EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML
December 22, 2002
CONTENTS
^
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Copyright No 2002 by Tony Hillerman. All rights reserved.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
While The Wailing Wind is fiction, the Fort Wingate Army Ordnance Depot is real. It sprawls over forty square miles east of Gallup adjoining transcontinental rail lines, old Highway 66 and Interstate 40, causing generations of passing tourists to wonder about the miles of immense bunkers. These once sheltered thousands of tons of bombs, rockets, and missiles, but now they are mostly empty. Antelope graze along abandoned railroad sidings—as do a few buffalo left over from a breeding experiment and the cattle of neighboring ranchers, some of whom are accused of cutting fences to facilitate this. TPL, Inc., is at work in some of the bunkers converting rocket fuel into plastic explosives, and Paul Bryan, Brenda Winter, and Jim Chee of that company earned my thanks by helping me with this project.
The fort began in 1850, moved to its present site in 1862. It became a depot for immense amounts of military explosives at the end of World War I, grew with World War II and the Korean War, and became the principal depot for explosives used in Vietnam. Now decommissioned, it is occasionally used by the army to fire target missiles over its White Sands anti-aircraft base, and a few bunkers and other buildings are occupied by government offices. My old friend James Peshlakai, Navajo shaman, singer of important curing rituals, and director of the Peshlakai Cultural Foundation, has allowed me to use his name for the fictional shaman of Coyote Canyon, and my thanks also go to Lori Megan Gallagher and to Teresa Hicks for helping me research mining legends.
Chapter One
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Officer bernadette manuelito had been having a busy day, enjoying most of it, and no longer feeling like the greenest rookie of the Navajo Tribal Police. She had served the warrant to Desmond Nakai at the Cudai Chapter House, following her policy of getting the most unpleasant jobs out of the way first. Nakai had actually been at the chapter house, obviating the hunt for him she'd expected, and—contrary to predictions of Captain Largo—he had been pleasant about it.
She had dropped down to the Beclabito Day School to investigate a reported break-in there. That was nothing much. A temp maintenance employee had overdone his weekend drinking, couldn't wait until Monday to get a jacket he'd left behind, broke a window, climbed in and retrieved it. He agreed to pay for the damages. The dispatcher then contacted her and canceled her long drive to the Sweetwater Chapter House. That made Red Valley next on her list of stops.
"And Bernie," the dispatcher said, "when you're done at Red Valley, here's another one for you. Fellow called in and said there's a vehicle abandoned up a gulch off that dirt road that runs over to the Cove school. Pale-blue king-cab pickup truck. Check the plates. We'll see if it's stolen."
"Why didn't you get the license number from the guy reporting it?"
Because, the dispatcher explained, the report was from an El Paso Natural Gas pilot who had noticed it while flying yesterday afternoon and again this morning. Too high to read the plates.
"But not too high to tell it was abandoned?"
"Come on, Bernie," the dispatcher said. "Who leaves a car parked in an arroyo overnight unless he stole it for a joyride?" With that he gave her a little better description of the probable location and said he was sorry to be loading her up.
"Sure," said Bernie, "and I'm sorry I sounded so grouchy." The dispatcher was Rudolph Nez, an old-timer who had been the first to accept her, a female, as a fellow cop. A real friend, and she had a feeling he was parceling her out more work to show her he looked on her as a full-fledged officer. Besides, this new assignment gave her a reason to drive up to Roof Butte, about as close as you could drive to ten thousand feet on the Navajo Reservation. The abandoned truck could wait while she took her break there.
She sat on a sandstone slab in a mixed growth of aspen and spruce, eating her sack lunch, thinking of Sergeant Jim Chee, and facing north to take advantage of the view. Pastora Peak and the Carrizo Mountains blocked off the Colorado Rockies, and the Lukachukai Forest around her closed off Utah's peaks. But an infinity of New Mexico's empty corner spread below her, and to the left lay the northern half of Arizona. This immensity, dappled with cloud shadows and punctuated with assorted mountain peaks, was enough to lift the human spirit. At least it did for Bernie. So did remembering the day when she was a brand-new rookie recruit in the Navajo Tribal Police and Jim Chee had stopped here to show her his favorite view of the Navajo Nation. That day a thunderstorm was building its cloud towers over Chaco Mesa miles to the northeast and another was taking shape near Tsoodzil, the Turquoise Mountain of the East. But the rolling grassland below them was bright under the afternoon sun. Chee had pointed to a little gray column of dirt and debris moving erratically over the fields across Highway 66. "Dust devil," she had said, and it was then she had her first glimpse behind Chee's police badge.
