Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 07] (3 page)

It was decorated in a hundred places with colored pins, each color representing its own sort of crime. It was inscribed in a hundred places with notes written in Leaphorn's cryptic shorthand. The notes reminded Leaphorn of information he'd accumulated in a lifetime of living on the reservation and half a lifetime of working it as a cop. The tiny
q
west of Three Turkey Ruins meant quicksand in Tse Des Zygee Wash. The
r
beside the road to Ojleto on the Utah border (and beside dozens of other such roads) recalled spots where rainstorms made passage doubtful. The
c's
linked with family initials marked the sites of summer sheep camps along the mountain slopes. Myriad such reminders freckled the map.
W's
marked places where witchcraft incidents had been reported.
B's
marked the homes of bootleggers.

The notes were permanent, but the pins came and went with the ebb and flow of misbehavior. Blue ones marked places where cattle had been stolen. They disappeared when the cattle thief was caught driving a truckload of heifers down a back road. Gaudy rashes of scarlet, red, and pink ones (the colors Leaphorn attached to alcohol-related crimes) spread and subsided inside the reservation with the fate of bootleggers. They made a permanent rosy blotch around reservation border towns and lined the entrance highways. Markers for rapes, violent assaults, family mayhem, and other, less damaging, violent losses of control tended to follow and mingle with the red. A few pins, mostly on the reservation's margins, marked such white-man crimes as burglary, vandalism, and robbery. At the moment, Leaphorn was interested only in three brown pins with white centers. They marked his homicides.

Homicides were unusual on the reservation. Violent death was usually accidental: a drunk stumbling in front of a passing car, drunken fights outside a bar, an alcohol-primed explosion of family tensions—the sort of unpremeditated violence that lends itself to instant solutions. When brown-and-white pins appeared, they rarely remained more than a day or two.

Now there were three. And they'd been stuck in Leaphorn's corkboard, and in his consciousness, for weeks. In fact, the oldest had been there almost two months.

Irma Onesalt was her name—pin number one. Leaphorn had stuck it beside the road between Upper Greasewood and Lukachukai fifty-four days ago. The bullet that killed her was a 30-06, the second most popular caliber in the world and the one that hung on the rifle rack across the rear window of every third pickup truck on the reservation, and around it. Everybody seemed to own one, if they didn't own a 30-30. And sometimes even if they did. Irma Onesalt, born to the Bitter Water Clan, born for the Towering House People, daughter of Alice and Homer Onesalt, thirty-one years old, unmarried, agent of the Navajo Office of Social Services, found in the front seat of her overturned Datsun two-door, hit in the jaw and throat by a bullet that smashed through the driver's-side window and, after destroying her, lodged in the opposite door. They had found a witness, more or less and maybe. A student from the Toadlena Boarding School had been enroute home to visit her parents. She had noticed a man—an old man, she'd said—sitting in a pickup truck parked about where the shot would have been fired from. That theory presumed that Irma Onesalt had lost control of the Datsun the moment she'd been hit. Leaphorn had seen the body. It seemed a safe presumption.

Pin two, two weeks later, represented Dugai Endocheeney, born to the Mud People, born for the Streams Come Together Clan. Maybe seventy-five, maybe seventy-seven, depending on whom you believed. Stabbed (the butcher knife left in his body) at the sheep pen behind his hogan on the Nokaito Bench, not far from where Chinle Creek runs into the San Juan River. Dilly Streib, the agent in charge, had said there was an obvious connection between pin one and pin two. "Onesalt didn't have any friends, and Endocheeney didn't have any enemies," Dilly had said. "Somebody is working from both ends. Going to keep knocking off good ones and bad ones until there's nothing left but the middle."

"Just us average ones," Leaphorn said.

Streib had laughed. "I think he'll get to you pretty quick, on the obnoxious end."

Delbert L. Streib wasn't your usual FBI agent. It had always seemed to Leaphorn, who had spent a tour at the FBI Academy and half his life running errands for the Agency, that Streib was smarter than most. He had a quick, innovative intelligence, which had made him a terrible misfit in the J. Edgar Hoover years and got him exiled to Indian country. But Streib, whose case it was since it was a homicide committed on a federal reservation, had drawn a blank on Onesalt. And on Endocheeney. And so had Leaphorn.

