A Thief of Time (3 page)

“She thinks something happened to Ms. Bernal,” Thatcher said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Leaphorn. “You ought to have that seat belt on.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He fumbled it around him, thinking that probably nothing had happened to the woman. He thought of the anonymous call that had provoked this trip. There would be a connection, somewhere. One thing somehow would link Dr. What's-Her-Name's departure from Chaco with the motive for the call. The departure had led to the call, or something had happened that provoked both.

“What do you think?” he would have asked Emma. “Woman takes off for Farmington and drops off the world. Two days later somebody nasty turns her in for stealing pots. It could be she'd done something to make him sore, and knew he'd find out about it and turn her in. So she took off. Or she went to Farmington, made him sore there, and took off. So what do you think?”

And Emma would have asked him three or four questions, and found out how little he knew about the woman, or about anything else to do with this, and then she would have smiled at him and used one of those dusty aphorisms from her Bitter Water Clan.

“Only yearling coyotes think there's just one way to catch a rabbit,” she'd say. And then she'd say, “About next Tuesday the woman will call and tell her friends she ran away and got married, and it won't have anything to do with stealing pots.” Maybe Emma would be right and maybe she'd be wrong, and that didn't really matter. It was a game they had played for years. Emma's astute mind working against his own intelligence, honing his thinking, testing his logic against her common sense. It helped him. She enjoyed it. It was fun.

Had been fun.

 

Leaphorn noticed it immediately—the cold, stagnant air of abandoned places. He was standing beside Thatcher when Thatcher unlocked the door to the apartment of Dr. Friedman-Bernal and pushed it open. The trapped air flowed outward into Leaphorn's sensitive nostrils. He sensed dust in it, and all that mixture of smells which humans leave behind them when they go away.

The Park Service calls such apartments TPH, temporary personnel housing. At Chaco, six of them were built into an L-shaped frame structure on a concrete slab—part of a complex that included maintenance and storage buildings, the motor pool, and the permanent personnel housing: a line of eight frame bungalows backed against the low cliff of Chaco Mesa.

“Well,” Thatcher said. He walked into the apartment with Maxie Davis a step behind him. Leaphorn leaned against the door. Thatcher stopped. “Ms. Davis,” he said, “I'm going to ask you to wait outside for a while. Under this search warrant here…well, it makes everything different. I may have to take an oath on what was in here when I opened the door.” He smiled at her. “Things like that.”

“I'll wait,” Maxie Davis said. She walked past Leaphorn, smiling at him nervously, and sat on the porch railing in the slanting sunlight. Her face was somber. Again, Leaphorn noticed her striking beauty. She was a small young woman. Cap off now, her dark hair needed combing. Her oval face had been burned almost as dark as Leaphorn's. She stared toward the maintenance yard, where a man in coveralls was doing something to the front end of a flatbed truck. Her fingers tapped at the railing—small, battered fingers on a small, scarred hand. Her blue work shirt draped against her back. Under it, every line of her body was tense. Beyond her, the weedy yard, the maintenance shed, the tumbled boulders along the cliff, seemed almost luminous in the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight. It made the gloom inside Dr. Friedman-Bernal's apartment behind Leaphorn seem even more shadowy than it was.

Thatcher walked through the living room, pulled open the drapes and exposed sliding-glass doors. They framed Fajada Butte and the expanse of the Chaco Valley. Except for a stack of books on the coffee table in front of the bleak brown institutional sofa, the room looked unused. Thatcher picked up the top book, examined it, put it down, and walked into the bedroom. He stood just inside the doorway, shaking his head.

“It would help some,” he said, “if you knew what the hell you're looking for.”

The room held a desk, two chairs, and two double beds. One seemed to be for sleeping—the covers carelessly pulled back in place after its last use. The other was work space—covered now with three cardboard boxes and a litter of notebooks, computer printouts, and other papers. Beyond this bed other boxes lined the floor along the wall. They seemed to hold mostly broken bits of pottery. “No way on God's green earth of telling where she got any of this stuff,” Thatcher said. “Not that I know of. It might be perfectly legal.”

