Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] (13 page)

“But they didn’t,” Leaphorn said. “Why not?”

“I think it was because the old man had his heart attack a little bit after that. When he passed away it hung everything up in probate court for a while. This ranch was in trust for Hal. He didn’t get it until he turned thirty, but of course the family didn’t control it anymore. That’s sort of where it stood for a while.”

Demott paused. He inspected his newly washed hand. Leaphorn was thinking, too, about this friction between Hal and his family and what it might imply.

“When I had my visit with Mrs. Rivera at the bank,” Leaphorn said, “she told me things were starting to brew on the moly mine development again just before Hal disappeared. But this time she thought it was going to be a deal with a different mining company. She didn’t think the family corporation was involved.”

Demott lost interest in his hand.

“She tell you that?”

“That’s what she said. She said a Denver bank was involved in the deal somehow. It was way too big an operation for her little bank to handle the money end of it.”

“With Mrs. Rivera in business we don’t really need a newspaper around here,” Demott said.

“So I was thinking that if the family told Hal they were going to run right over him, maybe he decided he’d screw them instead. He’d make his own deal and cut them out.”

“I think that’s probably about the way it was,” Demott said. “I know his lawyer told him all he had to do was slow things down in court long enough to get to his birthday. Then he’d have clear title and he could do what he wanted. That’s what Elisa wanted him to do. But Hal was a fella who just could not wait. There were things he wanted to buy. Things he wanted to do. Places he hadn’t seen yet. And he’d borrowed a lot of money he had to pay back.”

Demott produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “Elisa didn’t know about that. She didn’t know he could use the ranch as collateral when he didn’t own it yet. Came as quite a shock. But he had his lawyer work out some sort of deal which put up some sort of overriding interest in the place as a guarantee.”

“Lot of money?”

“Quite a bit. He’d gotten rid of that little plane he had and made a down payment on a bigger one. After he disappeared we let them take the plane back but we had to pay back the loan.”

With that, Demott rose and collected his tools. “Back to work,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t know anything that would help you.”

“One more question. Or maybe two,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still climbing?”

“Too old for it,” he said. “What’s that in the Bible about it? About when you get to be a man you put aside the ways of the boy. Something like that.”

“How good was Hal?”

“He was pretty good but he was reckless. He took more chances than I like. But he had all the skills. If he’d put his mind to it he could have been a dandy.”

“Could he have climbed Ship Rock alone?”

Demott looked thoughtful. “I thought about that a lot ever since Elisa identified his skeleton. I didn’t think so at first, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t even try it myself. But Hal…” He shook his head. “If he wanted something, he just had to have it.”

“George Shaw went out to the Maryboy place the other day and got permission for a climb,” Leaphorn said. “Next day or two. Any idea what he thinks might be found up there?”

“George is going to climb it?” Demott’s tone was incredulous and his expression shocked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“All I know is that he told me he paid Maryboy a hundred dollars for trespass rights. Maybe he’ll get somebody to climb it but I think he meant he was going up himself.”

“What the hell for?”

Leaphorn didn’t answer that. He gave Demott some time to answer it himself.

“Oh,” Demott said. “The son of a bitch.”

“I would imagine he thinks maybe somebody gave Hal a little push.”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “Either he thinks I did it, and I left something behind that would prove it—and he could use that to void Elisa’s inheritance—or he did it himself and he remembers that he left something up there that would nail him and he wants to go get it.”

Leaphorn shrugged. “As good a guess as any.”

Demott put down his tools.

“When Elisa came back from having the bones cremated she told me none of them had been broken,” he said. “Some of them were disconnected, you know. That could have been done in a fall, or maybe the turkey vultures pulled ’em apart. They’re strong enough to do that, I guess. Anyway, I hope it was a fall, and he didn’t just get hung up there to starve to death for water. He could have been a damn good man.”

“I never knew him,” Leaphorn said. “To me he was just somebody to hunt for and never find.”

“Well, he was a good, kind boy,” Demott said. “Big-hearted.” He picked up his tools again. “You know, when the cop came up to show Elisa Hal’s stuff I saw that folder he had with him. He had it labeled ‘Fallen Man.’ I thought, Yes, that described Hal. The old man gave him paradise and it wasn’t enough for him.”

L
UCY SAM HAD SEEMED GLAD TO SEE CHEE.

“I think they’re going to be climbing up Tse’ Bit’ a’i’ again,” she told Chee. “I saw a big car drive down the road toward Hosteen Maryboy’s place two days ago, and it stayed a long time, and when I saw it coming back from there, I drove over there to see how he was doing and he told me about it.”

“I heard about it, too,” Chee said, thinking how hard it was to keep secrets in empty country.

“The man paid Hosteen Maryboy a hundred dollars,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we should let them climb up there, even for a thousand dollars.”

“I don’t think so either,” Chee said. “They have plenty of their own mountains to play around on.”

“The one who lived here before,” Lucy Sam said, using the Navajo circumlocution to avoid saying the name of the dead, “he’d say that it would be like us Navajos climbing all over that big church in Rome, or getting up on top of the Wailing Wall, or crawling all over that place where the Islamic prophet went up to heaven.”

