Threepersons Hunt (21 page)

“This guy got killed just today? How do you know it wasn't Joe Threepersons that did it?”

“It wasn't Joe's modus-O. Somebody hacksawed Oto's tie rod, it broke on a mountain bend.”

“Christ.”

“Joe stole a three-seven-five magnum last night, 'scope sight. He's got somebody to kill but it wasn't Oto.” He glanced up as a car rattled by. It didn't stop. He said, “Another item. Put out an all-points on a stolen ‘Seventy-one Toyota Land Cruiser, color forest green, noncommercial plates Arthur Bravo Seven Five Niner Seven X-ray. The Agency police had it this morning so it's probably on the stolen car list already but I'm not much interested in the hot sheet. I'd like an APB, Joe Threepersons appears to be driving it.”

“Yeah? Then he could be in Wyoming by now.”

“I doubt it. It's a four-wheel-drive, he's probably back in these mountains right around here. First thing in the morning I'd like you to get an audience with Lieutenant Wilder and see if the department's willing to spring for a couple of days' helicopter coverage up here. It probably won't spot the Land Cruiser but it might caution Joe into keeping his head down a little while until I can get at him. Will you try that?”

“Sure. He might get Captain Custer to go for it, if people are getting murdered right and left up there.”

“Put it to him that way,” Watchman told him. “Now what's happening at your end?”

“Bits and pieces. I tracked down Maria Threepersons' doctor. He never prescribed Seconal for her. Never gave her any kind of barbiturates. He said she never went in for that kind of stuff. She hated the idea of drugs. He says she was the type who liked to be at the controls herself. So that confirms one thing, she didn't have a prescription and it doesn't look like she'd have drugged herself.”

Stevens went on: “Then I went on down to Florence and asked around about Joe's visitors. The screws remembered that big guy. He was there twice—I guess I told you that. The second time was two o'clock on the fifth, which is about three hours before they busted out.”

“And he had a map of the area in the truck,” Watchman said. “That's not a coincidence.”

“Nothing is. Or so you keep telling me. Anyhow then I took a flyer, I drove on back up here and went to see Dwight Kendrick's wife. You know, the one Charlie Rand was married to before. You were talking about her and I thought maybe she could tell me something.”

“Did she?”

“I don't know.”

“How'd you find her?”

“Police radar,” Stevens drawled. “I looked it up in the phone book.”

Watchman grinned. “What did she say?”

“She's not exactly demure.” Stevens' voice was thin along the wires; there was interference in the circuit. “She looks like she's run some pretty fast tracks. I told her about the case a little, got her talking about the old days. She sat there on a lawn chair, she kept snapping her thumbnail against her front teeth. I got vibrations from her. She kind of liked Joe Threepersons and she hates old Charlie Rand's guts. I asked her about Ross Calisher. She said he was kind of a blowhard, always making muscles at girls. Big rodeo hero, all that stuff. She said she wasn't impressed.”

“She said it. Did you believe it?”

“Yes. I did. Why should she lie about it? It's all dead and over. She went to some pains to insist Calisher never touched her. He was too loyal to her husband, she said, and she said it with a kind of sneer if you know what I mean—as if anybody that loyal to Charlie Rand had to be too stupid for words. Having an affair with Calisher would have been bad taste, to her. He wasn't on her level. That was the idea she put across.”

Watchman gnawed on it. “What did she say about her husband?”

“Which one?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“Well she hates Rand. She said he courts them like a royal prince and then as soon as he marries them he files them away someplace and forgets they exist. She got tired of being ignored, and looking at her you can understand that. She's one of those hearty types, you know, probably drinks more than she needs to, kind of bawdy, I guess she's a natural blonde. By the time Kendrick came along she was looking around for ways to get even with Charlie Rand. She said she thought about Calisher but he was just too big and stupid and crude to be believed. All he ever knew about was rodeoing and bossing crews. She met Kendrick on account of that water-rights case they were starting and she says she took up with him to spite her husband but after a while it got sticky because they both got serious about each other. Finally she divorced Rand and a little while after that Kendrick married her.”

