Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (7 page)

“There’s something you could do for me”—again the smile—”if you would.”

“Like what?” Leaphorn asked. “I have to get to the hogan of a man named Hosteen Tso,” Theodora Adams said. “I’ve found a man who knows how to get there, but my car won’t go over that road.” She glanced ruefully at the Corvette Stingray parked in the shade of the barn. Two young men were tinkering with it now. And then the full force of her eyes was again on Leaphorn. “It’s too low,” she explained. “The rocks hit the bottom.”

“You want me to take you to the Tso hogan?”

“Yes,” she said. Her smile said “please” for her.

“Why do you want to go?” The smile faded slightly. “I have some business there.”

“With Hosteen Tso?” The smile left. “Hosteen Tso is dead,” she said. “You know that. You’re a policeman.” Her eyes studied Leaphorn’s face, slightly hostile but mostly with frank, unabashed curiosity. Leaphorn remembered suddenly when he had first seen blue eyes like that. He had gone to the boarding school at Kayenta with his uncle and cousin and there had been a white woman there with blue eyes who had stared at him. He had thought, at first, that eyes as odd as that must be blind. That woman, too, had stared at him as if he were an interesting object. On that same day, he remembered, he had seen his first bearded man -comsomething to a Navajo boy as curious as a winged snake—but somehow the unaccustomed rudeness of those pale eyes had affected him more. He had always remembered it. And the memory, now, affected his response.

“Who’s your business with?”

“That’s none of your business,” Theodora Adams said. She took a half step away from him, stopped, turned back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course it’s your business. You’re a policeman.” She made a deprecating face, and shrugged. “It’s just that it’s something very private. Nothing to do with the law and I simply can’t talk about it.” She smiled again, plaintively. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her expression told Leaphorn that the regret was genuine. She was a remarkably handsome girl, high-breasted, slender, dressed in white pants and a blue shirt which exactly matched the color of her eyes. She looked expensive, Leaphorn thought, and competent and assured. She also looked utterly out of place at Short Mountain Trading Post. “Do you know how to get to Tso’s place?”

“That man was going to show me.” She pointed to the two young men at her car, one under it now— apparently inspecting front-end damage— and the other squatted beside him. “But we couldn’t get that damned Stingray over the rocks.” She paused, her eyes intent on Leaphorn’s.

“I was going to pay him twenty-five dollars,” she said. The statement hung there, not an offer, not a bribe, simply a statement for Leaphorn to consider and make what he wanted of. He considered it, and found it neatly done. The girl was smart. “One thing I’ve got. Plenty of money,” she said. “The Navajo Tribal Police have a regulation against picking up hitchhikers,” Leaphorn said. He turned it over in his mind. He would tell Largo his Theodora Adams was here and healthy. He would tell Largo where she wanted to go. He was almost sure Largo would tell him to take her to the Tso place, simply to find out what she wanted there. But maybe not. By asking Largo to find out about the welfare of Theodora Adams, Window Rock had, in an unofficial, unspoken way, made him responsible for it.

Under the circumstances, Largo might not want her taken into the back country. “Look,” he said. “How much do you know about Hosteen Tso?”

“I know somebody killed him, if that’s what you mean. Last spring.”

“And we don’t know who did it,” Leaphorn said. “So we’re interested in anybody who has business out there.”

“My business doesn’t have anything to do with crime,” Theodora Adams said. She looked amused.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the law, or with the police.

It’s just personal business. And if you’re not willing to help me, I’ll find somebody who will.” And with that, she walked across the yard and disappeared into the trading post. One of the disadvantages of the Short Mountain Trading Post location was that it was impossible for shortwave radio communication. To contact Tuba City, Leaphorn had to drive out of the declivity made by the wash, going high enough up the mesa so that his reception wasn’t blanked out by the terrain. He found Captain Largo suitably surprised at the Adams woman’s aim of visiting the Tso hogan. “You want me to take her?”

Leaphorn asked. “I’m going out to see the Cigaret woman and it’s sort of on the way. Same direction anyway.”

“No,” Largo said. “Just find out what the hell she’s doing.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s not going to tell me,” Leaphorn said. “She already told me it was none of our business.”

“You could bring her in here for questioning.”

“Could I? You recommending that?” The pause was brief—Largo remembering the reason for his original interest in Theodora Adams.

