"That's really what I want to talk to you about," Miss Pauling said. "If this Palanzer did it, I want to know it and I want to know where to find him. If somebody else was responsible, I want to know that." She paused. "I can pay you."
Chee looked doubtful.
"I know you say you're not working on this. But you're the one who found out how he was killed. And you're the only one I know."
"I tell you what I'll do," Chee said. "You go home. If I can find out whether Palanzer is the one, I'll call you and tell you. And then if I can find out where you could look for Palanzer, I'll let you know that, too."
"That's all I can ask," she said.
"Then you'll go home?"
"Gaines has the tickets," she said. "It was all so sudden. He called me at work, and told me about the crash and arranged to meet me. And he said he was Robert's lawyer and we should fly right out and see about it. So he took me home and I put some things in a bag and we went right out to the airport and all the money I have is just what was in my purse."
"You have a credit card?" Chee asked. She nodded. "Use that. I'll get you a ride to Flagstaff."
Two men at a table near the cash register had been watching them. One was about thirty-a big man with long blond hair and small eyes under bushy blond eyebrows. The other, much older, had thin white hair and a suntanned face. His pin-striped three-piece suit looked out of place on Second Mesa.
"Do you know who Gaines is?" Chee asked.
"You mean besides being my brother's attorney? Well, I guess from what I hear that he must be somebody involved in this drug business. I guess that's the real reason he wanted me along." She chuckled, without humor. "To make him legitimate in dealing with people. Is that right?"
"So it would seem," Chee said.
Cowboy Dashee came through the walkway, paused a moment by the cash register, spotted Chee, and came over.
"Saw you parked out there," he said.
"This is Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee," Chee said. "Miss Pauling is the sister of the pilot of that plane."
Cowboy nodded. "Everybody calls me Cowboy," he said. He pulled a chair over from an adjoining table and sat down.
"Why don't you pull up a chair and join us?" Chee asked.
"You knpw this guy's a Navajo?" he asked Miss Pauling. "Sometimes he tries to pass himself off as one of us."
Miss Pauling managed a smile.
"What's new?" Chee asked.
"You talked to your office this afternoon?"
"No," Chee said.
"You haven't heard about finding the car, or turning up the necklace?"
"Necklace?"
"From the Burnt Water burglary. Big squash blossom job. Girl over at Mexican Water pawned it."
"Where'd she get it?"
"Who else?" Cowboy said. "Joseph Musket. Old Ironfingers playing Romeo." Cowboy turned to Miss Pauling. "Shop talk," he said. "Mr. Chee and I have been worrying about this burglary and now a piece of the loot finally turned up."
"When?" Chee asked. "How'd it happen?"
"She just pawned it yesterday," Cowboy said. "Said she met this guy at a squaw dance over there somewhere, and he wanted to." Cowboy flushed slightly, glanced at Miss Pauling. "Anyway, he got romantic and he gave her the necklace."
"And it was Ironfingers."
"That's what she said his name was." Cowboy grinned at Chee. "I notice with intense surprise that you're not interested in the car."
"You said you found it?"
"That's right," Cowboy said. "Just followed a sort of hunch I had. Followed up an arroyo out there and believe it or not, there it was-hidden up under some bushes."
"Good for you," Chee said.
"I'll tell you what's good for me," Cowboy said. "I jimmied my way into it through the vent on the right front window, pried it right open."
"That's the best way to get in," Chee said.
"I thought you'd say that," Cowboy said.
Miss Pauling was watching them curiously.
Chee turned to her.
"You remember me telling you that the plane crash and the narcotics case wasn't my business? Well, it's in the jurisdiction of Mr. Dashee's sheriff's department. Coconino County. And now Cowboy has found that car that everyone's been wondering about. The one that drove away from the plane crash."
"Oh," she said. "Can you tell us about it?"
Cowboy looked slightly doubtful. He glanced at Chee again. "Well," he said. "I guess so. Not much to tell, really. Green gmc carryall. Somebody drove it way up that arroyo and jammed it under the brush where it couldn't be seen. Been rented at Phoenix to that guy Jansen-the one that was found out there by the plane crash. Bloodstains on the back seat. Nothing in it. I think the fbi's out there now, checking it for fingerprints and so forth."
"Nothing in it?" Chee said. He hoped he'd kept the surprise out of his voice. Cowboy looked at him.
"Few butts in the ashtray. Rental papers in the glove box. Owner's manual. No big bundles labeled cocaine. Nothing like that. I guess we'll be hunting around there tomorrow."
Chee became aware that Miss Pauling was staring at him.
"You all right?" she asked.
"I'm fine," Chee said.
"Funny thing," Cowboy said. "The inside had a funny smell. Like disinfectant. I wonder why that would be."
"Beats me," Chee said.
