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

D
ECEMBER CAME TO THE FOUR CORNERS but winter lingered up in the Utah mountains. It had buried the Wasatch Range under three feet and ventured far enough south to give Colorado’s San Juans a snowcap. But the brief post-Halloween storm that had whitened the slopes of Ship Rock and the Chuskas proved to be a false threat. It was dry again across the Navajo Nation—skies dark blue, mornings cool, sun dazzling. The south end of the Colorado Plateau was enjoying that typically beautiful autumn weather that makes the inevitable first blizzard such a dangerous surprise.

Beautiful or not, Jim Chee was keeping himself far too busy to enjoy it—even if his glum mood would have allowed it. He had learned that he could handle administrative duties if he tried hard enough, and that he would never, ever enjoy them. For the first time in his life, he felt no sense of pleasure as he went to work. But the work got done. He made progress. The vacation schedules were established in a way that produced no serious discontent among the officers who worked with him. A system had been devised whereby whatever policemen who happened to be in the Hogback neighborhood would drop in on Diamonte’s establishment for a friendly chat. This happened several times a week, thus keeping Diamonte careful and his customers uneasy without giving him any solid grounds for complaint. As a by-product, it had also produced a couple of arrests of young fellows who had been ignoring fugitive warrants.

On top of that, his budget for next year was about half finished and a plan had been drafted for keeping better track of gasoline usage and patrol car maintenance. This had produced an unusual (indeed, unprecedented in the experience of Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee) smile on the face of Captain Largo. Even Officer Bernadette Manuelito seemed to be responding to this new efficiency in Chee’s criminal investigation domain.

This came about after the word reached the ear of Captain Largo (and very shortly thereafter the ear of Acting Lieutenant Chee) that Mr. Finch had nailed a pair of cattle-stealing brothers so thoroughly that they had actually admitted not just rustling five unweaned calves but also about six or seven other such larcenies from the New Mexico side of Chee’s jurisdiction. So overwhelming was the evidence, the captain said, that they had plea-bargained themselves into jail at Aztec.

“Well, good,” Chee had said.

“Well, goddammit,” Largo replied, “why can’t we nail some of those bastards ourselves?”

Largo’s imperial “we” had actually meant him, Chee realized. He also realized, before this uncomfortable conversation ended, that Finch had revealed to Largo not only Chee’s ignorance of heifer curiosity but how he and Officer Manuelito had screwed up Finch’s trap out by Ship Rock. Chee had walked down the hall away from this meeting with several resolutions strongly formed. He would catch Finch’s favorite cow thief before Finch could get his hands on him. Having beaten Finch at Finch’s game, he would resign his role as acting lieutenant and go back to being a real policeman. There would be no more trying to be a bureaucrat to impress Janet. And to accomplish the first phase of this program he would shift Manuelito over to work on rustler cases—she and Largo being the only ones in the Shiprock District who took it seriously.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito responded to this shift in duties by withdrawing her request for a transfer. At least, that was Jim Chee’s presumption. Jenifer had another notion. She had noticed that the frequent calls between the lady lawyer in Window Rock and the acting lieutenant in Shiprock had abruptly ceased. Jenifer was very good at keeping the Shiprock District criminal investigation office running smoothly because she made it her business to know what the hell was going on. She made a couple of calls to old friends in the small world of law enforcement down at Window Rock. Yes, indeed. The pretty lawyer had been observed shedding tears while in conversation with a lady friend in her car. She had also been seen having dinner at the Navajo Inn with that good-looking lawyer from Washington. Things, it seemed, were in flux. Having learned this, it was Jenifer’s theory that Officer Manuelito would learn of it, too—not as directly perhaps, or as fast, but she would learn of it.

Whatever her motives, Manuelito seemed to like her new duties. She stood in front of Chee’s desk, looking excited, but not about rustling.

“That’s what I said,” she said. “They showed up at old Mr. Maryboy’s place last night. They told him they wanted trespass permission on his grazing lease. They wanted to climb Ship Rock.”

“And it was George Shaw and John McDermott?” Chee said.

“Yes, sir,” Officer Manuelito said. “That’s what they told him. They paid him a hundred dollars and said if they did any damage they’d pay him for that.”

“My God,” Chee said. “You mean those two lawyers are going to climb Ship Rock?”

“Old man Maryboy said the little one had climbed it before. Years ago. He said most of the white people just sneaked in and climbed it, but George Shaw had come to his house to get permission. He remembered that. How polite Shaw had been. But this time Shaw said they were bringing a team of climbers.”

