Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (20 page)

Demott had been following this intently, nodding sometimes. Sometimes frowning.

“But why Elisa?”

“If they can’t make the jury believe she helped plan it, you can see how easy it is to prove she helped cover it up. Just get Nez and some of the people at the Thunderbird Lodge under oath. They saw you there with her.”

“You mentioned an option. Said it depends on me. How could it?”

“We go into Gallup. You turn yourself in. Say you want to confess to the shooting of Hosteen Maryboy and Jim Chee. No mention of Nez. No mention of Hal. No mention of climbing Ship Rock.”

“And what do you say? I mean about where you found me. And why and all that.”

“I’m not there,” Leaphorn said. “I park where I can see you walk into the police station and wait awhile and when you don’t come out, I go somewhere and get something to eat.”

“Just Maryboy, then, and Chee?” Demott said. “And Elisa wouldn’t get dragged into it?”

“Without Nez involved, how would she?”

“Well, that other cop. The one I shot. Doesn’t he have a lot of this figured out?”

“Chee?” Leaphorn chuckled. “Chee’s a genuine Navajo. He isn’t interested in revenge. He wants harmony.”

Demott’s expression was skeptical.

“What would he do?” Leaphorn asked. “It’s obvious why you shot Chee. You were trying to escape. But you have to give them some plausible reason for shooting Maryboy. Chee isn’t going to rush in and say the real motive was some complicated something or other to cover up not reporting that Hal Breedlove fell off the mountain eleven years ago. What’s to be gained by it? Except a lot of work and frustration. Either way, you are going to do life in prison.”

“Yes,” Demott said, and the way he said it caused Leaphorn to lose his cool.

“And you damn sure deserve it. And worse. Killing Maryboy was cold-blooded murder. I’ve seen it before but it was always done by psychopaths. Emotional cripples. I want you to tell me how a normal human can decide to go shoot an old man to death.”

“I didn’t,” Demott said. “They found the skeleton. Then they identified Hal. The nightmare was coming true. I got panicky. Nobody knew I’d climbed up there with Hal and Elisa that day but the old man. We went to ask him about trespassing, but that was eleven years ago. I didn’t think he’d remember. But I had to find out. So I drove down there that evening, and knocked on the door. If he didn’t recognize me, I’d go away and forget it. He opened the door and I told him I was Eldon Demott and heard he had some heifers to sell. And right away I could see he knew me. He said I was the man who’d climbed up there with Mr. Breedlove. He got all excited. He asked how I could have gone off and left a friend up there on the mountain. And now that he knew who I was, he was going to tell the police about it. I went out and got into the car and there he was coming out after me, carrying a thirty-thirty, and wanted me to go back into the house. So I got my pistol out of the glove box and put it in my coat pocket. He went into his house and put on his coat and hat, and he was going to take me right into the police station at Shiprock. And, you know…”

“That’s how it was, then?”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “But if I can just keep Nez out of it, maybe we save Elisa?”

Leaphorn nodded.

Demott reached his hand slowly toward the rifle.

“What I’d like to do is slip the bolt out of this thing so it’s harmless.”

“Then what?”

“Then I walk five steps over there to the cliff, and I toss it down into that deepest crack where nobody could ever find it.”

“Do it,” Leaphorn said. “I won’t look.”

Demott did it. “Now,” he said. “I want just a few minutes to write Elisa a little letter. I want her to know I didn’t kill Hal. I want her to know that when I climbed on up there and signed that register for him, it was just so she wouldn’t lose her ranch.”

“Go ahead.”

“Got to get my notebook out of the glove box then.”

“I’ll watch,” Leaphorn said. He moved around to where he could do that.

Demott dug out a little spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, closed the box, backed out of the vehicle, and used the hood as a writing desk. He wrote rapidly, using two pages. He tore them out, folded them, and dropped them on the car seat.

“Now,” he said, “let’s get this over with.”

“Demott,” Leaphorn shouted. “Wait!” But Eldon Demott had already taken the half dozen running steps to the rim of Canyon del Muerto and jumped, arms and legs flailing, out into empty space.

Leaphorn stood there a while listening. And heard nothing but the wind. He walked to the rim and looked. Demott had apparently hit the stone where the cliff bulged outward, down some two hundred feet. The body bounced out and landed on the stony talus slope just beside the canyon road. The first traveler to come along would see it.

Demott had left the door open on the Land-Rover. Leaphorn reached in and picked up the letter, holding it by its edges.

Dear Sister:

The first thing you do when you read this is call Harold Simmons at his law office don’t tell anyone anything until you talk it over with him. I’ve made an awful mess of things, but I’m out of it now and you can still have a good life taking care of the ranch. But I want you to know that I didn’t kill Hal. I’m ashamed to tell you a lot of this but I want you to know what happened.

About a week after Hal disappeared from the canyon I got a call from him. He was in a motel in Farmington. He wouldn’t tell me where he had been, or why he was doing this, but he said he wanted to climb Ship Rock right away, before it got too cold. I said hell no. He said if I didn’t I was fired. I wouldn’t anyway. Then he said if I would and I didn’t say anything to you, he would decide against signing that strip mining contract and put it off for another full year. He said he wanted to explain everything to you after we got down. So I said okay and I picked him up at the motel about five the next morning. He wouldn’t tell me a word about where he’d been and he was acting strange. But we climbed it, up to Rappel Gulch, and there he insisted on edging out on the cliff face to see if there was a way good hands with rope could get down. A gust of wind caught him and he fell.

