A Thief of Time (13 page)

 

Leaphorn took a cab to the Seventy-eighth Street address, got there a quarter of an hour early, and spent the time prowling the neighborhood—a territory of uniformed doormen and expensive dogs walked by persons who seemed to have been hired for the job. He rang the door chimes at eleven exactly. He waited on the steps, looking at the sky down the street. It would rain again, and soon—probably before noon. An old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit, opened the door and stood silently, looking at him patiently.

“My name is Leaphorn,” he said. “I have an appointment with Richard DuMont.”

“In the study,” the man said, motioning Leaphorn in.

The study was a long, high-ceilinged room down a long, high-ceilinged hall. A man in a dark blue dressing gown was sitting at the end of a long library table. Light from a floor lamp beside his chair reflected off the white of a breakfast cloth, and china, and silver.

“Ah, Mr. Leaphorn,” the man said, smiling. “You are most punctual. I hope you will excuse me for not getting up to greet you.” He tapped the arms of the wheelchair in which he was sitting. “And I hope you will join me for some breakfast.”

“No thank you,” Leaphorn said. “I've eaten.”

“Some coffee, then?”

“I have never refused coffee. Never will.”

“Nor I,” DuMont said. “Another of my vices. But seat yourself.” He gestured toward a blue plush chair. “The woman at Nelson's told me you are hunting a missing woman. An anthropologist. And that murder is involved.” DuMont's small gray eyes peered at Leaphorn, avid with interest. Unusual eyes set in a pinched, narrow face under eyebrows almost identical in color to his pale skin. “Murder,” he repeated, “and a missing woman.” His voice was clear, precise, easy to understand. But like his face it was a small voice. Any background noise would bury it.

“Two pot hunters were killed,” Leaphorn said. Something about DuMont was unpleasant. Too much interest? But interest in such a man seemed natural enough. After all, he was a collector. “Including the man who found my pot,” DuMont said, with what seemed to Leaphorn to be a sort of pleasure. “Or so that woman at Nelson's told me.”

“We think so,” Leaphorn said. “Ms. Marcy told me you would be willing to let me see the documentation he sent in. We want to know where he found the pot.”

“The document,” DuMont said. “Yes. But tell me how the man was killed. How the woman is missing.” He raised his arms wide apart, his small mouth grinning. “Tell me all of that.”

Behind DuMont, on both sides of a great formal fireplace, shelves formed the wall. The shelves were lined with artifacts. Pots, carved stone images, baskets, fetishes, masks, primitive weapons. Just behind the man, a pedestal held a massive stone head—Olmec, Leaphorn guessed. Smuggled out of Mexico in defiance of that country's antiquities act.

“Mr. Etcitty and a companion were digging up an Anasazi ruin, apparently collecting pots. Someone shot them,” Leaphorn said. “An anthropologist named Friedman-Bernal was specializing in this sort of ceramics. In fact, she was interested in this pot you bought. She disappeared. Left Chaco Canyon—she worked there—for a weekend and hasn't come back.”

Leaphorn stopped. He and DuMont looked at each other. The stooped, gray man who had admitted Leaphorn appeared at his elbow, placed a small table beside his chair, spread a cloth upon it, put a silver tray on the cloth. The tray held a cup of paper-thin china sitting on a translucent saucer, a silver pot from which steam issued, two smaller silver containers, and a silver spoon. The gray man poured coffee into Leaphorn's cup and disappeared.

“One doesn't buy merely the object,” DuMont said. “One wants what goes with it. The history. This head, for example, came out of the jungles in northern Guatemala. It had decorated the doorway to a chamber in a temple. The room where captives were held until they were sacrificed. I'm told the Olmec priests strangled them with a cord.”

DuMont covered the lower part of his small face with his napkin and produced a small cough, his avid eyes on Leaphorn.

“And this Anasazi pot of yours. Why is it worth five thousand dollars?” He laughed, a small, tinkling sound. “It's not much of a pot, really. But the Anasazi! Such mysterious people. You hold this pot, and think of the day it was made. A civilization that had grown a thousand years was dying.” He stared into Leaphorn's eyes. “As ours is surely dying. Its great houses were standing empty. No more great ceremonials in the kivas. This is about when my pot was made—so my appraisers tell me. Right at the end. The twilight. In the dying days.”

