Leaning Land (9 page)

“Sharon? Who with? Who said that?”

“Did you ever hear of anything between her and Jesse Herrera?”

“Herrera? Hell, no. I don’t know him that good—he’s new around here. But Sharon wouldn’t do anything like that. I don’t think, anyway.” He frowned at something on the horizon. “Who told you that?”

“Mr. Haydn.”

“Aw, hell—that sawed-off little turd. You don’t want to listen to anything B.J. says about women or much else. He’s been trying to get in Sharon’s pants since Rubin brung her out here. And his chances won’t be much better now Rubin’s dead.”

“How about Herrera’s chances?”

The full jaw swayed slowly as the man chewed. It reminded Wager of a cow. “She’s a widow now. Got to find some way to support herself and them two kids, because the county’s not going to give her much help. But Herrera’s wife might have something to say about it. If there’s anything to it, which—seeing’s who told you about it—I doubt.”

“What about the other two killings—the government men? Any idea who might do something like that?”

The jaw stopped for a long moment and the man’s pale gray eyes, still studying something on the horizon, blinked. “No.”

“What about somebody in the Constitutional Posse?”

The eyes turned to Wager and the jaw moved faster, now, before Stein finally spoke. “I’m a member of that Posse, Mister. And damned proud to be. There’s not a man among them who won’t fight back at anybody who attacks them first.” He spit and rubbed the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “And not one who’d shoot somebody who didn’t. They sure as hell would not shoot somebody in the back, and they would not kill an unarmed man. So if you’re thinking of blaming the Posse for those killings, you’re barking up the wrong tree. And you sure as hell ain’t welcome on my property any more.”

Wager felt the glare of the man’s eyes follow him back to the car.

W
AGER REMINDED HIMSELF
that often the result of being a professional snoop was to cause discombobulation among the local citizenry, and even occasional mild hatred toward the snooper. In itself, that didn’t bother him—Wager could not think of more than one or two people whose attitude toward him he cared much about. The problem was purely tactics: most people—especially tight-mouthed cowboys—didn’t tend to give as much information when they felt they were being pushed. They got hard-jawed and stubborn, like some of the horses they rode, and an interview could turn into a mental or even physical wrestling match where the only thing that counted was to show Wager—the outsider—that being a cop didn’t carry much weight out here. And so far, even though he might be influencing people, Wager certainly wasn’t winning many friends.

He eased the old Plymouth through a stretch of rough pavement and accelerated again. The AM radio could pick up only two stations, one that sounded like an old man speaking a language with a lot of “ah” and “sh” sounds and soft grunts. Navajo, Wager guessed, because it was sort of like the World War II code-talkers he had seen in one of the Marine Corps’ training films. The other was a nasal voice that sang, “While we were waltzing, the heel of your heart stomped on the toe of mine.” It was hard to tell if the singer was happy or sad about that, but it didn’t make much difference; the wailing guitar and voice were only fillers between long advertisements for feed prices, farm and ranch supplies, wedding and birthday catering, used cars and trucks, well drilling and maintenance, auctions, appliance repair services, hunting and fishing centers, dressmaking, large and small animal veterinarians, heavy equipment rental and maintenance, grocery specials, LP gas deliveries to home and shop, automobile and truck repairs, local farm-fresh produce and all the other ways the population scattered thinly across these empty miles scrabbled for a living. Wager finally shut off the radio and listened to the hum of the motor and tires. If you could get some money out of it, do it; if it took money from you, fight it. But money did not seem to be behind the deaths; in fact, aside from the connection with the federal government, there was little to indicate any pattern in the killings: a USGS geologist, an informer, a BLM agent. And then there was an Indian whose murder seemed even less connected to the other three.

