The Wailing Wind Page 8

  “One more thing that might help me. Could you tell anything from the stuff in his truck, on his boots, clothes. Anything that would give you a hint at where he’d been between leaving Gallup and getting shot?”

  “Not much,” Osborne said. He looked at his watch, frowned, and glanced at Chee. “You’re going to ask me what kind of rocks he was walking on, and I can’t help you about that.” He pushed back from the table. “I can tell you he walked through somebody’s camp fire, or ash heap, or something. He had soot all over his shoes. And there’s something I’d like to ask you about.”

  Chee nodded.

  Osborne studied him. About to tell Chee something. Or ask him something. Then he picked up his notebook and paged through it. “Maybe those numbers will mean something to you,” he said.

  “Numbers?”

  “On that insurance card of McKay’s that Doherty copied. I remembered I copied them down. D2187. That ring any bells with you? It didn’t with us, and it didn’t with the insurance agent.”

  “The ‘D’ might stand for Denton, of course. Are those the last four numbers of his unlisted telephone?”

  “No. We thought of that. Funny thing to copy. Made us wonder if Doherty knew something about McKay that we don’t. It had to mean something or he wouldn’t have made a copy. Seems funny.”

  It seemed funny to Chee, too, and he jotted the numbers into his own notebook. He’d try D2187 on Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant would probably recognize them as map coordinates.

  With the number and the sooty shoes in mind, Chee had driven directly from Osborne’s office to the pay telephone outside the Pancake House, called the U.S. Forest Service office, asked for Denny Pacheco, and told him his problem. He needed Pacheco to check his records for the past big burn season, find out which fires the late Thomas Doherty had worked, and call Chee at his office in Shiprock.

  “Just drop whatever unimportant stuff I might be working on and do it, huh?” said Pacheco. “Why am I going to do something like that?”

  “Because I’m your good buddy, is why,” Chee said. “And we’re trying to find out where this guy was when somebody shot him. It would need to be a fire within, say, fifty or sixty miles of where he was found.”

  “And where was that?”

  Chee explained it.

  “So I plow through all that paper for you, and call you at your office with it?” Pacheco asked. “And you remember this when I need a ticket fixed. Right?”

  “Anything short of a felony,” Chee had said, and he found Pacheco’s message waiting on his answering machine when he got back to his office. Pacheco had listed three fires where Doherty’s name was on the crew payroll. One was the huge Mesa Verde burn, one was a smaller fire south in the White Mountains, and one was a little nipped-in-the-bud lightning-caused blaze in the Coyote Canyon drainage. The bigger ones were too distant to interest Chee. The lightning burn was in a narrow canyon draining the north slope of Mesa de los Lobos. “This one is well within your mileage limits,” Pacheco said. “Bad hot spots due to accumulation of dead timber, trash, etc., but we got to it fast with fire-suppression planes, and then it rained to dampen it down. We let the hot spots burn out the fuel trash and just sent a man in to make sure it didn’t take off again. That was your Doherty.”

  Chee listened to that again. Probably their canyon. He’d heard that this fire, like the one that roared through the Mesa Verde National Monument area, had uncovered interesting rock art. Perhaps it had also uncovered signs of the legendary Golden Calf dig. Perhaps Doherty had seen them.

  The phone buzzed. He picked it up. Officer Bernadette Manuelito calling. Take line three.

  12

  Chee sucked in his breath, picked up the telephone, punched button three, and said: “Bernie. I was just going to—“

  “Sergeant Chee,” said the strained-sounding voice in his ear, “this is Bernadette Manuelito. Are you still looking for where that man was shot?”

  “Well, yes,” Chee said. “But I think we have a pretty good idea now. It looks like—“

  “He was shot in a canyon draining off of Mesa de los Lobos,” Officer Manuelito said. “About two miles up a little drainage that runs into Coyote Canyon. There’s an old placer mining sluice there—“

  “Wait a minute,” Chee said. “What—“

  But Bernie wasn’t being interrupted. “And that’s the place it looks like he dug up the sand with the placer gold in it.”

