The Sinister Pig - 15 (8 page)

Chee had wanted this conversation to be very simple. He would explain his law enforcement puzzle with his former supervisor, seek his opinion on what caused an apparently unusually fierce federal interest in a Visa card, and so forth. He hoped to arouse Leaphorn’s interest and thus lead the Legendary Lieutenant into using his famed legendary network of good old boy cops to get some questions answered. Finally, and most important, he wanted to tell Leaphorn about a letter he’d received from Bernie this morning. It had included some photos that were not only worrisome, but might offer a legitimate reason for Chee to send himself down into the New Mexico bootheel to visit Bernie. It seemed to Chee that having Professor Bourbonette listening in on that would be sort of embarrassing.

But even as he was thinking this, the aroma of roasting lamb chops reached him from the kitchen. A prospect of a decent meal made this possible complication easy to tolerate.

“It’s true,” Leaphorn was saying. “We’re finally getting the thunderheads and the lightning, but the rains are way overdue. Anyway, I’ll bet weather’s not what you’re thinking about.”

“Well, no,” Chee said.

“I’d guess it’s that homicide you had up in the Checkerboard Reservation. You have an identification yet of the victim?”

Chee laughed. “I don’t. But if his name isn’t Carl Mankin, then we have two crimes instead of one. I was [69] hoping you’d tell me what’s being talked about by your law enforcement friends over the morning doughnuts.”

Leaphorn looked surprised. He was sitting in his living room recliner, feet on the ottoman, TV on but just a background murmur. Now Leaphorn leaned forward and clicked off the set, looked at Chee, said: “They haven’t told you yet?”

“Nope.”

“Well, now,” Leaphorn said. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

Chee nodded. “Told me what?”

“Well, I hear the victim was shot in the back. He was well dressed. No identification on him. Body left in the sage few yards from one of those dirt oil field roads. No vehicle around. Then a few days later, I heard the case was taken away from the Gallup and Farmington agents— not to Albuquerque and Phoenix, but all the way to Washington. A little later I heard the Jicarilla Apache cops had found a rented car abandoned somewhere on their reservation and took some prints off of it. Then the federals wouldn’t tell them whether or not the prints matched anybody. That about right?”

Chee nodded. “Pretty close. Except when I called Dulce about it, they gave me Sergeant Dungae, and he said the car seemed to have been wiped down and they just got some marginal partials here and there.”

Leaphorn took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “Guy named Ed Franklin used to be supervising agent out here. I think he was before your time. He told me that old J. Edgar Hoover used to tell his people, ‘Knowledge is power and be damn careful who you share it with.’ Who are you working with? You getting the silent treatment?”

[70] “His name’s Osborne,” Chee said. “And actually, he’s pretty good. I think he’s been told to be ... uh, let’s call it discreet. I doubt if he knows much more than I do. For example, both the credit card and the rental car connect to an outfit in El Paso. But the El Paso FBI office isn’t telling Osborne what they found out about Mankin there.”

Leaphorn made a wry face.

Chee described the stakeout at the Huerfano Trading Post and the adventures with the credit card. “I figured Washington must have had an eye on this card number or those purchases wouldn’t have been caught so fast. Osborne wouldn’t talk about it.”

“Probably they haven’t told him either,” Leaphorn said. He considered this a moment, shook his head. “What I hear is that the top Bureau people in Albuquerque and Phoenix were sort of encouraged to quit asking about the identity of the dead fellow. The gossips say they were told to lose interest in whose prints were on the car, about who picked up the body at the morgue. Told just to work on other cases. Washington would handle this one.”

Chee nodded.

“That doesn’t seem to surprise you,” Leaphorn said. He laughed. “I didn’t really think it would.”

“I went to First National in Farmington. Have an account there,” Chee said. Asked a cashier friend to check on a Visa card held by Carl Mankin. Gave him the number and all that. He called me the next day, asked me what the hell I was getting him into. About two hours after he made the inquiry an FBI agent showed up at his office. He wanted to know why he was asking about Mankin’s card.”

“And then the FBI came to see you?”

[71] Now Chee chuckled. “They didn’t have to. It was Osborne. He knew exactly what I was up to.”

“Pretty slick,” Leaphorn said, looking somber.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you knew that if that Visa inquiry call rattled the federal chains in Washington it would confirm your suspicions.”

“Which ones?”

Leaphorn held up a finger. “First, that the body left in the sage brush was the fellow who owned the credit card dumped way over there on the Jicarilla Reservation. And, second, that some sort of cover-up was going on.”

Chee made a deprecatory face. “Circumstantial evidence, anyway. But what’s being covered up?”

“I’d call it awfully strong circumstantial evidence,” Leaphorn said. He was frowning, leaning forward in his chair. “They’ll have checked that wallet you found for prints by now. Osborne wouldn’t tell you if they found any that matched the body?”

“I doubt they told Osborne,” Chee said, aware that Professor Bourbonette had been standing in the kitchen doorway, listening to all this. “It’s not Osborne’s case any longer,” he said, sort of explaining it to her. Then laughed. “It never was Chee’s case.”

“Are you gentlemen ready to join me for lunch?” she asked, stood aside, and invited them to the table. “You haven’t asked my opinion,” Louisa said as she sat down, “but if you had I would recommend to Jim that he just be happy Great White Father in Washington wants to do his work for him. And Joe should be happy he’s retired and it’s none of his business.”

“Come on, Louisa,” Leaphorn said. “Don’t tell me [72] you’re not curious about this. Who is this homicide victim? Why the secrecy?”

“Can I guess? He was a special agent looking into something politically touchy. Instead of having a media circus about his assassination out here, raising all sorts of questions, the U.S. Attorney General decides just to ship him home, have the proper people announce that he died suddenly of stroke, and funeral services will be held next week.”

