Threepersons Hunt (11 page)

“When did that happen?”

“I don't know, several years ago.”

“Before or after Calisher died?”

“I'm sure I couldn't tell you.”

LaSalle had a vivid imagination fueled by the excitement of forbiden fantasies. He was typical of a good many missionaries Beneath his theatricality was a curious undercurrent of fear—perhaps an unhappy fear that his own failures were too obvious.

“If he came back here,” Watchman said after a bit, “where would he go?”

“To hide, you mean. Well I'm sure I couldn't say. Of course there are a lot of shirttail relations—the clan structures being what they are. He has a sister here, you might try there.”

“I plan to. Did he have any close friends his own age?”

“Not many who are still here. The younger ones tend to drift away. The old women are constantly complaining about it, how the young men have forgotten how to carry baskets for their relatives. It's only a saying, of course, but it holds a great deal of meaning.”

“I know.”

“More than half the young people move off the reservations nowadays. They work in non-Indian jobs.”

Watchman was one of those; he didn't press the point. “His wife's family is still down on the San Carlos, is that right?”

“I suppose so. I doubt they'd be much help to you. They weren't on good terms. At any rate an Apache isn't allowed to talk to his mother-in-law except through an intermediary—he must avoid her, never be in the same house or even be caught looking at her. They still keep these customs, you know, even though we keep trying to enlighten them.”

Watchman covered a smile. It was becoming more apparent that LaSalle didn't realize he was an Indian. Perhaps he was so accustomed to looking at Indian faces that he no longer made the distinctions. Watchman's state-police identification had triggered all the reflex associations; and LaSalle was a man of fundamentalist faith, disinclined to exercise any curiosity.

“There is one young man still in Whiteriver who used to be friendly with him. Not a very savory boy, I'm sure. He's called Oto, Jimmy Oto.”

Tom Victorio had mentioned the name. Watchman said, “He works in town?”

“I don't think he works at all. Welfare case. He married a girl from the
Twagaidn
clan—they live in that cluster of wickiups several miles northeast of town. It's a poor section, even for this place.”

“Were they close enough friends for Joe to go to him for help now?”

“They were like this when they were schoolboys.” LaSalle held up two fingers overlapped together. “They were always up to their ears in horrible pranks. I had to discipline the two of them constantly. But I don't see much of Jimmy any more, and I'm sure I couldn't say whether they're still as close as they were. Remember it was more than ten years ago.”

4.

Sunset. The squalls had moved on to the east and the western sky was vivid with a sprawl of color. He crunched into the parking space in front of the trading post and saw Dwight Kendrick rolling forward from the council house in his grey Corvette. Watchman walked over to the car and Kendrick gave him a civil nod.

“Pretty spectacular sunset,” Watchman said.

“I wouldn't know. I'm color-blind. How are your investigations proceeding?”

“I wouldn't say they were proceeding at all.”

“Well they all tend to develop bad cases of lockjaw with strangers,” the lawyer said blandly.

“The sooner he gives himself up the easier it'll go on him. Somebody ought to tell him that.”

Kendrick smiled coolly. “You're not very subtle, are you. The fact is I haven't seen him and I don't expect to. He'd be an idiot to come back here.”

“I doubt he's got much choice. He doesn't know anyplace else.”

“He was in the Army.”

“Where'd he do his basic training?” Watchman asked without real interest.

“Fort Ord, I believe. But that's a lot of miles from here.”

“He'd know the towns around there, though.”

“It might be worth a try,” Kendrick said. He was gunning his engine; now he put it in gear and Watchman stepped back and watched the Corvette eel into the road.

He bought a sandwich in the trading post and made that his supper and washed it down with a can of ginger ale. From the booth on the porch he put in a station call to Buck Stevens' apartment.

“How's business, Sam?”

“Slow.”

“You coming back?”

“I've still got to talk to his sister. I'll probably overnight in a motel, most likely Showlow.”