DuMont did something at the arm of his wheelchair and said: “Edgar.”

“Yes sir.” Edgar's voice seemed to come from under the table.

“Bring me that pot we bought last month. And the documents.”

“Yes sir.”

“So stories are important to me,” DuMont said to Leaphorn. “What you could tell me has its value here. I show my new pot to my friends. I tell them not just of the Anasazi civilization, but of murder and a missing woman.” He grinned a small, prim grin, showing small, perfect teeth.

Leaphorn sipped his coffee. Hot, fresh, excellent. The china was translucent. To the right of DuMont a row of high windows lined the wall. The light coming through them was dim, tinted green by the vines that covered them. Rain streamed down the glass.

“Did I make my point?” DuMont said.

“I think so,” Leaphorn said.

“Tit for tat. You want information from me. In exchange it seems to me only fair that you give me my story. The story to go with my pot.”

“I did,” Leaphorn said.

DuMont raised two white hands, fluttered them. “Details, details, details,” he said. “All the bloody details. The details to pass along.”

Leaphorn told him the details. How the bodies were found. How the men had been killed. Who they were. He described the scene. He described the bones. DuMont listened, rapt.

“…and there we are,” Leaphorn concluded. “No leads, really. Our missing woman might be a lead to the killer. More likely she's another victim. But it's all vague. We know just that she was interested in the same pots. Just that she's missing.”

Edgar had returned early in this account and stood beside DuMont, holding a pot and a manila folder. The pot was small, about the size of a man's head. A little larger than DuMont's skull.

“Hand the pot to Mr. Leaphorn,” DuMont said. “And the documents, please.”

Edgar did so. And stood there, stooped and gray, his presence making Leaphorn edgy. Why didn't the man sit down? Leaphorn placed the pot carefully on the table, noticing the smooth feel of the glazing, aware that it had nothing to tell him. He opened the folder.

It contained what appeared to be two bills of sale, one from Harrison Houk to Nelson's and one from Nelson's to DuMont, and a form with its blanks filled in by an awkward hand. It was signed by Jimmy Etcitty.

Leaphorn checked the date. The previous June. He checked the space marked “Place of recovery.” The entry read:

Leaphorn was surprised at the intensity of his disappointment. It was exactly what he should have expected. He checked the other blanks and found nothing interesting. DuMont was watching him, grinning.

“A problem?”

“A little case of lying,” Leaphorn said.

“Just what Dr. Friedman said.” DuMont chuckled. “False, false, false.”

“You talked to Dr. Friedman?”

“Just like this,” DuMont said, delighted with Leaphorn's amazement. “Your missing lady was right here. In that same chair. Edgar, was she drinking from the same cup?”

“I have no idea, sir,” Edgar said.

“Same questions, anyway.” DuMont gestured. “Fascinating.”

“How did she find you?”

“As you did, I presume. Through Nelson's. She called, and identified herself, and made an appointment.”

Leaphorn didn't comment. He was remembering her note. “Call Q!” Ellie seemed to have had a pipeline into the auction house that got her past Ms. Marcy.

“She said the certification was false? The location?”

“She said that canyon isn't where Mr…. Mr….”

“Etcitty,” Edgar said.

“Where Mr. Etcitty said it was.” DuMont laughed. “Running the wrong way, she said. Too far down the river. Things like that.”

“She was right,” Leaphorn said. If that false location had an effect on DuMont's five-thousand-dollar pot, it had no effect on his humor. He was grinning his small white grin.

“She was quite upset,” he said. “Disappointed. Are you?”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. “But I shouldn't be. It's exactly what I should have expected.”

“Edgar has made you a copy of that,” DuMont said. “To take with you.”

“Thank you,” Leaphorn said. He pushed himself out of the chair. He wanted to get out of this room. Away. Out into the clean rain.

“And Edgar will give you my card,” DuMont said from behind him. “Call me with all the details. When you find her body.”