When he had seen Leaphorn's map, Streib had argued that pin two should be pin three. And maybe he was right. Leaphorn had assigned the third pin to Wilson Sam, born to the One Walks Around Clan, and born for the Turning Mountain People. The late Mr. Sam was fifty-seven, a herder of sheep who sometimes worked on Arizona Highway Department grader crews. He had been hit on the back of the neck with the blade of a shovel, so very, very hard that there was no question he had died instantly. But there was a question of when he had been hit. Sam's nephew had found the victim's sheepdog, voiceless from howling and half dead from thirst, sitting on the rim of Chilchinbito Canyon. Wilson Sam's body was on the canyon floor below—apparently dragged to the edge and tumbled over. The autopsy suggested a time of death about the same as Endocheeney's. So who died first? Anyone's guess. Again, no witnesses, no clues, no apparent motive, not much of anything except the negative fact that if the coroner was right, it would have been very difficult for the same man to have killed them both.

"Unless he was a skinwalker," Dilly Streib had said, looking somber, "and you guys are right about skinwalkers being able to fly, and outrun turbocharged pickup trucks, and so forth."

Leaphorn didn't mind Streib kidding him, but he didn't like anyone kidding him about witches. He hadn't laughed.

Remembering it now, he still didn't laugh. He sighed, scratched his ear, shifted in the chair. Staring at the map today took him exactly where it had taken him the last time he tried it. One pin was a Window Rock pin, relatively speaking. The first one. The next two were out-in-the-boondocks pins.

The first victim was a bureaucrat, younger, female, more sophisticated. Shot. The last two were men who had followed their flocks, traditional people, probably spoke little English, killed at close quarters. Did he have two separate cases? So it would seem. In the Window Rock case, premeditation—rarity of rarities on the reservation—was obvious. In the boondocks cases, it was possible but didn't look probable. A shovel hardly seemed a likely weapon of choice. And if you were determined to kill someone, most Navajos Leaphorn knew could take along an easier weapon than a butcher knife.

Leaphorn thought about his cases separately. He got nowhere. He thought about them as a trio. Same results. He isolated the Onesalt killing, considered everything they had learned about the woman. Mean as a snake, it seemed. People hesitated to bad-mouth the dead, but they had trouble finding good to say about Irma. No, Irma was a busybody. Irma was a militant. Irma was an angry young woman. Irma made trouble. As far as he could learn, she had no jilted lovers. In fact, the only one who seemed to mourn her aside from her immediate family was a longtime and apparently devoted live-in boyfriend—a schoolteacher at Lukachukai. Leaphorn always suspected devoted boyfriends in homicide cases. But this one had been standing in front of twenty-eight students talking about math when Onesalt was killed.

The mail arrived. Without breaking his concentration on the problem, idly, he sorted through it, mind still on Onesalt. Two telexes from the FBI were on top of the stack. The first one contained the details of the Jim Chee affair. He read the telex quickly. Nothing much new. Chee had not given chase. Chee said he had no idea who might have fired the shots. Tracks left by size seven rubber-soled running shoes had been found adjoining the trailer. They led about four hundred yards to a point where a vehicle had been parked. Tracks indicated worn tires. Drippage where vehicle had parked indicated either a lengthy stay or a serious oil leak.

Leaphorn set the message aside, expression glum. Again, no motive. But there was a motive, of course. When someone tries to ambush a cop there is a strong motive, and the motive tends to be unpleasant. Well, Chee was Captain Largo's boy, and finding out what Officer Chee was doing to provoke such a reaction would be Largo's problem.

The second telex reported that Agent Jay Kennedy of the Farmington office would this date locate and interrogate subject Roosevelt Bistie in connection with the Dugai Endocheeney homicide. Two witnesses had been located who placed a vehicle owned by Bistie at the Endocheeney hogan at the time of the killing. Another witness indicated that the driver of the vehicle had said he intended to kill Endocheeney. Any officer with any information about subject Roosevelt Bistie was asked to contact Agent Kennedy.

Leaphorn turned the paper over and looked at the back. Blank, of course. He glanced at the map, mentally removing the Endocheeney pin. The triangle of unsolved crimes became a line—two dots and no real reason to link them. It looked suddenly as if his rash of homicides were, in fact, coincidences. Two unsolved was a hell of a lot better than three. And perhaps Bistie would also prove to be the Wilson Sam killer. That seemed logical. The lives of the two men might be linked in many ways. Leaphorn felt much better. Order was returning to his world.

The telephone buzzed.

"This is your day for politicians, Lieutenant," the desk clerk said. "Dr. Yellowhorse wants to talk to you."

