Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (10 page)

“You live in Window Rock,” she said. “That’s a little town like Mancos. You think some widow woman there with a rich husband lost somewhere could have something going with a boyfriend and everybody wouldn’t know about it?”

Leaphorn laughed. “I’m a widower,” he said. “And I met this nice lady from Flagstaff on some police work I was doing. The very first time I had lunch with her, when I got back to the office they were planning my wedding.”

“It’s the same way out here,” Mrs. Rivera said. “About the time everybody around here decided that Hal was gone for good, they started marrying Elisa off to the Castro boy.”

Leaphorn smiled. “You know,” he said, “we cops tend to get too high an opinion of ourselves When I was up here asking around after Hal disappeared I went away thinking there wasn’t a boyfriend in the background.”

“You got here too quick,” Mrs. Rivera said “Here at Mancos we let the body get cold befor the talking starts.”

“I guess nothing came of that romance,” Leaphorn said. “At least she’s still a widow.”

“From what I heard, it wasn’t from lack of Tommy Castro’s trying. About the time she go out of high school everybody took for granted they were a pair. Then Hal showed up.” Mrs Rivera shrugged, expression rueful. “They made a kind of foursome for a while.”

“Four?”

“Well, sometimes it was five of ’em. This George Shaw, he’d come out with Hal sometime and Eldon would go. He and Castro were the old heads, the coaches. They’d go elk hunting together. Camping. Rock climbing. Growing up with her dad raising her, and then her big brother, Elisa was quite a tomboy.”

“What broke up the group? Was it the country boy couldn’t compete with the big-city glamour?”

“Oh, I guess that was some of it,” she said “But Eldon had a falling-out with Tommy. They’re too much alike. Both bull-headed.”

Leaphorn digested that. Emma’s big brother hadn’t liked him, either, but that hadn’t bothered Emma. “Do you know what happened?”

“I heard Eldon thought Tommy was out of line making a play for his little sister. She was just out of high school. Eight or ten years between ’em, I guess.”

“So Elisa was willing to let big brother monitor her love life,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t hear about that happening much these days.”

“Me neither,” Mrs. Rivera said, and laughed. “But you know,” she said, suddenly dead serious, “Elisa is an unusual person. Her mother died when she was about in the second grade, but Elisa takes after her. Has a heart big as a pumpkin and a cast-iron backbone, just like her mother. When old man Demott was losing the ranch it was Elisa’s mama who held everything together. Got her husband out of the bars, and out of jail a time or two. One of those people who are aways there in the background looking out for other people. You know?”

Mrs. Rivera paused at this to see what Leaphorn thought of it. Leaphorn, not sure of where this was leading, just nodded.

“So there Elisa was after Hal was out of the picture. Tommy was beginning to court her again, and Eldon wanted to run him off. They even got into a yelling match down at the High Country Inn. So there’s Elisa with two men to take care of—and knowing how she is I have a theory about that.” She paused again. “It’s just a theory.”

“I’d like to hear it,” Leaphorn said.

“I think she loved them both,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But if she married the Castro boy, what in the wide world was Eldon going to do? It was her ranch now. Eldon loved it but he wouldn’t stay around and work for Tommy, and Tommy wouldn’t want him to.” She sighed. “If we had a Shakespeare around here, they could have made a tragedy out of it.”

“So this Castro was a rock climber, too,” Leaphorn said. “Does he still live here?”

“If you got gas down at the Texaco station you might have seen him. That’s his garage.”

“What do you think? Did this affection for Castro linger on after she married Hal?”

“If it did, she didn’t let it show.” She thought about that awhile, looked sad, shook her head. “Far as you could tell being an outsider, she was the loyal wife. I couldn’t see much to love in Hal myself but every woman’s different about that and Elisa was the sort who—the more that was wrong with a man, the more she’d stand behind him. She mourned for him. Matter of fact, I think she still does. You hardly ever see her looking happy.”

