Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] (18 page)

“That’s correct,” Chee said.

“Did you know we have prohibited private aircraft flights in that
area?” Cabot said.

“I presumed you had,” Chee said. “That was a good idea. Otherwise,
you’ll have those bounty hunters your reward offer is bringing in tying
up the air-lanes.”

This caused a very brief pause while Cabot decided how to respond to
this—a not very oblique reminder of the gales of laughter the Bureau
had produced in its 1998 fiasco by offering a $250,000 reward one day,
and promptly following that with an exhortation for swarms of bounty
hunters the offer had attracted to please go away. They hadn’t.

Cabot decided to ignore the remark.

“I’ll need the name of the company that was operating this aircraft.”

“No company, actually,” Chee said. “This was a federal-government
helicopter.”

Cabot looked surprised.

“What agency?”

“It was a Department of Energy copter,” Chee said. “I believe it’s
based at the Tonapaw Proving Grounds over in Nevada.”

“Department of Energy? What business do the energy folks have out
here?”

Chee had decided he didn’t much like Special Agent Cabot, or his
attitude, or his well-shined shoes and necktie, or perhaps the fact
that Cabot’s paycheck was at least twice as large as his, plus all
those government perks. He said, “I don’t know.”

Captain Largo glowered at him.

“I understand the Department of Energy had leased the copter to the
EPA,” Chee said, and waited for the next question.

“Ah, let’s see,” said Cabot. “I will rephrase the question so you
can understand it. What are the Environmental Protection people doing
up here?”

“They’re hunting old mines that might be a threat to the
environment,” Chee said. “Mapping them. Didn’t the Bureau know about
that?”

Cabot, used to asking questions and not to answering them, looked
surprised again. He hesitated. Glanced at Captain Largo. Chee glanced at

Largo, too. Largo’s almost-suppressed grin showed that he also knew
what Chee was doing and wasn’t as upset by it as it had seemed a moment
ago.

“I’m sure we did,” Cabot said, slightly flushed. “I’m sure if such
mapping was in any way helpful to us in this case, it would be used.”

Chee nodded. The ball was in the FBI court. He outwaited Cabot, who
glanced at Largo again. Largo had found something interesting to look
at out the window.

“Sergeant Chee,” Cabot said, "Captain Largo told us you had some
reason to suspect this particular mine might be used by the
perpetrators of the Ute Casino robbery. Would you explain that, please?”

This was the moment Chee had dreaded. He could imagine the amused
look on Cabot’s face as he tried to explain that the idea came from a
Ute tribal legend, trying to describe a hero figure who could jump from
canyon bottoms to mesa rims. He took a deep breath and started.

Chee hurried through the relationship of George Ironhand with the
original Ironhand, the account of how the Navajos couldn’t catch the
villain, the notion that since the man was called the Ute name for the
badger he might have—like that animal—a hole to hide in with an exit as
well as an entrance. As Chee had expected, both Cabot and his partner
seemed amused by it. Captain Largo did not appear amused. No suppressed
grin now. His expression was dour. Chee found himself talking faster
and faster.

“So here was the EPA doing its survey, I hitchhiked a ride, and
there it was. The old entrance on a shelf high up on the canyon wall
and above it the ruins of the old surface mine. It made sense,” Chee
said. “I recommended to Captain Largo that it be checked out.”

Cabot was studying him. “Let’s see now,” he said. “You think that
the people digging coal out of the cliff down in the canyon decided to
dig right on up to the top? If I know my geology at all, that would
have them digging through several thick levels of sandstone and all
sorts of other strata. Isn’t that right?”

“Actually, I was thinking more of digging down from the top,” Chee
said.

“Can you describe the old mine structure?” Cabot asked. “The
building?”

“I have pictures of it,” Chee said. “I took my Polaroid camera
along." He handed Cabot two photos of the old structures, one shot from
rim level and one from a higher angle.

Cabot looked at them, then handed them to his partner.

“Is that the one you thought it might be?” he asked.

“That’s it,” Smythe said. “We spotted that the day we found their
truck. We put a crew in there that afternoon and searched it, along
with all the other buildings on that mesa.”

“What did you find?” asked Cabot, who obviously already knew the
answer. “Did you see any sign that people might be hiding in the mine
shaft?”

