The Wailing Wind Page 11

  “I speak Navajo,” Bernie said. “You never did ask him Osborne’s question. If he shot at me. You changed the question around.”

  Chee shrugged. “Same thing.”

  “Like hell it was,” Bernie said. “He could deny he tried to kill me. He couldn’t deny he shot at me.”

  Chee laughed. “As our former president would tell you, it depends on how you define the word at.”

  “It’s not funny,” Bernie said. “And if I’m not suspended, and if I’m still an officer working on this case, I think you should tell me what you were doing in that interview.”

  That produced a long silence. A new red Chrysler RV roared up behind them, way over the speed limit, noticed the police car markings, and slowed abruptly. Chee waved it past.

  “I have a right to know,” Officer Manuelito said. “Don’t you believe I do? Think about it.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Chee said. “And I guess you’re right. I gave him a question he could deny without lying because I didn’t think it mattered whether he shot at you. I’m pretty sure he must have. What mattered was why he shot. He must have wanted to scare you. To get you out of the canyon. Why? What’s the old man hiding? What’s the secret? From what he said, he’s protecting a sacred place. You heard him. Up there somewhere is a source of the herbs and minerals shamans need for the Night Chant. Need for their medicine bundles.”

  Bernie considered all of this, remembering how frightened she had been crouching behind the sandstone out of sight of the sniper. She felt a little hurt by the lack of importance Lieutenant Chee attached to her being shot at—even if it was just to frighten her. How would he have felt hiding behind that slab, waiting to be killed? But she saw his point. He thought Peshlakai had something to do with the Doherty homicide, which was why they were here. He had been establishing some “fellow shaman good old boy” bonding, being friendly. Pretty soon he’d be coming back to Peshlakai’s hogan to have a heart-to-heart talk.

  “Sergeant,” she said, “is it your intention to freeze out Agent Osborne? Solve this one yourself?”

  Chee glanced at her, not pleased by either the questions or the tone.

  “Come on, Bernadette,” he said. “Of course not.”

  Bernie waited a few moments, said: “Oh.”

  Hearing the skepticism in that, Chee was frowning at the windshield.

  “I think Hostiin Peshlakai has some helpful information. But I don’t think he’s going to tell anyone about it unless he knows he can trust them. I think it will be about this damned gold-mine business, and he’s not going to trust any belagaana if finding gold is in the picture.” Chee interrupted this with a wry chuckle. “Not many Navajos, either, for that matter.”

  15

  Deputy Sheriff Ozzie Price was almost as old as Joe Leaphorn, had known him for a long, long time, and was more interested in how he was faring in retirement than in why Leaphorn wanted to inspect the McKay homicide evidence.

  “As I remember, you never were much for fishing, or hunting, either,” Price said, as he slid the blue plastic basket out of its shelf in the sheriff’s department evidence locker. “And you don’t play golf as far as I know. How do you pass your time?”

  “Stuff like this, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “I get interested in all sorts of things.”

  “Not much interesting in this McKay homicide that I can see,” Price said. He put the basket on the sorting table, sat in the chair under the window, and leaned back against the wall. “As I remember, Denton got mad at a swindler and shot him and admitted it and got off on justified manslaughter, self-defense. Wasn’t that it?”

  “That was it,” Leaphorn said. He lifted a folded pair of trousers out of the basket and put it on the table. Next came a shirt, stained and stiffened with dried blood, a belt with a heavy buckle inlaid with turquoise, a pair of expensive-looking boots, and a leather jacket. Leaphorn held it up for a closer inspection.

  “Cost a lot of money, a jacket like that,” Price said.

  “No blood on it. No bullet hole that I can see. Front or back.”

  “It was hanging over the back of a chair when I got there,” Price said. “He wasn’t wearing it.”

  “He wasn’t?” Leaphorn found himself remembering Denton’s account of the shooting. In that, McKay had this jacket on. He’d taken his pistol out of its pocket. Leaphorn checked the pockets.

  “You worked this one?”