“How about her brother, then? You said he was sort of strange.”

She shrugged. “Well, he liked to climb up cliffs. To me, that’s strange.”

“Somebody said he taught Hal the sport.”

“That’s not quite the way it was. After old Edgar got the place away from Demott’s daddy, Hal and Shaw would come out in the summers. Shaw had been climbing already. So he didn’t need much teaching. And Demott and Castro were already into climbing some when they had time. Eldon was about six or eight years older than Hal and more of an athlete. From what I heard he was the best of the bunch.”

A customer came in and the cool smell of autumn and the sound of laughter followed him through the doorway from the street. Leaphorn could think of just one more pertinent question.

“You mentioned Hal Breedlove had overdue note payments when he disappeared. How’d that get paid off?”

It was the sort of bank business question he wasn’t sure she would answer. Neither was she. But finally she shook her head and laughed.

“Well, you sort of guessed right about not having it secured the way we should have. Old family, and all. So we weren’t pressing. But we’d sold off another loan to a Denver bank. Made it to a feedlot operator who liked to go off to Vegas and try to beat the blackjack tables. With people like that you make sure you have it secured. Wrote it on sixty-two head of bred heifers he had grazing up in a Forest Service lease. The Denver people foreclosed on it and they called us for help on claiming the property.”

She laughed. “Those Denver people had sixty-two head of cows out in the mountains grazing on a Forest Service lease and not an idea in the world about what to do with them. So I told ’em Eldon Demott might round them up for ’em and truck them over to Durango to the auction barn. And he did.”

“He got paid enough for that to pay off Breedlove’s note?”

She laughed again. “Not directly. But I mentioned we made the loan on bred heifers. So we sold the Denver bank a mortgage on sixty-two head, but when Demott went to get ’em, they weren’t pregnant anymore. They were mama cows.”

She paused, wanting to see if Leaphorn understood the implications of this. Leaphorn said: “Ah, yes. He didn’t get back from Las Vegas to brand ’em.”

“Ah, yes, is right,” Mrs. Rivera said. “In fact he didn’t get back at all. The sheriff has a warrant out for him. So there was Eldon with sixty-two cows loaded up and all those calves left over. They were all still slicks. Not any of ’em branded yet. Nobody in the world had title to ’em. Nobody owned ’em but the Lord in heaven.”

“Enough to pay off the note?”

“He might’ve had a little bit left over,” she said, and looked at Leaphorn over her glasses. “Wait a minute now,” she said. “Don’t you get any wrong ideas. I don’t actually know what in the world happened to those calves. And I’ve been talking way too much and it’s time to get some work done.”

Back at his car, Leaphorn fished his cellular telephone from the glove compartment, dialed his Window Rock number, and punched in the proper code to retrieve any messages accumulated by his answering machine. The first call was from George Shaw, asking if he had anything to report and saying he could be reached at room 23, Navajo Inn. The second call was from Sergeant Addison Deke at the Chinle police station.

“Better give me a call, Joe,” Deke said. “It probably doesn’t amount to anything but you asked me to sort of keep an eye on Amos Nez and you might like to hear about this.”

Leaphorn didn’t check on whether there was a third call. He dialed the Arizona area code and Chinle police department number. Yes, Sergeant Deke was in.

He sounded apologetic. “Probably nothing, Joe,” he said. “Probably wasting your time. But after we talked, I told the boys to keep it in their minds that whoever shot Nez might try it again. You know, keep an eye out. Be looking.” Deke hesitated.

Leaphorn, who almost never allowed impatience to show, said, “What did they see?”

“Nothing, actually. But Tazbah Lovejoy came in this morning—I don’t think you know him. He’s a young fellow out of recruit training two years ago. Anyway Tazbah told me he’d run into one of those Resource Enforcement Agency rangers having coffee, and this guy was telling him about seeing a poacher up on the rim of Canyon del Muerto yesterday.”