“Then I'd better give you what I've got so far. Where are you, pay phone?”

“Yes.”

“I'll call you back so you don't run out of dimes. What's the number?”

Watchman waited for the phone to ring and answered immediately. “Okay, go ahead.”

“Yeah. Item. Maria Threepersons and the kid, Joe Junior. They had it pretty good up in Sunnyslope. I talked to some neighbors and had a look at the house—they didn't lack for first-rate furniture. There's even one of those above-ground swimming pools.”

“Where'd they find that kind of money?”

“I'm trying to find out. Item, she wasn't just a clerk in that curio shop, she ran the place. Manageress, whatever. There's two girls working there now but they don't seem to know who owns the place. Curioser and curioser, right?”

“Go on.”

“She moved to Phoenix right after Joe went to the pen. The curio shop opened right away, with her running it. She was putting up in an apartment court then but it was only a couple months, then she bought the house.”

“Mortgage?”

“I'll find out tomorrow. Anyhow the color TV and stuff came damned quick. You get the picture?”

“Enough. She had a benefactor. Any signs of a boyfriend?”

“The neighbors were a little cagey. they didn't want to look like busybodies, but I got the idea she had some dates with local bachelors. Nothing serious. There was only one steady visitor and he didn't look rich, according to what they told me. An Indian.”

“Apache?”

“Nobody around there ever talked to him beyond hello-how's-the-weather. Most of the neighbors assumed he was some relative of hers, but she never said. Kind of a good-looking guy, drove an old Volkswagen beetle, kind of beat-up, dark blue. No license number, of course, they're not snoops.”

Watchman had seen a car that matched the description. It had been parked in the gravel patch between the trading post and the council house. It wasn't there now. Coincidence? Maybe; there were plenty of blue VWs around.

“The picture I get,” Stevens said on the line, “he was nice looking and he wore pretty good clothes but he didn't look like he was rolling in money. Informant tells me he never spent the night with her. He'd show up evenings maybe once every three, four weeks. Take her out to dinner now and then when she could get a sitter. The kid was in day school up there, by the way. Pretty good school.”

“Private school?”

“Yeah. Now here's the kicker—that blue beetle was parked outside her place the morning she died. Just before she went out and killed herself, he was there. Or at least his car was.”

“Or a car that looked like his.”

“Well sure. But what the hell. Man you better believe I'm trotting this phone bill over to Lieutenant Wilder the minute it comes in. Okay, let's see.… Item. The neighbor saw the beetle take off that morning and it ran the red light at the corner. I just throw that in for free—no extra charge—suspicious character breaking the law left and right.”

“Sounds like he was rattled.” Watchman thought about it and said, “Look, in the morning you call the Phoenix coroner and find out about that autopsy on her.”

“Okay. I'm not finished yet.”

“Then keep going.”

“All right, let's see. Item. Same neighbor-lady told me there was a prowler around Maria's house last night, drove off in a station wagon. Probably Joe Threepersons but she didn't get much of a look. She's got a hell of a nose on her, this woman. Lives right across the street.”

“What did she mean by prowler? Did he break in?”

“Not that she saw. When she saw the guy he was peeking in the windows. Then he drove off.”

“That had to be Joe. All right, what else?”

“That note we got? The anonymous tip? No fingerprints on it. The typewriter's an Olympia manual with pica type. Ordinary kind of paper and all.” Stevens coughed away from the phone and his voice came back: “Thing is, the trail still stops with those stolen horses up there.”

“For all we know he's in Johannesburg. Forty thousand people disappear every year in this country and a lot of them never get found.”

“You sound like you haven't turned up a damn thing up there.”

“You could put it that way,” Watchman said. “It goes that way, they tell me—we're supposed to get used to eating a steady diet of wild goose.”

“Well hang in there, kemo sabe.”

5.

When he opened the phone-booth door it extinguished the interior light and he saw them standing by his car.