  “We were short-handed that night. Had to send a car out to Fort Wingate. Some sort of Halloween prank, it turned out to be. Anyway, I went along out to Denton’s place.” Price shook his head. “Wow. What a mansion.”

  “You still have McKay’s gun?”

  “Firearms go in another locker,” Price said. He picked up his key ring, unlocked a small safe at the end of the room, and came back with a .38-caliber revolver, an identification tag dangling from its trigger guard. Leaphorn worked it into the jacket pocket. It went, but not easily, and produced a prominent bulge.

  “That where he was carrying it?” Price asked.

  “That’s the way Denton tells it.”

  Price looked skeptical. “That’s no way to treat that pretty jacket,” he said. “My wife would kill me for that.”

  Leaphorn left underwear and socks in the basket. He added a felt hat to the stack on the tabletop and then took out a slim black briefcase, checked the side pockets and found them empty, and unzipped the center section. From that he extracted two Ziploc bags, a folded map, a stack of papers, and a tiny padlock with a tiny key in it. He held that up.

  “Briefcase locked when you got there?”

  “Yeah, and we couldn’t find the key at first. When the crime scene crew got there, they found it in that little pocket some pants have inside the regular pants pocket. You know what I mean?”

  Leaphorn nodded. One of his jeans had such a bothersome little pocket. Dimes and other small things tended to lose themselves in it. He pointed at the bags, raised his eyebrows in a question.

  “The little one is stuff found in the furniture, and vacuumed up off the carpet. That kind of stuff.” Price laughed. “Not that you need it when the shooter is there, and hands you the gun and says he did it. But the crime scene boys always follow their routine. Think maybe they’ll get lucky, and it will be a mystery, and they can use the forensic stuff. And that bigger bag holds what was in the briefcase besides the papers.”

  Leaphorn set aside the map and checked the other papers—mostly what appeared to be copies of old letters, some written in an untidy scrawl and signed by Mott, some on the stationery of a San Francisco law firm. There was also an official-looking assay report, which seemed to Leaphorn’s unpracticed eye to confirm a high gold content in a sand sample. He left a single-page contract form for the last. It also matched Denton’s description of what McKay had brought—giving McKay a fifty-percent interest in all revenues derived from gold-mining development of “said Golden Calf property.” It was signed “Marvin F. McKay” at the bottom, but the space for Denton’s signature was blank.

  “How’s that for a deal,” Price said. “He was giving Denton a map to the end of the rainbow, and Denton was supposed to promise him fifty percent of nothing.”

  “And fifty thousand in cash,” Leaphorn said.

  “Yeah,” said Price, “along with a thirty-eight-caliber bullet in the chest. You think this Doherty kid was trying to play the same game?”

  Leaphorn shrugged. “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t know,” Price said. “But he came in here chatting with some of his old friends from when his uncle was sheriff, and then he wanted to know if he could look at all this stuff. And after he was gone, I noticed an old Prince Albert tobacco tin was missing. Thought he might be collecting souvenirs or something. But mostly he was interested in that map.”

  Leaphorn unfolded the map, stared at it, turned to Price.

  “This map was in the briefcase when you got it? When you unlocked and opened it?”

  The questi
on puzzled Price. “Sure,” he said.

  “No other maps there? On the desk? Anywhere where they might have been looking at them?”

  “There were maps on the walls,” Price said. “Lots of them. What’s the trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Every once in a while I find out I’m not as smart as I thought I was.”

  The map unfolded on the table before him was definitely not the map Denton had told him McKay had brought. It was a copy of a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle map, as Denton said. But this didn’t depict a section of the southeastern quadrant of the Zuñi Mountains. It was far north of the Zuñis. There was a dot identified as “Standing Rock T.P.” and Hosta Butte and Smith Lake—all miles northeast of Gallup, not northwest. But Leaphorn’s interest focused near the map’s bottom. There a ragged line represented the north slope of Mesa de los Lobos, and other such lines were identified as Hard Ground Wash and Coyote Canyon Wash. He followed that line into Mesa de los Lobos. Near its beginning was a circled X and the tiny initials “G.C.”