“So the tall one with the mustache probably isn’t going up,” Chee said, wondering if he sounded disappointed. But should he be disappointed? Would having McDermott fall off a cliff solve his problem with Janet? He didn’t think so.

“They didn’t say why they were going up there, I guess,” Chee said.

“No, sir. I asked him about that. Mr. Maryboy said they didn’t tell him why.” She laughed, showing very pretty white teeth. “He said why do white men do anything? He said he knew a white fellow once who was trying to get a patent on a cordless bungee jumper.”

Chee rewarded that with a chuckle. The way he’d heard it, it was a stringless yo-yo, but Maryboy had revised it to fit mountain climbers.

“But what I wanted to tell you about was business,” Officer Manuelito said. “Mr. Maryboy told me he was missing four steers.”

“Maryboy,” Chee said. “Let’s see. He has—”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “That’s his lease where we found the loose fence posts. Where somebody was throwing the hay over the fence. I went by his place to tell him about that. I was going to give him a notebook and ask him to keep track of strange trucks and trailers. He said I was a little late, but he took the notebook and said he’d help.”

“Did he say how late?” Maryboy hadn’t reported a cattle theft. Chee was sure of that. He checked on everything involving rustling every day. “Did he say why he hadn’t reported the loss?”

“He said he missed ’em sometime last spring. He was selling off steers and came up short. And he said he didn’t report it because he didn’t think it would do any good. He said when it happened before, a couple of times, he went in and told us about it but he never did get his animals back.”

That was one of the frustrations Chee has been learning to live with in dealing with rustling. People didn’t keep track of their cattle. They turned them out to graze, and if they had a big grazing lease and reliable water maybe they’d only see them three or four times a year. Maybe only at calving time and branding time. And if you did see them, maybe you wouldn’t notice if you were short a couple. Chee had spent his boyhood with sheep. He could tell an Angus from a Hereford but beyond that one cow looked a lot like every other cow. He could understand how you wouldn’t miss a couple and if you did, what could you do about it? Maybe the coyotes had got ’em, or maybe it was the little green men coming down in flying saucers. Whatever, you weren’t going to get ’em back.

“So we put an X on our map and mark ‘unreported,’” Chee said, “which doesn’t help much.”

“It might,” Officer Manuelito said. “Later on.”

Chee was extracting their map from his desk drawer. He kept it out of sight on the theory that everyone in the office except Manuelito would think this project was silly. Or, worse, they would think he was trying to copy Joe Leaphorn’s famous map. Everybody in the Tribal Police seemed to know about that and the Legendary Lieutenant’s use of it to exercise his theory that everything fell into a pattern, every effect had its cause, and so forth.

The map was a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle chart large enough in scale to show every arroyo, hogan, windmill, and culvert. Chee pushed his in basket aside, rolled it out and penned a tiny blue ? on the Maryboy grazing lease with a tiny 3 beside it. Beside that he marked in the date the loss had been discovered.

Officer Manuelito looked at it and said: “A blue three?”

“Signifies unreported possible thefts,” Chee said. “Three of them.” He waved his hand around the map, indicating a scattering of such designations. “I’ve been adding them as we learn about them.”

“Good idea,” Manuelito said. “And add an X there, too. Maryboy is going to be a lookout for us.” She pulled up a chair, sat, leaned her elbows on the desk, and studied the chart.

Chee added the X. The map now had maybe a score of those, each marking the home of a volunteer equipped with a notebook and ballpoint pen. Chee had bought the supplies with his own money, preferring that to trying to explain this system to Largo. If it worked, which today didn’t seem likely to Chee, he would decide whether to ask for a reimbursement of his twenty-seven-dollar outlay.

“Funny how this is already working out,” Manuelito said. “I thought it would take months.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the patterns you talked about,” she said. “How those single-animal thefts tend to fall around the middle of the month.”

Chee looked. Indeed, most of the 1’s that marked single-theft sites were followed by mid-month dates. And a high percentage of those midmonth dates were clustered along the reservation border. But what did that signify? He said: “Yeah.”

“I don’t think we should concentrate on those,” she said, still staring thoughtfully at the map. “But if you want me to, I could check with the bars and liquor stores around Farmington and try to work up a list of guys who come in about the middle of the month with a fresh supply of money.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t prove anything, but it would give us a list of people to look out for.”

About halfway through this monologue, Chee’s brain caught up with Manuelito’s thinking. The Navajo Nation relief checks arrived about the first of the month. Every reservation cop knew that the heavy workload produced by the need to arrest drunks tended to ease off in the second week when the liquor addicts had used up their cash. He visualized a dried-out drunk driving past a pasture and seeing a five-hundred-dollar cow staring through the fence at him. How could the man resist? And why hadn’t he thought of that?