That’s it, Elisa. I’ve been too ashamed to tell you all these years and I’m ashamed now. I think it’s made me crazy. Because when I went to see Mr. Maryboy about his stock getting onto our grazing over on the Checkerboard Reservation, we got to yelling at one another and he got his rifle down and I shot him and then I shot the policeman to get away. I checked on the penalty I can expect and it’s life in prison, so I’m going to take the quick way out of it and set an all-time record getting down that 800-foot cliff into Canyon del Muerto.

Remember I love you. I just got crazy.

Your big brother, Eldon

Leaphorn read it again, refolded it carefully, replaced it on the seat. He took out his handkerchief, pushed down the lock lever, wiped off the leather seat where he might have touched it, and slammed the door.

He drove a little faster than was smart down the track, anxious to get out before somebody spotted Demott’s body. He didn’t want to meet a police car coming in, and if he didn’t, the dry snow now being carried by the wind would quickly eliminate any clue that Demott had had company. He was almost back to Window Rock before a call on his police monitor let him know that the body of a man had been found up Canyon del Muerto.

He turned up the thermostat beside his front door, heard the floor furnace roar into action, put on the coffeepot, and washed his face and hands. That done, he checked his telephone answering machine, punched the button and listened to the first words of an insurance agent’s sales pitch, and hit the erase button. Then he took his coffee mug off the hook, got out the sugar and cream, poured himself a cup, and sat beside the telephone.

He sipped now, and dialed Jim Chee’s number in Ship Rock.

“Jim Chee.”

“This is Joe Leaphorn,” he said. “Thanks for the message you sent me. I hope I’m not calling at a bad time.”

“No. No,” Chee said. “I’ve been wondering. And I’ve been wanting to tell you about an arrest we made today in our cattle-rustling case. But by the way, have you heard they found a man’s body in Canyon del Muerto? Deke said it was near the Nez place. He said it’s Demott.”

“Heard a little on my scanner,” Leaphorn said.

Brief silence. Chee cleared his throat. “Where are you calling from? Was it Demott? Were you there?”

“I’m at home,” Leaphorn said. “Are you off duty?”

“What do you mean? Oh. Well, yes. I guess so.”

“Better be sure,” Leaphorn said.

“Okay,” Chee said. “I’m sure. I’m just having a friendly talk with an unidentified civilian.”

“Tomorrow, you’re going to get the word that Demott killed himself. He jumped off the cliff above the Nez place. About like diving off a sixty-story building. And he left a suicide note to his sister. In it he said he got into a quarrel with Mr. Maryboy over some cattle and shot him. Shot you while escaping. He told Elisa that he didn’t kill Hal. He said Hal had called him from Farmington a week after vanishing from his birthday party, offered to delay signing the mining lease he had cooking for a year if Demott would climb Ship Rock with him the next day. Demott agreed. They climbed. Hal fell off. Demott said he kept it a secret because he was ashamed to tell her.”

Silence. Then Chee said, “Wow!”

Leaphorn waited for the implications to sink in.

“I’m not supposed to ask you how you know all this?”

“That is correct.”

“What did he say about Nez?”

“Who?”

“Amos Nez,” Chee repeated. “Oh, I guess I see.”

“Saves you a lot of work, doesn’t it?”

“Sure does,” Chee said. “Except for when they find the rifle. Body near the Nez place, rifle nearby I guess. Nez recently shot. Two and two make four and the ballistics test raises a problem. Even the FBI won’t be able to shrug that off.”

“I think the rifle doesn’t exist,” Leaphorn said.

“Oh?”

“It’s my impression that Demott didn’t want to involve his sister. So he didn’t want the Nez thing connected to the Maryboy thing because with Nez, you have his sister indicted as an accessory.”

“I see,” Chee said, a little hesitantly. “But how about Nez? Won’t he be talking about it?”

“Nez isn’t much for talking. And he’s going to think I pushed Demott off the cliff to keep Demott from shooting him.”

“Yeah. I see that.”

“I think Demott did this partly to keep the Breedlove Corporation from strip-mining the ranch. Ruining his creek. So he left the world a suicide letter certifying that he was on Ship Rock with Hal a week after the famous birthday. Add that to Hal signing the register a week after the same birthday.”

“One’s as phony as the other,” Chee said.

“Is that right?” Leaphorn said. “I would like to sit there and listen while you try to persuade the agent in charge that he should reopen his Maryboy homicide, throw away a written point-of-death confession on grounds that Demott was lying about his motive. I can just see that. ‘And what was his real motive, Mr. Chee?’ His real motive was trying to prove that accidental death that happened eleven years ago actually happened on a different weekend, and then—”

Chee was laughing. Leaphorn stopped.

“All right,” Chee said. “I get your point. All it would do is waste a lot of work, maybe get Mrs. Breedlove indicted for something or other, and give the ranch back to the Breedlove Corporation.”

“And get a big commission to the attorney,” Leaphorn added.

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“Tomorrow, when the news is out, I’ll send Shaw details about the suicide note. And give him back what’s left of his money. Now, what were you going to tell me about cattle rustling?”

“It sounds trivial after this,” Chee said, “but Officer Manuelito arrested Dick Finch today. He was loading Maryboy heifers into his camper.”

is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards. Among his other honors are the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. His many novels include
Finding Moon
,
Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, Talking God
, A
Thief of Time
, and
Dance Hall of the Dead
. He is also the author of
The Great Taos Bank Robbery
. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[scanned anonymously]

[September 2003—v1 html proofed by mouse_23, formatting by Molly]