“I guess not,” he said. “Not unless we have to. Handle it your own way. But don’t let anything happen to her.” The way Leaphorn had already decided to handle it would be to offer to drive Theodora Adams to the Tso hogan. If he did that there would be no conceivable way she could prevent him from learning why she had gone there. He would find the Adams woman and get on the road. But when he got back to the trading post, it was after 10 P.M. and Theodora Adams was gone. So was a GMC pickup truck owned by a woman named Naomi Many Goats. “I saw her talking to Naomi Many Goats,” Mcginnis said. “She came in here and got me to draw her a little map of how to get to the Tso place. And then she asked if you were headed back to Tuba City, and I told her you’d probably just gone off to do some radio talking because you was fixing to go out and talk to the Cigaret woman. So she got me to show her where the Cigaret hogan was on the map. Then she asked who she could hire to take her to the Tso place, and I said you never could tell with you Navajos, and the last thing I saw her doing was talking to Naomi.”

“She get the Many Goats woman to drive her?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” Mcginnis said. “I didn’t see ‘em leave.”

“I’ll guess she did,” Leaphorn said. “It occurs to me that I’ve been telling you a hell of a lot and you ain’t been telling me nothing,” Mcginnis said. “Why does that girl want to go to the Tso hogan?”

“Tell you what,” Leaphorn said. “When I find out, I’ll tell you.”

By the relaxed standards of the Navajo Reservation, the first three miles of the road to the hogan of Hosteen Tso were officially listed as “unimproved—passable in dry weather.” They led up Short Mountain Wash to the site where the anthropological team was excavating cliff ruins. The road followed the mostly hard-packed sand of the wash bottom, and if one was careful to avoid soft places, offered no particular hazard or discomfort. Leaphorn drove past the ruins a little after midnight. Except for a pickup and a small camping trailer parked in the shade of a cottonwood, there was no sign of life. From there, the road quickly deteriorated from fair, to poor, to bad, to terrible, until it was, in fact, no road at all, merely a track. It left the narrowing wash via a subsidiary arroyo, snaked its way through a half mile of broken shale and emerged on the top of Rainbow Plateau. The landscape became a roadbuilder’s nightmare and a geologist’s dream. Here, eons ago, the earth’s crust had writhed and twisted. Nothing was level. Limestone sediments, great masses of gaudy sandstone, granite outcroppings, and even thick veins of marble had been churned together by some unimaginable paroxysm—then cut and carved and washed away by ten million years of wind, rain, freeze and thaws. Driving here was a matter of following a faintly marked pathway through a stone obstacle course.

It required care, patience and concentration. Leaphorn found concentration difficult. His head was full of questions. Where was Frederick Lynch? Where was he going? His course northward from his abandoned car would take him near the Tso hogan. Was Theodora Adams’s business at the hogan business with Frederick Lynch? That seemed logical—if anything about this odd business made any logic at all. If two white strangers appeared at about the same time in this out-of-the-way corner, one headed for the Tso hogan and the other aimed in that direction, logic insisted that more than coincidence was involved. But why in the name of God would they cross half a continent to meet at one of the most remote and inaccessible spots in the hemisphere? Leaphorn could think of no possible reason. Common sense insisted that their coming must have something to do with the murder of Hosteen Tso, but Leaphorn could conceive no link. He felt the irritation and uneasiness that he always felt when the world around him seemed out of its logical order. There was also a growing sense of anxiety. Largo had told him not to let anything happen to Theodora Adams. Most likely, Theodora Adams was somewhere ahead of him on this road, riding with a woman familiar with its hazards, who could drive it faster than could Leaphorn. Leaphorn remembered once again the face of Lynch grinning as he set Leaphorn up for the kill. He thought of the shepherd’s dogs savaged by the animal Lynch had with him. This was what Theodora Adams was going to meet. Leaphorn jolted the carryall over a boulder faster than he should have, heard the bottom grate against stone, and cursed aloud in Navajo. As he braked the carryall to a halt, he became aware that something was in the vehicle with him.

Some sense of motion, or unexplained sound, reached him. He unsnapped the holding strap over his pistol, drew the hammer quietly back to the half-cocked position, palmed it, and spun in the seat.