Sergeant Deke hesitated again. This time Leaphorn gave him a moment to organize his thoughts.

“The ranger told Tazbah he was checking on some illegal firewood cutting, and he stopped at that turnout overlook down into del Muerto. Wanted to take a leak. He was getting that done, standing there, looking out across the canyon, and he kept seeing reflections off something or other across the canyon. No road over there, you know, and he wondered about it. So he went to his truck and got his binoculars to see what he could see. There was a fellow over there with binoculars. The reflections turned out to be coming off the lenses, I guess. Anyway, he had a rifle, too.”

“Deer hunter, maybe,” Leaphorn said.

Deke laughed. “Joe,” he said. “How long’s it been since you’ve been deer hunting? That’d be out on that tongue of the plateau between del Muerto and Black Rock Canyon. Nobody’s seen a deer over there since God knows when.”

“Maybe it was an Anglo deer hunter then. Did he get a good look at him?”

“I don’t think so. The ranger thought it was funny. Hunter over there and nothing to hunt. But I guess he was going to call it attempted poaching, or conspiracy to poach. So he drove back up to Wheatfields campground and tried to get back in there as far as he could on that old washed-out track. But he gave up on it.”

“Did he get a good enough look to say man or woman?”

“I asked Tazbah and he said the ranger didn’t know for sure. He said they were thinking man, on grounds a woman wouldn’t be stupid enough to go hunting where there wasn’t anything to shoot at. I thought you’d like to know about it because it was just up the canyon a half mile or so from where that sniper shot old Amos.”

“Which would put it just about right over the Nez place,” Leaphorn said.

“Exactly,” Deke said. “You could jump right down on his roof.”

A
CTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE was parked at sunrise on the access road to Beclabito Day School because he wanted to talk to Officer Teddy Begayaye at a private place. Officer Begayaye would be driving to the office from his home at Tec Nos Pos. Chee wanted to tell him that vacation schedules were being posted today, that he was getting the Thanksgiving week vacation time he had asked for. He wanted Begayaye to provide him some sort of justification (beyond his twelve years of seniority) for approving it. Another member of Chee’s criminal investigation squad wanted the same days off, namely, Officer Manuelito. She had applied for them first, and Chee wanted to give her some reason (beyond her total lack of seniority) why she didn’t get it—thereby avoiding friction in the department. Thus Chee had parked where Begayaye could see him instead of hiding his patrol car behind the day school sign in hope of nabbing a speeder.

But now Chee wasn’t thinking of vacation schedules. He was thinking of the date he had tonight with Janet Pete, back from whatever business had taken her to Washington. Janet shared an apartment at Gallup with Louise Guard, another of the DNA lawyers. Chee had hopes that Louise, as much as he liked her would be away somewhere for the evening (or better, had found herself another apartment), wanted to show Janet a videotape he’d borrow of a traditional Navajo wedding. She had more or less agreed, with qualifications, that they would do the ceremony the Navajo way and he could pick the haatalii to perform it. But she clearly had her doubts about it. Janet’s mother had something more socially correct in mind. However, if he lucked out and Ms. Guard actually had shoved off for somewhere, he would hold the videotape for another evening. He and Janet hadn’t seen each other for a week and there were better ways to occupy the evening.

The vehicle rolling down U.S. 64 toward him was a camper truck, dirty and plastered with tourist stickers. Dick Finch’s vehicle. It slowed to a crawl, with Finch making a series of hand signals. Most of them were meaningless to Chee but one of them said “follow me.”

Chee started his engine and followed, driving eastward on 64 with Finch speeding. Chee topped the ridge. Finch’s truck had already appeared, but a plume of dust hanging over dirt road that led past the Rattlesnake pump tion betrayed it. Chee made the left turn into the dust—thinking how quickly this arid climate could replace wet snow with blowable dirt. Just out of sight of the highway the camper was parked, with Finch standing beside it.

Finch walked over, smiling that smile of his. Lots of white teeth.

