A Thief of Time Page 9

  “She didn’t want to stay on the reservation. You didn’t want to leave,” Janet Pete said. “You are saying you understand her problem.”

  “Our problem,” Chee said. “My problem.”

  Janet Pete sipped her coffee. “Mine was a law professor. Assistant professor, to be technical.” She put the cup down and considered. “You know,” she said, “maybe it was the same symbolic cat problem. Let me see if I can make it fit.”

  Chee waited. Like Mary Landon, Janet Pete had large, expressive eyes. Dark brown instead of blue. Now they were surrounded by frown lines as Janet Pete thought.

  “Doesn’t fit so well,” she said. “He wanted a helpmate.” She laughed. “Adam’s rib. Something to hold back the loneliness of the young man pursuing his brilliant career at law. The Indian maiden.” The words sounded bitter, but she smiled at Chee. “You remember. Few years ago, Indian maidens were in with the Yuppies. Like squash-blossom necklaces and declaring yourself to be part Cherokee or Sioux if you wanted to write romantic poetry.”

  “Not so much now,” Chee said. “I gather you agreed to disagree.”

  “Not really,” she said. “The offer remains open. Or so he tells me.”

  “Fits in a way,” Chee said. “I wanted her to be my Navajo.”

  “She was a schoolteacher? At Crownpoint?”

  “For three years,” Chee said.

  “But didn’t want to make a career out of it. I can see her point.”

  “That wasn’t exactly the problem. It was raising kids out here. More than that, too. I could leave. Had an offer from the FBI. Better money. Sort of a choice involved, as she saw it. Did I want her enough to quit being a Navajo?”

  Outside the dusty front window of the Navajo Nation Café the dazzling late-day sunlight turned dark with cloud shadow. A Ford 250 pickup rolled past slowly, its front seat crowded with four Navajos, its rear bumper crowded by the van of an impatient tourist. Chee caught the eye of the waitress and got their coffees refilled. What would he say if Janet Pete pressed the question. If she said: “Well, do you?” what would he say?

  Instead, she stirred her coffee.

  “How has the professor’s brilliant career developed?” Chee asked.

  “Brilliantly. He’s now chief legal counsel of Davidson-Bart, which I understand is what is called a multinational conglomerate. But mostly involved with the commercial credit end of export-import business. Makes money. Lives in Arlington.”

  Through the dusty window came the faint sound of thunder, a rumble that faded away.

  “Wish it would rain,” Janet Pete said.

  Chee had been thinking exactly the same thing. Sharing a Navajo thought with another Navajo. “Too late to rain,” he said. “It’s October thirty-first.”

  Janet Pete dropped him at the garage. He stopped at the station to call Lieutenant Leaphorn on his way back to the trailer.

  “Largo told me you found the bodies of those pot hunters,” Leaphorn said. “He was a little vague about what you were doing out there.”

  He left the question implied and Chee thought a moment before answering. He knew Leaphorn’s wife had died. He’d heard the man was having trouble coping with that. He’d heard—everybody in the Navajo Tribal Police had heard—that Leaphorn had quit the force. Retired. So what was he doing in this affair? How official was this? Chee exhaled, taking another second for thought. He thought, quit or not, this is still Joe Leaphorn. Our legendary Leaphorn.

  “I was looking for that fellow who stole that backhoe here at Shiprock,” Chee said. “I found out he was a pot hunter now and then, and I was trying to catch him out digging. With the stolen property.”

  “And you knew where to look?” Leaphorn, Chee remembered, never believed in coincidence.

  “Some guessing,” Chee said. “But I knew what gas company he worked for, and where his job would have taken him, and where there might be some sites in the places he would have been.”

  The word that spread among the four hundred employees of the Navajo Tribal Police was that Joe Leaphorn had lost it. Joe Leaphorn had a nervous breakdown. Joe Leaphorn was out of it. To Jim Chee, Leaphorn’s voice sounded no different. Neither did the tone of his questions. A kind of skepticism. As if he knew he wasn’t being told all he needed to know. What would Leaphorn ask him now? How he knew the man would be digging last night?

  “You have anything else to go on?”

  “Oh,” Chee said. “Sure. We knew he rented a truck with new tires on double back wheels.”

