on the table. With sort of an unspoken
understanding that if I took it, I could do whatever I wanted with it.
But promising him confidentiality was implied no matter what I did.”

“And you took the paper?”

“Not exactly. I read it, then wadded it up and dropped it in the
wastebasket.”

She was smiling at him, shaking her head.

“You’re right,” he said. “Throwing it away didn’t work. I’m still
stuck with the promise.”

She nodded, cleared her throat, sat very straight. “Mr Leaphorn,”
she said, “I remind you that you are under oath to tell this grand jury
the truth and the whole truth. How did you obtain this information?”
Louisa stared over her glasses at him, her stern look. “Then you say
you read it off a piece of paper left on a restaurant table, and the
lawyer asks if you know who left the paper, and…"

Leaphorn raised his hand. “I know,” he said.

“Two choices, really. After all, that Gershwin jerk was just trying
to use you. You could just forget it. Or you could figure out some
sneaky way to get the names to the FBI. How about an anonymous letter?
In fact, don’t you wonder why he didn’t write one himself?”

“I guess it was timing. A couple of days pass before the letter gets
delivered. Then if it’s anonymous, it goes right to the bottom of the
pile,” Leaphorn said. “I guess he knew that. I think he’s afraid these
days. That the bandits know that he knows, and they don’t trust him,
and if they aren’t caught, they’ll be coming after him.”

Louisa laughed. “I’d say they have pretty good reason not to trust
him. You shouldn’t either.”

“I thought about faxing it in from some commercial place where
nobody knows me, or sending an e-mail. But just about everything is
traceable these days. And now there’s a reward out, so they’ll be
getting dozens of tips by now. Probably hundreds.”

“I guess so,” Louisa said. “Why don’t you call one of your old FBI
buddies? Do the same thing to them Gershwin’s doing to you?”

Leaphorn laughed. “I tried that. I called Jay Kennedy. You remember
me telling you about him? Used to be Agent in Charge at Gallup, and we
worked on several things together. Anyway, he’s retired over in
Durango. So I tried it on him. No luck.”

“What did he say?”

“Same thing you just told me. If he passes it along to the Bureau,
they ask him where he got it. He tells ‘em me. They ask me where I got
it.”

“So what’s your solution? How about disguising your voice and giving
them a telephone call?”

“I might try that. The FBI has them flying away. I could tell them
one of the guys is a pilot. That would be easy for them to check, and
if one of them happens to be a flier, then they’d be interested. But
that’s just half of the problem."He paused to take another bite of
pancake.

She watched him chew, waited, sighed. Said, “OK, what’s the other
half?”

“Maybe these three guys had nothing to do with it. Maybe Gershwin
just wants them hassled for some personal reason, and if the robbers
aren’t caught, this would damn sure do that sooner or later.”

She nodded. “I’ll take it under advisement, then,” she said, and
left the kitchen to call her interpreter.

By the time Leaphorn had the dishes washed she was back, looking
disheartened.

“Not only is he sick, he has laryngitis. He can hardly talk. I guess
I’ll head back to Flagstaff and try it later.”

“Too bad,” Leaphorn said.

“Another thing. He’d told them we were coming today. And no
telephone, of course, to tell them we’re not.”

“Where do these guys live?”

Louisa’s expression brightened. “Are you about to volunteer to
interpret? The Navajo’s a fellow named Dalton Cayodito and the address
I have is Red Mesa Chapter House. The other one’s a Ute. Lives at
Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation. How’s your Ute?”

“Maybe fifty words or so,” Leaphorn said. “But I could help you with
Cayodito.”

“Let’s do it,” Louisa said.

“I’m thinking that a couple of the men on that list are supposed to
live up there in that border country. One of ’em’s Casa Del Eco Mesa.
That couldn’t be too far from the chapter house.”

Louisa laughed. “Mixing business with pleasure. Or I should say your
business with my business. Or maybe my business with something that
really isn’t your business.”

“The one who has a place up there—according to the notes on that
paper anyway—is Everett Jorie. I can’t place him, but the name’s
familiar. Probably something out of the distant past. I thought we
could ask around.”

Louisa was smiling at him. “You’ve forgotten you’re retired,” she
said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going along for the
pleasure of my company.”

Leaphorn drove the first lap—the 110 miles from his house to the
Mexican Water Trading Post. They stopped there for a sandwich and to
learn if anyone there knew how to find Dalton Cayodito. The teenage
Navajo handling the cash register did.

“An old, old man,” she said. “Did he used to be a singer? If that’s
him, he did the Yeibichai sing for my grandmother. Is that the one
you’re looking for?”

