People of Darkness jlajc-4 Page 10

  Did Emerson Charley’s body ever turn up?

  Hunt frowned. What do you mean?

  Tomas Charley told me that the hospital lost his daddy’s body. Emerson died one night, and Tomas came to get the body the next morning, and it was gone out of the morgue.

  Hunt opened his mouth, and closed it again. I didn’t know that, he said. Be damned. Why wasn’t it reported?’

  Tomas reported it to apd, Chee said.

  Hunt’s embarrassment showed. You know how that’d be, he said. Probably told some clerk at the front desk, and filled in a form, and somebody did a little calling around, and that was about it. Nobody pushing it. By then the bombing case wasn’t active. And nobody up front would have a way to know the detective division was interested in a sick Navajo.

  Guess not, Chee said.

  I’ll check on it. Right away. He frowned again. How can a hospital lose a body?

  Tomas thinks it was stolen.

  Stolen? Why? Who’d steal it? This guy? He tapped the drawing.

  Chee didn’t feel like talking about the Vineses. Tomas thinks a witch stole it, he said. Why? Who knows? But a reason was forming in his mind.

  And, apparently, in the mind of Hunt.

  What did he die of? Hunt asked. They told us he had cancer.

  But maybe the guy who tried to hurry him along with the bomb found another way to hurry him along. That’s what you’re thinking? Chee found himself respecting the way Hunt’s mind worked, and liking the man.

  Exactly, Hunt said. And if the body’s gone, there’s no autopsy. I’ll check into that.

  Good, Chee said.

  I’ll let you know, Hunt said. And there’s one other thing. He fished the sketch out of the folder again and looked at it. If our man here is the same as your man, I think he’s a biggie. I think the fbi’s going to be very interested.

  They were here this morning, Chee said. The nurse wouldn’t let ‘em in. What do they want?

  Past several years they’ve had a run of professional killings done a lot the same. People shot in the head with a .22. Nobody hears a shot. And then there was a couple of cases where they had one person hit with a .22 and one bombed. A couple of hoods in the construction union in Houston and witnesses in an extortion case in Philadelphia. Anyway, mostly the little silenced pistol and a couple of times with the bomb. And both times the bombs seem to have been the kind that get set off by tilting the package. That’s the kind of bomb he used here.

  Tilting the package?

  Clever as hell, Hunt said. It uses mercury to make the electrical connection. You just set the damn thing down and take off the safety gadget, and the next time the thing moves, or tilts, or shakes, the mercury slides and it goes off. No timer to screw you up, no wiring it up to the ignition. No fuss. No muss. If the driver doesn’t see it, it goes off when the car moves. If he does see it, it goes off when he picks it up.

  Then what went wrong here? Chee asked.

  Luck. Wrecker crew was going to haul off the truck, Hunt said. They started to hoist the rear end. Tilt. Boom, But that was sheer bad luck. It’s quite a gadget. Understand the CIA developed it.

  The fbi arrived as Hunt was leaving. His name was Martin. He was young. He wore a brown suit with a vest. His mustache was trim, and his haircut would not have offended the late J. Edgar Hoover. Being second to an Albuquerque policeman did not please him.

  The nurse told me you were asleep, he said. It was more an accusation than a statement.

  No, Chee said. I was watching Hollywood Squares. I guess she didn’t want to interrupt. Ever watch ‘em?

  Martin denied it. He wanted to talk about what the blond man looked like. And about why anyone would want Tomas Charley killed. And about the Vines burglary. It took Chee less than five minutes to exhaust all he knew about all three subjects and ten minutes more to go over it all twice more from slightly different angles.

  You find anything in the man’s car? Chee asked. It was a rental car, wasn’t it?

  We haven’t recovered it yet, Martin said. We think it was rented from Hertz at the Albuquerque airport. He fished a folder from his briefcase and extracted a copy of Hunt’s sketch.

  Your man look like this?

  Pretty close, Chee said.

  The Hertz people identified him as the man who rented a green-and-white Plymouth sedan. Now the car’s overdue. He gave his name as McRae and an Indiana address. It doesn’t check out.

  Chee didn’t comment. Talking to Hunt had tired him. His chest hurt. His ears were ringing. He wanted Martin to go away.

