Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (3 page)

“With Harold? Did he own the place?”

Leaphorn laughed. “He’d just inherited it. Three days before he disappeared.”

“Well, now,” Chee said, and thought about it while Leaphorn sipped his coffee.

“Did you see the report on the shooting over at Canyon de Chelly the other day?” Leaphorn asked. “An old man named Amos Nez shot apparently by somebody up on the rim?”

“I saw it,” Chee said. It was an odd piece of business. Nez had been hit in the side. He’d fallen off his horse still holding the reins. The next shot hit the horse in the head. It had fallen partly across Nez and then four more shots had been fired. One hit Nez in the forearm and then he had pulled himself into cover behind the animal. The last Chee’d seen on it, six empty 30.06 cartridges had been recovered among the boulders up on the rim. As far as Chee knew that’s where the trail in this case ended. No suspects. No motive. Nez was listed in fair condition at the Chinle hospital—well enough to say he had no idea why anyone would want to shoot him.

“That’s what stirred me up,” Leaphorn said. “Old Hosteen Nez was one of the last people to see this Hal Breedlove before he disappeared.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Chee said. When he’d worked for Leaphorn at Window Rock, Leaphorn had told him never to believe in coincidences. Told him that often. It was one of the man’s cardinal rules. Every effect had its cause. If it seemed to be connected and you couldn’t find the link it just meant you weren’t trying hard enough. But this sounded like an awfully strained coincidence.

“Nez was their guide in the canyon,” Leaphorn said. “When the Breedloves were staying at the lodge he was one of the crew there. The Breedloves hired him to take them all the way up Canyon del Muerto one day, and the main canyon the next. I talked to him three times.”

That seemed to Leaphorn to require some explanation.

“You know,” he said. “Rich guy with a pretty young wife disappears for no reason. You ask questions. But Nez told me they seemed to like each other a lot. Having lots of fun. He said one time he’d been up one of the side canyons to relieve himself and when he came back it looked like she was crying and Breedlove was comforting her. So he waited a little before showing up and then everything was all right.”

Chee considered. “What do you think? It could have been anything?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said, and sipped coffee. “Did I mention they were celebrating Breedlove’s birthday? We found out that he’d turned thirty just the previous week, and when he turned thirty he inherited. His daddy left him the ranch but he put it into a family trust. It had a provision that the trustee controlled it until Breedlove got to be thirty years old. Then it was all his.”

Chee considered again. “And the widow inherited from him?”

“That’s what we found out. So she had a motive and we had the logical suspect.”

“But no evidence,” Chee guessed.

“None. Not only that. Just before Breedlove drove away, our Mr. Nez arrived to take them on another junket up the canyon. He remembered Breedlove apologized for missing out, paid him in advance, and gave him a fifty-dollar tip. Then Mrs. Breedlove and Nez took off. They spent the day sight-seeing. Nez remembered she was in a hurry when it was getting dark because she was supposed to meet Breedlove and another couple for dinner. But when they got back to the lodge, no car. That’s the last Nez saw of her.”

Leaphorn paused, looked at Chee, and added, “Or so he says.”

“Oh?” Chee said.

“Well, I didn’t mean he’d seen her again. It’s just that I always had a feeling that Nez knew something he wasn’t telling me. That’s one reason I kept going back to talk to him.”

“You think he had something to do with the disappearance. Maybe the two of them weren’t up the canyon when Breedlove was supposed to be driving away?”

“Well, no,” Leaphorn said. “People staying at the lodge saw them coming out of the canyon in Nez’s truck about seven P.M. Then a little after seven, she went over to the lodge and asked if Breedlove had called in. About seven-thirty she’s having dinner with the other couple. They remembered her being irritated about him being so late, mixed with a little bit of worry.”

“I guess that’s what they call an airtight alibi,” Chee said. “So how long did it take her to get old Hal declared legally dead so she could marry her coconspirator? And would I be wrong if I guessed that would be George Shaw?”

“She’s still a widow, last I heard,” Leaphorn said. “She offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward and after a while upped it to twenty thousand and didn’t petition to get her husband declared legally dead until five years later. She lives up near Mancos, Colorado. She and her brother run the Lazy B now.”