He thought of it now. Weeks compiling the list, weeks spent cross-checking, sorting, coming up finally with four or five cases, getting maybe two convictions resulting in hundred-dollar fines, which would be suspended, and thirty-day sentences, which would be converted to probation. Meanwhile, serious crime would continue to flourish.

“I think instead we’ll sort those out and set them aside. Let’s concentrate on solving the multiple thefts,” Chee said.

“There’s a pattern there, too, I think,” Officer Manuelito said. “Am I right?”

Chee had noticed this one himself. The multiple thefts tended to show up in empty country—from grazing leases like Maryboy’s where the owner might not see his herd for a month or so. They talked about that, which led them back to their growing list of rustler-watchers, which led them back to Lucy Sam.

“You looked through her telescope,” Manuelito said. “Did you notice she could see that place where the fence posts were loose?”

Chee shook his head. He had been looking at the mountain. Thinking of the Fallen Man stranded on the cliff up there, calling for help.

“You could,” Manuelito said. “I looked.”

“I think I should go talk to her,” Chee said. But he wasn’t thinking of rustling when he said it. He was wondering what Lucy Sam’s father might have seen all those years ago when Hal Breedlove had huddled on that little shelf waiting to die.

T
HE SOUND OF
BANG, BANG, BANG, thud, thud
stopped Joe Leaphorn in his tracks. It came from somewhere up Cache Creek, nearby, just around the bend and beyond a stream-side stand of aspens. But it stopped him just for a moment. He smiled, thinking he’d spent too many years as a cop with a pistol on his hip, and moved up the path. The aspen trunks were wearing their winter white now, their leaves forming a yellow blanket on the ground around them. And through the barren branches Leaphorn could see Eldon Demott, bending over something, back muscles straining.

Doing what? Leaphorn stopped again and watched. Demott was stretching barbed wire over what seemed to be a section of aspen trunk. And now, with more banging, stapling the wire to the wood.

Something to do with a fence, he guessed. Here a cable had been stretched between ponderosas on opposite sides of the stream, and the fence seemed to be suspended from that. Leaphorn shouted, “Hello!”

It took Demott just a moment to recognize him but he did even before Leaphorn reminded him.

“Yeah,” Demott said. “I remember. But no uniform now. Are you still with the Tribal Police?”

“They put me out to pasture,” Leaphorn said “I retired at the end of June.”

“Well, what brings you all this way up the Cache? It wouldn’t have something to do with finally finding Hal, would it? After all these years?”

“That’s a good guess,” Leaphorn said “Breedlove’s family hired me to go over the whole business again. They want me to see if I overlooked anything. See if I could find out where he went when he left your sister at Canyon de Chelly. See if anything new turned up the past ten years or so.”

“That’s interesting,” Demott said. He retrieved his hammer. “Let me get done with this.” He secured the wire with two more staples, straightened his back, and stretched.

“I’m trying to rig up something to solve a problem here,” he explained. “The damned cows come to drink here, and then they move downstream a little ways—or their calves do—and they come out on the wrong side of the fence. We call it a water gap. Is that the term you use?”

“We don’t get enough water down in the low country where I was raised to need ’em much,” Leaphorn said.

“In the mountains, it’s the snowmelt. The creek gets up, washes the brush down, it catches on the fence and builds up until it makes a dam out of it, and the dam backs up the water until the pressure tears out the fence,” Demott said. “It’s the same story every spring. And then you got cattle up and down the creek, ruining the stream banks, getting erosion started and everything silted up.”

It was cool up here, probably a mile and a half above sea level, but Demott was sweating. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve.

“The way it’s supposed to work, it’s kinda like a drawbridge. You make a section of fence across the creek and just hang it from that cable with a dry log holding the bottom down. When the flood comes down, the log floats. That lifts the wire, the brush sails right by under it, and when the runoff season’s over, the log drops back into place and you’ve got a fence again.”

“It sounds pretty foolproof,” Leaphorn said, thinking that it might work with snowmelt, but runoff from a male rain roaring down the side of a mesa would knock it into the next county and take the cable with it, and the trees, too. “Or maybe I should say cowproof.”

Demott looked skeptical. “Actually, it just works until too much stuff catches on the log,” he said. “Anyway, it’s worth trying.” He sat on a boulder, wiped his face again.

“What can I tell you?”

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But we wrote off this thing with your brother-in-law almost eleven years ago. It was just another adult missing person case. Another skip-out without a clue to where or why. So there’s been a lot of time for you to get a letter, or hear some gossip, or find out that somebody who knew him had seen him playing the slots in Las Vegas. Something like that. There’s no crime involved, so you wouldn’t have had any reason to tell us about it.”