Chee considered it as he drove back to Tuba City. Obviously the body had been gone when Cowboy found the vehicle. Obviously someone had come and taken it. Why? Perhaps because whoever had seen him parked at the arroyo mouth had become nervous and decided the body might be found. But why preserve it in the first place? And who had moved it? Joseph Musket, it would seem. But tonight he felt very disappointed in Ironfingers. Disillusioned. Musket should be smarter than the run-of-the-mill thief. In his mind Chee had built him up to be much too clever to do the same thing that always trips up small-time thieves. And the facts as Chee knew them seemed to make him too smart to give a girl that stolen necklace. Someone seemed to have thought so. Someone had given him something close to seven hundred dollars-probably, Chee guessed, an even thousand-to do something when he left the prison at Santa Fe. And whatever it was, it involved working until the end of summer at Burnt Water. Doing what? Setting up and watching the landing strip for a multimillion-dollar narcotics delivery. That seemed to be the answer. But if he had seven hundred dollars in his pocket, if he had coming a payoff big enough to buy a wealth in sheep, why would he steal the pawn jewelry? Chee had been over all of that before, and the only motive he could think of was to provide what would seem to be a logical reason for disappearing from the trading post. Something which might put off the hunters if he intended to steal the shipment. And that meant he was too damn smart to give an instantly identifiable piece of squash blossom jewelry to some girl he'd picked up.
"Ironfingers, where are you?" Chee asked the night.
And oddly, just as he said it, aloud, to himself, another little mystery solved itself in his mind. He knew suddenly what had caused the clicking sound he'd heard in the darkness on the other side of the chamiso bushes. To make certain, he slid his.38 out of its holster. With his thumb he moved the hammer back and forth-off safety, to full cock, and back to safety. Click. Click. Click. He glanced at the pistol and back at the highway again. It was the kind of nervous thing a man might do if he was tensely ready to shoot something. Or someone.
The thought of Musket, pistol cocked, hunting him in the dark aroused a surprising anger in Chee. It made the abstraction intensely personal. Well, Largo wanted him away from Tuba City. He'd quit postponing that trip to the prison in New Mexico. He'd take another step down the trail of Ironfingers.
Chapter Nineteen
The drive from tuba city to the New Mexico State Penitentiary on the Santa Fe plateau is about four hundred miles. Chee, who had risen even earlier than usual and cheated a little on the speed limit, got there in the early afternoon. He identified himself through the microphone at the entrance tower and wa
ited while the tower checked with someone in the administration building. Then the exterior gate slid open. When it had closed behind him, and locked itself, another motor purred and the inside gate rolled down its track. Jim Chee was inside the fence, walking up the long, straight concrete walk through the great flat emptiness of the entrance yard. Nothing living was visible except for a flight of crows high to the north, between the prison and the mountains. But the long rows of cell block windows stared at him. Chee looked back, conscious of being watched. Above the second-floor windows of the second block to his right, the gray concrete was smudged with black. That would be cell block 3, Chee guessed, where more than thirty convicts were butchered and burned by their fellow prisoners in the ghastly riot of 1980. Had Joseph Musket been here then? If he'd been among the rioters, he'd concealed his role well enough to justify parole.
Another electronic lock let Chee through the door of the administration building, into the presence of a thin, middle-aged Chicano guard who manned the entrance desk. "Navajo Tribal Police," the guard said, eyeing Chee curiously. He glanced down at his clipboard. "Mr. Armijo will handle you." Another guard, also gray, also Chicano, led him wordlessly to Mr. Armijo's office.
Mr. Armijo was not wordless. He was plump, and perhaps forty, with coarse black hair razor-cut and blow-dried into this year's popular shape. His teeth were very, very white and he displayed them in a smile. "Mr. Chee. You're not going to believe this, but I know this Joseph Musket personally." Armijo's smile became a half inch broader. "He was a trusty. Worked right here in our records section for a while. Have a seat. I guess we'll be getting him back now." Armijo indicated a gray steel chair with a gray plastic cushion. "Violated his parole, is that it?"
"Looks like it," Chee said. "I guess you could say he's a suspect in a burglary. Anyway, we need to know more about him."
"Here he is." Armijo handed Chee a brown cardboard accordion file. "All about Joseph Musket."
Chee put the file on his lap. He'd read through such files before. He knew what was in them, and what wasn't. "You said you knew him," Chee said. "What was he like?"
"Like?" The question surprised Armijo. He looked puzzled. He shrugged. "Well, you know. Quiet. Didn't say much. Did his work." Armijo frowned. "What do you mean, what was he like?"
A good question, Chee thought. What did he mean? What was he looking for? "Did he tell jokes?" Chee asked. "Was he the kind of guy who sort of takes over a job, or did you have to tell him everything? Have any friends? That sort of thing."
"I don't know," Armijo said. His expression said he wished he hadn't started the conversation. "I'd tell him what to do and he'd do it. Didn't ever say much. Quiet. He was an Indian." Armijo glanced at Chee to see if that explained it. Then he went on, explaining the job-how Musket would come in each afternoon, how he'd set up the files on the new prisoners received that day and then sort through the File basket and add whatever new material might have developed to the folders of other inmates. "Not a very demanding job," Armijo said. "But he did it well enough. Didn't make mistakes. Got good reports."
"How about friends?" Chee asked.
"Oh, he had friends," Armijo said. "In here, you got money, you got friends."
"Musket had money? " That surprised Chee.