“You know what?” Chee said. “I think I know those people. Is the brother Eldon Demott?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s one of our customers,” Chee said. “The ranch still has those public land leases you mentioned on the Checkerboard Reservation and they’ve been losing Angus calves. He thinks maybe some of us Navajos might be stealing them.”

“Eldon is Elisa Breedlove’s older brother,” Leaphorn said. “Their daddy was old man Breedlove’s foreman, and when their daddy died, I think Eldon just sort of inherited the job. Anyway, the Demott family lived on the ranch. I guess that’s how Elisa and the Breedlove boy got together.”

Chee stifled a yawn. It had been a long and tiring day and this session with Leaphorn, helpful as it had been, didn’t qualify as relaxation. He had accumulated too many memories of tense times trying to live up to the man’s high expectations. It would be a while before he could relax in Leaphorn’s presence. Maybe another twenty years would do it.

“Well,” Chee said. “I guess that takes care of the fallen man. I’ve got a probable identification of our skeleton. You’ve located your missing Hal Breedlove. I’ll call you when we get it confirmed.”

Leaphorn drained his cup, got up, adjusted his hat.

“I thank you for the help,” he said.

“And you for yours.”

Leaphorn opened the door, admitting a rush of cold air, the rich perfume of autumn, and a reminder that winter was out there somewhere, like the coyote, just waiting.

“All we need to do now—” he said, and stopped, looking embarrassed. “All that needs to be done,” he amended, “is find out if your bones really are my Breedlove, and then find out how the hell he got from that abandoned Land Rover about a hundred fifty miles west, and way up there to where he could fall off of Ship Rock.”

“And why,” Chee said. “And how he did it all by himself.”

“If he did,” Leaphorn said.

T
HE STRANGE TRUCK PARKED in one of the Official Visitor slots at the Shiprock headquarters of the Navajo Tribal Police wore a New Jersey license and looked to Jim Chee anything but official. It had dual back wheels and carried a cumbersome camper, its windows covered by decals that certified visitation at tourist traps from Key West to Vancouver Island. Other stickers plastered across the rear announced that A BAD DAY FISHING Is BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT WORK, and declared the camper-truck to be OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE. Bumper decals exhorted viewers to VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS and to TRY RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS, and endorsed the National Rifle Association. A broad band of silver duct tape circled the camper’s rear panel, sealing the dust out of the joint and giving the camper a ramshackle, homemade look.

Chee stuck his head into Alice Notabah’s dispatcher office and indicated the truck with a nod: “Who’s the Official Visitor?”

Notabah nodded toward Largo’s office. “In with the captain,” she said. “And he wants to see you.”

The man who drove the truck was sitting in the comfortable chair Captain Largo kept for important visitors. He held a battered black hat with a silver concha band in his lap and looked relaxed and comfortable.

“I’ll catch you later,” Chee said, but Largo waved him in.

“I want you to meet Dick Finch,” Largo said. “He’s the New Mexico brand inspector working the Four Corners, and he’s been getting some complaints.”

Chee and Finch shook hands. “Complaints?” Chee said. “Like what?”

“‘Bout what you’d expect for a brand inspector to get,” Finch said. “People missing their cattle. Thinking maybe somebody’s stealing ’em.”

Finch grinned when he said it, eliminating some of the sting from the sarcasm.

“Yeah,” Chee said, “we’ve been hearing some of that, too.”

Finch shrugged. “Folks always say that nobody likes to eat his own beef. But it’s got a little beyond that, I think. With bred heifers going at sixty dollars a hundred pounds, it just takes three of ’em to make you a grand larceny.”

Captain Largo was looking sour. “Sixty dollars a hundred, like hell,” he said. “More like a thousand dollars a head for me. I’ve been trying to raise purebred stock.” He nodded in Chee’s direction. “Jim here is running our criminal investigation division. He’s been working on it.”

Largo waited. So did Finch.

“I’m here on something else now,” Chee said finally. “I think we may have an identification on that skeleton that was found up on Ship Rock.”

“Well, now,” Largo said. “Where’d that come from?”