The reasons for killing someone, the reasons Wager had usually run across, were several: hatred, greed, mindless terror, a twisted sense of justice, and, most popular and to Wager the most damning, just plain carelessness. Carelessness about the results of one’s acts, carelessness about the worth of another human being. Those usually ranged from drive-by shootings to murder in the course of a robbery. But it wasn’t clear yet which, if any of these, was behind the deaths of Del Ponte or the others. Nor, Wager cautioned himself, should he start getting impatient yet; out here he was a stray dog in a strange neighborhood, and getting things done would take more time than in Denver—to understand, he would have to see wider and read more deeply than he did on his familiar turf. Which, he reminded himself, was why he had volunteered for temporary additional duty in the first place: because he was tired of the routine his work had fallen into. It was only yesterday at this time that his airplane had been circling for a landing, and he’d even taken eight hours out for sleep since then. Besides, there were a lot of people he hadn’t yet talked to, and a lot of facts he had to learn before he could start making things happen.

He passed a wooden sign whose carved, blue-painted letters said “Squaw Point Reservation. Home of the Blue Sky People. Welcome to the Ute Nation. Please Observe Our Laws.” On the map lying open beside him, Wager noted sixteen miles from the boundary line to Dark Mesa Village; he also noted that the quality of the pavement had improved—wider lanes and shoulders, newer road surface, no potholes. And an expensive stock fence now lined both sides of the highway with taut wire and metal posts painted a fresh, bright blue.

Occasional breaks in the fence, protected by cattle guards, opened to dirt roads that wound away into the sagebrush and grass clumps. There were no names tacked up or mailboxes on posts, but he could glimpse houses tucked into draws or against the shelter of low hills and buttes. Some were a single story and boxy, almost square. They looked a lot like the prefab homes found off the reservation. Others were the kind of split level with attached garage that you could see in any subdivision anywhere else. There seemed to be no people around them, but most had a corral of some sort and a few of those held horses that stared off at nothing. Now and then he saw a house with an outbuilding that looked like a low, clay-covered haystack with a stovepipe poking out of the top of its dome and a low door in the round wall. It wasn’t a hogan—Wager knew what the Navajo hogans looked like with their eight straight sides made nine logs high and domed with a clay roof over the octagonal. These looked more like frozen bubbles of clay that had erupted from the red dirt around them, and he guessed they were sweat lodges. Trucks: some shiny and new, many broken in one way or another and sitting forever in the sun. An occasional cottonwood tree, where there was enough underground water to feed one; usually a large, dully white fiberglass tub lifted on a frame beside the house to be filled once every month or so with drinking water from a tank truck. Even now and then a teepee, the kind Wager associated with the Plains Indians who used to wander around the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains—Arapaho, Kiowa, Pawnee. The steeply pointed tent with its inverted cone of poles sprouting out of the top looked somehow alien in this land of no grass and abrupt walls of red rock.

In about ten minutes, he saw the village, three or four miles ahead, a scatter of tiny, low buildings half hidden along a tree-marked watercourse and spreading a little way up the side of the stone face of a mesa. Other mesas—some big enough on top to graze cattle, others standing like broken smokestacks—dotted the heat-wavered glare of the treeless desert. Unlike many of the surrounding ones, this wide mesa was capped with a band of black rock—lava, maybe—that spilled in tongues from its irregular lip down a face of red, yellow, and white striations. Along its rim and against a hard, blue sky, a dark green fringe of cedar and Douglas fir made the stripe of black rock look wider and thus, Wager patted himself on the back, the name: Dark Mesa.

Here and there, in the draws and beside washes that had begun to cut the dry plain into rough, cedar-dotted desert were more of the boxy houses. Government issue and made on a standard plan, some were nestled among outbuildings while others stood stark and isolated, bleak and fragile, unprotected from the sun or the wind. As the highway widened into the main street of the village, he passed a platted subdivision of the houses, uniform in color and design and with a regularity that reminded Wager of the quarters on a military base. But unlike a military base, their upkeep varied; some of the quarters were neat and even had a few struggling flowers planted in the shade near their foundations; others, despite looking new, were already sagging and chipped and unkempt. A few were boarded up and empty.

Along the highway, which now formed the village street, each building wanted to be by itself. Widely spaced, they were separated by weedy stretches of earth or by broad sandy parking areas. The most modern buildings were a gas station with its convenience store, and a sprawling cast-concrete box with a flat roof and a sign naming it TRIBAL HEADQUARTERS. Half a dozen pickup trucks were parked in front of that, many with slatted wooden sides framing the truck bed as a pen for carrying livestock.