"Dust devil," he repeated, thoughtfully. "Yes. We have the same idea. I was taught to see in those nasty little twisters the Hard Flint Boys struggling with the Wind Children. The good yei bringing us cool breezes and pushing the rain over grazing land. The bad yei putting evil into the wind."
She finished her thermos of coffee, trying to decide what to do about Chee. If anything. She still hadn't come to any conclusions, but her mother seemed to have deemed him acceptable. "This Mr. Chee," she'd said. "I heard he's born to the Slow Talking Dineh, and his daddy was a Bitter Water." That remark had come apropos of absolutely nothing, and her mother hadn't expanded on it. Nor did she need to. It meant her mother had been asking around, and had satisfied herself that since Bernie was born to the Ashjjhi Dineh, and for Bead People, none of the Navajo incest taboos were at risk if Bernie smiled at Chee. Smiling was as far as it had gone, and maybe as far as she wanted it to go. Jim Chee was proving hard to understand.
But she was still thinking about him when she pulled her patrol car up the third little wash north of Cove and saw the sun glinting off the back window of a truck—pale blue as described and blocking the narrow track up the bottom of the dry wash.
New Mexico plates. Bernie jotted down the numbers. She stepped out of her car, walked up the wash, noticing the vehicle's windows were open. And stopped. A rifle was in the rack across the back window. Who would walk off and leave that to be stolen?
"Hello," Bernie shouted, and waited.
"Hey. Anyone home?" And waited again.
No answer. She unsnapped the flap on her holster, touched the butt of the pistol, and moved silently to the passenger-side door.
A man wearing jeans and a jean jacket was lying on his side on the front seat, head against the driver-side door, a red gimme cap covering most of his face, knees drawn up a little.
Sleeping one off, thought Bernie, who'd been in police work now long enough to recognize that. But she didn't detect the sick odor of whiskey sleep. No sign of motion. No sign of breathing, either.
She sucked in a deep breath, moved a fraction closer to the door. "Ya eeh teh," Bernie said, loudly. No answer. She could see no sign of blood or any hint of violence.
Strands of the man's long, curly blonde hair were visible around the cap. His jean jacket and shoes were dusty. It seemed to Officer Manuelito he was emphatically unconscious if not dead. She opened the door, grabbed the door post, pulled herself up on the running board. She pushed up the bottom of the jean-clad leg and reached for his ankle to check for a pulse. The ankle was cold. No pulse, and as cold as death.
The feel of the lifeless ankle under her hand abruptly replaced in Bernie's mind her awareness of herself as cop with an awareness of herself as Navajo. A thousand years before the Dineh were aware of bacteria or viruses, they were aware of the contagion spread by the newly dead and the dying. The elders called this danger chindi, the name of a ghost, and taught their people to avoid it for four days—longer if the death came inside a closed house where the chindi would linger. Bernie stepped off the running board and stood for a moment. What should she do now? First she would call this in. When she got home, she would ask her mother to recommend the right shaman to arrange the proper curing ceremony.
Back at her patrol car she gave the dispatcher her report.
"Natural, you think?" he asked. "No decapitation. No blood. No bullet holes. No smell of gunpowder. Nothing interesting?"
"It looked like he just died," Bernie said. "One bottle too many."
"Then I've got an ambulance over at Toadlena, if it's still there. Hold on a minute and I'll let you know."
Bernie held on. The hand holding the mike was dirty, smeared with what looked like soot. From the dead man's shoe, she guessed, or his pant leg. She grimaced, switched the mike to her left hand, and wiped the dirt away on the leg of her uniform trousers.
"Okay, Bernie. Got him. He should be there in less than an hour."
That proved to be overly optimistic. An hour and almost twenty-two minutes had plodded past before the ambulance and its crew arrived, and to Bernie it seemed a lot longer. She sat in her car thinking of the corpse and who he might have been. Then got out and scouted around the pickup to reassure herself she hadn't overlooked anything—such as a row of bullet holes through the windshield, or a pool of dried blood on the floor around the brake pedal, or bloodstains on the steering wheel, or maybe on the rifle in the window rack, or a suicide note clutched in the victim's hand.
