The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 (13 page)

"Like what?"

"Like where was your wife while all this was happening? She said she was coming home after lunch."

"I don't know where she was. I thought she might have stopped off to do some shopping, but usually she told me if she was doing that."

"Did she take anything with her? A big handbag, anything that would hold stuff if she was going to be gone for, ah, say, overnight?"

Denton drew in a long breath. "That was the last time I saw Linda," he said, "and I've been over it many a time. It was a sort of chilly, breezy day, and she had on a tweed-looking skirt, and a jacket, and was carrying her little purse and one of those little radio tape players. I gave it to her for her birthday. What do they call them? They have headphones so you can listen to music or whatever while you're walking."

"Just carrying a regular purse?"

"That's all."

"She was driving herself?"

"Yeah. She had a little Honda. Same one she was driving when we got married. When they had me in jail waiting the court hearing, I called Mrs. Mendoza or George Billie every day to see if they'd heard from Linda, and George said her Honda had turned up in the parking lot at the mall. He got someone to drive it back to the house."

"Nothing in it?"

Denton shrugged. "Just the regular stuff. Road maps in the side pocket, sunglasses, package of tissues, usual stuff." He made a wry face. "I asked George about that little radio tape player. Thought he might have got off with it, to tell the truth. A very pricey little gadget. I saw it advertised in one of those airline shopping-mall magazines. Think it was Cutting Edge, or Sharper Edge. Something like. Very high tech. Played disks as well as tape. Linda was into disks. Loved music."

"George didn't steal it?"

"He said he didn't. Got pissed off when I asked him. Said Linda wouldn't have taken it along with her if she didn't intend to listen to it. Good point, I guess. In the car she had the car radio, but it didn't play her disks."

"It hasn't turned up anywhere?"

"I had the pawn shops checked," Denton said. "Nothing."

"You said McKay called you. Said he'd be late. You're not listed in the telephone book, and I've been told you never give anybody your telephone number."

"He'd gotten it from Linda."

That produced a long silence.

"When? That day?"

"No. No." Denton said. "When they first got acquainted down at the café. I guess you've heard how friendly she was with everybody when she was working down there." He produced a humorless laugh. "Including me. Anyway, she heard him talking about prospecting and the hunt for old gold digs, and she told him about me being interested in that. And he said he'd like to compare notes with me, and she said why didn't he call me about it."

"Is that your only number?"

"It used to be. But after I was in jail and found out she hadn't come home and started running those advertisements asking her to call, I put in the other line." Denton pointed. "It's that phone on the little desk over there."

"Was anyone with McKay when he got here?"

"Just him."

"No one came in the car with him?"

Denton stared at Leaphorn.

"I didn't see him drive up. He pushed the button at the gate, and I pushed the button in here to open it. Then Mrs. Mendoza let him in when he rang the bell."

Denton turned and yelled down the hall: "Gloria, can you bring us another round of coffee?" He faced Leaphorn again, frowning. "What are you getting at? You think he had a partner?"

"You sure he didn't?"

"Well, no. Not sure. No way to be certain. But why would he? Are you thinking Linda might have worked with him?"

"McKay had been out at Fort Wingate that afternoon. He had a woman in the car with him."

Denton looked startled. "Who? Where'd you hear that?"

"The clerk in the records office just got a glimpse of her. When she suggested McKay bring her in, he said it was his wife, and she was sleeping."

"You think it was Linda?"

"I have no idea who it was," Leaphorn said. "I'm just asking questions. Working a jigsaw puzzle with some missing pieces. Linda originally met McKay at the café? That right? He talked to her about gold-mine legends. She told him about your interests and gave him your number. So Linda sort of got the two of you together. Didn't you have any suspicions about that?"

"Never. Absolutely damned never."

"Those days after the shooting, when you were wondering what happened to her, it would have been natural to think about that when you were—"

"No sir," said Denton. "It wouldn't have been natural. Not for me, it wouldn't have been. I knew her. She loved me. Anything she would have done, it would have been because she thought it would help me."

"And that time in prison. Not a call. Not a postcard. Nothing. It's hard to believe—"

"Mr. Leaphorn,"
Denton
said, his voice strained. He walked to the wall of windows and stood looking out. "You ever loved anybody?" he asked. "People talk about people, and you got to be sort of legendary, and so you got talked about a lot. They said you really loved your wife."

"I did."

"Well, maybe you can understand this, then. If I can figure out how to tell you."

It proved to be a long story. Denton described himself as an old bachelor, the only child of a preacher who moved too often to give a boy a chance to make friends even if he'd been good at making them. Being bashful, being homely, he'd never really had a girlfriend—at least not the kind you'd want to have much to do with. By the time he had gotten lucky in the lease-buying business, he'd written himself off as a lifelong bachelor. He said when he saw Linda waiting tables at the café where he often lunched, he was solidly set in his loner ways. But she was beautiful and kind and friendly, and she never seemed to notice he was homely, and they gradually got acquainted. It turned out she'd lived in Wyoming before her family moved to New Mexico, and one snowy day when nobody was eating lunch there, she told him about once getting snowbound at their place near Cody, and he told her about spending two days trying to keep from freezing in his stuck pickup truck out on a drilling lease.

"I don't know how the hell it ever happened," Denton said, "but we got to be really friends. She'd ask me questions and get me talking about trying to get a wildcat well drilled, and the bad guesses I'd made, and the thrill of seeing a big well come in up in the Texas Panhandle when I was flat broke. All that sort of stuff. She was going to school part-time then at the University of New Mexico branch here, and having trouble with a geology course. I helped her with that, and before long it dawned on me. Crazy as it was, I was in love with her."