Stevens paused. “I'm looking at my notes.” Then he resumed. “I asked her about the murder. She didn't seem to know much about it. She sort of liked Joe Threepersons but he was just a hired hand. She hadn't liked Calisher anyway, she thought it was good riddance and she's not too bashful to say so.”

“She have any opinion? On Joe's guilt?”

“I asked her. She said she just didn't know much about it.”

“Rand never talked to her about the case?”

“Rand never talked to her about much of anything.”

“What about Kendrick?”

“I don't know. She's a little murky on that subject. She didn't want to talk to me about him. Maybe she thinks it would be disloyal.”

“Did you get the feeling she thought she had something to hide?”

“Maybe. I don't know, Sam. She didn't say it in so many words but she left the possibility open. But hell she left any possibility open. She just didn't say anything.”

“So the significant thing isn't what she said, it's what she didn't say.”

“Could be. I'm new at this game, maybe I didn't ask the right questions. She's polite but she's holding a lot back. I don't know if that means she knows anything about the case. It could just be she doesn't want anybody prying into her private affairs. You can't blame her for that.”

“Okay,” Watchman said. “Have you got anything else?”

Stevens didn't. Watchman reminded him about the helicopter in the morning. Stevens said, “First thing. Listen, shouldn't we report on that Oto murder to Lieutenant Wilder?”

“Tell him in the morning. It's a county case, we haven't got any official business mixing into it.”

“But that map you found in his truck, on top of that description of him down at Florence—it ties him right in.”

“We're not supposed to investigate murders,” Watchman said, very dry. “The assignment is Joe Threepersons. That's what we're doing. That's
all
we're doing.”

“Okay, I've got it.”

“When you get done talking to Wilder in the morning, drive on up here. I'll meet you at the trading post around noon.”

“Fine. You got a place to stay?”

“Yes. See you.” Watchman hung up and opened the booth door. He went across to the front corner of the porch and tipped his shoulder against the post. Victorio was still inside the law offices at the back of the council house; he saw light in the high window and shadows moving across it.

The moon was way over west, it was well after one o'clock and he'd been up since five. He was a little hungry and very tired. The pale silver earth stretched away past the trees of the settlement, breaking up against the foothills; the mountains were vague heavier masses against the stars. He stepped off the porch and walked fretfully up the shoulder of the road, unable to keep still, disquieted by the uncertainty of this case and his place in it. He was deliberately trying to keep Wilder and Captain Custis at arm's length, not reporting directly to them and it was largely because he was doing everything intuitively. There was no science to it, only innuendoes, and in Phoenix they wouldn't buy any of it. The moment Watchman had begun to believe it possible that Joe Threepersons was innocent he became one Indian trying to protect another Indian and there was no way to expect support from Phoenix; at the same time he was a Navajo hunting an Apache and the Apaches weren't helping, except for Victorio and it was hard to get a clear impression of Victorio's motives in the scheme of things.

The frustration was in the way they were all protecting Joe, each in his own way: the department by refusing to reopen the old case officially, the tribe by preventing Watchman from getting near Joe. If he could reach Joe he might reason with him: if it could be proved that Joe hadn't murdered Calisher in the first place then Joe was home free—but not if he proceeded to kill someone for real.

There were so many vulnerable parties; why hadn't any of them cracked? Or if they had why hadn't Watchman spotted it? It had to be his own identity: they couldn't talk to him, they couldn't be sure if he was red or white, they had no way of knowing whose side he was really on. So all of them from Luxan down to Danny Sanada and Pete Porvo presented faces as hostile and protective as the face of a dog guarding a bone.

He turned and began to retrace the route to the center of town. A big jack bounded across the road, ears erect. He heard a toilet flush nearby; a light went off in a small window across a weedy lot and a moment later he heard water pipes bang. He crossed the apron of the filling station and kept walking toward the intersection but a car came up the south road and made a right turn past him and he recognized the two men inside it. He changed course with an abrupt jerk and ran across the parking lot probing his pocket for car keys.