She found nothing like that, but she noticed that the victim's jeans had collected lots of those troublesome chamisa seeds in their travels, and so had the sock on the ankle she had tested—chamisa seeds, sandburs, and other of those stickery, clinging seeds by which dry-country plants spread their species. The rubber sole of the sneaker on the foot she'd touched had also accumulated five goathead stickers—the curse of bike riders. She sat in her car, considering that, and climbed out again to inspect the local flora. Here it was above nine thousand feet, not the climate for chamisa. She found none now, nor any sandburs or goatheads. She collected the seedpods from a cluster of asters, gone to seed early at this high, cold altitude, and which just possibly might grow in the hotter climate of her Shiprock flower bed. She added the seeds from two growths of columbine and from a vine she couldn't identify. And being tidy, she went back to the columbines and salvaged the little Prince Albert pipe tobacco tin she'd noticed among the weeds. It was dirty, but it was better that trying to carry her seed collection loose in her pocket.
Chapter Two
« ^ »
Joe leaphorn had been slow to learn how to cope with retirement, but he had learned. And one of the lessons had been to prepare himself when he tagged along with Professor Louisa Bourbonette on one of her excursions. These tended to be out to the less acculturated districts of the Navajo reservations to collect memories of elders on her "oral history" tapes. That usually left him sitting in an oven-hot hogan or lolling in her car and had caused him to buy himself a comfortable folding chair to relax upon in the shade of hogan brush arbors.
He was relaxing in it now under a tree beside the hay barn of the Two Grey Hills Trading Post. The breeze was blowing out of cumulus clouds forming a towering line over the ridge of the Lukachukai and producing an occasional promising rumble of thunder. Louisa was selecting a rug from the famous stock of the Two Grey Hills store—a wedding gift for one of Louisa's various nieces. Since the professor took even grocery shopping seriously, and this was a very special gift, Leaphorn knew he had plenty of quiet thinking time. He had been thinking of Louisa's quest for perfection amid the Two Grey Hills rug stock as sort of a race with the thunder-head climbing over the mountain. Would the rain come before the purchase? Would both purchase and cloud fizzle without success—the cloud drifting away to disappointing dissipation in dry air over the buffalo plains and Louisa emerging from the T.P. without a rug? Or would the cloud climb higher, higher, higher, its bottom turning blue-black and its top glittering with ice crystals, and the blessed rain begin speckling the packed dirt of the Two Grey Hills parking lot, and Louisa, happily holding the perfect collectors' quality rug, signaling him to drive over to the porch to keep the raindrops from hitting it.
A dazzling lightning bolt connected the slope of the mountain with the cloud, producing an explosive crack of thunder and suggesting the cloud might be winning. Just then a Chevy sedan rolled into the parking lot, with sheriff painted on its side. The driver slowed to park near the porch, then aborted that move and rolled his car over to Leaphorn's tree.
"Lieutenant Leaphorn," said the driver, "you oughtn't be sitting under a tree in a lightning storm."
A face from the past. Deputy Sheriff Delo Bellman.
Leaphorn raised his hand in greeting, considered saying: "Hello, Delo," but said: "Delo, ya eeh teh."
"You been listening to the news?" Delo asked.
"Some of it," Leaphorn said. Bellman didn't need a radio to collect the news. He was widely known as the premier gossip of the Four Corners Country law enforcement fraternity.
"Hear about the killing?" Bellman said. "That man your guys found dead near Cove the other day. It turns out he was old Bart Hegarty's nephew. Fellow named Thomas Doherty."
Leaphorn produced the facial expression appropriate for such sad news. His experiences with Bart Hegarty had been neither frequent nor particularly pleasant. He hadn't been among the mourners when the sheriff hadn't survived sliding his car into an icy bridge's abutment a few winters back. "Died of what?" Leaphorn asked. "If he was the sheriff's nephew he must have been fairly young."
"Late twenties, I guess. Bullet in the back," said Bellman, with the somber pleasure gossips feel when passing along the unpleasant. "Rifle bullet."
That surprised Leaphorn, pretty well saying the Doherty boy hadn't been shot in the car. But he didn't ask for details. He nodded, trying not to give Bellman an interested audience. Maybe he would go about his business. Leaphorn had heard on the TV news last night that neither cause of death nor identity of the victim had been released by the fbi. But the mere fact the Federals had taken the case away from the ntp had told Leaphorn that either it was a homicide or the victim was a fugitive felon.
Bellman chuckled. "Funny, don't you think? A woman named Hegarty would marry a man named Doherty." He glanced at Leaphorn, awaiting a response. Getting none, he said: "You know, an 'arty marrying an 'erty."