“Joe Leaphorn remembered a missing person case he had eleven years ago. The man disappeared from Canyon de Chelly but he was a mountain climber.”

“Leaphorn,” Largo said. “I thought old Joe was supposed to be retired.”

“He is,” Chee said.

“Eleven years is a hell of a long time to remember a missing person case,” Largo said. “How many of those do we get in an average month?”

“Several,” Chee said. “But most of ’em don’t stay missing long.”

Largo nodded. “So who’s the man?”

“Harold Breedlove was the missing man. He used to own the Lazy B ranch south of Mancos. Or his family owned it.”

“Fella named Eldon Demott owns it now,” Finch said. “Runs a lot of Herefords down in San Juan County. Has some deeded land and some BLM leases and a big home place up in Colorado.”

“What have you got beyond this Breedlove fella’s been missing long enough to become a skeleton and him being a climber?” Largo asked.

Chee explained what Leaphorn had told him.

“Just that?” Largo asked, and thought a moment. “Well, it could be right. It sounds like it is and Joe Leaphorn never was much for being wrong. Did Joe have any notion why this guy left his wife at the canyon? Or why he’d be climbing Ship Rock all by himself?”

“He didn’t say, but I think he figures maybe Breedlove wasn’t alone up there. And maybe the widow knew more than she was telling him at the time.”

“And what’s that about Amos Nez getting shot last week down at Canyon de Chelly? You lost me on that connection.”

“It was sort of thin,” Chee said. “Nez happened to be one of the witnesses in the disappearance case. Leaphorn said he was the last person known to have seen Breedlove alive. Except for the widow.”

Largo considered. Grinned. “And she was Joe’s suspect, of course,” he said. And shook his head. “Joe never could believe in coincidences.”

“They still had that mountain climbing gear in the evidence room at Window Rock and I had them send it up,” Chee said. “It looks to me a lot like the gear they found on our Fallen Man, so I called Mrs. Breedlove up at Mancos.”

“What’d she say?”

“She’d gone into town for something. The housekeeper said she’d be back in a couple of hours. I left word that I was coming up this afternoon to show her some stuff that might bear on her missing husband.”

Finch cleared his throat, glanced up at Chee. “While you’re there why not just kind of keep your eyes open? Tell ’em you’ve heard good things about the way they run their place. Look around. You know?”

Finch looked to Chee to be about fifty. He had a hollowed scar high on his right cheek (resulting, Chee guessed, from some sort of surgery), small, bright blue eyes, and a complexion burned and cracked by the Four Corners weather. He was waiting now for Chee’s response to this suggestion.

“You think Demott’s sort of augmenting his herd with some strangers?” Chee asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Finch said, and shrugged. “But who knows? People losing their cattle. Maybe the coyotes are getting ’em. Maybe Demott’s got fifteen or twenty head he’s shipping off to the feedlot and he thinks it would be nice to round it off at twenty or twenty-five. No harm in looking. Seeing what you can see.”

“I’ll do that,” Chee said. “But were you telling me you don’t have anything specific against Demott?”

Finch was studying Chee, looking quizzical. He’s trying to decide, Chee thought, how stupid I am.

“Nothing I could take in to a judge and get a search warrant with. But you hear things.” With that, Finch broke into a chuckle. “Hell, you hear things about everybody.” He jerked a thumb at Largo. “I’ve even been told that your captain here has some peculiar-looking brands on some of his stock. That right, Captain?”

“I’ve heard that myself,” Largo said, grinning. “We have a barbecue over at the place, all the neighbors want to go out and take a look at the cowhides.”

“Well, it’s a lot cheaper than buying beef at the butcher shop. So maybe somebody’s eating Demott’s sirloin and the Demotts are eating theirs.”

“Or mutton,” added Largo, who was missing some ewes as well as a calf or two.

“How about me going along for the ride?” Finch said. “I mean up to the Lazy B?”

“Why not?” Chee said.

“You wouldn’t have to introduce me, you know. I’ll just sort of get out and stretch my legs. Look around a little bit. You never know what you might see.”