  “Okay,” Leaphorn said. “Good. So there were tracks to look for.” Now his voice sounded more relaxed. “Makes a lot of difference. Otherwise you spend the rest of your life out there running down the roads.”

  “And I figured he might be out digging last night because of something he said to Slick Nakai. The preacher bought pots from him, now and then. And he sort of told the preacher he’d have some for him quick,” Chee said.

  Silence.

  “Did you know I’m on leave? Terminal leave?”

  “I heard it,” Chee said.

  “Ten more days and I’m a civilian. Right now, matter of fact, I guess I’m unofficial.”

  “Yes sir,” Chee said.

  “If you can make it tomorrow, would you drive out there to the site with me? Look it over with me in daylight. Tell me how it was before the sheriff’s people and the ambulance and the FBI screwed everything up.”

  “If it’s okay with the captain,” Chee said, “I’d be happy to go.”

  EIGHT

  LEAPHORN HAD BEEN AWARE of the wind most of the night, listening to it blow steadily from the southeast as he waited for sleep, awakening again and again to notice it shifting, and gusting, making chindi sounds around the empty house. It was still blowing when Thatcher arrived to pick him up, buffeting Thatcher’s motor pool sedan.

  “Cold front coming through,” Thatcher said. “It’ll die down.”

  And as they drove northward from Window Rock it moderated. At Many Farms they stopped for breakfast, Thatcher reminiscing about Harrison Houk, cattleman, pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, potent Republican, subject of assorted gossip, county commissioner, holder of Bureau of Land Management grazing permits sprawling across the southern Utah canyon country, legendary shrewd operator. Leaphorn mostly listened, remembering Houk from long ago, remembering a man stricken. When they paid their check, the western sky over Black Mesa was bleak with suspended dust but the wind was down. Fifty miles later as they crossed the Utah border north of Mexican Water, it was no more than a breeze, still from the southeast but almost too faint to stir the sparse gray sage and the silver cheat grass of the Nokaito Bench. The sedan rolled across the San Juan River bridge below Sand Island in a dead calm. Only the smell of dust recalled the wind.

  “Land of Little Rain,” Thatcher said. “Who called it that?”

  It wasn’t the sort of friendship that needed answers. Leaphorn looked upstream, watching a small flotilla of rubber kayaks, rafts, and wooden dories pushing into the stream from the Sand Island launching site. A float expedition down into the deep canyons. He and Emma had talked of doing that. She would have loved it, getting him away from any possibility of telephone calls. Getting him off the end of the earth. And he would have loved it, too. Always intended to do it but there was never enough time. And now, of course, the time was all used up.

  “One of your jobs?” Leaphorn asked, nodding toward the flotilla below.

  “We license them as tour boatmen. Sell ’em trip permits, make sure they meet the safety rules. So forth.” He nodded toward the stream. “That must be the last one of the season. They close the river down just about now.”

  “Big headache?”

  “Not this bunch,” Thatcher said. “This is Wild Rivers Expeditions out of Bluff. Pros. More into selling education. Take you down with a geologist to study the formations and the fossils, or with an anthropologist to look at the Anasazi ruins up the canyons, or maybe with a biologist to ge
t you into the lizards and lichens and the bats. That sort of stuff. Older people go. More money. Not a bunch of overaged adolescents hoping to get scared shitless going down the rapids.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “Take great pride in cleaning up after themselves. The drill now is urinate right beside the river, so it dilutes it fast. Everything else they carry out. Portable toilets. Build their camp fires in fireboxes so you don’t get all that carbon in the sand. Even carry out the ashes.”

  They turned upriver toward Bluff. Off the reservation now. Out of Leaphorn’s jurisdiction and into Thatcher’s. Much of the land above the bluffs lining the river would be federal land—public domain grazing leases. The land along the river had been homesteaded by the Mormon families who’d settled this narrow valley on orders from Brigham Young to form an outpost against the hostile Gentile world. This stony landscape south of the river had been Leaphorn’s country once, when he was young and worked out of Kayenta, but it was too waterless and barren to support the people who would require police attention.