"Yeah," Leaphorn said.
"Probably a hunting rifle," Bellman added, and waited for a comment from Leaphorn. "Looked like who ever done it was quite a ways behind Doherty. Just took a bead on him and went bang." Leaphorn nodded. So the crime scene crew had concluded the victim had been shot, and then put in the vehicle where he was found. Interesting.
"That's probably why your officer had it pegged as natural causes, no sign of violence."
"Did he?"
"She," Bellman said. "It was the Manuelito girl."
Bernadette Manuelito, Leaphorn was thinking. Smart young woman, from the impression he'd had of her last year when he'd gotten involved with Jim Chee in investigating that casino robbery business. Smart, but she'd still be a greenhorn. "Well," he said. "Things like that are hard to see sometimes, and I think she's new at patrolling. I can understand how she could miss it."
Easy to understand, he thought. Bernie was the daughter of a traditional Navajo family, taught to respect the dead and to fear death's contamination—the chindi spirit that would have lingered with the body. She wouldn't have wanted to handle it. Or even be around it more than she could help. Just turn the body over to the ambulance crew and keep her distance.
"I hear the Feds aren't so understanding. Heard they bitched to Captain Largo about the way she handled it." Bellman chuckled. "Or didn't handle it."
"What brings you to Two Grey Hills?" Leaphorn asked, wanting to change the subject and maybe get Bellman moving. It didn't work.
"Just touching bases," Bellman said. "Finding out what's going on." He restarted his engine, then leaned out the window again.
"I'll bet the fbi is going to give Jim Chee a ration of paperwork out of this. You think?"
"Who knows?" Leaphorn said, even though he knew all too well.
Bellman grinned, knowing Leaphorn knew the answer, and recited it anyway. It had three parts. The first was the friction between Sergeant Chee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, widely known and happily celebrated in the Four Corners Country law enforcement fraternity; the second being a general belief by the same fraternity that Captain Largo, where the buck stopped in the Shiprock district of the Navajo police, detested paperwork and would pass it down where Sergeant Chee would be stuck with it; the third being gossip that Chee and Officer Manuelito had romantic inclinations—which meant Chee would strain himself to defend her from any allegations of mishandling evidence in a homicide.
"And something else, Joe," Bellman continued, "I got a feeling you're going to get interested in this one before it's over."
Leaphorn opened his mouth, closed it. He wanted Bellman to drive away before Louisa came out with her trophy, or without it, rushing up and giving Bellman more ammunition for his gossip mill. "Guess who I saw with old Joe Leaphorn out at the T.G.H. trading post?" Bellman would be saying. But now Leaphorn was curious. He blurted out a "Why?"
"The stuff they found in Doherty's truck. Bunch of maps, some computer printouts about geology and mineralogy, a whole bunch of Polaroid photographs taken in canyons, that sort of material."
Leaphorn didn't comment.
"Had a folder full of reprints of articles about the Golden Calf Mine," Bellman added. "I'll bet that will remind you of old Wiley Denton and what's his name? The con man Wiley killed five years ago. McKay, wasn't it?"
"Marvin McKay," Leaphorn said. Yes, it did remind him, but he wished it hadn't. The Wiley Denton case was one he'd like to forget if he could. And he probably could, if he could ever find out what had happened to Wiley Denton's wife.
Chapter Three
« ^ »
Sergeant jim chee came out the side exit of the Navajo Tribal Police headquarters in a mood compatible with the weather—which was bad. The gusting west wind slammed the door behind him, saving Chee the trouble, blew up the legs of his uniform pants, and peppered his shins with hard-blown sand. To make things worse, the anger he was feeling was as much against himself—for complicating the problem—as against the Chief for not just telling the fbi to mind its own business and against Captain Largo for not handling this himself.
Part of the dust blown against Chee was now being stirred up by a civilian pickup truck being parked in one of the clearly marked "Police Vehicle Only" spaces. It was a familiar truck, blue and banged up, rust spot on the right fender—the truck of Joe Leaphorn, now retired but still the Legendary Lieutenant.
Chee took two steps toward the truck and was abruptly beset by the familiar mixed feelings of irritation, admiration, and of personal incompetence he always had around his former boss. He stopped, but Leaphorn had his window down and was waving to him.
"Jim," he shouted. "What brings you down to Window Rock?"