“Unless her field notes tell us something,” Leaphorn said. “They might. In fact, if she collected that stuff as part of some project or other, they should tell exactly where she picked up every bit of that stuff. And it's going to be legal unless she's been selling the artifacts.”

“And of course if she's doing it for a project, it's legal,” Thatcher said. “Unless she doesn't have the right permit. And if she's selling the stuff, she sure as hell ain't going to write down anything incriminating.”

“Nope,” Leaphorn said.

A man appeared at the apartment door. “Finding anything?” he asked. He walked past Leaphorn without a glance and into the bedroom. “Glad to see you people getting interested in this,” he said. “Ellie's been missing almost three weeks now.”

Thatcher put a fragment of pot carefully back into its box. “Who are you?” he asked.

“My name's Elliot,” he said. “I work with Ellie on the Keet Katl dig. Or did work with her. What's this Luna's been telling me? You think she's stealing artifacts?”

Leaphorn found himself interested—wondering how Thatcher would deal with this. It wasn't the sort of thing anticipated and covered in the law enforcement training Thatcher would have received. No chapter covering intrusion of civilian into scene of investigation.

“Mr. Elliot,” Thatcher said, “I want you to wait outside on the porch until we get finished in here. Then I want to talk to you.”

Elliot laughed. “For God's sake,” he said, in a tone that canceled any misunderstanding the laugh might have caused. “A woman vanishes for almost a month and nobody can get you guys off your butts. But somebody calls in with an anonymous…”

“Talk to you in a minute,” Thatcher said. “Soon as I'm done in here.”

“Done what?” Elliot said. “Done stirring through her potsherds? If you get 'em out of order, get 'em mixed up, it will screw up everything for her.”

“Out,” Thatcher said, voice still mild.

Elliot stared at him.

Maybe middle thirties or a little older, Leaphorn thought. A couple of inches over six feet, slender, athletic. The sun had bleached his hair even lighter than its usual very light brown. His jeans were worn and so were his jean jacket and his boots. But they fit. They had been expensive. And the face fit the pattern—a little weather-beaten but what Emma would have called “an upper-class face.” A little narrow, large blue eyes, nothing crooked, nothing bent, nothing scarred. Not the face you'd see looking out of a truckload of migrant workers, or in a roofing crew, or the cab of a road grader.

“Of course this place is full of pots.” Elliot's voice was angry. “Studying pots is Ellie's job….”

Thatcher gripped Elliot at the elbow. “Talk to you later,” he said mildly, and moved him past Leaphorn and out the door. He closed the door behind him.

“Trouble is,” Thatcher said, “everything he says is true. Her business is pots. So she'll have a bunch of 'em here. So what the hell are we looking for?”

Leaphorn shrugged. “I think we just look,” he said. “We find what we find. Then we think about it.”

They found more boxes of potsherds in the closet, each shard bearing a label that seemed to identify it with the place it had been found. They found an album of photographs, many of them snapshots of people who seemed to be anthropologists working at digs. There were three notebooks—two filled and one almost half filled—in which little pencil drawings of abstract patterns and pots were interposed with carbon rubbings of what they agreed must be the surface patterns of potsherds. The notes that surrounded these were in the special shorthand scientists develop to save themselves time.

“You studied this stuff at Arizona State,” Thatcher said. “Can't you make it out?”

“I studied anthropology,” Leaphorn admitted. “But mostly I studied cultural anthropology. This is a specialty and I didn't get into it. We went on a few digs in a Southwestern Anthro class, but the Anasazi culture wasn't my thing. Neither were ceramics.”

Among the papers on the bed were two Nelson's catalogs, both auctions of American Indian art, African art, and Oceanic art. Both facedown, both open to pages that featured illustrations of Mimbres, Hohokam, and Anasazi pots. Leaphorn studied them. The appraised prices ranged from $2,950 to $41,500 for a Mimbres urn. Two of the Anasazi ceramics had been circled in red in one catalog, and one in the other. The prices were $4,200, $3,700, and $14,500.

“Heard of Nelson's all my life,” Thatcher said. “Thought they were just a London outfit. Just auctioned art, masterpieces, the
Mona Lisa,
things like that.”