Demott was wiping mud off the side of his hand on his pant leg. “I can tell you why they hired you,” he said.

Leaphorn waited.

“They want this place back.”

“I thought they might,” Leaphorn said. “I couldn’t think of another reason.”

“The sons-a-bitches,” Demott said. “they want to lease out the mineral rights. Or more likely, just sell the whole outfit to a mining company and let ’em wreck it all.”

“That’s the idea I got from the bank lady at Mancos.”

“Did she tell the plan? They’d do an open pit operation on the molybdenum deposits up there.” Demott pointed up Cache Creek, past the clusters of white-barked aspens, past the stately forest of ponderosa, into the dark green wilderness of firs. “Rip it all out,” he said, “and then…”

The emotion in Demott’s voice stopped him. He took a deep breath and sat for a moment looking down at his hands.

Leaphorn waited. Demott had more than this to say. He wanted to hear it.

Demott gave Leaphorn a sidewise glance. “Have you seen the Red River canyon in New Mexico? Up north of Taos?”

“I’ve seen it,” Leaphorn said.

“You seen it before and after?”

“I haven’t been there for years,” Leaphorn said. “I remember a beautiful trout stream, maybe a little bigger than your creek here, winding through a narrow valley. Steeper than this one. High mountains on both sides. Beautiful place.”

“They ripped the top right off of one of those mountains,” Demott said. “Left a great whitish heap of crushed stone miles long. And the holding ponds they built to catch the effluent spill over and that nasty stuff pours down into Red River. They use cyanide in some sort of solution to free up the metal and that kills trout and everything else.”

“I haven’t been up there for years,” Leaphorn said.

“Cyanide,” Demott repeated. “Mixed with sludge. That’s what we’d have pouring down Cache Creek if the Breedlove Corporation had its way. That slimy white silt brewed with cyanide.”

Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He spent a few minutes letting Demott get used to him being there, listening to the music of Cache Creek bubbling over its rocky floor, watching a puffy white cloud just barely making it over the ridge upstream. It was dragging its bottom through the tips of the fir trees, leaving rags of mist behind. A beautiful day, a beautiful place. A cedar waxwing flew by. It perched in the aspens across the creek and watched them, chirping bird comments.

Demott was watching him, too, still absently picking at the resin and dirt on his left hand. “Well, enough of that,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I got no letters and neither did Elisa. If she had, I would have known it. We’re a family that don’t keep secrets, not from one another. And we didn’t hear anything, either. Nothing.”

“You’d think there’d be rumors,” Leaphorn said. “You know how people are.”

“I do,” Demott said. “I thought it was strange, too. I’m sure there must have been a lot of talk about it up at Mancos and around. Hal disappearing was the most exciting thing that happened around here in years. I’m sure some people would say Elisa killed her husband so she could get the ranch, or she had a secret boyfriend do it, or I killed him so the ranch would come back into the Demott family.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I’d think that would be the natural kind of speculation, considering the circumstances. But you didn’t hear any of that kind of talk?”

Demott looked shocked. “Why, they wouldn’t say things like that around me. Or Elisa either, of course. And you know, the funny thing was Elisa loved Hal, and I think folks around here understood that.”

“How about you? What did you think of him?”

“Oh, I got pretty sick of Hal,” Demott said. “I won’t lie about it. He was a pain in the butt. But you know in a lot of ways I liked him. He had a good heart, and he was good for Elisa. Treated her like a quality lady, and that’s what she is. And it made you feel sad, you know. I think he could have amounted to something if he’d been raised right.”

Demott despaired of getting the hand suitably clean by rubbing at it. He got up, squatted by the stream, and washed it.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Leaphorn said. “What went wrong?”

Finished with his ablutions, Demott resumed his seat and thought about how to tell this.

“Hard to put it exactly,” he said. “But when he was just a kid his folks would send him out here and we’d get him on a horse, and he’d do his share of work just like everybody else. Made a good enough hand, for a youngster. When we was baling hay, or moving the cows or anything, he’d do the twelve-hour day right along with us. And when the work was laid by, he’d go rock climbing with me and Elisa. In fact he got good at it before she did.” Demott exhaled hugely, shook his head.

No mention of Tommy Castro. “Just the three of you?” Leaphorn asked.

Demott hesitated. “Pretty much.”

“Tommy Castro didn’t go along?”

Demott flushed. “Where’d you hear about him?”

Leaphorn shrugged.