"Just a little administrative problem," Chee said. "How about you? Here at the office, I mean?"
"I was just scouting around for somebody to buy me lunch," Leaphorn said.
They got a table at the Navajo Inn, ordered coffee. Chee would eat a hamburger with fries as always, but he pretended to study the menu while struggling with his pride. All during the long drive down U.S. 666 from his Shiprock office in answer to the Chief's summons, he'd considered going by Leaphorn's place and asking for some advice. This idea had been rejected on various grounds—unfair to bother the lieutenant in his retirement, or he should be able to deal with it himself, or it would make him look like a nerd in the eyes of his former boss, or… Finally he'd rejected the idea—and then there was Leaphorn waving at him through the dust.
He glanced over the menu at Leaphorn, whose own menu still lay unopened on the table.
"I always have an enchilada," Leaphorn said. "People fall into habits when they get older."
That seemed to Chee as good an opening as any. "You still have that habit of being interested in odd cases?"
Leaphorn smiled. "I hope you mean the killing of that Doherty boy. I'm sort of interested in that."
"What do you hear?" Chee asked, thinking it would be just about everything—except maybe the final twist to his own problem.
"What I read in the Gallup Independent and the Navajo Times, which was what the fbi was telling. No suspect. And I guess no known motive. Doherty apparently shot somewhere else, hauled to where he was found in his own pickup truck. That's about it."
"How about what's on the rumor circuit?"
"Well, it's said that the fbi's not happy with how the crime scene was handled." Leaphorn was grinning at him. "And if I was into betting, I'd bet that's what brought you down to see the Chief today."
"You'd win," Chee said. "The dispatcher sent Officer Manuelito out to check on an abandoned truck. Bernie looks in and sees the body. Doherty slumped over on the driver's side. No blood. No sign of violence. Just like ten thousand drunks you've seen pulled over to sleep it off. When Doherty doesn't wake up, Bernadette reaches in to check an ankle for a pulse. It's cold. So then she calls in and asks for an ambulance and hangs around waiting for it."
Chee stopped. Leaphorn waited. He sipped his coffee.
Chee sighed. "And she says she walked around some, collecting seed pods and that sort of thing. Bernie's a botany buff. The ambulance guys pull the body out and then, finally, the blood gets noticed. Of course by that time everybody has walked all over everything. But there wasn't a way in the world Bernie could—" He stopped. With Leaphorn, there was never any need to explain anything.
He waited for Leaphorn to tell him that Bernie should have looked more closely at the situation, should have taped off the site. But of course Leaphorn didn't. He just sipped a little more of his coffee and put down his cup.
"I ran into Delo Bellman yesterday at Two Grey Hills. He said Doherty had a bunch of stuff with him relating to gold mining. Some articles about that famous old Golden Calf diggings. He said it would remind me of the Wiley Denton case. Wiley shooting that con man. That sound right?"
Chee nodded, made a wry face. "As you may have heard I'm not all that popular with the Bureau these days. But the grapevine told me it looked like Doherty might have been looking into that McKay homicide himself. I heard some of the stuff the Federals found in his briefcase must have been copied out of the evidence files in that homicide."
"He was old Bart Hegarty's nephew," Leaphorn said. "And it's an old dead case. He could have gotten that easily enough."
"I gather there's no suspect yet. I wonder if the Bureau has picked Denton as its man," Chee said.
Leaphorn sipped his coffee and considered. Chee was asking him what he thought about that idea. And, indeed, the fact was he had thought about it. He hadn't found any sign of a sensible connection, but something about it nagged at him. Hinted there might be one if he was smart enough to find it.
"What would be Denton's motive?" Leaphorn asked.
"Pretty vague," Chee said. "I guess the theory of the crime is that Doherty wanted to finish what McKay started. Tell Denton he'd located the Golden Calf, try to milk him for some money."
Leaphorn smiled. "Vague indeed," he said. "That would make him either pretty stupid. Or maybe suicidal." He wanted off this subject. To get Chee to tell him what was really on his mind. So he said: "Bellman said he heard the Federals wanted Manuelito suspended."
"That seems to be true," Chee said.
Leaphorn shook his head. "I wouldn't worry much about it. Nothing happens if you arrest the killer. Otherwise if a scapegoat is required, she'd get suspended a week or so. Probably with pay. I'd think that would be the worst."
Chee said: "Well…" then stopped.