“It’s disrespectful,” Chee agreed, and with that subject out of the way he shifted the conversation to cattle theft.

Had Hosteen Maryboy mentioned to her that he’d lost some more cattle? He had, and he was angry about it. There would have been enough money in those cows to make the last payment on his pickup truck.

Had Ms. Sam seen anything suspicious since the last time he’d been here? She didn’t think so

Could he look at the ledger where she kept her notes? Certainly. She would get it for him.

Lucy Sam extracted the book from its desk drawer and handed it to Chee.

“I kept it just the same way,” she said, tapping the page. “I put down the date and the time right here at the edge and then I write down what I see.”

As he leafed backward through the ledger Chee saw that Lucy Sam wrote down a lot more than that. She made a sort of daily journal out of it, much as her father had done. And she had not just copied her father’s system, she also followed his Franciscan padres’ writing style—small, neat lettering in small, neat lines—which had become sort of a trademark of generations of those Navajos educated at St. Michael’s School west of Window Rock. It was easily legible and wasted neither paper nor ink. But readable or not, Chee found nothing in it very helpful.

He skipped back to the date when he and Officer Manuelito had visited the site of the loose fence posts. They had rated an entry, right after Lucy Sam’s notation that, “Yazzie came. Said he would bring some firewood” and just before, “Turkey buzzards are back.” Between those Lucy had written, “Police car stuck on road under Tse’ Bit’ a’i’. Truck driver helps.” Then, down the page a bit: “Tow truck gets police car.” The last entry before the tow truck note reported, “That camper truck stopped. Driver looked around.”

That camper truck? Chee felt his face flush with remembered embarrassment. That would have been Finch checking to see how thoroughly they had sprung his Zorro trap. He worked his way forward through the pages, learning more about kestrels, migrating grosbeaks, a local family of coyotes, and other Colorado Plateau fauna than he wanted to know. He also gained some insights into Lucy Sam’s loneliness, but nothing that he could see would be useful to Acting Lieutenant Chee in his role as rustler hunter. If Zorro had come back to collect a load of Maryboy’s cows from the place he’d left the hay, he’d done it when Lucy Sam wasn’t looking.

But she was looking quite a lot. There was a mention of a “very muddy” white pickup towing a horse trailer on the dirt road that skirted Ship Rock, but no mention of it stopping. Chee made a mental note to check on that. About a dozen other vehicles had come in view of Lucy Sam’s spotting scope, none of them potential rustlers.

They included a Federal Express delivery truck, which must have been lost, another mention of Finch’s camper truck, and three pickups that she had identified with the names of local-area owners.

So what was useful about that? It told him that if Manuelito’s network of watchers would pay off at all, it would require patience, and probably years, to establish suspicious-looking patterns. And it told him that Mr. Finch looked upon him as a competitor in his hunt for the so-called Zorro. Finch wanted him to write off Maryboy’s loose-fence-posts location, but Finch hadn’t written it off himself. He was keeping his eye on the spot. That produced another thought. Maryboy had been losing cattle before. Had either Lucy Sam or her father noticed anything interesting in the past? Specifically, had they ever previously noticed that white truck pulling its horse trailer? He would page back through the book and check on that when he had time. And he would also look through the back pages for school buses. He’d noticed a Lucy Sam mention of a school bus stuck on that same dirt road, and the road wasn’t on a bus route. She had also mentioned “that camper truck” being parked almost all day at the base of the mountain the year before. Her note said “Climbing our mountain?”

Chee put down the ledger. Lucy Sam had gone out to feed her chickens and he could see her now in her sheep pen inspecting a young goat that had managed to entangle itself in her fence. He found himself imagining Janet Pete in that role and himself in old man Sam’s wheelchair. It didn’t scan. The white Porsche roared in and rescued her. But that wasn’t fair. He was being racist. He had been thinking like a racist ever since he’d met Janet and fallen in love with her. He had been thinking that because her name was Pete, because her father was Navajo, her blood somehow would have taught her the ways of the
Diné
and made her one of them. But only your culture taught you values, and the culture that had formed Janet was blue-blooded, white, Ivy League, chic, irreligious, old-rich Maryland. And that made it just about as opposite as it could get from the traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.

Well, to hell with that. He got up, refocused the spotting scope, and found the place where the posts had been loosened. That road probably carried no more than a dozen vehicles a week— none at all when the weather was wet. It was empty today, and there was no sign of anything around Mr. Finch’s Zorro trap. Beyond it in the pasture he counted eighteen cows and calves, a mixture of Herefords and Angus, and three horses. He scanned across the Maryboy grassland to the base of Ship Rock and focused on the place where Lucy Sam had told him the climbing parties liked to launch their great adventures. Nothing there now but sage, chamisa, and a red-tailed hawk looking for her lunch.

Chee sat down again and picked up the oldest ledger. On his last visit he’d checked the entries on the days following Breedlove’s disappearance but only with a casual glance. This time he’d be thorough.

Lucy Sam came in, washed her hands, and looked at him while she dried them.