  “Bernie,” Chee said. “Slow down.”

  “I found what looked like his tracks there, and the same sort of seeds that were in his shoes and socks, but I didn’t stake off the scene because somebody shot at me.”

  With that, Officer Manuelito inhaled deeply. A moment of silence ensued.

  “Shot at you!” Chee said.

  “I think so,” Bernie said. “He missed. That’s why I called in, really. I didn’t see him and maybe he wasn’t shooting at me, but I thought I should report it. And find out whether I’m still suspended.”

  “Somebody shot at you!” Chee shouted. “Are you all right? Where are you? Where are you calling from?”

  “I’m home,” Bernie said. “But you didn’t answer me. Am I still suspended?”

  “You never were suspended,” Chee said. From there the conversation settled into a relatively normal pace, with Chee shutting up and letting Officer Manuelito give an uninterrupted account of her afternoon. It wasn’t until it had ended and Chee was leaning back in his chair, shocked, feeling stunned, digesting the fact that Bernie Manuelito might well have been killed, that he remembered that he had forgotten to apologize.

  He’d need to report all this to Captain Largo, but Largo wasn’t in his office today. Chee picked up the telephone again. He’d call Osborne, tell him the probable site of the Doherty homicide had been found, tell him an officer had been shot at there, and give him the details. He’d enjoy doing that. But halfway through punching in the numbers, he hung up. Officer Bernadette Manuelito wacoming in. Officer Manuelito deserved to make her own report.

  13

  The car rolling to a stop in the parking lot of the McDonald’s where Joe Leaphorn was eating a hamburger was a shiny black latest version of Jaguar’s Vanden Plas sedan—which Leaphorn guessed was the only one of its vintage in Gallup. The man climbing out of it seemed totally out of character for the car. He wore rumpled jeans, a plaid work shirt, and a gimme cap decorated with a trucking company’s decal. It shaded a slightly lopsided and weather-beaten face with a mouth that was too large for it.

  Wiley Denton. He’d said he’d meet Leaphorn at the McDonald’s at 12:15 P.M. and came through the entrance twenty-three seconds early.

  Leaphorn stood and motioned Denton over to his booth. They shook hands, and sat.

  “I guess I owe you an apology,” Denton said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Last time I talked to you, I mean, before calling you down at Window Rock this morning, I hung up on you. Called you a son of a bitch. I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry about that.”

  “I’ve been called that several times,” Leaphorn said. “Before and since.”

  “I remember I was pretty pissed off at the time. Didn’t mean to give any offense.”

  “None taken,” Leaphorn said.

  “Hope not,” said Denton, “because I’m going to ask you for a favor. I’d like to get you to do some work for me.”

  Leaphorn considered this a moment, looked at Denton who was studying his reaction, and waved over at the service counter. “You want to get yourself something to eat?”

  “No,” Denton said. He glanced around at the lunchroom crowded with the noontime hungry. “What I’d rather do, if you’ve got the time, is go out to the house where we could talk with some privacy.” He pushed back his chair, then stopped. “Unless you’re just not interested.”

  Leaphorn was definitely interested. “Let’s go have a talk,” he said.

  Denton’s house and its grounds occupied an expanse of the high s
lope that looked down on Gallup, Interstate 40 and the railroad below, and, fifty miles to the east, the shape of Mount Taylor—the Navajo’s sacred Turquoise Mountain. Leaphorn had seen a few more imposing residences, most of them in Aspen where the moguls of Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry had been buying five-million-dollar houses and tearing them down to make room for fifty-million-dollar houses, but by Four Corners standards this place was a mansion. Denton pushed the proper button and the iron gate slid open, groaning and shrieking, to admit them to the drive. A little past the halfway point the gate stopped.

  “Well, hell,” Denton said, and jammed the heel of his hand down on the car horn. “I told George to fix that damn thing.”

  “Sounds like it needs greasing,” Leaphorn said.

  “I think George needs some greasing, too,” Denton said. “He hasn’t been good for much since—ah, since I went away and did my time.”