Leaphorn waited awhile, took another sip of coffee. "Miss Manuelito seemed like a fine officer from what I saw of her when you were working on that casino robbery. Probably has a good record in her personnel jacket. But maybe there's something I don't know about this."
"There is," Chee said. "Can I talk to you in confidence? Because I may wish I'd kept my mouth shut."
Their lunches arrived. Leaphiorn stirred sugar into his fresh cup of coffee.
"I guess you're sort of asking if maybe you can tell me something that if it came down to crunch I might have to deny you told me?"
"Something like that," Chee said. You never had to explain anything to the Legendary Lieutenant.
"Well," Leaphorn said. "I think I know you well enough so I can rely on your judgment. Go ahead and tell me."
Chee extracted a Ziploc bag from his jacket pocket and put it on the table.
"Officer Manuelito picked this up at the crime scene, in a bush beside the car. She used it to hold the weed seeds she'd been collecting."
"Looks like an old Prince Albert tobacco tin," Leap-horn said.
He looked at Chee, expression curious.
Chee took another plastic bag from his pocket, handed it to Leaphorn.
"When she got home and dumped her seeds out into a bowl, this came out."
"Looks like arroyo bottom sand," Leaphorn said. He shook the bag in his palm, studied it. "Or is it?" he asked. "Color's a little off and it seems too heavy."
"It's partly sand and I think it's partly placer gold dust."
"Be damned," said Leaphorn. He opened the plastic bag, rubbed a pinch of the sand between his fingertips, and examined what stuck to the skin. "I'm no assayer, but I'll bet you're right."
"She said she picked up the can from some weeds maybe three or four feet from the driver-side door," Chee said. "Gave it to me because she thought it might be evidence." He laughed at that, a sort of grim laugh.
"For you to give to the fbi?"
"Sure," Chee said, sounding bitter. "To do my duty. And absolutely guarantee she'll get suspended with a reprimand in her file. I told her that's what would happen, and she said she guessed she deserved it." Chee grimaced at that and looked down into his cup, seeing not coffee but Bernie standing rigidly in front of his desk, looking very small, very slim, her black hair glossy and her uniform neater than usual. She had glanced down and away, made one of those vague motions with her lips that expressed regret and apology and then looked up at him, her dark eyes sad, awaiting his verdict. And he had understood then why he'd never rated her as cute. There was dignity in her face. She was beautiful. And then she had said: "I guess I'm just too careless to be in police work." And what had he said? Something stupid, he was sure. And now Leaphorn was studying him, wondering why he was just staring into his cup of coffee.
"It might be evidence, all right," Leaphorn said. "With that placer gold in it. It could be connected to the crime."
"So, Lieutenant, how do I handle this? I guess I'm asking you what you'd do if you were me?"
Leaphorn put a forkful of enchilada in his mouth. Chewed it. Took another bite. Frowned. "Do you know the L.C. of this one? Is it the one you got crosswise with a couple of years back in that case involving the eagle poaching?"
"No. He was transferred," Chee said. "Thank God for that small favor."
Leaphorn took another bite, said: "But the memory will linger in the federal tribe for a while."
"I'm sure it will," Chee said.
"I think if it was me, and the officer was a good one I wanted to keep in my department, I'd take that tobacco can and put it back exactly where Bernie found it. Then I'd tell someone, in a suitably subtle way, someone who had some business out there, tell them where to look for it and ask him to go find it. Then he could call the fbi and tell them he's noticed this tin out there and let them find it for themselves. Do you have any of your Shiprock people working the crime scene?"
"They've dealt us out of it," Chee said. He'd thought he'd got beyond being surprised by Leaphorn, but he hadn't. Was the Legendary Lieutenant volunteering to do this himself?
Leaphorn was smiling, mostly to himself.
"Well then, I've got a legitimate reason to go out there and take a look," he said. "I still get kidded now and then about being obsessed with that McKay killing. I'll be looking for a connection. Worst they can do is tell me to go away."
"Connection? Isn't that going to sound pretty weak?"
"Awful weak," Leaphorn said. "Maybe I'll just tell 'em I'm a bored old ex-cop looking for a way to kill time. Maybe they'll be finished at the scene and nobody will even ask."
"I've always wondered why you were so interested in that case," Chee said. "Hell, Denton laid it all out. Admitted he shot McKay, claimed it was self-defense, and worked out a plea bargain. You've had doubts about that?"
"He got a year, served part of it with time off for behaving," Leaphorn said. "I had some doubts about the self-defense, but mostly I've always wondered what happened to Linda Denton."