Smythe looked amused. “We didn’t even see a shaft,” he said. “Much
less people. Just lots of rodent dropping, old, old trash, odds and end
of broken equipment, animal tracks, three empty Thunderbird wine
bottles with well-aged labels. There was no sign at all of human
occupancy. Not in recent years.”

Cabot handed Chee the photographs, smiling. “You might want these
for your scrapbook,” he said.

As was his lifelong habit, Joe Leaphorn had gone to bed early.

Professor Louisa Bourebonette had returned from her
Ute-myth-collecting expedition late. The sound of the car door shutting
outside his open window had awakened him. He lay listening to her
talking to Conrad Becenti about some esoteric translation problem. He
heard her coming in, doing something in the kitchen, opening and
closing the door to what had been Emma’s private working space and
their guest bedroom, then silence. He analyzed his feelings about all
this: having another person in the house, having another woman using
Emma’s space and assorted related issues. He reached no conclusions.
The next thing he knew the sunlight was on his face, he heard his
Mister Coffee making those strangling sounds signaling its work was
done, and it was morning.

Louisa was scrambling eggs at the stove.

“I know you like ’em scrambled,” she said, "because that’s the way
you always order them.”

"True,” Leaphorn said, thinking that sometimes he liked them
scrambled, and sometimes fried, and rarely poached. He poured both of
them a cup of coffee, and sat.

“I had a fairly productive day,” she said, serving the eggs. “The
old fellow in the nursing home at Cortez told us a version of the Ute
migration story I’ve heard before. How about you?”

“Gershwin came to see me.”

“Really? What did he want?”

“To tell the truth, I’ve been wondering about that. I don’t really
know.”

“So what did he say he wanted? I’ll bet he didn’t come just to thank
you.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “He said he’d had a threatening telephone call.
Someone accusing him of tipping off the police. He said he was scared,
and he seemed to be. He wanted to know what was being done to catch
them. If the police had any idea where they were. He said he was going
to move into a motel somewhere until this was over.”

“Might be a big motel bill,” Louisa said. “Those two guys from the
1998 jobs are still out there, I guess. I hear the FBI has quit
suggesting they’re dead.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He drank coffee, buttered his toast, ate eggs
that were scrambled just a bit too dry for his taste and tried to
decide what it was about Gershwin’s visit that was bothering him.

“Something’s on your mind,” Louisa said. “Is it the crime?”

“I guess. It’s none of my business anymore, but some things puzzle
me.”

Louisa had consumed only toast and was cleaning up around the stove.

“I’m heading south to Flagstaff,” she said. “I’ll go through all
these notes. I’ll take this wonderful old myth that has been floating
around free as the air all these generations and punch it into my
computer. Then one of these days I will call it up out of the hard disk
and petrify it in a paper for whichever scholarly publication will want
it.”

“You don’t sound very eager,” Leaphorn said. “Why not let that wait
another day and come along with me?”

Louisa had made her speech facing the sink, where she was rinsing
his frying pan. Pan in hand, she turned.

“Where? Doing what?”

Leaphorn thought about that. A good question. How to explain?

“Actually doing what I do sometimes when I can’t figure something
out. I drive off somewhere, and walk around for a while, or just sit on
a rock and hope for inspiration. Sometimes I get it, sometimes not.”

Professor Bourebonette’s expression said she liked the sound of that.

“Being a social scientist, I think I’d like to observe that
operation,” she said.

And so they left the professor’s car behind and headed south in
Leaphorn’s pickup, taking Navajo Route 12 south, with the sandstone
cliffs of the Manuelito Plateau off to their right, the great emptiness
of Black Creek Valley on the left, and clouds lit by the morning sun
building over the Painted Cliffs ahead of them.

“You said some things were bothering you,” Louisa said. “Like what?”

“I called an old friend of mine up at Cortez. Marci Trujillo. She
used to be with a bank up there that did business with the Ute Casino.
I told her I thought that our-hundred-and-something-thousand-dollar
estimate of the loot sounded a little high to me. She said it sounded
just about right for an end-of-the-month payday Friday night.”

“Wow,” Louisa said. “And that mostly comes from people who can’t
afford to lose it. I think you Navajos were smart to say no to
gambling.”

“I guess so,” Leaphorn said.

