Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (2 page)

C
HEE’S TRAILER HAD BEEN CHILLY when he left it at dawn. Now it was frigid, having leaked what little warmth it had retained into the chill that settled along the San Juan River. Chee lit the propane heater and started the coffee.

Joe Leaphorn was sitting stiff and straight on the bench behind the table. He put his hat on the Formica tabletop and rubbed his hand through his old-fashioned crew cut, which had become appropriately gray. Then he replaced the hat, looked uneasy, and took it off again. To Chee the hat looked as weatherworn as its owner.

“I hate to bother you like this,” Leaphorn said, and paused. “By the way, congratulations on the promotion.”

“Thanks,” Chee said. He glanced around from the coffeepot, where the hot water was still dripping through the grounds, and hesitated.

But what the hell. It had not seemed plausible when he’d heard it, but why not find out?

“People tell me you recommended me for it.”

If Leaphorn heard that, it didn’t show on his face. He was watching his folded hands, the thumbs of which he had engaged in circling each other.

“It gets you lots of work and worry,” Leaphorn said, “and not much pay goes with the job.”

Chee extracted two mugs from the cabinet, put the one advertising the
Farmington Times
in front of Leaphorn, and looked for the sugar bowl.

“How you enjoying your retirement?” Chee asked. Which was a sort of oblique way of getting the man to the point of this visit. This wouldn’t be a social call. No way. Leaphorn had always been the boss and Chee had been the gofer. One way or another this visit would involve law enforcement and something Leaphorn wanted Chee to do about it.

“Well, being retired there’s a lot less aggravation,” Leaphorn said. “You don’t have to put up with—” He shrugged and chuckled.

Chee laughed, but it was forced. He wasn’t used to this strange new version of Leaphorn. This Leaphorn, come to ask him for something, hesitant and diffident, wasn’t the Lieutenant Leaphorn he remembered with a mixture of puzzlement, irritation, and admiration. Seeing the man as a supplicant made him uneasy. He’d put a stop to that.

“I remember when you told me you were retiring, you said if I ever needed to pick your brains for anything, to feel free to ask,” Chee said. “So I’m going to ask you what you know about the cattle-rustling business.”

Leaphorn considered, thumbs still circling. “Well,” he said, “I know there’s always some of it going on. And I know your boss and his family have been in the cow business for about three generations. So he probably doesn’t care much for cow thieves.” He stopped watching his thumbs and looked up at Chee. “You having a run of it up here? Anything big?”

“Nothing very big. The Conroy ranch lost eight heifers last month. That was the worst. Had six or seven other complaints in the past two months. Mostly one or two missing, and some of them probably just strayed off. But Captain Largo tells me it’s worse than usual.”

“Enough to get Largo stirred up,” Leaphorn said. “His family has grazing leases scattered around over on the Checkerboard.”

Chee grinned.

“I’ll bet you already knew that,” Leaphorn said, and chuckled.

“I did,” Chee said, and poured the coffee.

Leaphorn sipped.

“I don’t think I know anything about catching rustlers that Captain Largo hasn’t already told you,” Leaphorn said. “Now we have the Navajo Rangers, and since cattle are a tribal resource and their job is protecting tribal resources, it’s really their worry. But the rangers are a real small group and they tend to be tied up with game poachers and people vandalizing the parks, or stealing timber, or draining off drip gasoline. That sort of thing. Not enough rangers to go around, so you work with whoever the New Mexico Cattle Sanitary Board has covering this district, and the Arizona Brand Inspection Office, and the Colorado people. And you keep an eye out for strange trucks and horse trailers.” Leaphorn looked up and shrugged. “Not much you can do. I never had much luck catching ’em, and the few times I did, we could never get a conviction.”

“I don’t think I’m going to get much return on the time I’ve been investing in it either,” Chee said.

“I bet you’re already doing everything I suggested.” Leaphorn added sugar to his coffee, sipped, looked at Chee over the rim. “And then, of course, you’re getting into the ceremonial season, and you know how that works. Somebody’s having a sing. They need to feed all those kin-folks and friends who come to help with the cure. Lots of hungry people and maybe you have them for a whole week if it’s a full-fledged ceremony. You know what they say in New Mexico nobody eats his own beef.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Looking through the reports for the past years I noticed the little one or two animal thefts go up when the thunderstorms stop and the sings begin.”