“This is art,” Leaphorn said.

“A painting is art,” Thatcher said. “What kind of nut pays fourteen grand for a pot?” He tossed the catalog back on the bed.

Leaphorn picked it up.

The cover picture was a stylized re-creation of a pictograph—stick-figure Indians with lances riding horses with pipestem legs across a deerskin surface.

Across the top the legend read:

NELSON'S

FOUNDED
1744

Fine American Indian Art

New York

Auction May 25 and 26

It opened easily to the pottery pages. Ten photographs of pots, each numbered and described in a numbered caption. Number 242 was circled in red. Leaphorn read the caption:

Inside the scrawled red circle, the same pen had put a question mark over “anonymous collector” and scribbled notations in the margin. What looked like a telephone number. Words that seemed to be names. “Call Q!” “See Houk.” Houk. The name made a faint echo in Leaphorn's mind. He'd known someone named Houk. The only notation that meant anything to him was: “Nakai, Slick.” Leaphorn knew about Slick Nakai. Had met him a time or two. Nakai was a preacher. A fundamentalist Christian evangelist. He pulled a revival tent around the reservation in a trailer behind an old Cadillac sedan, putting it up here and there—exhorting those who came to hear him to quit drinking, leave off fornication, confess their sins, abandon their pagan ways, and come to Jesus. Leaphorn scanned the other names, looking for anything familiar, read the description of a Tonto Polychrome olla valued at $1,400/$1,800. He put the catalog back on the bed. On the next page, a Mimbres black-on-white burial pot, with a “kill hole” in its bottom and its exterior featuring lizards chasing lizards, was advertised for $38,600. Leaphorn grimaced and put down the catalog.

“I'm going to make a sort of rough inventory,” Thatcher said, sorting through one of the boxes. “Just jot down some idea of what we have here, which we both know is absolutely nothing that is going to be of any use to us.”

Leaphorn sat in the swivel chair and looked at the 365-day calendar on the desk. It was turned to October 11. “What day was it they said Dr. Hyphenated left here? Wasn't it the thirteenth?”

“Yeah,” Thatcher said.

Leaphorn flipped over a page to October 13. “Do it!” was written under the date. He turned the next page. Across this was written: “Away.” The next page held two notes: “Be ready for Lehman. See H. Houk.”

H. Houk. Would it be Harrison Houk? Maybe. An unusual name, and the man fit the circumstances. Houk would be into everything and the Houk ranch—outside of Bluff and just over the San Juan River from the north side of the reservation—was in the heart of Anasazi ruins country.

The next page was October 16. It was blank. So was the next page. That took him to Wednesday. Across this was written: “Lehman!!! about 4
P.M
. dinner. sauerbraten, etc.”

Leaphorn thumbed through the pages up to the present. So far Dr. Friedman-Bernal had missed two other appointments. She would miss another one next week. Unless she came home.

He put down the calendar, walked into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, remembering how Emma liked to make sauerbraten. “It's way too much work,” he would say, which was better than telling her that he really didn't like it very well. And Emma would say: “No more work than Navajo tacos, and less cholesterol.”

The smell of soured milk and stale food filled his nostrils. The worse smell came from a transparent ovenware container on the top shelf. It held a Ziploc bag containing what seemed to be a large piece of meat soaking in a reddish brown liquid. Sauerbraten. Leaphorn grimaced, shut the door, and walked back into the room where Thatcher was completing his inventory.

The sun was on the horizon now, blazing through the window and casting Thatcher's shadow black against the wallpaper. Leaphorn imagined Eleanor Friedman-Bernal hurrying through the sauerbraten process, getting all those things now shriveled and spoiled lined up on the refrigerator shelves so that fixing dinner for Lehman could be quickly done. But she hadn't come back to fix that dinner. Why not? Had she gone to see Harrison Houk about a pot? Leaphorn found himself remembering the first, and only, time he'd encountered the man. Years ago. He'd been what? Officer Leaphorn working out of the Kayenta substation, obliquely involved in helping the FBI with the manhunt across San Juan.