Five of them. One was digging around in his mouth with a toothpick. They all looked like delinquents, overage and gone to seed. He recognized one of them, the very big one with a gut on him: he'd seen that one sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck swigging canned beer, down at the horse camp where Joe Threepersons had run off with the herd.

The man was genuinely huge. The skin of his face was suspended from massive cheekbones and he probably weighed 280 pounds, part lard but mainly muscle.

They weren't exactly Nature's noblemen. The big one put the comb away in his pocket and held Watchman's eyes as long as he could without stirring up violence in himself; then the left side of his mouth flicked upward and he glanced at his friend with the toothpick.

It broke the tableau and Watchman started down the porch steps. An engine raced momentarily and to his right he glimpsed a familiar grey pickup truck parked at the roadside. The headlights threw a splash of illumination as far as the gas station but the pickup had only one taillight and that was burnt out.

The big man stirred. He wore a maroon shirt with balloon sleeves and tight chinos on his long legs, cinched up so that his belly made a precarious overhang.

Sicksweet exhaust fumed from the pickup. Watchman walked toward them conscious of the weight of the automatic against his spine, and conscious of how long it would take him to get at it if he had to.

“You want something?”

None of them spoke; neither did they back away. The squat one kept digging at his teeth.

Watchman put his weight on the balls of his feet and flexed his knees a fraction—he wanted to be loose because he might have to move quickly. He said, “If that's your pickup you'd better get that taillight fixed before somebody rear-ends it.”

The big one slid his childishly challenging glance from Watchman's face to his boots and when he had completed that gesture he made a little movement of his left hand, out to one side, and the four men behind him walked away toward the pickup.

The big one said, “
Enju, yutuhu nda.
” It was addressed to Watchman and it wasn't friendly. Having spoken he wheeled slowly toward the pickup. The other four had climbed into its open bed; the big one got inside and smoke spurted from the ramshackle truck.

The breeze tousled his hair. He watched the truck recede, defined in silhouette against the flood of its own headlights. It had been an immature warning; but was it because he was a cop—any cop—or was it because of Joe?

The crumpled folds of the mountains had turned black with shadow. Sky merged with earth along the uncertain twilit horizons. He walked around the Volvo but the hubcaps were intact and the car appeared undisturbed.

It had been an irritating day filled with wasted words but there was a pattern to it like the design of a Chinle blanket and he got into the Volvo and drove up toward the roadhouse in an alert frame of mind because he had a feeling Joe was here. Right around here somewhere.

You didn't explain such feelings; you ignored them or you rode with them. There was more to be learned from what people said than could be found in their words. It was their faces and voices and the way they looked away; it was in the way they used their hands and the way they breathed.

They resented him because he was the outsider but that still left too much out. They were overreacting to him. They were lying to him, almost all of them, and it was because the town had something to hide. Joe, probably. Joe, and something more. If it wasn't guilt it was suspicion, and not all of it was directed at Watchman.

There were layers of secrets; what made it strange was that it was an Indian town—such intrigues were expected in Anglo communities but that was because they weren't real communities, they weren't tribes. Indian skeletons were usually on view to all because there were no closets to hide them in.

But here dark spirits had been stirred up. And he was beginning to sense that if Joe wasn't dug up soon there would be an explosion of violent forces.

He parked in front of the Broken Arrow and grinned at himself for his melodramatic imaginings. But when he got out he locked the car.

6.

They were mainly pickups and dusty Chevys and Fords and that was why he noticed the Volkswagen. He couldn't determine the color in this light but it was a dark shade. He found it unlocked and looked for the registration slip but it wasn't in the car; he made a note of the license number and went into the roadhouse.

The lights were no brighter than before but this time he didn't have to accustom his eyes to a change from bright sunlight. The place was well populated but not overcrowded. The same one-armed bartender and a helper now, and a man at the register in place of Luxan's teen-age daughter. The bartender was very fast, probably faster than most who had two arms—he had to prove something.