The Sinister Pig - 15 (11 page)

Finding the front entrance of the Tuttle Ranch was simple enough. The elderly lady at the Giant Station cash register explained it.

“Get off Interstate 10 at Gage, take County Road 2, and then 20 toward JBP Mountain and—”

“Hold it,” Chee said. “Show me on my map.”

The cashier frowned, looked at the map, put her pencil tip on a hump labeled “JBP Mountain” and traced it along. “Then past Soldiers Farewell Hill, right here, and take the turn south toward the Cedar Mountains”—she tapped with her pencil point—“and then you pass Hattop Mountain”—another pencil tap—“and turn right on a dirt road there. It’s graded but they never put any gravel on it. You’ll see a big corner post at the junction pointing southward and a sign on it says ‘Tuttle Ranch.’ But if you’re [99] looking for Tuttle, he’s not there much. Lives somewhere back east.”

The sign nailed to the corner post was painted in neat red block letters:TUTTLE RANCH—SEVEN MILES. The legend neatly painted below read:PRIVATE PROPERTY.ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY.

Chee paused here a moment, comparing the landmarks Bernie had indicated on her napkin to the large-scale Benchmark map he kept in his truck. After about ninety minutes, several wrong turns, and much dust, he found the road along which Bernie had followed the Seamless Weld truck, and the ridge she had mentioned crossing just before she had reached the locked gate and encountered Tom O’day. He stopped on the ridge, got out his binoculars, and checked. He saw the gate, but no one was there to open it for him even if he could show them a reason they should. He scanned the landscape. Mountain ridges in every direction, but dry mountains here. Far to the east the Floridas and to the west, the Big and Little Hatchets. Far beyond them and blue with distance, the ragged shapes of the Animas and Peloncillos. Chee was comfortable with the emptiness of his tribe’s Four Corners country, but here all he could see seemed to be a lifeless total vacuum.

But not quite lifeless. Across the fence and far down the ridge away from the locked gate his eye caught motion. He refocused the binoculars. Five great gray beasts, two with long curved horns, were walking in a line down a slope. But going where?

Apparently into a playa where runoff water would collect if rain ever fell here. In the playa a windmill stood beside a circle of what seemed to be a water tank.

[100] The sound of an engine. Chee shifted his binoculars toward it. A truck towing a horse trailer was rolling down the hill toward the gate.

Chee climbed into his own pickup and headed for the gate. The driver of the ranch truck was standing behind it now, looking about thirty years younger than the man Bernie had described. About seventeen maybe, grinning, with his hat pushed to the back of his head.

“ ’Fraid you hit a dead end here,” he said. “I can’t let you through.”

“I saw your sign,” Chee said. “But maybe you can help me out with some information.”

“If I can. Where you from?”

“Up in San Juan County. Navajo Reservation.”

“I saw you was Indian,” the boy said. “But down here we got a lot of Indians, but mostly the local tribe and some Apaches. Got three of them on our team.”

Chee studied the boy, “Football, I’d say. You a tight end, or maybe fullback.”

The boy laughed. “Little school there at Gage. We played six man. We didn’t have all those positions.”

“If you could unlock that gate for me, I’d go down that road just far enough to take a look at that new watering tank you’re putting in.”

“Watering tank down the road? I don’t know nothing about that. The only water tank out that direction is way over yonder.” He pointed in the direction of the playa where Chee had seen the windmill. “In the spring, and again after the rainy season, water drains down into that low place, and soaks in. They put a little windmill there to pump it into the drinking tank when the playa goes dry.”

[101] “Well, I don’t know,” Chee said. “But a man at the Chevron station at Lordsburg told me about it. He’s a rancher around here somewhere, and I was telling him about the trouble we were having keeping our stock watered, and how I was looking for some used tanks we could buy. Anyway, he said the Tuttle Ranch was putting in some new tanks for those African animals you’re raising and was selling off their old metal tanks.”

The boy shrugged. “News to me.”

“This fella said it involved some sort of new construction a few miles inside the Southeast Gate. Would this be the Southeast Gate?”

“Hey,” the boy said. “I bet I know what he was talking about.” He pointed. “They’re putting in some sort of a structure over the hill there.” He pointed. “Just three or four miles beyond that hill. There was a crew in there doing some digging and pouring concrete. They put up a house of some sort and mounted a little windmill on it, but I think it was just to run an electric generator, and the building was to store stuff in. I don’t think it had anything to do with water. And then just yesterday I was by there and the sparks were flying. They were doing some metal cutting and welding. Working on pipes, it looked like. Nothing like a water tank.”

Chee considered that. “Well, the man at the Chevron said they were installing a windmill to pump water for the animals.”

The boy was grinning. “I heard that too. But it’s to run a little electric generator. To get to the water table here, you’d have to drill down damn near like an oil well. Hundreds of feet. Probably thousands. Take’s a big rig to do that. Nothing like that’s been in here.”

[102] “I’d sure like to see what they’ve done,” Chee said. “How about it? No harm done.”

“They don’t give me the key.”

“Why don’t I just climb over the fence and walk over there. Not more than three or four miles you said?”

The boy took off his hat, studied Chee thoughtfully, rubbed his tangled blond hair, and restored the hat.

“No, sir. I’d just have to get out my cell phone here and report it. And somebody would come out and run you off. And maybe I’d get fired.”

So Chee said thanks, anyway. He drove back up the hill he’d come in on and found what he was looking for—fading tracks leading off from the road in the proper direction. They would have been made hauling in post hole diggers, posts, spools of wire, and all else needed when that formidable fence was built. Chee jolted down the tracks to the fence, and along it, around the slope of the hill, and up the next one. Near the top of it he stopped. The gate where he met the boy was out of sight now, but in the valley below he could see down where a little building stood with a small windmill mounted on its roof.