  When you get out of here, we want you to come down to the office, Martin said. We want you to look at mug shots and give us more details on the identification if you can.

  Mug shots? You think you have a record on him?

  Not really, Martin said. We think we have a ten-year accumulation of suspicions. We want you to look just in case. And we want you to spend a lot of time remembering everything you can about him. Everything.

  Chee said nothing. He just closed his eyes.

  It’s important, Martin said. This guy’s slick. That little pistol he used must be really silent. And he gets it in places where nobody sees anything. Apparently he scouts everything out very methodically, and then he likes to catch them alone for one quick close shot at the head. In the john is a favorite of his. We know of four found sitting on the john with the stall door closed. And a couple in telephone booths. Places like that. A quick shot and he just walks away. Never any witnesses. Not until the bombing. And now you and Miss Landon.

  Chee opened his eyes. We’re the first witnesses?

  Martin was staring at him. The first he knows about. He didn’t know anyone saw him putting the bomb in Charley’s truck. Medium-sized. Blond. So forth. You’re the only two who actually got a look at him and who could pin him to a killing.

  Chee’s head ached. He closed his eyes again.

  You know, Martin said, I think I’d be careful if I were you.

  Chee had already had that thought. Chapter Sixteen

  When martin left, Chee spent the next ten minutes on the telephone. He got Mary Landon’s number from information, but no one answered when he called it. He remembered then that it was a school day and called the school. Miss Landon had taken the day off. He called his own office, explained the situation, and told Officer Dodge to see if she could find Mary and do what she could do to keep an eye on her. The doctor came in, thena young man with red hair and freckles. He inspected Chee’s ribs, replaced the dressing, said, Take it easy, and left. The nurse arrived, took his temperature, gave him two pills, watched while he took them, said, This isn’t a police station. You’re supposed to be resting, and left. Chee rearranged himself on the pillow and gazed out across the university campus. He thought about Mary, and about the peyote religion, and B. J. Vines’ keepsake box, and the ways of white men, and drifted off into an uneasy sleep. When he awoke it was late afternoon. The sun was slanting through his window and Mary sat in the bedside chair.

  Hello, she said. How’re you feeling?

  Fine, Chee said. He did feel fine. Vastly relieved.

  Boy, she said. You sure scared me. I thought you were dead. I waved down a truck, and he got that state policeman on his cb radio. And when we got back to you, you were just lying there. She grimaced at him. Like dead.

  Chee told her what he’d learned about the blond man. You see the problem? There’s a chance he’s going to decide he needs to get rid of us.

  Even as he was saying them, the words sounded melodramatic to him. In this quiet, antiseptic room, the idea of anyone wanting to kill Jim Chee and Mary Landon seemed foolish.

  Don’t you think what he’d really do is just run? Mary asked. That’s what I’d do.

  But you’re not a professional gunman, Chee said.

  If that remark’s a reflection on my shooting, I want to remind you that it was you who screwed up the rear sight.

  Be serious, Chee said. This guy kills people.

 
The humor left Mary’s face. I know, she said. But what can you do? It’s sort of like being struck by lightning. You can’t go around all the time hiding from clouds.

  But you don’t stand under trees while it’s raining, either, Chee said. Why don’t you take a leave and go off and visit some relatives somewhere for a while and don’t tell anyone where you’re going?

  Mary’s expression shifted from somber to skeptical. Is that what you’re going to do?

  I would if I could, Chee said. But I’m a policeman. It’s my business.

  No, it’s not, Mary said. You don’t even have jurisdiction. That’s what you told me. It’s fbi business. Or maybe the sheriff’s.

  Legally, Chee said. But this sore rib sort of gives me a special interest. And besides, I’m a material witness.

  So am I, Mary said.

  They argued about it, an uneasy, tentative sparring of two persons not yet sure of their relationship.

  Mary changed the subject to his earlier visitors, to Sheriff Sena, to Sena’s obsession with the death of his brother in the oil well explosion. The conversation was oddly strained and uncomfortable.

  When I get out of here, Chee said, I’m going to dig into the newspaper files and learn everything I can about that oil well accident, and get some names, and see what I can find out.