T
HEY CAME INTO VIEW OF THE HEADQUARTERS of the Lazy B with the autumn sun low over Mesa Verde, producing shadow patterns on Bridge Timber Mountain. Chee had been thinking more of home sites lately and he thought now that this little valley would be a beautiful place for Janet and him. The house in the cluster of cottonwoods below them would be far, far too large for him to feel comfortable in. But Janet would love it.

Finch had been doing the talking on the drive up from Shiprock. After the first fifty miles of that, Chee began listening just enough to nod or grunt at the proper intervals. Mostly he was thinking about Janet Pete and the differences between what they liked and what they didn’t. This house, for example. Women usually had most to say about living places, but if he retained veto power, theirs certainly wouldn’t be anything as huge as the fieldstone, timber, and slate mansion the Breedlove family had built for itself. Even if they could afford it, which they certainly never would.

That reminded Chee of the white Porsche that had zipped past him yesterday. Why did he connect it to Janet? Because it had class, as did she. And was beautiful. And, sure, she’d like it. Who wouldn’t? So why did he resent it? Was it because it was a part of the world she came from in which he would never be comfortable? Or understand? Maybe.

But now he was about to walk in and see if he could get a widow to identify a bunch of stuff that would tell her that her husband was truly dead. Tell her, that is, unless she already knew—having killed him herself. Or arranged it. He’d worry about the Porsche later. The Breedlove mansion was now just across the fence.

According to Finch, old Edgar Breedlove had built it as a second home—his first one being in Denver, from which he ran his mining operations. But he’d never lived in it. He’d bought the ranch because his prospectors had found a molybdenum deposit on the high end of the property. But the ore price fell after the war and somehow or other the place got left to a grandson, Harold. Hal had adopted his granddad’s policy of overgrazing it and letting it run down.

“That ain’t happening now,” Finch had told him. “This place ain’t going to go to hell while Demott’s running it. He’s sort of a tree-hugger. That’s what people say. Say he never got married ’cause he’s in love with this place.”

Chee parked under a tree a polite distance from the front entrance, turned off the ignition, and sat, killing the time needed by hosts to get decent before welcoming guests. Finch, another empty-country man, seemed to understand that. He yawned, stretched, and examined the half dozen cows in the feedlot beside the barn with a professional eye.

“How do you know all this about the Breedlove ranch, and Demott and everything?” Chee asked. “This is Colorado. It’s not your territory.”

“Ranching—and stealing cows off of ranches—don’t pay much attention to state lines,” Finch said, not taking his eyes off the cows. “The Lazy B has leases in New Mexico. Makes ’em my business.”

Finch extracted a twenty-stick pack of chewing gum from his jacket pocket, offered it to Chee, extracted two sticks for himself, and started chewing them. “Besides,” he said, “you got to have something going to make the job interesting. I got one particular guy I keep looking for. Most of these cow thieves are ‘hungries.’ Folks run out of eating money, or got a payment due, and they go out and get themselves a cow or two to sell. Or, on the reservation, maybe they got somebody sick in the family, and they’re having a sing for the patient, and they need a steer to feed all the kinfolks coming in. I never worried too much about them. If they keep doing it, they get careless and they get caught and the neighbors talk to them about it. Get it straightened out. But then there’s some others who are in it for business. It’s easy money and it beats working.”

“Who’s this one you’re specially after?”

Finch laughed. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking about it, now would we?”

“I guess not,” Chee said, impressed with how insulting Finch could be even when he was acting friendly.

“We’d just go out and get him then, wouldn’t we?” Finch concluded. “But all I know about him is the way he operates. Modus operandi, if you know your Latin. He always picks the spread-out ranches where a few head won’t be missed for a while. He always takes something that he can sell quick. No little calves that you have to wean, no big, expensive, easy-to-trace breeding bulls. Never messes with horses, ’cause some people get attached to a nag and go out looking for it. Has some other tricks, too. Like he finds a good place beside a back road where there wouldn’t be any traffic to bother him and he’ll put out feed. Usually good alfalfa hay. Do it several times so the cattle get in the habit of coming up and looking for it when they see his truck parking.”

Finch stopped, looked at Chee, waited for a comment.

“Pretty smart,” Chee said.

“Yes, sir,” Finch agreed. “So far, he’s been smarter than me.”