Demott drew in a deep breath. “Castro and I were friends in high school and, yeah, he and I climbed together some. But then when Elisa got big enough to learn and she’d come along Tommy began to make a move on her. I told him she was way too young and to knock it off. I put a stop to that.”

“He still climb?”

“I have no idea,” Demott said. “I stay away from him. He stays away from me.”

“No problem with Hal, though.”

“He was more her age and more her type even though he was citified and born with the old silver spoon.” Demott thought about that. “You know,” he said, “I think he really did love this place as much as we did. He’d talk about getting his family to leave it to him as his part of the estate. Had it all figured out on paper. It wasn’t worth near as much as the share he’d get otherwise, but it was what he wanted. That’s what he’d say. Prettiest place on earth, and he’d make it better. Improve the stream where it was eroding. Plant out some ponderosa seedlings where we had a fire kill. Keep the herd down to where there wouldn’t be any more overgrazing.”

“I didn’t see much sign of overgrazing now, Leaphorn said.

“Not now, you don’t. But before Hal’s daddy died he always wanted this place to carry a lot more livestock than the grass could stand. He was always putting the pressure on my dad, and after dad passed away, putting it on me. As matter of fact he was threatening to fire me if didn’t get the income up to where he thought it ought to be.”

“You think he would have done it?”

“We never will know,” Demott said. “I wasn’t going to overgraze this place, that’s for damn sure. But just in time Breedlove had his big heart attack and passed away.” He chuckled. “Elisa credited it to the power of my prayers.”

Leaphorn waited. And waited. But Demott was in no hurry to interrupt his memories. A breeze came down the stream, cool and fresh, rustling the leaves behind Leaphorn and humming the little song that breezes sing in the firs.

“It’s a mighty pretty day,” Demott said finally. “But blink your eyes twice and winter will be coming over the mountain.”

“You were going to tell me what went wrong with Hal,” Leaphorn said.

“I got no license to practice psychiatry,” Demott said. He hesitated just a moment, but Leaphorn knew it was coming. It was something Demott wanted to talk about—and probably had for a long, long time.

“Or theology, either,” he continued. “If that’s the word for it. Anyway, you know how the story goes in our Genesis. God created Adam and gave him absolutely everything he could want, to see if he could handle it and still be obedient and do the right thing. He couldn’t. So he fell from grace.”

Demott glanced at Leaphorn to see if he was following.

“Got kicked out of paradise,” Demott said.

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “I remember it.” It wasn’t quite the way he’d always heard it, but he could see the point Demott might make with his version.

“Old Breedlove put Hal in paradise,” Demott said. “Gave him everything. Prep school with the other rich kids, Dartmouth with the children of the ruling class—absolutely the very goddamn best that you can buy with money. If I was a preacher I’d say Hal’s daddy spent a ton of money teaching his boy to worship Mammon— however you pronounce that. Anyway, it means making a god out of things you can buy.” He paused, gave Leaphorn a questioning glance.

“We have some of the same philosophy in our own Genesis story,” Leaphorn said. “First Man calls evil ‘the way to make money.’ Besides, I took a comparative religion course when I was a student at Arizona State. Made an A in it.”

“Okay,” Demott said. “Sorry. Anyway, when Hal was about a senior or so he flew into Mancos one summer in his own little airplane. Wanted us to grade out a landing strip for it near the house. I figured out how much it would cost, but his daddy wouldn’t come up with the money. They got into a big argument over it. Hal had already been arguing with him about taking better care of this place, putting money in instead of taking it all out. I think it was about then that the old man got pissed off. He decided he’d give Hal the ranch and nothing else and let him see if he could live off it.”

“Figuring he couldn’t?”

“Yep,” Hal said. “And of course the old man was right. Anyhow Breedlove eased up on the pressure for profits some and I got to put in a lot of fencing we needed to protect a couple of the sensitive pastures and get some equipment in there for some erosion control along the Cache. Elisa and Hal got married after that. Everything going smooth. But that didn’t last long. Hal took Elisa to Europe. Decided he just had to have himself a Ferrari. Great car for our kind of roads. But he bought it. And other stuff. Borrowed money. Before long we weren’t bringing in enough from selling our surplus hay and the beef to cover his expenses. So he went to see the old man.”

At this point Demott’s voice was thickening. He paused, rubbed his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “Warm for this time of year,” he said.

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, thinking it was a cool, dry sixty degrees or so even with the breeze gone.

“Anyway, he came back empty. Hal didn’t have much to say but I believe they must have had a big family fight. I know for sure he tried to borrow from George—that’s George Shaw, his cousin who used to come out and climb with us—and George must have turned him down, too. I think the family must have told him they were going ahead with the moly strip mine deal, and to hell with him.”