  A tall, narrow-faced man wearing a red nylon windbreaker was hurrying toward them. Leaphorn first noticed he was a Navajo with the western Navajo shape of broad shoulders and narrow hips, then that he had a nose which seemed to have been bent, that the face was familiar. Finally he recognized George Billie.

  “You got back early, Mr. Denton,” Billie said. “I was just about to take care of that gate.”

  “Well, get it open now,” Denton said. “And then get it fixed.”

  “Okay,” Billie said. He had glanced at Leaphorn, glanced again, and then looked quickly away.

  “Ya eeh teh, Mr. Billie,” Leaphorn said. “How is life treating you these days?”

  “All right,” Billie said. He put his shoulder to the gate and pushed it open. Denton drove through.

  “You and George know one another,” Denton said. “I bet I can guess how that happened. He said he was a wild kid. Did time for this and that before he quit drinking.”

  Denton pushed another button, raising one of the three garage doors. They drove in. “He’s been working here for several years now. Pretty fair help, and Linda liked him. She thought he was sweet.” Denton chuckled at this description as they exited the garage and entered the house. Denton ushered Leaphorn through a foyer and down a hallway into a spacious office.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “And how about a drink?”

  Leaphorn opted for a glass of water, or coffee if available.

  “Mrs. Mendoza,” Denton shouted. “Gloria.” He awaited a response, got none, and disappeared back down the hall. Leaphorn studied the office. Its expanse of windows looked out across a thousand square miles of green, tan, and pink, with the shade of colors changing under a sky full of those dry autumn clouds. The view was spectacular, but Leaphorn was more interested in the interior decorations. A section of wall behind Denton’s desk was occupied with photographs of Mrs. Linda Denton, a blonde, blue-eyed girl smiling shyly and wearing oval glasses, who was every bit as beautiful as all he’d heard. Other photographs, some in color, some black-and-white copies of old photos, some aerials, and all in various sizes and shapes, hung on two of the walls. Denton himself appeared in only one of them, a much younger version of him standing with two other soldiers in Green Beret camouflage attire by the side door of a helicopter. In most of the photos mining was the subject, and the exceptions seemed to Leaphorn to be views of canyons, ridges, or cliffs where mining was a possibility for the future. He edged around the room, examining photographs of nineteenth-century prospectors working at sluices, smiling at the camera in assay offices, leading pack mules, or digging along dry streambeds. He recognized Arizona’s Superstition Mountains in one photograph, the Navajo Nation’s own Beautiful Mountain in another, and—in the largest one of all—a mural-sized blowup of part of Mesa de los Lobos. That, being east of Gallup, probably included Navajo land, Bureau of Land Management land, and private land. In other words, it would be a part of the “Checkerboard Reservation.”

  He was studying that when Denton reappeared, carrying a tea tray with two coffee cups, cream, sugar, and a glass of ice water, which he carefully deposited on a table.

  “I imagine you’ve heard I’m a gold-mine nut,” Denton said. “Came out in the trial, and all. I made my money in oil and natural gas leases, but gold’s where the glamour’s always been for me. Ever since I was a kid.”

  Leaphorn was sampling his coffee. He nodded.

  “Always had a dream of actually finding the so-called Lost Adams dig down south of here,” Denton said. “Or that Sick Swede Mine that’s supposed to be somewhere in the Superstitions. Or one of the other ones. Read everything about ’em. And then I heard about the Golden Calf and I got to reading about it. And that was the one I decided I’d find.”

  Denton had picked up his cup and was pacing back and forth with it, still untasted. He waved his unoccupied hand at the bookshelves along much of the fourth wall. “Collected everything I could find on it, and that’s a hell of a lot of stuff.” He laughed. “Mostly just baloney. Just fellows rewriting somebody else’s rewriting of tall tales.” Denton laughed. “One of ’em said if you say a man’s a prospector, you don’t have to say he’s a liar.” He put down the cup and sat across from Leaphorn.

  “That’s sort of what I suspected,” Leaphorn said. “Always seemed funny that gold deposits were so easy to lose out here.”

  Denton didn’t like the sound of that.