Chee had no comment on that. He glanced at his watch. Another three minutes and he’d go ring the doorbell and get this job over with.

“Then I’ve found a place or two where he fixed up the fence so he could get ’em through it fast.” He paused again, seeing if Chee understood this. Chee did, but to hell with Finch.

“You could cut the wire, of course,” Finch explained, “but then the herd gets out on the road and somebody notices it right away and they do a head count and know some are missing.”

Chee said, “Really?”

“Yeah,” Finch said. “Anyway, I’ve been after this son of a bitch for years now. Every time I take off from home to come out this way, he’s the one I’m thinking of.”

Chee didn’t comment.

“Zorro,” Finch said. “That’s what I call him. And this time I think I’ll finally get him.”

“How?”

Silence, unusual for Finch, followed. Then he said, “Well, now, that’s sort of complicated.”

“You think it might be Demott?”

“Why you say that?”

“Well, you wanted to come up here. And you’ve collected all that information about him.”

“If you’re a brand inspector you learn to pick up on all the gossip you can hear if you want to get your job done. And there was some talk that Demott paid off a mortgage by selling a bunch of calves nobody knew he owned.”

“So what’s the gossip about the widow Breedlove?” Chee asked. “Who was the lover who helped her kill her husband? What do the neighbors say about that?”

Finch was wearing a broad smile. “People I know up in Mancos have her down as the brokenhearted, wronged, abandoned bride. The majority of them, that is. They figured Hal ran off with some bimbo.”

“How about the minority?”

“They think she had herself a local boyfriend. Somebody to keep her happy when Hal was off in New York, or climbing his mountains or playing his games.”

“They have a name for him?”

“Not that I ever heard,” Finch said.

“Which bunch you think is right?”

“About her? I never thought about it,” Finch said. “None of my business, that part of it wasn’t. Talk like that just means that folks around here didn’t like Hal.”

“What’d he do?”

“Well, for starters he got born in the East,” Finch said. “That’s two strikes on you right there. And he was raised there. Citified. Preppy type. Papa’s boy. Ivy Leaguer. He didn’t get any bones broke falling off horses, lose a finger in a hay baler. Didn’t pay his dues, you know. You don’t have to actually do anything to have folks down on you.”

“How about the widow? You hear anything specific about her?”

“Don’t hear nothing about her, except some fellas guessing. And she’s a real pretty woman, so that was probably just them wishing,” Finch said. He was grinning at Chee. “You know how it works. If you’re behaving yourself it’s not interesting.”

The front door of the Breedlove house opened and Chee could see someone standing behind the screen looking out at them. He picked up his evidence satchel and stepped out of the vehicle.

“I’ll wait here for you,” Finch said, “and maybe scout around a little if I get too stiff from sitting.”

Mrs. Elisa Breedlove was indeed a real pretty woman. She seemed excited and nervous, which was what Chee had expected. Her handshake grip was hard, and so was the hand. She led him into a huge living room, dark and cluttered with heavy, old-fashioned furniture. She motioned him into a chair, explaining that she’d had to run into Mancos “to get some stuff.”

“I got back just before you drove up and Ramona told me you’d called and were coming.”

“I hope I’m not—” Chee began, but she cut him off.

“No. No,” she said. “I appreciate this. Ramona said you’d found Hal. Or think so. But she didn’t know anything else.”

“Well,” Chee said, and paused. “What we found was merely bones. We thought they might be Mr. Breedlove.”

He sat on the edge of the sofa, watching her.

“Bones,” she said. “Just a skeleton? Was that the skeleton they found about Halloween up on Ship Rock?”

“Yes, ma’am. We wanted to ask you to look at the clothing and equipment he was wearing and see if—tell us if it was the right size, and if you thought it was your husband’s stuff.”

“Equipment?” She was standing beside a table, her hand on it. The light slanting through windows on each side of the fireplace illuminated her face. It was a small, narrow face framed by light brown hair, the jaw muscles tight, the expression tense. Middle thirties, Chee guessed. Slender, perfectly built, luminous green eyes, the sort of classic beauty that survived sun, wind, and hard winters and didn’t seem to require the disguise of makeup. But today she looked tired. He thought of a description Finch had applied to a woman they both knew: “Been rode hard and put up wet.”