Louisa said it was. “We heard he lived up by the Red Mesa Chapter
House.”

“He lives with his daughter,” the girl said. “That’s Madeleine
Horsekeeper, I think they call her. Her place is -" She paused,
thought, made a gesture of frustration with her hands, penciled a map
on a grocery sack and handed it to Louisa.

“How about a man named Everett Jorie?” Leap-horn said. “You know
where to find him? Or Buddy Baker? Or George Ironhand.”

She didn’t, but the man who had been stacking Spam cans on shelves
along the back wall thought he could help.

“Hey,” he said. “Joe Leaphorn. I thought you’d retired. What you
want Jorie for? If you got a law against being a damned nuisance, you
oughta had him locked up long ago.”

They left the trading post a quarter hour later armed with explicit
instructions on how to find the two places Jorie might be located, an
addendum to the grocery-sack map outlining which turns to take from
which roads to find Ironhand, and a vague notion that Baker might have
moved into Blanding. Along with that they took a wealth of speculative
gossip about Utah-Arizona borderland political ambitions, social
activities, speculation about who might have robbed the Ute Casino, an
account of the most recent outrages committed by the Forest Service,
Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Park Service, and
other federal, state and county agencies against the well-being of
various folks who lived their hardscrabble lives along the Utah border
canyon country.

“No wonder the militia nuts can sign people up,” Louisa said, as
they drove away. “Is it as bad as that?”

“They’re mostly just trying to enforce unpopular laws,” Leaphorn
said. “Mostly fine people. Now and then somebody gets arrogant.”

“OK, now,” Louisa said. “These guys you mentioned in there—Jorie and
Ironhand and so forth. I guess they’re the three who robbed the casino?”

“Or maybe robbed it,” Leaphorn said. “If we believe Gershwin.”

Louisa was driving and spent a few moments looking thoughtful.

“You know,” she said, "as long as I’ve been out here I still can’t
get used to how everybody knows everybody.”

“You mean that guy at the store recognizing me? I was a cop out here
for years.”

“But living where? About a hundred and fifty miles away. But I
didn’t mean just you. The cashier knew all about Everett Jorie. And
people know about Baker and Ironhand living"—she waved an expressive
hand at the window—"living way the hell out there someplace. Where I
came from people didn’t even know who lived three houses down the
block.”

“Lot more people in Baltimore,” Leaphorn said.

“Not a lot more people on our block.”

“More people in your block, I’ll bet, than in a twenty-mile circle
around here,” Leaphorn said. He was remembering the times he’d spent in
Washington, in New York, in Los Angeles, when he’d considered this
difference between urban and rural social attitudes.

“I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You
city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you
try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re
interested. We sort of collect them.”

“You’ll have to make it a lot more complicated than that to get the
sociologists to adopt it,” Louisa said. “But I know what you’re driving
at.”

“Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody
different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him yet. In
the city, nobody wants to make eye contact. They have built themselves
a little privacy bubble—hard to get any privacy in crowded places—and
if you look at them, or speak on the street, then you’re an intruder.”

Louisa looked away from the road to give him a sidewise grin.

“I take it you don’t care for the busy, exciting, stimulating city
life,” she said. “I’ve also heard it put another way. Like “rural folks
tend to be nosy busy-bodies.”’

They were still discussing that when they turned off the pavement of
U.S. 160 onto the dirt road that climbed over the Utah border onto the
empty, broken highlands of the Casa Del Eco Mesa. She slowed while
Leaphorn checked the map against the landscape. The clouds were
climbing on the western horizon, and the outriders of the front were
speckling the landscape spreading away to the west with a crazy-quilt
pattern of shadows.

“If my memory’s good, we hit an intersection up here about seven
miles,” he said. “Take the bad road to the right, and it takes you to
the Red Mesa Chapter House. Take the worse road to the left, and it
gets you to Highway 191 and on to Bluff.”

“There’s the junction up ahead,” she said. “We do a left? Right?”

“Left is right,” Leaphorn said. “And after the turn, we’re looking
for a track off to our right.”

They found it, and a dusty, bumpy mile later, they came to the place
of Madeleine Horsekeeper, which was a fairly new double-wide mobile
home, with an attendant hogan of stacked stones, sheep pens, outhouse,
brush arbor and two parked vehicles -an old pickup truck and a new blue
Buick Regal. Madeleine Horsekeeper was standing in the doorway greeting
them, with a stern-looking fortyish woman standing beside her. She
proved to be Horsekeeper’s daughter, who taught social studies at Grey
Hills High in Tuba City. She would sit in on the interview with Hosteen
Cayodito, her maternal grandfather, and would make sure the
interpreting was accurate. Or do it herself.