  I’ll go see about it, Mary said. The university library keeps newspapers on microfilm. She got up and collected her purse. I’ll see if they have the right ones. If I hurry, I can get it done today. Chapter Seventeen

  I t was 3:11 a.m. when Chee looked at his watch. He had been awake perhaps fifteen minutes, lying motionless with his eyes closed in the vain hope that sleep would return. Now he gave it up. Sleeping away the afternoon had left him out of tune with time. The nurse had given him another sleeping pill at ten o’clock but he had let it lay. His policy was to take pills only when unavoidable. Having his sleeping habits dislocated was the price he was now paying for that pill at lunch. He sat on the edge of the bed and put on the hospital slippers. Much of the soreness had gone out of his side. Only when he moved was there still pain under the heavy bandages. Through the curtain that now partitioned the room he could hear the heavy breathing of a drugged sleep. They had wheeled a man in from the post-surgery recovery room about midnighta young Chicano sewn up after some sort of accident earlier in the evening. Chee flicked on his bed light and began to reread the newspaper. Through the curtain he heard his roommate mumble in his sleep. The man shifted his position, groaned. Chee switched off the light. Let him sleep, he thought. This is the time of night for sleeping. But Chee had never felt more wide awake. He put on his robe and walked down to the nurse’s station. The nurse was a woman in her middle forties, with a round, placid face and a complexion marred by those ten thousand wrinkles the desert sun inflicts upon white people. She glanced up from her paperwork through bifocal glasses.

  Can’t sleep, Chee said.

  Let’s see, Bifocals said. You’re Chee? She found his folder and glanced at it. You had a pill at ten, but I guess I could give you another one.

  I don’t like ‘em, Chee said. They make me drowsy.

  Bifocals gave him a double take, detected the irony, and grinned. Yes, she said. That’s the trouble with sleeping pills.

  A while back this hospital lost a body, Chee said. Fellow named Emerson Charley. You hear about that?

  Not officially, Bifocals said. But I heard. She grinned at the memory. There was some hell raised over it.

  How could it happen? What do you do with bodies?

  Well, first the attending physician comes, takes care of the certification, Bifocals said. She looked thoughtful. Then the body is tagged for identification and moved to the morgue on the second floor. It’s held there until relatives get a funeral home to claim it. Or, if there’s an autopsy, it’s tagged for that, and it’s held until the morphology laboratory does the postmortem. The way I heard about this one, it was tagged for an autopsy, but somebody came and took it.

  Tell me about it, Chee said.

  Nothing to tell. He died late in the day. The body was taken down and put in the cooler. In the morning, morphology called for it and the body was gone. Bifocals grinned. Lots of embarrassment. Lots of red faces.

  Did somebody steal the body?

  Had to be that, Bifocals said. Somebody in the family, probably. Indians usually don’t want an autopsy made.

  Chee didn’t correct her. Charley was a Navajo and most Navajos had even less distaste for autopsies than do whites. It was the Pueblo Indians who tended to resist autopsies. Their dead needed to be buried in the same cycle of the sun as their death. They had to begin on time the tightly scheduled four-day journey of the soul into eternity. But for most of the Navajo clans, death produced only a short-lived and evil ghost, and everlasting oblivion for the human consciousness. They had little sentiment for corpses.

  Could somebody just walk in and walk out with a body? Chee asked.

  I guess they did, Bifocals said. And with clothing, too. She chuckled. We had two flaps out of this one. First the body was missing, and then two days later it turned out we’d given this Emerson Charley’s clothing to another corpse. Whoever took him took the other man’s clothing.

  How could that happen?

  Easy enough. When a patient comes in, his clothing goes into a red plastic baglooks sort of like a shopping bagand it goes to the morgue with the body. Whoever got the body just picked up the wrong bag.

  But don’t they keep the place locked?

  Supposed to be. But somebody probably left it open for some funeral home. That’s what I think happened. And somebody from the man’s family came, found it unlocked, and just walked out with the body. The morgue’s right by the laundry dock. They could go out that way and nobody would see them. And you should be back in bed.