“I used to just snoop around a little. Maybe I’d find some fresh hides with the wrong brands on ’em. But you know there’s not much use arresting anybody for that. I’d just say a word or two to let ’em know we’d caught ’em, and then I’d tell the owner. And if he was Navajo, he’d figure that he should have known they needed a little help and butchered something for them and saved ’em the trouble of stealing it.”

Leaphorn stopped, knowing he was wasting time.

“Good ideas,” Chee said, knowing he wasn’t fooling Leaphorn. “Anything I can do for you?”

“It’s nothing important,” Leaphorn said. “Just something that’s been sort of sticking in my mind for years. Just curiosity really.”

Chee tried his own coffee and found it absolutely delicious. He waited for Leaphorn to decide how he wanted to ask this favor.

“It was eleven years this fall,” Leaphorn said. “I was assigned to the Chinle office then and we had a young man disappear from the lodge at Canyon de Chelly. Fellow named Harold Breedlove. He and his wife were there celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. His birthday, too. The way his wife told it, he got a telephone call. He tells her he has to meet someone about a business deal. He says he’ll be right back and he drives off in their car. He doesn’t come back. Next morning she calls the Arizona Highway Patrol. They call us.”

Leaphorn paused, understanding that such a strong reaction to what seemed like nothing more sinister than a man taking a vacation from his wife needed an explanation. “They’re a big ranching family. The Breedloves. The Lazy B ranch up in Colorado, leases in New Mexico and Arizona, all sorts of mining interests, and so forth. The old man ran for Congress once. Anyway, we put out a description of the car. It was a new green Land Rover. Easy to spot out here. And about a week later an officer spots it. It had been left up an arroyo beside that road that runs from 191 over to the Sweetwater chapter house.”

“I’m sort of remembering that case now,” Chee said. “But very dimly. I was new then, working way over at Crownpoint.” And, Chee thought, having absolutely nothing to do with the Breedlove case. So where could this conversation possibly be leading?

“No sign of violence at the car, that right?” Chee asked. “No blood. No weapon. No note. No nothing.”

“Not even tracks,” Leaphorn said. “A week of wind took care of that.”

“And nothing stolen out of the car, if I remember it right,” Chee said. “Seems like I remember somebody saying it still had an expensive audio system in it, spare tire, everything still there.”

Leaphorn sipped his coffee, thinking. Then he said, “So it seemed then. Now I don’t know. Maybe some mountain climbing equipment was stolen.”

“Ah,” Chee said. He put down the coffee cup. Now he understood where Leaphorn was heading.

“That skeleton up on Ship Rock,” Leaphorn said. “All I know about it is what I read in the
Gallup Independent
. Do you have any identification yet?”

“Not that I know of,” Chee said. “There’s no evidence of foul play, but Captain Largo got the FBI laboratory people to take a look at everything. Last I heard, they hadn’t come up with anything.”

“Nothing much but bare bones to work with, I heard,” Leaphorn said. “And what was left of the clothing. I guess people who climb mountains don’t take along their billfolds.”

“Or engraved jewelry,” Chee added. “Or anything else they’re not using. At least this guy didn’t.”

“You get an estimate on his age?”

“The pathologist said between thirty and thirty-five. No sign of any health problems which affected bone development. I guess you don’t expect health problems in people who climb mountains. And he probably grew up someplace with lots of fluoride in the drinking water.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “Which means no fillings in his teeth and no help from any dental charts.”

“We had lots of that kind of luck on this one,” Chee said.

Leaphorn drained his cup, put it down. “How was he dressed?”

Chee frowned. It was an odd question. “Like a mountain climber,” he said. “You know. Special boots with those soft rubber soles, all the gear hanging off of him.”

“I was thinking about the season,” Leaphorn said. “Black as that Ship Rock is, the sun gets it hot in the summer—even up there a mile and a half above sea level. And in the winter, it gets coated with ice. The snow packs in where it’s shaded. Layers of ice form.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Well, this guy wasn’t wearing cold-weather gear. Just pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe some sort of thermal underwear, though. He was on a sort of shelf a couple of hundred feet below the peak. Way too high for the coyotes to get to him, but the buzzards and ravens had been there.”

“Did the rescue team bring everything down? Was there anything that you’d expect to find that wasn’t there? I mean, you’d expect to find if you knew anything about the gear climbers carry.”