  History said 250 Mormons had settled the place in the 1860s, and the last census figures Leaphorn had seen showed its current population was 240—three service stations strung along the highway, three roadside cafés, two groceries, two motels, the office and boathouse of Wild Rivers Expeditions, a school, a ward meetinghouse, and a scattering of houses, some of them empty. The years hadn’t changed much at Bluff.

  Houk’s ranch house was the exception. Leaphorn remembered it as a big, solid block of a building, formed of cut pink sandstone, square as a die and totally neat. It had been connected to the gravel road from Bluff by a graded dirt driveway, which led through an iron gate, curved over a sagebrush-covered rise, and ended under the cottonwoods that shaded the house. Leaphorn noticed the difference at the gate, painted then, rusted now. He unlatched it, refastened it after Thatcher drove through. Then he pulled the chain, which slammed the clapper against the big iron church bell suspended on the pole that took the electric line to the house. That told Houk he had visitors.

  The driveway now was rutted, with a growth of tumbleweeds, wild asters, and cheat grass along the tracks. The rabbit fence, which Leaphorn remembered surrounding a neat and lush front yard garden, was sagging now and the garden a tangle of dry country weeds. The pillars that supported the front porch needed paint. So did the pickup truck parked beside the porch. Only the solid square shape of the house, built to defy time, hadn’t been changed by the years. But now, surrounded by decay, it stood like a stranger. Even the huge barn on the slope behind it, despite its stone walls, seemed to sag.

  Thatcher let the sedan roll to a stop in the shade of the cottonwood. The screen door opened and Houk appeared. He was leaning on a cane. He squinted from the shadows into blinding sunlight, trying to identify who had rung the yard bell. At first look, Leaphorn thought that Houk, like the pink sandstone of his house, had been proof against time. Despite the cane, his figure in the shadow of the porch had the blocky sturdiness Leaphorn remembered. There was still the round bulldog face, the walrus mustache, the small eyes peering through wire-rimmed glasses. But now Leaphorn saw the paunch, the slight slump, the deepened lines, the grayness, the raggedness of the mustache which hid his mouth. And as Houk shifted his weight against the cane, Leaphorn saw the grimace of pain cross his face.

  “Well, now, Mr. Thatcher,” Houk said, recognizing him. “What brings the Bureau of Land Management all the way out here so soon? Wasn’t it only last spring you was out here to see me?” And then he saw Leaphorn. “And who…” he began, and stopped. His expression shifted from neutral, to surprise, to delight.

  “By God,” he said. “I don’t remember your name, but you’re the Navajo policeman who found my boy’s hat.” Houk stopped. “Yes I do. It was Leaphorn.”

  It was Leaphorn’s turn for surprise. Almost twenty years since he’d been involved in the hunt for Houk’s boy. He had talked to Houk only two or three times, and only briefly. Giving him the wet blue felt hat, soggy with muddy San Juan River water. Standing beside him under the alcove in the cliff that tense moment when the state police captain decided they had Brigham Houk cornered. And finally, on this very porch when it was all over and no hope remained, listening to the man examine his conscience, finding in his own flaws the blame for his boy’s murderous rage. Three meetings, and a long, long time ago.

  Houk ushered them into what he called the parlor, a neat room that smelled of furniture polish. “Don’t use this room much,” Houk said loudly, and he pulled back the curtains, raised the blinds, and pushed up the sash windows to admit the autumn. But the room was still dim—its walls a gallery of framed photographs of people, of bookshelves lined mostly with pots. “Don’t get much company,” Houk concluded. He sat himself in the overstuffed armchair that matched the sofa, creating another faint puff of dust. “In just a minute the girl will be in here with something cold to drink.” He waited then, his fingers tapping at the chair arm. It was their turn to speak.

  “We’re looking for a woman,” Thatcher began. “Anthropologist named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal.”

  Houk nodded. “I know her.” He looked surprised. “What she do?”

  “She’s been missing,” Thatcher said. “For a couple of weeks.” He thought about what he wanted to say next. “Apparently she came out here just a little while before she disappeared. To Bluff. Did you see her?”

  “Let’s see now. I’d say it was three, four weeks when she was out here last,” Houk said. “Something like that. Maybe I could figure it out exactly.”

  “What did she want?”

  It seemed to Leaphorn that Houk’s face turned slightly pinker than its usual hue. He stared at Thatcher, his lip moving under the mustache, his fingers still drumming.