Denton paused and repeated that. "Crazy as it was. Me old enough to be her daddy, and I was in love with her. And I never got over it and I never will." He turned to look at Leaphorn. "Can you understand that?"

"Perfectly," Leaphorn said. He had never gotten over being in love with Emma—not with her being dead all these years. And he never would.

"Then I'll tell you something that's even harder to understand. It turned out it was mutual. She loved me, too. Can you believe that?"

"How did you know?"

"All sorts of little things," Denton said. He thought about it, nodded, and decided to explain.

"You might think I'm pretty easy to fool, letting this McKay thing go as far as I did. But that wasn't normal. It was because I want that Golden Calf so damn bad, and I was getting so frustrated with hunting it, I just quit thinking. But you don't make money in the mineral lease racket without being skeptical, and if you ain't to start with, you get that way damn quick. You leave your trust at home in the closet. Your basic idea is that everybody is out to skin you, and so you're always looking and listening for a sign of it. You ever gamble?"

"All Navajos gamble," Leaphorn said. "But I've never done much of it."

"Gamblers call it 'looking for tells.' Little things that another gambler might do that tip you off. Well…" Denton waved at their surroundings. "You can see by this I was good at reading tells. And when the money started coming in, and people could see it was, then I got to practice on another bunch. People who wanted to get to me and get some of it."

"And you thought Linda was one of those."

"Of course I did. Wouldn't you if you looked like me? So I was watching everything she said or did. And finally…" He stopped. Threw up his hands. "What can I tell you to make you believe it? I couldn't believe it myself, but I finally had to admit it. Crazy, but she loved me. So I asked her why. Me being way too old and ugly. And she said…" Denton looked away from Leaphorn, embarrassed by this. "She said it was because of what I'd done. How I'd lived. What I'd gone through. She said she thought I was a real strong man and the men she'd been around before were really just boys. Can you understand that kind of thinking?"

"Sure," Leaphorn said. "But do you want me to believe that, after what happened with McKay, after she dropped out of sight, you didn't have your doubts?"

"Never. Not a single—" And then he stopped, closed his eyes. "Of course I did," he said. "Sitting in the jail there that night after they arrested me. And she didn't call. And hadn't come home. And my lawyer couldn't locate her. If I could have thought of a way to do it, I would have killed myself."

"How about now? How about running those ads, having me try to find her? Do you think she was working with McKay?"

Denton shrugged. "Hell, I don't know. I wore myself out trying to figure it out—month after month after month. Never did decide. After a while I just didn't give a damn. Maybe she did. Just a girl, you know. Didn't know anything about how the world works. All tied up with music and daydreams. I don't care what she did. I still love her."

Denton started to add something to that, but didn't. He stood a moment, staring at Leaphorn, waiting for a reaction. And then he said: "Does any of that make sense to you?"

"It does," Leaphorn said. "And it made sense to William Shakespeare."

"Shakespeare."

"He wrote plays a couple of hundred years ago."

"Oh, yeah. Sure."

"I had to do a paper about one of his dramas about forty years ago when I was in college.
Othello
. Young lady named Desdemona falls in love with a rough old warrior. He's trying to explain it sort of like you were, and he says…" Leaphorn stopped, wishing he'd never gotten into this.

But Denton was interested. "Said what?"

"Said, ah: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her because she pitied them.' That's about how it went."

"Pretty well fits Linda and me, I guess," Denton said. "How's that story end?"

"It's not very happy," Leaphorn said.

Chapter Fourteen

Officer bernadette manuelito had spent some of her not-suspended-but-out-of-favor time off sorting through her income tax records, responding to an irs objection to her April 15 return. Perhaps that explained her negative attitude as she surveyed the swarm of tax-paid people now congregated at the Coyote Canyon Chapter House. Sergeant Chee had overheard something she muttered and had assumed his role of mentor, which didn't improve her mood either.

"It's a political law. Like physics," Chee said. "When a federal agency gets into something, the number of tax-paid people at work multiplies itself by five, the number of hours taken to get it done multiplies by ten, and the chances of a successful conclusion must be divided by three."

Bernie responded to than with an ambiguous shrug. It had been a long day—more tiring than usual for her because she was working to establish a correct attitude toward Sergeant Chee. At first that had shifted all the way from friend to potential boyfriend to arrogant boss. During the day it had modified itself to something like fairly nice boss. This improvement in Chee's rating had been helped along by how well he'd accepted his own secondary role, with her in the primary position, as source of information for Agent-in-Charge Osborne. It got another big boost when Osborne had wondered aloud how Doherty had happened upon this place, and Chee had explained that Doherty had been the post-burn clean-up man assigned here after the fire had swept through the canyon. How could Chee have learned that? Only if he zeroed in on this canyon himself. But if he had, he had said not a word about it. He'd left all the credit to her.

After she had directed Osborne and his crime scene experts to the burned area where she had been (probably) shot at, and showed him where she'd noticed what she presumed were the victim's boot prints, this area of the canyon had been made off limits by strips of yellow crime scene tape. She and Chee, their usefulness exhausted, had then been advised to go about their business elsewhere while the crime scene folks sniffed the air, read the sand, and deduced what had happened here. But by the time they'd reached the chapter house on the way out, a New Mexico state policeman had waved them down, said Agent Osborne wanted them, and directed them back to the hogan near the canyon entrance.

The hogan now was definitely occupied. Smoke, and the aroma of burning piñon, emerged from its stovepipe. The track up the slope was occupied by three vehicles—a McKinley County sheriff's car, a Ford sedan in fbi black, and an elderly Chevy pickup. Bernie recognized the grinning deputy at the hogan's plank door as a young fellow who had made a move on her last spring when they were both working the Navajo Fair, and said "Hello, George," as he waved them in.