He slowly drove past an old-style adobe building, flat with roof poles sticking out like fingers just below its rim. It was fronted by an American flag and a cast-concrete sign saying BUREAU OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR. Then a large prefab building with a wide and sun-scorched gravel parking lot and its sign: DARK MESA CLINIC. A smaller building off to the side was labeled ALCOHOL ABUSE CENTER. A few hundred yards down from that, a similar prefab building, which had a taller flagpole with a bigger American flag, was what Wager looked for: DARK MESA JUSTICE CENTER. Across the street, sitting by itself on half a block of weedy sand, was a small brick post office, brand new, with a wide, glaringly white concrete walk leading from the road’s unpaved shoulder to its shiny aluminum-frame door.

Wager pulled his car into the justice center’s parking lot and plodded through the baking heat to mount the four concrete steps toward the double doors of glass. A painted directory listed the offices inside: TRIBAL COURT, LEGAL RECORDS AND PERMITS, TRIBAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS. The last was left, down a corridor leading off from the cool and shadowy lobby.

“Yessir? Help you?” A young woman—black hair, black eyes, smooth round face—looked up from the computer screen on her desk behind the service counter. The rest of the small office held a table and transmitter, three tall metal filing cabinets, and the inevitable bulletin board cluttered with notices and messages. The cleric wore a dark denim vest over what to Wager looked like a white, short-sleeved muscle shirt. It didn’t show any muscles, but what it did show caught his eye and said “fashion magazine” more than “Indian reservation” or even “police headquarters.”

Wager leaned on the counter and dangled his ID over his forefinger. “I’m investigating the death of Rubin Del Ponte. I’d like to talk with any of your officers who could give me information about him or his family.”

She glanced at Wager’s photograph and pushed her chair back on its squealing rollers. The heels of her cowboy boots, peeking from under the narrow legs of her nicely rounded Levi’s, thumped hollowly across the floor as she went to a partition and leaned around it. Wager couldn’t hear what she said, but a moment later she looked his way and nodded. “Ray says he might be able to help you.”

Ray was about Wager’s height and build but at least twenty years younger. He had a last name, but Wager hadn’t caught it clearly—something like “cantaloupe,” but there was no name-plate on his desk that spelled it.

“Rubin Del Ponte? Sheriff Spurlock finally find out something about his death?” On one light brown wall hung a collection of diplomas and certificates bearing the policeman’s name: Ray Qwana’tua. One certified in ornate script that he had completed the requirements for a bachelor of science degree in criminal justice from Ft. Lewis State College. Another not quite so fancy told the world that he had “Achieved a Certificate in Managerial Sciences.” A smaller one simply stated that he had completed the course of study for the crime scene search and physical evidence program at the FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia. Above them and head high was a rack of deer horns with a canteen dangling by its strap from one point. The other wall held large displays; two were a pair of scheduling charts covered with acetate and marked with grease pencil. A stained wipe rag hung on a string between them. Another large sheet was a detailed topographical map of the reservation and surrounding land. It, too, was covered with acetate and ready for the grease pencil.

“No. He turned it over to me. I’m from Denver Homicide. CBI sent me out to work with the sheriff.” Wager accepted the single straight-backed chair the Indian officer gestured toward. Through the open window over the man’s shoulder, Wager could look across the fenced police parking lots into a backyard of one of the military-style houses. Like Sharon Del Ponte’s yard, it held a brightly colored kiddy gym, but no child clambered up its sun-heated steel bars. “I’d like to interview members of his family—see if they might be able to tell me anything about him.”

Ray’s black eyes watched Wager’s face. Some bad acne had pitted his brown cheeks. He had straight black hair trimmed close at the sides and neck but long on top. Like the office secretary, he wore mostly ranch clothing: Levi’s, probably cowboy boots—though Wager couldn’t see them when the man had stood for a brief and light handshake—olive-colored uniform shirt with a black-and-yellow shoulder patch that said Squaw Point Reservation Tribal Police. He waited until he was certain Wager had finished speaking. “Luther Del Ponte, Rubin’s half brother. They were closest, anyway, more than with his half sisters or stepmother. Luther lives over in Narraguinnep Wash. You want to talk to him?”