  “You fellas didn’t take long to get out here,” he said. “I’ll say that for you.” He pushed himself up in the chair, then sat back down again. “But how the hell you connect it with me?”

  “You mean her being missing?” Thatcher said, puzzled. “She had your name down in her notes.”

  “I meant the killings,” Houk said.

  “Killings?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Over in New Mexico,” Houk said. “The pot hunters. It was on the radio this morning.”

  “You think we’re connecting those with you?” Leaphorn asked. “Why do you think that?”

  “Because it seems to me that every time the feds start thinking about pot stealing, they come nosing around here,” Houk said. “Those folks get shot stealing pots, stands to reason it’s going to get the BLM cops, and the FBI, and all off their butts and working. Since they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, they bother me.” Houk surveyed them, his small blue eyes magnified by the lenses of his glasses.

  “You fellas telling me this visit hasn’t nothing to do with that?”

  “That’s what we’re telling you,” Leaphorn said. “We’re trying to find an anthropologist. A woman named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. She disappeared the thirteenth of October. Some references in her notes about coming out here to Bluff to see Mr. Harrison Houk. We thought if we knew what she came out here to see you about, it might tell us something about where to look next.”

  Houk thought about it, assessing them. “She came to see me about a pot,” he said.

  Leaphorn sat, waiting for his silence to encourage Houk to add to that. But Thatcher was not a Navajo.

  “A pot?”

  “To do with her research,” Houk said. “She’d seen a picture of it in a Nelson auction catalog. You know about that outfit? And it was the kind she’s interested in. So she called ’em, and talked to somebody or other, and they told her they’d got it from me.” Houk paused, waiting for Thatcher’s question.

  “What did she want to know?”

  “Exactly where I found it. I didn’t find it. I bought it off a Navajo. I give her his name.”

  A middle-aged Navajo woman came into the room, carrying a tray with three water glasses, a pitcher of w
hat appeared to be ice water, and three cans of Hires root beer.

  “Drinking water or root beer,” Houk said. “I guess you knew I’m Latter-day Saints.”

  Everybody took water.

  “Irene,” Houk said. “You want to meet these fellas. This is Mr. Thatcher here. The one from the BLM who comes out here now and then worrying us about our grazing rights. And this fella here is the one I’ve told you about. The one that found Brigham’s hat. The one that kept those goddam state policemen from shooting up into that alcove. This is Irene Musket.”

  Irene put down the tray and held her hand out to Thatcher. “How do you do,” she said. She spoke in Navajo to Leaphorn, using the traditional words, naming her mother’s clan, the Towering House People, and her father’s, the Paiute Dineh. She didn’t hold out her hand. He wouldn’t expect it. This touching of strangers was a white man’s custom that some traditional Navajos found difficult to adopt.

  “You remember what day it was that anthropology woman was out here?” Houk asked her. “Almost a month ago, I think.”

  Irene considered. “On a Friday,” she said. “Four weeks ago last Friday.” She picked up the tray and left.

  “Great friend of my wife, Irene was. After Alice passed on, Irene stayed on and looked after things,” Houk said.

  They sipped the cold water. Behind Houk’s gray head, the wall was lined with photographs. Houk and his wife and their children clustered on the front porch. Brigham, the youngest, standing in front. The brother and sister he was destined to kill standing behind him, smiling over his shoulders. Brigham’s mouth looked slightly twisted, as if he had been ordered to smile. Houk’s face was happy, boyish. His wife looked tired, strain showing in the lines around her mouth. A wedding picture, the bride with the veil raised above her face, Houk with the mustache much smaller, older couples flanking them. A picture of Brigham on a horse, his smile strained and lopsided. A picture of the sister in a cheerleader’s uniform. Of the brother in a Montezuma Creek High School football jacket. Of Brigham holding up a dead bobcat by its back legs, his eyes intense. Of Houk in an army uniform. Of the Houks and another couple. But mostly the pictures were of the three children. Dozens of them, at all ages. In most of them, Brigham stood alone, rarely smiling. In three of them, he stood over a deer. In one, over a bear. Leaphorn remembered Houk talking endlessly on the porch the day Brigham had drowned.