"In his canteen account," Armijo said. "That's all you can have. No cash, of course. Just credit for smokes, candy, and stuff like that. All the little extras."
"You mean more money than he could earn in here? Outside money?"
"He had connections," Armijo said. "Lots of narcotics dealers have connections. Some lawyer depositing money into their account."
And that seemed to be all Armijo knew. He showed Chee into an adjoining room and left him with the file.
In the file there were first the photographs.
Joseph Musket stared out at Chee: an oval face, clean shaven, a line extending down the center of the forehead, the expression blank-the face a man puts on when he has cleared everything out of his mind except the need to endure. He hadn't changed a lot, Chee thought, beyond the change caused by the thin mustache, a few added pounds, and a few added years. But then maybe he had changed. Chee turned his eyes away from the stolid eyes of Musket and looked at his profile. That was all he had seen of Joseph Musket-a quick disinterested glance at a stranger walking past. The profile showed Chee a high, straight forehead-the look of intelligence. Nothing more.
He looked away from the face and noted the vital statistics. Musket today would be in his early thirties, he noticed, which was about what he had guessed. The rest checked out with what he had already learned from Musket's probation officer: born near Mexican Water, son of Simon Musket and Fannie Tsossie, educated at Teec Nos Pos boarding school and the high school at Cottonwood. As he'd remembered from what the probation officer had shown him at Flagstaff, Musket was doing three-to-five for possession of narcotics with intent to sell.
Chee read more carefully. Musket's police record was unremarkable. His first rap had been at eighteen in Gallup, drunk and disorderly. Then had come an arrest in Albuquerque for grand theft, dismissed, and another Albuquerque arrest for burglary, which had led to a two-year sentence and referral to a drug treatment program, suspended. Another burglary charge, this one in El Paso, had led to a one-to-three sentence in Huntsville; and then came what Chee had been (at least subconsciously) looking for-Joe Musket's graduation into the more lethal level of crime. It had been an armed robbery of a Seven-Eleven Store at Las Cruces, New Mexico. On this one, the grand jury hadn't indicted, and the charge had been dismissed. Chee sorted through the pages, looking for the investigating officer's report. It sounded typical. Two men, one outside in a car, the other inside looking at the magazines until the last customer leaves, then the gun shown to the clerk, money from the register stuffed into a grocery bag, the clerk locked in the storeroom, and two suspects arrested after abandoning the getaway car. Musket had been found hiding between garbage containers in an alley, but the clerk wasn't ready to swear he was the man he'd seen waiting in the car outside. At the bottom of the page, a Xerox out of the Las Cruces police files, was a handwritten note. It said: "True bill on West-no bill on Musket." Chee glanced quickly back up the page, found the suspect-identification line. The man who'd gone into the store with the gun while Joseph Musket waited in the car was identified as Thomas Rodney West, age 30, address, Ideal Motel, 2929 Railroad Avenue, El Paso.
It didn't really surprise Chee. West had said Musket was a friend of his son's. That was the reason he'd given Musket the job. And West had said his son had bad friends and had been in trouble, and had been killed. But how had he been killed? Chee hurried now. He found Thomas Rodney West once again in the investigation report which covered the drug bust that had sent Musket to the Santa Fe prison. He had been nailed along with Musket in the pickup truck carrying eight hundred pounds of marijuana. The pot had been unloaded off a light aircraft in the desert south of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The plane had eluded the dea trap, the pickup hadn't. Chee put down the Musket file and stared for a long moment at the gray concrete wall. Then he went into Armijo's office. Armijo looked up from his paperwork, teeth white.
"Do you keep files on inmates after they're dead?"
"Sure." Armijo's smile widened. "In the dead file."
"I'm not sure he was here," Chee said. "Fellow named Thomas Rodney West."
Armijo's smile lost its luster. "He was here," he said. "Got killed."
"In here?"
"This year," Armijo said. "In the recreation yard." He got up and was stooping to pull open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. "Things like that happen now and then," he said.
"Somebody?" Chee said. "It wasn't solved?"
"No," Armijo said. "Five hundred men all around him and nobody saw a thing. That's the way it works, usually."
The accordion file of Thomas Rodney West was identical to that of Joseph Musket (a.k.a. Ironfingers Musket), except that the string which secured its flap was tied with a knot, giving it the final
ity of death, instead of a bow, which suggested the impermanence of parole. Chee carried it back into the waiting room, put it beside the Musket file, and worked the knot loose with his fingernails.
Here there was no question of recognizing the mug shots that looked glumly out from the identification sheet. Thomas Rodney West, convict, looked just like Tom West, schoolboy, and Tom West, Marine, whose face Chee had studied in the photographs in the Burnt Water Trading Post. He also looked a lot like his father. The expression had the suffering blankness that police photographers and the circumstances impose on such shots. But behind that, there was the heavy strength and the same forcefulness that marked the face of the older West. Chee noticed that West had been born the same month as Musket, West was nine days younger. Chee corrected the thought. The knife in the recreation yard had changed that, sparing young West the aging process. Now Musket was a month or so older.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 05 - The Dark Wind Page 11