  Leaphorn made another quick check of the map, confirming what he had already known. It was a 1940 U.S.G.S. map. Except for the few marks McKay seemed to have added in red, it was identical to the bound volume of them he had in his desk—covering all the quadrants of the Four Corners of four states. He refolded the map, stacked it with the papers, and put it neatly back into the briefcase.

  Then he went carefully through the pockets and cuffs of McKay’s trousers, checked the pocket of the bloody shirt, the cuffs and the collar, examined the boots and the belt—finding nothing. He replaced everything in the basket, with Price watching, leaving McKay’s hat. He ran his finger along the inside of the sweatband, found nothing there either, put it atop the stack.

  “With a closed case like this, I was surprised when the clerk told me you still had all this stuff. I guess no relatives showed up to claim it.”

  “Well, usually we’d dispose of it after the legal period is over, but we had a call from a woman. Used to be what you’d call a common-law wife, I guess. She asked about how to establish a legal right to it, and I told her I wasn’t sure and she should ask her lawyer.”

  “She didn’t come in for it?”

  “Didn’t give us her name, either,” Price said. “That was the last we heard of her. In fact, the only one who showed any interest in McKay’s stuff was Doherty. He came and wanted to look through it. Said he was interested in prospecting, and he’d heard what McKay was up to. Nobody had any problem with that, him being kin of the old sheriff and everybody knowing him.” He looked at his watch. “You about done with this?”

  “I heard he made copies of the map and some of the other stuff,” Leaphorn said.

  “I let him use our machine,” Price said. “Copied the map, bunch of letters, so forth, even copied a salesman’s business card.”

  “Why’d he want that?”

  “He didn’t say but I remember it had something written on it. It’s in here somewhere. He reached into the stack and extracted a business card. An insurance agent’s name and address on one side, and on the back “D2187” was written.

  “Any guesses about what that might mean?” Price asked.

  Leaphorn shook his head. “Thank you, Ozzie, for your time and your patience.”

  “You’re pretty thorough,” Price said.

  “I read a book by Raymond Chandler a long time ago. The crime scene crew had finished searching the hotel room, the victim, gone through everything. When the police were gone, Chandler had his detective take a look under the victim’s toupee.”

  “Never read it,” Price said.

  16

  Leaphorn had been trying to explain to Professor Louisa Bourbonette the confusing business of the maps.

  “I might have known,” said Louisa, “that if you got yourself mixed up in this it would involve maps.”

  For once Louisa had no other commitments, no academic duties at Northern Arizona U., and no reason not to take a ride with Leaphorn. This one was to a coffee shop in Shiprock and an appointment with Sergeant Jim Chee.

  “Aside from that,” Leaphorn said, “can you think of a reason Denton would want to lie to me about it?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Louisa said. “Maybe McKay had two maps in that briefcase. He showed Denton the one Denton told you about. Denton kept it. And after he shot McKay, Denton hid it away somewhere before police arrived.”

  They both thought about that for a moment.

  “That’s possible,” Leaphorn said.

  “But not likely,” she said. “Can you think of a reason he’d bring along two maps? You might bring two maps yourself. In fact, you probably have two maps with you right now.”

  Leaphorn laughed. “Actually, I have three today.” He extracted an American Automobile Association Indian Country map from the door pocket, and two pages copied from the U.S.G.S. quadrangle maps book from the glove compartment.

  They hadn’t settled the puzzle of Denton’s wrong map, nor why Denton had lied about McKay’s jacket, if indeed he had, or any of the several other things that had been bothering Leaphorn. But Louisa had firmly and emphatically resolved the Linda-Wiley relationship. Yes, Wiley was in love with Linda, and vice versa. Louisa had no doubt at all.

  Sergeant Chee’s patrol car was parked at the café, and Chee was inside holding a corner table. He stood to greet them.

  “I owe you a big favor if you ever need one,” he told Leaphorn. “Osborne didn’t seem to have anything to complain about.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “Is this something I’m not supposed to know about?” Louisa asked.