Leaphorn tried to think of some workable reason to justify not seeing Dr. Yellowhorse, who was a tribal councilman representing the Badwater Chapter and a member of the Tribal Council Judiciary Committee, as well as a doctor. And who, as a doctor, was founder and chief of medical staff of the Badwater Clinic.

No reason occurred to Leaphorn. "Tell him to come up," he said.

"I think he's already up," the clerk said.

Leaphorn's office door opened.

Dr. Bahe Yellowhorse was a barrel of a man. He wore a black felt reservation hat with a silver-and-turquoise band and a turkey feather. A closely braided rope of hair hung, Sioux fashion, behind each ear, the end of each tied with a red string. The belt that held his jeans over his broad, flat belly was two inches wide, studded with turquoise and buckled with a sand-cast silver replica of Rainbow Man curved around the symbol of Father Sun.

"
Ya-tah
," said Yellowhorse, grinning. But the grin looked mechanical.

"
Ya-tah-hey
," Leaphorn said. "Have a ch—"

"Going to have a meeting of Judicial Committee this afternoon," Yellowhorse said, easing himself into the chair across from Leaphorn's desk. "My people want me to talk to the committee about doing something to catch that fellow that killed Hosteen Endocheeney."

Yellowhorse dug in the pocket of his denim shirt and dug out a package of cigarets, giving Leaphorn an opportunity to comment. Leaphorn didn't. Old Man Endocheeney had been a resident of that great sprawl of Utah-Arizona borderlands included in the Badwater Chapter. Leaphorn didn't want to discuss the case with Tribal Councilman Bahe Yellowhorse.

"We're working on it," he said.

"That means you're not getting nowhere."
said Yellowhorse. "You having any luck at all?"

"The FBI has jurisdiction," Leaphorn said, thinking that this was his day for telling people what they already knew. "Felony committed on federal trust land comes under—"

Yellowhorse held up a huge brown hand. "Save it," he said. "I know how it works. The feds don't know anything unless you guys tell 'em. You finding out who killed Endocheeney? I need to know something to tell my people back at the chapter house."

He leaned back in the wooden chair, extracted a cigaret from the package, and tapped its filtered end uselessly against his thumbnail, eyes on Leaphorn.

Leaphorn considered his police academy conditioning against ever telling anybody anything about anything, weighed it against common sense. Yellowhorse was sometimes an unusually severe pain in the ass, but he did have a legitimate interest. Beyond that, Leaphorn admired the man and respected what he was trying to do. Bahe Yellowhorse, born to the Dolii Dinee, the Blue Bird People of his mother. But he had no paternal clan. His father was an Oglala Sioux. Yellowhorse had founded the Bad Water Clinic mostly with his own money. True, there was a big Kellogg Foundation grant in it, and some other foundation money, and some federal funds. But from what Leaphorn knew, most of the money, and all of the energy, had come from Yellowhorse himself.

"You can tell them we have a suspect in the Endocheeney homicide," Leaphorn said. "Witnesses put him at the hogan at the right time. Expect to pick him up today and talk to him."

"You got the right fellow?" Yellowhorse asked. "He have a motive?"

"We haven't talked to him," Leaphorn said. "We're told he said he wanted to kill Endocheeney, so you can presume a motive."

Yellowhorse shrugged. "How about the other killing? Whatever his name was?"

"We don't know," Leaphorn said. "Maybe they're connected."

"Your suspect," Yellowhorse said. He paused, put the cigaret between his lips, lit it with a silver lighter, and exhaled smoke. "He another one of my constituents?"

"Seems to live up in the Lukachukais. Long way from your country."

Yellowhorse stared at Leaphorn, waiting for further explanation. None came. He inhaled smoke again, held it in his lungs, let it trickle from his nostrils. He extracted the cigaret and came just close enough to pointing it at Leaphorn to imply the insult without delivering it. Navajos do not point at one another.

"You guys s'posed to be out of the religion business, aren't you? Since the court cracked down on you for hassling the peyote people?"

Leaphorn's dark face turned a shade darker. "We haven't been arresting anyone for possession of peyote for years," Leaphorn said. He had been very young when the Tribal Council had passed its ill-fated law banning the use of hallucinogens, a law openly aimed at suppressing the Native American Church, which used peyote as a sacrament. He hadn't liked the law, had been glad when the federal court ruled it violated the First Amendment, and he didn't like to be reminded of it. He especially didn't like to be reminded of it in this insulting way by Yellowhorse.