“As far as I know nothing was missing,” Chee said. “Of course, stuff may have fallen down into cracks. The birds would have scattered things around.”

“A lot of rope, I guess,” Leaphorn said.

“Quite a bit,” Chee said. “I don’t know how much would be normal. I know climbing rope stretches a lot. Largo sent it to the FBI lab to see if they could tell if a knot slipped, or it broke, or what.”

“Did they bring down the other end?”

“Other end?”

Leaphorn nodded. “If it broke, there’d be the other end. He would have had it secured someplace. A piton driven in or tied to something secure. In case he slipped.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “The climbers who went up for the bones didn’t find it. I doubt if they looked. Largo asked them to go up and bring down the body. And I remember they thought there’d have to be two bodies. Nobody would be crazy enough to climb Ship Rock alone. But they didn’t find another one. I guess our fallen man was that crazy.”

“Sounds like it,” Leaphorn said.

Chee poured them both some more coffee, looked at Leaphorn and said, “I guess this Harold Breedlove was a mountain climber. Am I right?”

“He was,” Leaphorn said. “But if he’s your fallen man, he wasn’t a very smart one.”

“You mean climbing up there alone.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Or if he wasn’t alone, climbing with someone who’d go off and leave him.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Chee said. “The rescue crew said he’d either climbed up to the ledge, which they didn’t think would be possible without help, or tried to rappel down from above. But the skeleton was intact. Nothing broken.” Chee shook his head.

“If someone was with him, why didn’t they report it? Get help? Bring down the body? You have any thoughts about that?”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Makes no sense either way.”

Leaphorn sipped coffee. Considered.

“I’d like to know more about this climbing gear you said was stolen out of Breedlove’s car,” Chee said.

“I said it might have been stolen, and maybe from the car,” Leaphorn said.

Chee waited.

“About a month after the guy vanished, we caught a kid from Many Farms breaking into a tourist’s car parked at one of the Canyon de Chelly overlooks. He had a bunch of other stolen stuff at his place, car radios, mobile phones, tape decks, so forth, including some mountain climbing gear. Rope, pitons, whatever they call those gadgets. By then we’d been looking for Breedlove long enough to know he was a climber. The boy claimed he found the stuff where runoff had uncovered it in an arroyo bottom. We had him take us out and show us. It was about five hundred yards upstream from where we’d found Breedlove’s car.”

Chee considered this.

“Did you say the car hadn’t been broken into?”

“It wasn’t locked when we found it. The stuff kids usually take was still there.”

Chee made a wry face. “You have any idea why he’d just take the climbing gear?”

“And leave the stuff he could sell? I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. He picked up his cup, noticed it was empty, put it down again.

“I heard you’re getting married,” he said. “ Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You want a refill?”

“A very pretty lady,” Leaphorn said. “And smart. A good lawyer.” He held out his cup.

Chee laughed. “I never heard you use that adjective talking about a lawyer before. Anyway, not about a defense lawyer.” Janet Pete worked for Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agaditahe, which translates more or less literally as “People who talk fast and help people” and was more likely to be called DNA, or public defenders, or with less polite language by Navajo Police.

“Has to be a first time for everything,” Leaphorn said. “And Miss Pete—” Leaphorn couldn’t think of a way to finish that sentence.

Chee took his cup and refilled it.

“I hope you’ll let me know if anything interesting turns up on your fallen man.”

That surprised Chee. Wasn’t it finished now? Leaphorn had found his missing man. Largo’s fallen man was identified. Case closed. What else interesting would there be?

“You mean if we check out the Breedlove identification and the skeleton turns out to be the wrong size, or wrong race, or Breedlove had false teeth? Or what?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. But he still sat there, holding his replenished coffee cup. This conversation wasn’t finished. Chee waited, trying to deduce the way it would be going.

“Did you have a suspect? I guess the widow would be one?”

“There seemed to be a good reason for it in this case. But that didn’t pan out. Then there was a cousin. A Washington lawyer named George Shaw. Who just happened to also be a mountain climber, and just happened to be out here and looked just perfect as the odd man in a love triangle if you wanted one. He said he’d come out to talk to Breedlove about some sort of mineral lease proposal on the Lazy B ranch. That seemed to be true from what I could find out. Shaw was representing the family’s business interests and a mining company was dickering for a lease.”