Mrs. Breedlove was waiting for an answer, her green eyes fixed on his face.

“Mountain climbing equipment,” Chee said. “I understand the skeleton was in a cleft down the face of a cliff. Presumably, the man had fallen.”

Mrs. Breedlove closed her eyes and bent slightly forward with her hips against the table.

Chee rose. “Are you all right?”

“All right,” she said, but she put a hand against the table to support herself.

“Would you like to sit down? A drink of water?”

“Why do you think it’s Hal?” Her eyes were still closed.

“He’s been missing for eleven years. And we’re told he was a mountain climber. Is that correct?”

“He was. He loved the mountains.”

“This man was about five feet nine inches tall,” Chee said. “The coroner estimated he would have weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. He had perfect teeth. He had rather long fingers and—”

“Hal was about five eight, I’d say. He was slender, muscular. An athlete. I think he weighed about a hundred and sixty. He was worried about gaining weight.” She produced a weak smile. “Around the belt line. Before we went on that trip, I let out his suit pants to give him another inch.”

“He’d had a broken nose,” Chee continued. “Healed. The doctor said it probably happened when he was an adolescent. And a broken wrist. He said that was more recent.”

Mrs. Breedlove sighed. “The nose was from playing fraternity football, or whatever the boys play at Dartmouth. And the wrist when a horse threw him after we were married.”

Chee opened the satchel, extracted the climbing equipment, and stacked it on the coffee table. There wasn’t much: a nylon belt harness, the ragged remains of a nylon jacket, even more fragmentary remains of trousers and shirt, a pair of narrow shoes with soles of soft, smooth rubber, a little rock hammer, three pitons, and a couple of steel gadgets that Chee presumed were used somehow for controlling rope slippage.

When he glanced up, Mrs. Breedlove was staring at them, her face white. She turned away, facing the window but looking at nothing except some memory.

“I thought about Hal when I saw the piece the paper had on the skeleton,” she said. “Eldon and I talked about it at supper that night. He thought the same thing I did. We decided it couldn’t be Hal.” She attempted a smile. “He was always into derring-do stuff. But he wouldn’t try to climb Ship Rock alone. Nobody would. That would be insane. Two great rock men were killed on it, and they were climbing with teams of experienced experts.”

She paused. Listening. The sound of a car engine came through the window. “That was before the Navajos banned climbing,” she added.

“Are you a climber?”

“When I was younger,” she said. “When Hal used to come out, Eldon started teaching him to climb. Hal and his cousin George. Sometimes I would go along and they taught me.”

“How about Ship Rock?” Chee asked. “Did you ever climb it?”

She studied him. “The tribe prohibited that a long time ago. Before I was big enough to climb anything.”

Chee smiled. “But some people still climbed it. Quite a few, from what I hear. And there’s not actually a tribal ordinance against it. It’s just that the tribe stopped issuing those ‘back country’ permits. You know, to allow non-Navajos the right to trespass.”

Mrs. Breedlove looked thoughtful. Through the window came the sound of a car door slamming.

“To make it perfectly legal, you’d go see one of the local people who had a grazing permit running up to the base and get him to give you permission to be on the land,” Chee added. “But most people even don’t bother to do that.”

Mrs. Breedlove considered this. Nodded. “We always got permission. I climbed it once. It was terrifying. With Eldon, Hal, and George. I still have nightmares.”

“About falling?”

She shuddered. “I’m up there looking all around. Looking at Ute Mountain up in Colorado, and seeing the shape of Case del Eco Mesa in Utah, and the Carrizos in Arizona, and Mount Taylor, and I have this dreadful feeling that Ship Rock is getting higher and higher and then I know I can never get down.” She laughed. “Fear of falling, I guess. Or fear of flying away and being lost forever.”

“I guess you’ve heard our name for it,” Chee said. “Tse’ Bit’ a’i’—the Rock with Wings. According to the legend it flew here from the north bringing the first Navajos on its back. Maybe it was flying again in your dream.”

A voice from somewhere back in the house shouted: “Hey, Sis! Where are you? What’s that Navajo police car doing parked out there?”