F
INDING THE
R
EVEREND
S
LICK
N
AKAI
had not been easy. At the Nageezi site Chee found only the trampled place where the revival tent had stood, and the trash left behind. He asked around, learned that Nakai was known at the Brethren Navajo Mission. He drove to Escrito. The
belagana
at the mission there knew of Nakai but not his whereabouts. If he had scheduled a revival around there, they hadn't heard of it. Must be a mistake. Chee left, sensing that he wasn't alone in his disapproval of Slick Nakai. At Counselors Trading Post, where people tend to know what's happening on the north side of the Checkerboard Reservation, he hung around until he found someone who knew of a family not only fervently following the Jesus Road, but doing so as prescribed by the tenets of Nakai's sect. It was the family of Old Lady Daisy Manygoats. The Manygoats outfit, unfortunately, lived way over by Coyote Canyon. Chee drove to Coyote Canyon, stopped at the chapter house, got directions down a road that was bad even by reservation standards, and found nobody at home at the Manygoats place except a boy named Darcy Ozzie. Yes, Darcy Ozzie knew about the Reverend Slick Nakai, had in fact gone to his recent revival over at Nageezi.

“They say he was going to preach over between White Rock and Tsaya, over there by the mountains,” the boy said, indicating west in the Navajo fashion by a twist of his lips. “And then when he was finished there, he was going way over into Arizona to have a revival over there by Lower Greasewood. Over there south of the Hopi Reservation.”

So Chee drove up the Chuska Valley toward Tsaya, with the Chuska Range rising blue to his left and autumn asters forming two lines of color along the opposite sides of the cracked old asphalt of U.S. 666, and snakeweed and chamisa coloring the slopes mottled tan-yellow-gold and the November sky dark blue overhead.

He had quit thinking of Slick Nakai about halfway between Nageezi and Coyote Canyon, having exhausted every possible scenario their meeting might produce. Then he considered Mary Landon. She loved him, he concluded. In her way. But there was love, and then there was love. She would not change her mind about living her life on the reservation. And she was right. Lacking some very basic change in Mary, she would not be happy raising their children here. He wanted Mary to neither change nor be unhappy. Which led him back to himself. She would marry him if he left the reservation. And he could do that. He'd had offers. He could go into federal law enforcement. Work somewhere where their children could go to school with white kids and be surrounded by white culture. Mary would be happy. Or would she? He could still be a Navajo in the sense of blood, but not in the sense of belief. He would be away from family and the Slow Talking Dineh, the brothers and sisters of his maternal clan. He would be outside of Dineh Bike'yah—that territory fenced in by the four sacred mountains within which the magic of the curing ceremonials had its compulsory effect. He would be an alien living in exile. Mary Landon would not enjoy life with that Jim Chee. He could not live with an unhappy Mary Landon. It was the conclusion he always eventually reached. It left him with a sense of anger and loss. That, in turn, moved his thoughts to something else.

He thought of Janet Pete, trying to work what little he knew of her character into the solution she would find to her own problem. Would she allow her lawyer to convert her into an Indian maiden? Not enough data to be sure, but he doubted if Janet Pete would ever buy that.

Who killed Nails and Etcitty? Find the motive. There lies the answer. But there could be a dozen motives and he had no basis for guessing. Leaphorn, obviously, believed Slick Nakai somehow fit into that puzzle. But then Leaphorn knew a lot more about this business than Chee. All Chee knew was that Nakai bought pots from Etcitty—or perhaps was given them. That Etcitty was one of Nakai's born-again Christians. That Leaphorn believed Nakai sold pots to the woman missing from Chaco Canyon. That was the focus of Chee's assignment. Leaphorn's voice on the telephone had sounded tired. “You want to stick with me a little longer on this Friedman-Bernal business?” he asked. “If you do, I can arrange it with Captain Largo.”

Chee had hesitated, out of surprise. Leaphorn had identified the pause as indecision.

“I should remind you again that I'm quitting the department,” Leaphorn had interjected. “I'm on terminal leave right now. I already told you that. I tell you now so if you're doing me a favor, remember there's no way I can return it.”

Which, Chee had thought, was a nice way of saying the reverse—I can't punish you for refusing.