“On the other hand, in the old days when the Utes were stealing your
horses they had to come down and get ’em. Now you drive up there and
hand over the cash.”

Leaphorn nodded. “So I told her I was guessing that the loot would
be mostly in smaller bills. A
very few hundreds or fifties, and mostly twenties, tens, fives, and
ones. She said that was a good guess. So I asked her how much that
would weigh.”

“Weigh?”

“She said if we decide the median of bills in the loot was about ten
dollars, which she thought would be close, that would be forty-five
thousand bills. The weight of that would be just about one hundred and
seven pounds and eleven ounces.”

“I can’t believe this,” Louisa said. “Right off the top of her head?”

“No. She had to do some arithmetic. She said banks get their money
supply in counted bundles. They put the bundles on special scales to
make sure someone with sticky fingers isn’t slipping a bill out here
and there.”

Louisa shook her head. “There’s so much going on out in the real
world we academics don’t know about.” She paused, thinking. “For
example, now I’m wondering how any of this is causing you to get
suspicious about Gershwin’s visit.”

“Ms Trujillo once ran the bank Everett Jorie used. I asked her if
she could tell me anything about Jorie’s financial situation. She said
probably not, but since Jorie was dead and his account frozen until an
estate executor showed up, she could maybe give me some general hints.
She said Jorie had both a checking and a savings account. He had
“some” balance in the first one and “several thousand dollars” in the
other. Plus a fine credit rating.”

“Then why in the world—But he said it was to help finance their
little revolution, didn’t he? I guess that explains it. But it doesn’t
explain how you knew where Jorie did his banking.”

“The checkbook was on Jorie’s desk,” Leaphorn said.

Louisa was grinning at him. “Oh, really,” she said. “Right out there
in plain sight just where people keep their checkbooks. Wasn’t that
convenient for you?”

Leaphorn chuckled. “Well, maybe I had to inch open a desk drawer a
little. But anyway, then I asked if Ray Gershwin banked with her, and
she said not now, but he used to. They’d turned him down for a loan
last spring, and Gershwin had gotten sore about it and moved his
business elsewhere. And did she know anything about Gershwin’s current
solvency. She laughed and said it was bad last spring, and she doubted
if it was going to get any better. I asked why not, and she said
Gershwin may lose his biggest grazing lease. Some sort of litigation is
pending in federal court. So I called the district court clerk up in
Denver to ask about that. He called me back and said the case was moot.
The plaintiff had died.”

Silence. Leaphorn angled to the left off of Navajo Route 12 onto New
Mexico Highway 134.

“Now we cross Washington Pass,” he said. “Named after the governor
of New Mexico Territory who thought this part of the world was full of
gold, silver and so forth and was an early believer in ethnic
cleansing. He’s the one who sent Kit Carson and the New Mexico Hispanos
and the Utes to round us up and get rid of us—once and for all. The
Tribal Council got the government to agree to change the name a few
years ago, but everybody still calls it Washington Pass. I guess that
proves we Navajos don’t hold grudges. We’re tolerant.”

“I’m not,” Louisa said. “I’m tired of waiting for you to tell me the
name of the deceased plaintiff.”

“I’ll bet you’ve already guessed.”

“Everett Jorie?”

“Right. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Let me think about it.”

She did. “That could be a motive for murder, couldn’t it?”

“Good enough I’d think.”

“And lots of irony there,” Louisa said, ”if irony is the word for
it. It reminds you of one of those awful wildlife films you’re always
seeing on television. The lions pull down the zebra, and then the
jackals and the buzzards move in to take advantage. Only this time it’s
old Mr Timms, trying to defraud his insurance company, and Mr Gershwin,
trying to get rid of a lawsuit.”

“Doesn’t do a lot for one’s opinion of humanity,” Leaphorn said.

Louisa was still looking thoughtful. “I’ll bet you know this
district court clerk personally, don’t you? If I’d call the federal
district court and asked for the court clerk, I’d get shifted around
four or five times, put on hold, and finally get somebody who’d tell me
he couldn’t release that information, or I had to drive up to Denver
and get it from the judge or something like that." Louisa was sounding
slightly resentful. “This all-encompassing, eternal, universal,
everlasting good-old-boy network. You do know him, don’t you?”