  “They weren’t exactly lost,” he said, tone defensive. “With the Adams dig, the Apaches wiped out the miners. It was usually something like that. Pretty much the same with the Golden Calf, too.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. Sooner or later Denton would get to what he’d brought him to talk about. The coffee was good and the chair comfortable, something more important to him now that his back had discovered arthritis. He had intended to drive north today to see Chee at Shiprock, but Chee could wait. After a while Denton would say something interesting and it would give him a chance to ask questions. He had several to ask.

  “About fifteen years ago one of the people working on a lease up by the Utah border told me about the Golden Calf. He was part Zuñi, part white, and he said his white granddaddy used to talk about it. Claimed the grandfather had known Theodore Mott, the fellow who found the deposit and was borrowing money to build the sluices he needed to develop it. This half-Zuñi guy showed me a little bit of placer gold. It was supposed to have been sluiced out of an arroyo draining south out of the Zuñi Mountains.”

  Denton unbuttoned his shirt pocket and extracted a little bottle about the size of shampoo bottles found in hotel bathrooms.

  “Here it is,” Denton said, and handed the bottle to Leaphorn.

  “I had it assayed. A little more than half an ounce, but it is flake gold all right. You’ll notice some of those little grains are pinkish and some are almost black. It don’t turn shiny gold until it’s washed and refined.” He laughed. “The son of a bitch charged me for a full ounce, and that was back when we were having that inflation and the gold price was up over six hundred dollars.”

  Leaphorn shook the bottle and studied it. He noticed the pink and the black, but it looked pretty much like the stuff Jim Chee had showed him from the troublesome Prince Albert tobacco tin.

  “Interesting,” he said. He handed Denton the bottle and watched him button it back into his pocket.

  “The price is way down now. Running below two hundred and fifty an ounce the last time I checked the market.” With that said, Denton put down his cup, picked it up again, sipped, and looked across the rim at Leaphorn, waiting. But for what?

  Leaphorn gestured around the room. “From the looks of all this, I wouldn’t think the price has much to do with you being interested in gold mines. Am I right?”

  “Exactly right,” Denton said. “It ain’t the money. I want to be in the books. The man who solved the mystery. Wiley Denton. The man who found the Golden Calf. I was going to have people paying attention to me.” He put down the cup, threw up his hands, and laughed, dismissing the idea. But Leaphorn saw he wasn’t laughing at himse
lf. He was watching Leaphorn, waiting again for what Leaphorn would say.

  Well, now, Leaphorn thought, we Navajo are good at this waiting game. The Enduring Navajo, as one of the anthropologists had labeled them. He examined the view through the window behind Denton, the sunlight on the cliffs across the interstate and the cloud formation given new shape by the slanting light. But Leaphorn’s patience was overcome by his curiosity. Was Denton mentally unstable? Probably. Who wasn’t, to one degree or another?

  “Mr. Denton,” Leaphorn said. “Are you going to tell me what it is you want me to do for you?”

  Denton sighed. “I want you to find my wife.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Leaphorn expected. But it probably wasn’t exactly what Denton wanted, either. What Denton wanted, Leaphorn suspected, was to use him as a pipeline into what the FBI was doing about the Doherty homicide. He was surely smart enough to know they must be looking for a connection.

  “How do you think I can do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Denton said. “You’re the cop. Or were. People tell me you’re good at getting things done.”

  Leaphorn didn’t respond to that. He sipped his coffee.

  “I’ll pay you whatever you ask,” Denton said. “Doesn’t matter. Just look for her for as long as it takes. And let me know.”

  The coffee was cold now. Leaphorn put the cup down.

  “Is this where you shot McKay? Right here in this room?”

  Denton pointed. “There by the hall door.”

  “Whether I’ll try to find your wife will depend on how you answer some questions,” Leaphorn said. “If I see any signs you’re misleading me, or holding stuff back, then I’m not interested. It would be impossible. It’s probably impossible anyway, unless you can tell me something useful.”

  Denton’s expression was quizzical. “There’s talk that you’ve already been looking for Linda,” he said.

  “I was once. I drew a blank.”