“I'd like to stay on it,” Chee had said. “I'd like to find out who killed those guys.”

“That's not what we're working on,” Leaphorn had said. “They're connected, I guess. They must be connected. But what I'm after is what happened to the woman missing from Chaco. The anthropologist.”

“Okay,” Chee had said. It seemed an odd focus. Two murders, apparently premeditated assassinations. And Leaphorn was devoting his leave time, and Chee's efforts, to a missing person case. Same case, probably, the way it looked now. But going at it totally backward. Well, Lieutenant Leaphorn was supposed to be smarter than Officer Chee. He had a reputation for doing things in weird ways. But he also had a reputation for guessing right.

At Tsaya, Chee found he'd missed Slick Nakai, but not by much. Nakai had canceled his planned revival there and headed north.

“Just canceled it?” Chee asked.

He was asking a plump girl of about eighteen who seemed to be in charge of the Tsaya Chapter—since she was the only one present in the chapter house.

“He sort of hurried in, and said who he was, and said he had to cancel a tent meeting that was supposed to be for to night,” she said. “It's over there on the bulletin board.” She nodded toward the notices posted by the entrance.

“NOTICE!”
Nakai had scrawled at the top of a sheet of notepaper:

“Well, shit!” said Jim Chee, aloud and in English, since Navajo lends itself poorly to such emotional expletives. He glanced at his watch. Almost four-thirty. Where the devil could Nakai have gone? He walked back to the desk where the girl was sitting. She had been watching him curiously.

“I need to find Nakai.” Chee smiled at her, happy that he hadn't worn his uniform. A good many people her age looked upon Navajo Tribal Police as the adversary. “Did he say anything else? Like where he was going?”

“To me? Nothing. Just borrowed a piece of paper for his note. You one of his Christians?”

“No,” Chee said. “Matter of fact, I'm a
hatathali
. I do the Blessing Way.”

“Really?” the girl said.

Chee was embarrassed. “Just beginning,” he said. “Just did it once.” He didn't explain that the one time had been for a member of his own family. He fished out his billfold, extracted a business card, and handed it to her.

 

JIM CHEE

HATATHALI

SINGER OF THE BLESSING WAY

AVAILABLE FOR OTHER CEREMONIALS

FOR CONSULTATION CALL
_____

(
P.O. BOX 112, SHIPROCK, N.M
.)

 

Since he had no telephone at his trailer, he'd left the number blank. His plan had been to list the Shiprock police station number, gambling that by the time Largo got wind of it and blew the whistle, he'd have a reputation and a following established. But the dispatcher had balked. “Besides, Jim,” she'd argued, “what will the people think? They call for a singer to do a ceremonial and when the phone rings somebody says, ‘Navajo Tribal Police.'”

“Give me some more,” the girl said. “I'll stick one up on the board, too. Okay?”

“Sure,” Chee said. “And give them to people. Especially if you hear of anybody sick.”

She took the cards. “But what's a
hatathali
doing looking for a Christian preacher?”

“A minute ago, when I asked you if Nakai said anything about where he was headed, you said not to you. Did he tell somebody else?”

“He made a phone call,” she said. “Asked if he could borrow the phone here”—she tapped the telephone on her desk—“and called somebody.” She stopped, eyeing Chee doubtfully.

“And you overheard some of it?”

“I don't eavesdrop,” she said.

“'Course not,” Chee said. “But the man's talking right there at your desk. How can you help it? Did he say where he was going?”

“No,” she said. “He didn't say that.”

Chee was smart enough to realize he was being teased. He smiled at her. “After a while you are going to tell me what he said,” Chee said. “But not yet.”

“I just might not tell you at all,” she said, grinning a delighted grin.

“What if I tell you a scary story? That I'm not really a medicine man. I'm a cop and I'm looking for a missing woman, and Nakai is not really a preacher. He's a gangster, and he's already killed a couple of people, and I'm on his trail, and you are my only chance of catching him before he shoots everybody else.”

She laughed. “That would fit right in with what he said on the phone. Very mysterious.”

Chee managed to keep grinning. Just barely.

“Like what?”