“Good morning,” Chee said.

“Captain Largo wants us to work together,” Finch said. “So do my people. Get along with the Navajos, they tell me. And the Utes and the Zunis, Arizona State Police, the county mounties, and everybody. Good policy, don’t you think?”

“Why not?” Chee said.

“Well, there might be a reason why not,” Finch said, still smiling, waiting for Chee to say, “Like what?” Chee just looked at him until Finch tired of the game.

“For example, somebody’s been taking a little load of heifers now and then off that grazing lease west of your Ship Rock mountain. They’re owned by an old codger who lives over near Toadlena. He rents grass from a fella named Maryboy, and his livestock is all mixed up with Maryboy’s and nobody keeps track of the cattle.”

Finch waited again. So did Chee. What Finch was telling him so far was common enough. People who had grazing leases let other people use them for a fee. One of the problems of catching cattle thieves was the animals might be gone a month before anyone noticed. Finally Chee said: “What’s your point?”

“Point is, as we say, I’ve got reason to believe that the fella picking up these animals is this fella I’ve been trying to nail. He comes back to the mountain about every six months or so and picks up a load. Does the same thing over around Bloomfield, and Whitehorse Lake, and Burnham, and other places. When I catch him, a lot of this stealing stops. My job gets easier. So a couple of months ago, I found where he got the last ones he took from that Ship Rock pasture. The son of a bitch was throwing hay over a fence at a place where he could back his truck in. Chumming them up like he was a fisherman. I imagine he’d blow his horn when he threw the hay over. Cows are curious. Worse than cats. They’d come to see about it. And they’ve got good memories. Do it about twice, and when they hear a horn they think of good alfalfa hay. Come running.”

Finch laughed. Chee knew exactly where this was leading.

“Manuelito spotted that hay, too,” Chee said. “She noticed how the fence posts had been dug up there, loosened so they can be pulled up. She took me out to show me.”

“I saw you,” Finch said. “Watched you through my binoculars from about two miles away. Trouble is, our cow thief was probably watching, too. He’s baited that place three times now. No use wasting any more hay. It’s time to collect his cows.”

Finch stared at Chee, his smile still genial. Chee felt his face flushing, which seemed to be the reaction Finch was awaiting.

“But he ain’t going to do it now, is he? You can bet your ass he’s got a set of binoculars every bit as good as mine, and he’s careful. He sees a police car parked there. Sees a couple of cops tromping around. He’s gone and he won’t be back and a lot of my hard work is down the goddamn tube.”

“This suggests something to me,” Chee said.

“I hoped it would. I hoped it would make you want to learn a little more about this business before you start practicing it.”

“Actually it suggests that you screwed up. You had about four hours of talking to me on that ride up to Mancos, with me listening all the way. You told me about this Zorro you’re trying to catch—and I guess this is him. But you totally forgot to tell me about this trap you were going to spring so we could coordinate. How could you forget something like that?”

Finch’s face had also become a little redder through its windburn. The smile had gone away. He stared at Chee. Looked down at his boots. When he looked up he was grinning.

“Touché! I got a bad habit of underestimating folks. You say that woman cop with you noticed the fence posts had been dug loose. I missed that. Good-looking lady, too. You give her my congratulations, will you. Tell her any old time she wants to work alongside of me, or under me either, she’s more than welcome.”

Chee nodded, started his engine.

“Hold it just a minute,” Finch said, his smile looking slightly more genuine. “I didn’t stop you just to start an argument. Wondered if I could get you to be a witness for something.”

Chee left the motor running. “For what?”

“There’s five Angus calves at a feedlot over by Kirtland. Looks like they were branded through a wet gunnysack, like the wise guys do it, but they’re still so fresh they haven’t even scabbed over yet. And the fellow that signed the bill of sale hasn’t got any mother cows. He claimed he sold ’em off—which we can check on. On the other hand, a fellow named Bramlett is short five Angus calves off some leased pasture. I’m going over and see if there’s five wet cows there. If there is I call the feedlot and they bring the calves over and I turn on my video camera and get a tape of the mama cows saying hello to their missing calves. Letting ’em nurse, all that.”