  “Just avoiding some bureaucratic red tape,” Leaphorn said.

  “How about you, Sergeant Chee? Are you willing to tell me?”

  “A piece of evidence got misplaced,” Chee said. “I wasn’t sure how to deal with it, and I asked Lieutenant Leaphorn for advice. He handled it for me.”

  Louisa laughed. “No rules broken either, not so anyone would notice it. Right?”

  “Let’s just say no harm was done,” Leaphorn said.

  Officer Bernadette Manuelito was hurrying up to the table, looking flustered, saying she was sorry to be late. Leaphorn pulled back a chair for her, introduced her to Louisa, told her he was glad she could join them.

  “Sergeant Chee asked me to come,” Bernie said. “He said you were interested in the Doherty homicide.”

  “I think we were just talking about that,” Louisa said. “Something that got Joe involved in it.”

  Professor Bourbonette had been around long enough, attended enough meetings with touchy faculty prima donnas, to sense instantly that she would have been better off to have restricted herself to smiles and nods.

  Officer Manuelito’s face expressed unnaturally intense interest. Leaphorn and Chee looked merely embarrassed.

  “But I gather no harm was done,” the professor added.

  “I was just simplifying matters,” Sergeant Chee said.

  “An item that might be useful as evidence was involved,” said Leaphorn, in an effort at damage control. “Jim wanted to get it back in place without involving a lot of needless paperwork.”

  “Oh,” said Louisa. “Okay.” And noticed that Officer Manuelito was leaning forward, her face flushed, and that Jim Chee was looking remarkably tense, and that it was time to change the subject.

  “By the way,” she said, “one of our history professors specializes in American frontier, nineteenth century, and I made the mistake of asking him if he’d heard of the Golden Calf gold legend and that touched off a standard academic fifty-minute lecture.”

  “Hey,” said Chee, “I’d like to hear about that.”

  “As I understand it, the recorded facts are that a civilian quartermaster employee at Fort Wingate, a man named Theodore Mott, was sent with four soldiers to deliver some supplies to the camp where they were building Fort Defiance. The soldiers were detached to join the cavalry unit at Defiance. Mott came back al
one and resigned from his job. There’s paperwork for that much in the army records. The interesting part is just talk about him finding a gold deposit on his trip.”

  Louisa paused. Bernie leaned forward again. Chee said: “Go ahead. This is going to be the interesting part.”

  “The legend is that Mott came back with a sack of placer gold. Several thousand dollars worth of it, very big money those days. He’s supposed to have told a tale of having to detour going to Fort Defiance to avoid a band of Navajos who looked hostile. It was early summer after a wet winter—and the snowy winter is also recorded. They did an overnight camp in a canyon carrying runoff water. Mott did some placer mining with a frying pan and liked what he saw in the sand. On the way back, alone now, he stopped again and—the way he told it—collected the sack of gold between sundown and dark and the higher he got up the canyon, the richer the sand. When he awakened the next morning, six Navajos were standing around him. He said their leader was a shaman and while none of the Navajos could speak English, he knew enough Navajo words to know the shaman was telling him this canyon was a sacred place and being there for him was taboo, and if he came back again they would kill him.”

  The waiter was hovering, waiting to hand them their menus and to take their drink orders. Louisa paused while the group did their duty.

  Bernie leaned forward, opened her mouth, said: “I’d like to know—“

  “Yes,” said Chee. “What happened next? Did he leave?”

  “There’s a sort of vague reference in Fort Wingate military records of Mott asking a military escort for a project, and the request being denied. But apparently he got three other men to join him and they left with pack animals, telling people they were going to be prospecting down in the Zuñi Mountains. Later one of the men came back to Wingate. He left a bunch of letters Mott had written to people at the fort to be mailed, and, according to the story, he turned in a substantial amount of placer gold at the assayer’s office, and bought supplies, and headed out again.” She threw up her hands. “That’s the end of it. No one ever saw Mott or any of his partners again.”