He got out his binoculars again and studied it. The boy was right. The blades were connected on the platform to a drive shaft that terminated in what was probably a gearbox. That was mounted atop what looked like the housing for a generator. Chee could also make out insulated cables running down one of the walls of the shack and disappearing into it. It was not an unusual sight for Chee. Many family outfits around the reservations established such electrical sources for their hogans to run refrigerators and their television sets. But what would it be used for here? Hard to tell from what was visible to [103] him. But he could make out the edge of what appeared to be a fairly large excavation. There were pipes in that.

Back on the access road, he headed for Interstate 10 and then turned north toward Shiprock. It had been a long, long day of driving and a total, absolute waste of time. Almost anyway. He had learned that Bernie was getting along a lot better without him than he was without her. And he had added another vague little bit of information to be considered in a vague murder case, which was none of his business anyway. Officially not his affair.

But Bernie was his affair. At least he wanted her to be. And Bernie’s boss seemed to have a peculiar interest in this welding truck and in what Bernie saw beyond the Tuttle Ranch gate. He was feeling increasingly uneasy about that. He was suspecting what Bernie had photographed had nothing to do with anything as innocent as watering exotic animals.

Former Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn was making a hurried effort to tidy up his living room. Someone named Mary Goddard was coming over to interview him. Not a visit he expected. He knew almost nothing about this woman except she worked for
U.S. News and World Report,
formerly with the
Baltimore Sun,
and that she wanted to ask him about that peculiar homicide up on the border of the Jicarilla Reservation.

“Why me?” Leaphorn had asked. “Didn’t you tell her I’m just a civilian. That it’s an FBI case anyway, and—”

Georgia Billie was the senior secretary in the NTP administration office, but she had never quite come to think of Lieutenant Leaphorn as legendary.

“Joe. Joe,” she said. “Of course I did. I told her you’d gotten old and grumpy and didn’t like to be bothered and you wouldn’t know anything about it anyway but she just grinned at me and said you were still the Legendary Lieutenant and she’d like to meet you anyway.”

[106] That produced a moment of silence.

“You didn’t give her my number did you? Or my address?”

“She already had your address.”

Leaphorn sighed. Said: “Oh, well.”

“In fact, she’s on her way out there now. Instead of acting like you’re mad at me, you should be thanking me for the warning.” She laughed. “I’m giving you some time to sneak out the back door and hide.”

But he didn’t. His curiosity had kicked in. What was it about this homicide that had brought a reporter from the best of the national newsmagazines all the way to Window Rock? Maybe she knew something that would cast some light on this affair.

The Mary Goddard who introduced herself at his door did not resemble the smooth-faced, glossy women reporters television had taught Leaphorn to expect. She was short, sturdy, and obviously middle-aged. The heavy layers of makeup with which white women so often coated their faces were missing. Her smile, which looked to Leaphorn warm and friendly, revealed natural-looking teeth and not the chalk-white caps displayed by TV celebrities.

“I’m Mary Goddard,” she said, handing him a business card. “I’m a reporter, and I came here hoping you’ll have time to talk to me.”

“Come on in,” Leaphorn said, and pointed her to a chair. “If you like coffee, I have a pot brewed in the kitchen.”

“Please,” Ms. Goddard said. “Black.”

He remembered to put the cups on saucers as Emma would have done had she not left him a widower, or [107] Professor Bourbonette would have had she not been up on the Southern Ute Reservation collecting oral history tales. He also brought in napkins and then seated himself across the coffee table from Goddard.

She sipped, made an approving face. Leaphorn sipped, trying to decide what Goddard’s first question would be. It would concern what progress was being made on the homicide investigation, and his answer would be that the FBI was handling it and he didn’t know anything about it.

She restored her cup to its saucer.

“Mr. Leaphorn,” she began, “I wonder how you managed to get an official of the Bank of America to ask questions in the bank’s credit card administration about a credit card issued to Carl Mankin. Could you tell me that?”

Far from what he’d expected. He looked at Ms. Goddard with sharply increased interest. He was dealing with a professional here.

“Did that happen?”

“It did,” she said. And waited.

Leaphorn chuckled, already enjoying this. “My turn now. How do you know? And what brought you to me?”

“You’re retired, aren’t you. Technically not involved in any way in any of this. But a sergeant who used to be your assistant had jurisdiction, or did, more or less, until the FBI took over. Is that right?”

“Right.”

“As I understand from my sources in Washington, this sergeant—Jim Chee, isn’t it?—he had someone in his local bank make inquiries about a Visa card held by someone killed in San Juan County, New Mexico. The inquiry ran into an FBI stop order and that ended that.” [108] She combined a hand gesture with a change of expression to signify finality. Then smiled at Leaphorn and said: “However!”

Leaphorn smiled.

“However, not much later the same inquiry comes in from the important direction—from the top instead of the bottom. It hits the same federal roadblock. But this time the bank’s big shots are involved. The kind of folks not used to being told no by the FBI or anyone else. This gets chatted about at their two-martini lunches. One of the power brokers asks his lobby lawyer. People talk to a senator whose campaign they helped finance. Somebody calls the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Department of the Interior, and so it goes. About then I ask myself, What’s making this credit card such a big deal? Why are these busy moguls getting so interested in this homicide way out in San Juan County, New Mexico?”

Goddard picked up her cup, looked over the rim at Leaphorn, took another sip.

“That’s the same question I’m asking,” Leaphorn said. He looked at her business card.
“U.S. News and World Report.
Not the sort of publication that goes after sin, sex, and sensation. And it wouldn’t care much about a murder out here. Not unless it was somehow significant.”