Nothing. He peered over the back of the seat, the pistol ready. On the floor, cushioned by his sleeping bag, lay Theodora Adams. “I hope you didn’t get stuck,” she said. “That’s what happened to me— butanging over the rocks like that.” Leaphorn flicked on the dome light and stared down at her, saying nothing. Surprise was replaced by anger, and this was quickly diluted by relief. Theodora Adams was safe enough. “I told you we had a rule against riders,” Leaphorn said. She pulled herself from the floor to the back seat, shook her head to untangle the mass of blond hair. “I didn’t have any choice.

That woman wouldn’t take me. And that old man told me you were going out here anyway.”

“Mcginnis?” Theodora Adams shrugged. “Mcginnis.

Whatever his name is. So there wasn’t any reason for me not to come along.” It was a statement that could be argued, but not answered.

Leaphorn rarely argued. He considered his impulse to order her out of the carryall, to be picked up on his way back. The impulse died quickly, anger overcome by the need to know why she was going to the Tso hogan. Her eyes were an unusually deep blue, or perhaps the color was accentuated by the unusual clarity of the whiteness that surrounded the iris. They were eyes that would not be stared down, which fixed on Leaphorn’s eyes—unabashed, arrogant, slightly amused.

“Get in the front seat,” Leaphorn said. He didn’t want her behind him. They jolted through the boulder field in silence and onto the smoother going of a long sandstone slope. Theodora Adams dug into her purse, extracted a folded square of notepaper and smoothed it on the leg of her pants. It was a pencil-drawn map. “About where are we?” Leaphorn turned up the dash light and peered at it. “About here, ” he said. He was conscious of her thigh under his fingertip.

Exactly, he knew, as she knew he would be. “About ten miles?”

“About twenty.”

“So we’ll be there pretty soon?”

“No,” Leaphorn said, “we won’t.” He down-geared the carryall over a hump of stone. The carryall rolled into the shadow of an outcrop, making her reflection suddenly visible on the inside of the windshield. She was watching him, waiting for the answer to be expanded. “Why not?”

“Because first we’re going to the Cigaret hogan. I’ll talk to Margaret Cigaret. Then we’ll decide whether to go to the Tso hogan.” In fact, there was no reason to reach the Cigaret place before dawn. He had intended to find it and then park for some sleep. “Decide?”

“You’ll tell me what your business is. I’ll decide whether we go on from there.”

“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry if I was rude back there. But you were rude, too. Why don’t we …” She paused. “What’s your name?”

“Joe Leaphorn.”

“Joe,” she said, “my name is Judy Simons, and my friends all call me Judy, and I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”

“Reach into your purse, Miss. Simons, and let me see your driver’s license,” Leaphorn said. He pushed the handbag toward her. “I don’t have it with me,” she said. Leaphorn’s right hand fished deftly into the handbag, extracted a fat blue leather wallet. “Put that back.”

Her voice was icy. “You don’t have any right to do that.” The driver’s license was in the first plastic cardholder. The face that stared from the square was the face of the woman beside him, the smile appealing even when directed at the license bureau camera. The name was Theodora Adams. Leaphorn flipped the wallet shut and pushed it back into the handbag. “Okay,” she said. “It’s none of your business, but I’ll tell you why I’m going to the Tso place.” The carryall tilted over the sloping stone. She clutched the door to keep from sliding down the seat against him. “But you’ll have to promise to take me there.” She waited for an answer, staring at him expectantly. Leaphorn said nothing. “I have a friend. A Navajo. He’s been having a lot of trouble.” Leaphorn glanced at her. Her smile disparaged her good Samaritan role. “You know. Getting his head together. So he decided to come home. And I decided I would come out and help him.” The voice stopped, the silence inviting comment.

Leaphorn shifted again to cope with another steep slope. “What’s his name?”

“Tso. He’s Hosteen Tso’s grandson. The old man wanted him to come to see him.”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said. But was this grandson also Frederick Lynch? Was he Goldrims? Leaphorn was almost certain he was.

“Joe,” she said. Her fingertip touched his leg. “You could drop me off at the Tso place and talk to Mrs. Cigaret on the way home. It won’t take any longer.”

“I’ll think about it,” Leaphorn said. Mrs. Cigaret probably wasn’t home. And whatever Margaret Cigaret could tell him seemed trivial against the thought of confronting Goldrims- -of taking the man who had tried, so gleefully, to kill him. “Is he expecting you?”