She made herself comfortable. “Oh,” she said. “He said, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Then he listened. Then he said something like, it made him nervous. And to be careful. And then he said somebody-else-or-other was who he worried about and the only way to warn him was to go out to his hogan and find him. He said he was going to cancel his revival here and go up there. And then he listened a long time, and then he said he didn't know how far. It was over into Utah.” She shrugged. “That's about it.”

“About it isn't good enough.”

“Well, that's all I remember.”

Apparently it was. She was blank on both so-and-so and somebody-else-or-other. Chee left, thinking “over into Utah” was over into the country Leaphorn wanted Nakai cross-examined about—the source of Friedman-Bernal's pot obsession. He was also thinking that heading into the Four Corners would take him past Shiprock. Maybe he would take the night off, if he was tired when he got there. Maybe he would run Slick Nakai to earth tomorrow. But why had Nakai changed his plans and headed for the Utah border? Who knows? “So-and-so” was probably Etcitty. “Somebody-else-or-other” probably another of Nakai's converts who stole pots on the side. To Chee, Nakai was seeming increasingly odd.

He was driving through the Bisti Badlands, headed north toward Farmington, when the five o'clock news began. A woman reporting from the Durango, Colorado, station on the letting of a contract for range improvement on the Ute Mountain Reservation, and a controversy over the environmental impact of an additional ski run at Purgatory, and a recall petition being circulated to unseat a councilman at Aztec, New Mexico. Chee reached up to change the channel. He'd get more New Mexico news from a Farmington station. “In other news of the Four Corners country,” the woman said, “a prominent and sometimes controversial Southeast Utah rancher and political figure has been shot to death at his ranch near Bluff.”

Chee stopped, hand on the dial.

“A spokesman for the Garfield County Sheriff's Office at Blanding said the victim has been identified as Harrison Houk, a former Utah state senator and one of southern Utah's biggest ranch operators. The body of Houk was found in his barn last night. The sheriff's office said he had been shot twice.

“Some twenty years ago, Houk's family was the victim of one of the Four Corners' worst tragedies. Houk's wife and a son and daughter were shot to death, apparently by a mentally disturbed younger son who then drowned himself in the San Juan.

“Across the line in Arizona, a suit has been filed in federal district court at…”

Chee clicked off the radio. He wanted to think. Houk was the man to whom Nakai had sold pots. Houk lived at Bluff, on the San Juan. Maybe Etcitty was Nakai's “so-and-so.” More likely it would be Houk. Could Nakai have heard of Houk's murder en route to Tsaya? Probably, on an earlier newscast. That would explain the abrupt change in plans. Or maybe Houk was “somebody-else-or-other”—the man Nakai wanted to warn. Too late for that now. Either way, it seemed clear that Nakai would be headed to somewhere very close to Bluff, to where Houk, his customer for pots, had been killed.

Chee decided he would work overtime. If he could find the elusive Nakai tonight, he would.

It proved to be surprisingly easy. On the road north toward Bluff, far enough north of Mexican Water so he was sure he'd crossed the Arizona border into Utah, Chee saw Nakai's tent trailer. It was parked maybe a quarter-mile up an old oil field road that wanders off U.S. 191 into the rocky barrens south of Caso del Eco Mesa.

Chee made an abrupt left turn, parked by the trailer, and inspected it. The tie-down ropes were in place, all four tires were aired, everything in perfect order. It had simply been unhooked and abandoned.

Chee jolted down the old road, past a silent oil pump, down into the bare stoniness of Gothic Creek, and out of that into a flatland of scattered sage and dwarf juniper. The road divided into two trails—access routes, Chee guessed, to the only two Navajo families who survived in these barrens. It was almost dark now, the western horizon a glowing, luminous copper. Which route to take? Far down the one that led straight ahead he saw Nakai's car.

He drove the five hundred yards toward it cautiously, feeling uneasy. He'd been joking with the girl at Tsaya when he cast Nakai in the role of gangster. But how did he know? He knew almost nothing. That Nakai had been preaching on the reservation for years. That he encouraged his converts to collect pots for him to sell to help finance his operation. Did he have a pistol? A criminal record? Leaphorn probably knew such things, but he hadn't confided in Chee. He slowed even more, nervous.