“Something wrong?”

“Disappointed,” Chee said. “So many details. This will take forever.”

“He didn’t have anything else to do,” Lucy Sam said, voice apologetic. “After he got that sickness with his nerves, all he could do after that was get himself into his wheelchair. He couldn’t go anyplace, he’d just sit there in the chair and sometimes he would read, or listen to the radio. And then he would watch through his telescope and keep his notes.”

And he kept them very well, Chee noticed. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to include what he wanted to find.

The date Hal Breedlove vanished came about midpoint in the old ledger. In Hosteen Sam’s eyes it had been a windy day, cool, crows beginning to gather as they did when summer ended, flying in great, disorganized twilight flocks past Ship Rock to their roosting places in the San Juan River woods. Three oil field service trucks came down the road toward Red Rock and turned toward the Rattlesnake field. Some high clouds appeared but there had been no promise of rain.

The next day’s entry was longer, devoted largely to the antics of four yearling coyotes who seemed to be trying to learn how to hunt in the prairie dog town down the slope. Interesting, but not what Chee was hoping for.

An hour and dozens of pages later, he closed the ledger, rubbed his eyes, and sighed.

“You want some lunch?” Lucy Sam asked, which was just the question Chee had been hoping to hear. Lucy had been there at the stove across the kitchen from him, cutting up onions, stirring, answering his questions about abbreviations he couldn’t read or points he didn’t understand, and the smell of mutton stew had gradually permeated the room and his senses— making this foolish search seem far less important than his hunger.

“Please,” he said. “That smells just like the stew my mother used to make.”

“Probably is the same,” Lucy said. “Everybody has to use the same stuff—mutton, onions, potatoes, can of tomatoes, salt, pepper.” She shrugged.

Like his mother’s stew, it was delicious. He told Lucy what he was looking for—about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and then his skeleton turning up on the mountain. He was looking for some idea of when Hal Breedlove returned to make his fatal climb.

“You find anything?”

“I think I learned that the man didn’t come right back here after running away from his wife in Canyon de Chelly. At least there was no mention of anybody climbing.”

“There would have been,” she said. “How far did you get?”

“Just through the first eight weeks after he disappeared. It’s going to take forever.”

“You know, they always do it the same way. They start climbing just at dawn, maybe before. That’s because they want to get down before dark, and because there’s some places where that black rock gets terribly hot when the afternoon sun shines on it. So all you got to do is take a look at the first thing written down each day. He would always do the same every morning. He would get up at dawn and roll his wheelchair to the door. Then he would sing the song to Dawn Boy and bless the morning with his pollen. Next he would take a look at his mountain. If there was anything parked there where the climbers always left their cars, it would be the first thing he wrote down.”

“I’ll try that, then,” he said.

On the page at which Chee reopened the ledger the first entry was marked 9/15/85, which was several pages and eight days too early. He glanced at the first line. Something about a kestrel catching a meadowlark. He paged forward, checking Lucy’s advice by scanning down the first notes after dates.

Now he was at 9/18/85—halfway down the page. The first line read, “Climbers. Funny looking green van where climbers park. Three people going up. If Lucy gets back from Albuquerque I will get her to go into Shiprock and tell the police.”

Chee checked the date again. September 18, 1985. That would be five days before Hal Breedlove disappeared from the Canyon de Chelly. He scanned quickly down the page, looking for other mentions of the climbers. He found two more on the same day.

The first said: “They are more than half way up now, creeping along under a cliff—like bugs on a wall.” And the second: “The headlights turned on on the fancy green car, and the inside lights. I see them putting away their gear. Gone now, and the police did not come. I told Maryboy he should not let anyone climb Tse’ Bit’ a’i’ but he did not listen to me.”

Lucy was washing dishes in a pan of water on the table by the stove, watching him while she worked. He took the ledger to her, pointed to the entry.

“Do you remember this?” Chee asked. “It would have been about eleven years ago. Three people came to climb Ship Rock in some sort of green van. Your father wanted you to go tell the police but you had gone to Albuquerque.”

Lucy Sam put on her glasses and read.

“Now why did I take the bus to Albuquerque?” she asked herself. “Yes,” she answered. “Irma was having her baby there. Little Alice. Now she’s eleven. And when I came home he was excited about those climbers. And angry. He wanted me to take him to see Hosteen Maryboy about it. And I took him over there, and they argued about it. I remember that.”

“Did he say anything about the climbers?”

“He said they were a little bit slow. It was after dark when they got back to the car.”

“Anything about the car?”

“The car?” She looked thoughtful. “I remember he hadn’t seen one like it before. He said it was ugly, clumsy looking, square like a box. It was green and it had a ski rack on top.”

Chee closed the ledger and handed it to Lucy, trying to remember how Joe Leaphorn had described the car Hal Breedlove had abandoned after he had abandoned his wife. It was a recreational vehicle, green, something foreign-made. Yes. A Land-Rover. That would fit old man Sam’s description of square and ugly.

“Thank you,” he said to Lucy Sam. “I have to go now and see what Hosteen Maryboy can remember.”