"Linda Denton? What do you mean?" Leaphorn was surprising him again. Chee checked his memory. The way it came to him, the young Mrs. Denton had set her wealthy old hubby up for McKay's swindle and then ran when the plan didn't work out. "Now I'm wondering why you've been wondering."
Leaphorn smiled, consumed a bit more of his lunch. Shook his head.
"You're going to think I'm an old-fashioned romantic," he said. "That's what Louisa—what Professor Bourbonette says. Tells me to get real."
Chee finally took the first bite from his hamburger, studying Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant actually looked slightly abashed. Or was he imagining it?
"You really want to hear all this?" Leaphorn asked. "It takes time."
"I do," Chee said.
"Well, of course it was a McKinley County case because Denton built his house outside Gallup city limits. Lorenzo Perez was undersheriff then and handling major crime investigations. Good man, Lorenzo. He had himself a clear-cut uncomplicated case with the shooter admitting it. Only question was how much self-defense was involved. Where'd the gun come from the con man had? You remember the story Denton told? McKay had told him he'd located the Golden Calf diggings and needed money to file claims and begin development. He'd let Denton in for fifty grand. In cash. So Denton drew the money out of his bank, had it in a briefcase at his house. McKay shows him a bunch of stuff, a little bit of placer gold, part of a map, some other stuff. Denton spots it as bogus, tells McKay to get out. McKay says he'll take the money with him. He pulls a gun and Denton shoots him."
Leaphorn stopped. "McKay was an ex-con with a record of trying to run con games. That didn't seem to leave much to investigate."
"Yeah," Chee said. "That's the way I remember it. But how does this bring us to Linda Denton? The story was she wasn't home when it happened."
"Denton said she'd gone to have lunch with some friends and wasn't there when it happened and never did come back. He said he was worried. Couldn't imagine what had happened to her." Leaphorn made a wry face. "It seemed pretty easy to guess if you remember the circumstances. Turned out Linda had introduced McKay to her husband. Denton said she'd met McKay before she married him. Met him at that bar-grill where she used to wait tables."
Their waiter came and refilled their cups. Leaphorn picked his up, looked at it, returned it to the saucer. "And she never did come back. Ever. Not a word. Not a trace."
It sounded sad, the way he said it, and Chee asked: "Didn't that seem natural? Young gal working in a bar meets a rich guy about thirty years older, bags him, then decides he's too boring for her taste so she locks onto a slick-talking young con man to get the old bird's money. It turns into a homicide with her maybe facing some sort of conspiracy charge. So she runs."
"That's the way I read it at first," Leaphorn said. "Lorenzo wanted to find her. See what she had to say. I started on it. Went out to see her folks at Thoreau. Couple named Verbiscar. They were frantic. Said she would never leave Denton. Loved him. Something had to have happened to her."
Chee nodded. It seemed to him about the sort of response you'd expect from the woman's parents. And he noticed Leaphorn had sensed his attitude.
"They sat me down and told me her story," Leaphorn said. "Great kid. Went to the St. Bonaventure School there. Real bookish girl and very much into music. Not much for boyfriends. Good grades. Scholarship offers from University of Arizona, couple of other places. But her dad had a heart problem. So Linda Verbiscar turned the scholarship down and enrolled at the u.n.m. branch at Gallup. She got herself that restaurant waitress job. She and another girl from Thoreau rented themselves a little place out on Railroad Avenue. Brought home a boyfriend once for them to look over but decided he was sort of stupid. Then she brought Wiley Denton out to meet them."
Leaphorn paused, the polite Navajo gesture to give the listener a chance to comment.
Chee tried to think of something sensible to say, and came up with: "Linda doesn't sound like the kind of woman I had in mind."
Leaphorn nodded.
"They said it scared 'em to death when she showed up with Wiley Denton. She was twenty then and he was early fifties. Older than her dad, in fact. Big, homely, rich old guy." Leaphorn chuckled. "Verbiscar said they knew he hadn't been born rich because he had the kind of broken nose that can't be overlooked and is easy to fix if you can pay the surgeon. All they really knew about him was he had been in the Green Berets in the Vietnam War, made a ton of money off oil and gas leases out around the Jicarilla Reservation and built himself that huge house on the slope outside Gallup. That, and everybody said he was an eccentric sort of loner."
Leaphorn stopped again, drank coffee. Looked over the cup at Chee. "Did you ever meet him?"