“So what do you need me for?”

“It’d be a mostly Navajo jury, and the cow thief—he’s a Navajo,” Finch said. “Be good to have a Navajo cop on the witness stand.”

Chee looked at his watch. By now Teddy Begayaye would be at the office celebrating getting his requested vacation time, and Manuelito would be sore about it. Too late for any preventive medicine there. But he had, after all, ruined Finch’s trap. Besides, it would give him another hour away from the office and something positive for a change to report to Captain Largo on the cow-theft front.

“I’ll follow you,” Chee said, “and if you speed, you get a ticket.”

Finch sped, but kept it within the Navajo Tribal Police tolerance zone. He parked beside the fence at the holding pasture at just about nine A.M. It was bottomland here, a pasture irrigated by a ditch from the San Juan River, and it held maybe two hundred head of Angus—young cows and their calves—last spring’s crop but still nursing. Chee parked as Finch was climbing the fence, snagging his jeans on the barbed wire.

“I think I saw a wet one already,” he shouted, pointing into the herd, which now was moving uneasily away. “You stay back by your car.”

Wet one
? Chee thought. He’d been raised with sheep, not cows. But “wet” must be what you called a cow with a painfully full udder. A cow whose nursing calf was missing. Finch had been right about cow memories. Their memory connected men on foot with being roped, bull-dogged, and branded. They were scattering away from Finch. So the question was, how was Finch going to locate five such cows in that milling herd and know he hadn’t just counted the same cow five times?

Finch picked himself a spot free of cow manure, dropped to his knees, and rolled over on his back. He folded his arms under his head and lay motionless. The cows, which had shied fearfully away from him, stopped their nervous milling. They stared at Finch. He yawned, squirmed into a more comfortable position. A heifer, head and ears stretched forward, moved a cautious step toward him. Others followed, noses pointed, ears forward. The calves, with no memory of branding to inhibit them, were first. By eleven minutes after nine, Finch was surrounded by a ring of Angus cattle, sniffing and staring.

As for Finch, only his head was moving, and he made an udder inspection. He arose, creating a panic, and walked through the scattering herd already dialing his portable telephone, talking into it as he climbed the fence. He closed it, walked up to Chee’s window.

“Five wet ones,” he said. “They’re going to bring the calves right out. I’m going to videotape it, but it’d help if you’d stick around so you can testify. You know, tell the jury that the calves ran right up to their mamas and started nursing, an their mamas let ’em do it.”

“That was pretty damn clever,” Chee said.

“I told you about cows being curious,” Fine said. “They’re scared of a man standing up. Lay down and they say, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ and come on over to take a look.” He brushed off his jeans. “Drawback is you’re like to get manure all over yourself.”

“Well, it’s a lot quicker than chasing them all over the pasture, trying to get a look.”

Finch was enjoying this approval.

“You know where I learned that trick? I was in the dentist’s office at Farmington waiting’t get a root canal. Picked up a
New Yorker
magazine and there was an article in there about Nevada brand inspector name of Chris Collis. It was a trick he used. I called him and asked him if it really worked. He said sure.”

Finch fished his video camera out of the truck cab, fiddled with it. Chee radioed his office, reported his location, collected his messages. One was from Joe Leaphorn. It was brief.

A truck from the feedlot arrived bearing two men and five terrified Angus calves. Each was ear-tagged with its number and released into the pasture. Each ran, bawling, in search of its mother, found her, underwent a maternal inspection, was approved and allowed to nurse while Finch videotaped the happy reunions.

But Chee wasn’t paying as much attention as he might have been. While Finch was counting turgid udders, Chee had checked with his office. Leaphorn wanted to talk to him again about the Fallen Man. He said he was working for the Breedlove family now.