The Volvo gnashed and whined before the engine caught. He spun a little gravel getting out of the lot; turned right to follow the other car and didn't turn his headlights on until the red taillights of the car ahead of him had disappeared over a rise in the road.

It was Will Luxan driving that car and the passenger with him was old Rufus Limita, bare-chested with something glittery hanging around his neck. It had to be ceremonial gear and it could mean there was going to be a curing ceremony. Anything that would draw those two men out together at this hour of the night implied either urgency or a need for secrecy. It could be some old woman who'd had a sudden seizure. It could be something else. Angelina had said she thought Luxan knew where Joe was.

They were hustling northeast along the main road at a steady fifty-mile clip in Luxan's Pontiac. Watchman closed the distance to a few hundred yards and hung there. They knew he was there but Luxan wouldn't make anything of it unless he turned off the road and found he still had a tail.

The night air had a distinct bite to it but he kept the windows wide open; it helped keep him awake. He hit a little bounce in the road and the suspension banged ominously.

Victorio would be coming out and wondering what had happened to him but it couldn't be helped, there hadn't been time. Whatever Victorio found could wait.

The Pontiac led him almost due north along State Highway 73 until after ten miles or so Watchman saw the brake-lights flash. He took his foot off the gas. The Pontiac made a right turn onto some sort of dirt track and crawled off through the brush, jouncing.

Watchman drove past. He stayed on the highway until he'd gone over the next hill, switched off his headlights, made a U-turn in the road and slowly drove back over the hill with his eyes slowly adjusting to the night. The moon would be down in twenty minutes or half an hour but the stars provided a fair illumination in blacks and greys.

The Pontiac had gone not more than a quarter of a mile; it wasn't built for rough travel. He saw the taillights heaving up and down and the frequent angry blare of the brakes. Watchman parked off the side of the highway, concealing the Volvo as well as he could in the bushes.

He took the flashlight and got out of the car, not switching the torch on. He tested the thumb-strap over the pistol in his small-of-the-back holster; he didn't want it falling out.

Then he went after the Pontiac, on foot, jogging it.

Using the car would have been too risky. He had no idea how far they had to go but once they stopped they'd be able to hear the telltale clank of that busted shock absorber. He didn't think they'd have used the Pontiac if they had far to go along this rutted track and he knew there were no other paved roads back in here. The only real risk was that they were being clever, doing a loop that would take them back to the main highway, to evade pursuit; but it wasn't too likely.

He was out of shape from too much sitting and he settled in to a pace somewhat slower than he would have chosen five years ago, or ten. Cross-country running was a sport of every young Navajo. He had frequently run the length of Canyon de Chelly but that had been fifteen years ago and while his mind remembered the discipline his muscles weren't ready for it. The ache started at the fronts of his thighs and worked down into his ankles.

He had the flashlight in his left hand but he didn't use it; there was enough light. He stayed on the tufted hump between the ruts because there was less chance of turning an ankle over an exposed stone. Bunches of piñon and scrub oak went by, close enough to scrape the sides of a car; it was a Jeep trail and it probably led back to an old-fashioned farm cluster, the kind of wickiups where you'd still find horses and a buckboard wagon. Some isolated clan still living in the old way.

The thing to concentrate on was the breathing; you had to keep the engines fueled with oxygen. Once you allowed yourself to start panting you were finished. Let everything out of the lungs and then whoosh in a deep long breath, as much as the chest could contain without bursting; hold it in long enough for the oxygen to get into the lung-linings and then shove it all out and collapse the lungs and start over, long and deep and slow, four footsteps to the breath. Elbows bent, fists up at chest level. A good arm swing from shoulder to elbow. Pick up the feet because you couldn't afford to stumble or trip, you'd lose the rhythm. Saw it in, saw it out. Count miles, not feet.