"Denton? No. I just saw him on television a time or two. At the sentencing, I guess. I just remember thinking if they had charged him with being ugly he was guilty."
"Well, Mrs. Verbiscar said they got invited to a meal at his house and the big impression he made on her was that he was bashful. She said she noticed he had a grand piano in the living room and asked him if he played and he said no, he'd bought that for Linda to play if he could get her to marry him. She said he seemed real shy. Sort of clumsy. Nothing much to say."
Chee laughed. "What some people would call 'deficient in social graces.'"
"I guess," Leaphorn said. "He seemed that way to me when I interviewed him with Lorenzo Perez. But to get on with this, both of Linda's parents said they liked him. Way too old for their daughter, but she seemed to love him dearly. And a little after she turned twenty-one she said she wanted to marry him. And she did. Catholic wedding. Flower girls, ushers, the whole business."
"Now the bad part starts," Chee said. "Am I right?"
Leaphorn shook his head. "Unless a lot of people were lying to me that didn't start until the day Denton killed the swindler. But I was thinking like you are. When she went missing, I went to talk to people who knew her."
Leaphorn's first call had been on the woman Linda Verbiscar had lived with in Gallup. Linda and Denton were a match made in heaven, she'd said. Linda didn't date much. Uneasy with men. Sex would wait until she met the right man, and married him, and then it would be forever. But something about Denton, homely as he was, attracted her right away. And awkward and bashful as he was, you saw it was mutual.
"According to her roommate, Miss Verbiscar seemed to like the awkward and bashful types," Leaphorn said, and chuckled. "And broken noses. The only other man she seemed real friendly with was a Navajo. Couldn't remember his name, but she remembered the crooked nose. She said Linda never went out with him, but he'd come in the place middle of afternoons when it was quiet. He'd get a doughnut or something and Linda would sit down and talk to him. Nothing going there, but with Denton it got to be real, genuine, romantic love."
Leaphorn paused with that, looked thoughtful. "Or, so her roommate said."
"Okay," said Chee. "Maybe I've been too cynical."
And then Leaphorn had gone to Denton's massive riverside house and talked to his housekeeper and his foreman. It was the same story, with a variation—the variation being that now Denton was falling deeply in love. Obsessively in love, the housekeeper had said, because Mr. Denton was an extremely focused man who tended to be obsessive. His overpowering obsession had been to find that legendary mine. Which was what the housekeeper and the foreman said got him into the trouble with McKay. But the bottom line was, there was no way they would believe the official police theory. Linda would never, never leave Wiley Denton. Something had happened to her. Something bad. The police should stop screwing around and find her.
While Leaphorn talked, Chee finished his hamburger, and his coffee, and another cup. The waiter left his ticket and disappeared. The gusty wind rattled sand against the window where they sat. And finally Leaphorn sighed.
"I talk too damn much. Blame it on being retired, sitting around the house with nobody to listen to me. But I wanted you to see why I think there was more to that killing than we knew."
"I can see that," Chee said. "Any chance they thought Denton might have figured Linda had sold him out? Bumped her off in the famous jealous rage?"
"I asked 'em both. They said she'd left to go downtown to have lunch with some lady friends that morning. Usual huggy-kissy good-bye at the car with Wiley. Then about middle of the afternoon Denton had asked if she had called. He was wondering why she was late. Held up dinner for her. Then McKay showed up. The help told Perez they'd heard McKay and Denton talking in the den, and then the talking got loud, and then they heard the shot."
Leaphorn paused, looking for comment.
"Does that match what you were told?"
"Just the same," Leaphorn said. "They said after the shot, Denton came rushing out and told them to call nine one one. Said McKay had tried to rob him. Pulled a pistol on him so he'd shot McKay and he thought he'd probably killed him."
"So Linda never came home?"
"Never got to the luncheon with her lady friends, in fact," Leaphorn said. "And when they booked Denton into the Gallup jail and he called his lawyer, he told the lawyer he was worried about her. See if he could find her. Let him know."
"Sounds persuasive," Chee said.
"Then after Denton bonded out, he hired a private investigators outfit in Albuquerque to find her. Next, when he went away to do his prison time, he had advertisements placed in papers here and there, asking her to come home."
This surprised Chee. This wasn't the sort of information the Legendary Lieutenant could have obtained casually on the cop grapevine. Interest there would have died with the confession. Leaphorn obviously maintained his interest. He'd made this something personal.