“Could be,” Leaphorn said. “But how about the hard part. What was the touchy business he was looking into?”

Louisa considered that a moment while she passed the pepper shaker to Chee.

“How about that big lawsuit some of the tribes are filing against the Department of the Interior, claiming the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been stealing from their trust fund since about 1880?”

“You wouldn’t find any clues to that out here,” Leaphorn said. “You’d be digging into dusty filing cabinets in accounting offices. Stuff like that. The stealing was probably done in the way oil and natural gas—and maybe coal— ‘ was accounted when it was taken from tribal lands.”

“Maybe he was checking records out here,” Chee said. “His body was found out in oil and gas territory.”

Louisa welcomed this support with a nod. “And don’t forget that the Four Corners field is the biggest source of natural gas in North America. Billions of bucks going down the pipelines.”

Chee swallowed a bite of lamb chop and cut off another. “Maybe this guy was looking for ways the gas gauges are fixed to record the right kind of misleading information,” he said. “Maybe he found it.”

[73] This produced a thoughtful silence. Chee extracted Bernie’s letter from his pocket.

“From Bernie Manuelito,” he said, and spread the photos she’d sent on the table. “She’s with the Border Patrol now, learning how to track illegals.”

“Joe told me about that,” Louisa said, giving Chee a look that was both curious and sympathetic. “I’ll bet you miss her.”

Chee, not knowing exactly what to say, said: “Bernie was a good cop,” and pushed the most interesting picture toward Leaphorn. “She said she took this on that old Brockman Ranch, way down south of Lordsburg. Rich guy named Tuttle bought it. He’s trying to get a herd of North African mountain goats started down there. Ibex, I think they are. Or maybe oryx.”

Leaphorn studied it. Louisa was examining another one. “Some of them on the slope here,” she said. “Oryx is right, but they’re not goats. They’re a breed of antelope.”

“What am I looking for in this?” Leaphorn asked.

“Notice the sign on the trailer behind the truck. ‘Seamless Welds.’ ”

“Yeah. I see it.”

“Our homicide victim listed El Paso Seamless Welds as his company on the rental agreement,” Chee said.

Leaphorn looked at the photo again, said: “Well, now,” and handed it to Louisa.

“Another thing about this, I did some checking and called the Seamless Weld company in El Paso. The guy they referred me to there said they didn’t have anyone working named Mankin. Hadn’t rented him a car.”

Another thoughtful silence. Louisa broke it.

“I’m thinking that if Joe had his map here he’d be [74]measuring the distance from that exotic animal ranch to where you found the rented car,” she said. “A couple of hundred miles, I guess, and he’d be drawing a line between them, and another line back to Washington, and trying to make some connections.”

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But I think I’d call Bernie about the car rental agreement and Seamless Weld.”

“I will,” Chee said.

Professor Bourbonette smiled at him. “I think you should drive down there and discuss it with her.”

When Customs Service District Supervisor Ed Henry was a seventh grader in Denver he’d found a way intelligence and technical skills could augment income. His mother gave him a daily quarter for the pay phone at the bus stop outside Aspen Middle School. He’d call her at the laundry where she worked. If her duties kept her overtime, he’d take the city bus home and get supper started. Otherwise he’d do his homework at the bus stop until she picked him up.

To Henry this phone call had seemed a needless expense. Henry avoided it by drilling a hole through his quarter in shop class and threading a copper wire through it. With practice, he perfected the system. Drop the quarter in the slot, hear the sound of it being registered, then quickly pull it out for repeated use.

At first this merely saved Henry his quarters. But when another kid saw what he was doing, Henry used the [76] same system to give the boy a free call. From that came the idea of cashing in on his wait beside the telephone booth, serving other students who showed up to call home. Henry charged a dime per call, thereby saving the customer fifteen cents.

When Henry’s mother inquired about his new affluence he explained it. She rated it questionable, but as only American Telephone and Telegraph was the loser, her only instruction to Ed was to be careful, keep his mouth shut, and not overdo it.

An academic scholarship took Ed Henry to a smallish college in one of those Texas counties that continued to prohibit alcoholic beverages under the state’s local option law. Telephones there made the coin-recovery business impossible, but it was far more profitable to drive his old car across the county line, fill the whiskey orders from fraternity and sorority students, and deliver the bottles to prearranged hiding places under bushes. Following his mother’s “be careful” advice, Henry had discreetly approached the appropriate police captain and arranged a system of splitting the profits. That plan left him enough to make his car payments and send a little home to augment his mother’s income—which was failing along with her health.

This eventually led Ed Henry to the U.S. Customs Service, the Border Patrol, and to where he sat in his office this particular morning going through the personnel file of Bernadette Manuelito, his newest charge, and wondering if he had any reason to be worried about her. His mother’s stroke had forced Henry to drop out of college, but his flawless performance of his end of the deal with the police captain had earned him an enthusiastic [77] recommendation from the captain to a friend in a Denver area juvenile detention system. Henry became a reformatory officer, moved from that to a sheriff’s deputy job, and from that to the Customs Service—each time helped along by recommendations from superiors who appreciated his diligence, his intelligence, his reliability, and his talent for getting along with everyone. As the sheriff had said in his letter to Customs Service: “Mr. Henry honestly likes people. He enjoys helping folks and it pays off in their cooperation.”

Which was true. Ed Henry liked Bernadette Manuelito from the very first, an intelligent, levelheaded young woman a bit like his own daughter. She had a lot to learn about border patrolling, but she would learn fast, being energetic and eager. Maybe a wee bit too eager, Ed Henry was thinking. His bedside telephone had rung just a few minutes after sevena.m., which would be just a little after nine in Washington, or maybe New York. It was The Man, and The Man had sounded grim.