  Okay, Chee said. Good night. ’

  But Chee still wasn’t sleepy. At his doorway, he glanced back. Bifocals was immersed in her paperwork. He walked down the hall, around the corner, and out the door to the elevator landing. He took the stairway down to second, and paused there to get his directions. From what Bifocals said, the morgue was near the laundry loading dock. That made sense in terms of logistics. The hospital was built on a slope, a hillside that angled downward from northeast to southwest. Thus if the laundry loading dock was on a second floor, it must be on the northeast side of the hospital. Chee took a hall that led north and made a right turn eastward. As he walked down this empty, echoing corridor he could hear thumping sounds ahead. The sounds, Chee guessed, a laundry would make. On the next door, a sheet of typing paper had been stuck. A legend printed on it with a marking pen declared that the morphology laboratory had been moved to the New Mexico State Laboratory. Just around the corner, Chee found the door to the morgue. It was a wide door, protected by a plywood bumper sheet. Three body-tables-on-wheels were parked beside it. The door was locked. Chee examined the lock. He guessed he could open it with a flexible blade, but there was no way to be sure. The ceiling offered another possibility. He glanced up and down the hallway and down the connecting hall that led to the laundry dock. All deserted. The only sound was the thumping of the laundry machinery. Chee pushed one of the carts against the door and climbed stiffly atop it. He lifted the acoustical ceiling tile and stuck his head through the opening. There was about four feet of crawl space between the false ceiling and the floor above. Chee tested the aluminum-alloy gridwork that supported the ceiling tiles. It seemed sturdy but probably not strong enough to support the full weight of a man. There were, however, other means of supportelectrical-cable conduits, water pipes, and the heavily insulated sheet-metal tubes through which the hot and cold air of the heating-cooling system flowed. Chee could see well enough in the darkness now to tell that getting into the morgue wouldn’t be difficult even if the door was locked. One could simply climb into the false ceiling, cross the partition, lift another of the acoustical tiles, and drop into the room. He withdrew his head, and sliding the ceil
ing section back into place, climbed gingerly down from the body cart. At the elevator he yawned. Suddenly he felt both tired and relaxed. He had answered a question that no one had asked, and that didn’t matter anyway. But now he could sleep. Chapter Eighteen

  Colton wolf had left the car parked in the darkness about fifty yards from the laundry loading dock. He tested the dock entrance door. It was unlocked. Then he circled the hospital, checking the parking lots. He found no police cars. His plan was simple. He would use the front entrance of the hospital. He would take the stairs to the fifth-floor post-surgical wing, find room 572, and kill the Indian policeman. The next steps would depend on the circumstanceswhether there was any sort of disturbance. Colton expected none. The Indian policeman would be sleeping the heavy sleep that hospitals impose upon their patients. He should present no problem. If there was a nurse on duty, Colton would evade her if he could and kill her quietly if he couldn’t. And then he would walk downstairs, take the hall past the morgue, go out the laundry loading dock exit, and drive away in a common, nondescript two-year-old Chevy. He had taken the Chevy from the low-rate, long-term parking lot at the airport; the ticket on the dashboard of the one he picked showed it had already been left overnight. It might not be missed for days. But in the event it was missed, he had stopped in the parking lot of an all-night grocery store and switched license plates.

  It was cold. Colton hated cold. He felt exposed and vulnerable. Overhead, as he walked across the almost empty front-entrance parking lot, the sky was a dazzle of strange stars. Unlike the soft, warm protecting darkness of his California boyhood, the night here was hostile. He could hear the soft sound of his crepe-rubber soles on the asphalt, the sound of his trouser legs rubbing, cloth on cloth. Behind him a truck moved up Lomas Avenue. Except for that, the night was silent. Colton squeezed the pistol in his coat pocket. It had a solid, reassuring feel. It was a good piece. Long-barreled and unhandy to look at, but efficient. He had made most of it himself to exactly fit his needs. The grip was walnut, roughed to eliminate the possibility of fingerprints, as was every metal surface. The barrel was threaded at both ends so that a half turn removed the silencer from its muzzle and a turn and a half detached barrel from firing chamber. Only the barrelwith its telltale ballistic tracks left on the lethal bulletwas directly incriminating. Within minutes after a job, the barrel was disposed of and a new barrel screwed into placeapparent proof that the pistol Colton carried had never been fired.