Their hamburgers arrived, plus the doughnuts and refills of their coffee cups. Leaphorn took a careful bite, waiting. Not wanting to break Rostic’s chain of thought, anxious to hear Rostic’s statement concluded. The pastry was good. Not quite up to Dunkin’ Donuts’ high standards, but very tasty. Coffee was good, too. He sipped.
“Another name? Another identity?”
“Just bureau gossip, of course. You know. The bureau knocking the agency. FBI finding ways to offset the CIA’s looking down its lofty secretive noses at the bureau.”
Leaphorn smiled. Nodded. “Yeah. The word was this Shewnack was CIA?”
Rostic depreciated his gossip with a shrug. “Had been, anyway. The way it went he was a guy in the early stages of those special operations deals in Vietnam. Back when the Kennedy group had decided that President Diem wasn’t cutting it and that little bunch of South Viet generals were being lined up for the coup. Remember that?”
“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “Diem was ousted, but it didn’t seem to be a very slick operation. Or very secret either.”
“Far from it. Lots of CIA careers dented. Lots of bad political fallout. Little bits of bad stuff started leaking out of cracks later, when people were quitting. And one of the bad-news items was about a special ops guy running something in the mountains, in Laos, I think it was. Anyway, the story was that the ARVN generals he was delivering the money bags to, they started claiming that they’d been shorted in their share of the payoff. Amounted to a lot of money. The guy who was telling me said it amounted to better than eight hundred thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” Leaphorn said. “I picked up that gossip before, but the tale I heard didn’t have the dollar amount with it.”
“Probably exaggerated,” Rostic said. Anyway, the bird supposed to have the sticky fingers was, was…let me put it this way. He was George Perkins then, but he was showing that shrewdness that made Shewnack our Most-Wanted hero. He rigged it up so he left the proper memos, notes, etc., in all the right files so he could present the CIA brass with an unpleasant choice. They could lock him up and watch him try to demonstrate to all who would listen that all he did was heroically deliver the taxpayers’ money to a bunch of corrupt ARVN generals. Generals who, it seemed to Perkins, must be splitting the loot back with the CIA accountants. And yes indeed, he would be perfectly willing to testify and help the taxpayers recover their money from these villains.”
“Let me guess,” Leaphorn said. “So they said, ‘Oh, well, boys will be boys. You resign, and we’ll put such little things behind us.’”
Rostic laughed. “Leaphorn,” he said, “you have been there in the J. Edgar Hoover building, and you understand how federal law enforcement bureaucracy works.”
“But I don’t understand how this connects with Shewnack. Or any of the rest of this.”
“Well, nobody could ever prove there is any connection,” Rostic said. “But the shrewd way he made the money sort of disappear reminded me of the way he planned things. And then, according to my gossip, this guy shows up in Northern California, under some different name, no longer George Perkins. The FBI wouldn’t have minded seeing the CIA get its feathers burned, so it tried to keep a sort of halfway eye on him. Of course, the ex-Mr. Perkins, being an old, old hand at that game, seems to have caught on in a hurry. Maybe he was already calling himself Ray Shewnack. Anyway, the bureau lost track of him.”
Rostic shrugged, considered what he’d been saying, then went on. “But the timing was right. I mean, the sort of slick Shewnack-type jobs happened a time or two. And then when I think the agency was catching on and checking, Perkins seems to have sensed he was being looked at by the FBI. He just disappeared. Next thing you know, a couple of crimes turned up in New Mexico that reminded the bureau of Shewnack jobs in California. And then the double murder of the Handy couple, with the slick setup that left fall guys behind, and absolutely no witnesses or fingerprints. By then that Shewnack MO was familiar.”
“But no actual physical evidence?”
“No, nary a trace that I’ve heard about.”
“You’re an old hand in this business. What do you think?”
“I would imagine that Shewnack might have previously been George Perkins, or who knows who else. But I would also bet nobody is ever going to know for sure. My trouble is I had the bad luck of getting sent over to check on that Totter fire, and there the bastard was, all burned up, and I got stuck with him. And he’s such a spectacularly evil son of a bitch that he’s hard to forget.”
“What I’d like you to do,” said Leaphorn, “is sort of give me a picture of what happened when you got to Totter’s place.”
Rostic thought. Nodded. “Two cops already there. A sheriff’s deputy and a state policeman. My only business, as a federal, would be if the burned man was wanted for a federal crime. So I looked at the corpse. They’d moved it out of that burned-up gallery place and laid it out on the trading post floor.” He grimaced. “I guess you guys see a lot of violent scenes, but we’re more into the white-collar crimes. I can still see that bunch of baked meat and scorched bones in my dreams. So then they showed me the folder full of posters. Eleven of them, with a note on the bottom of each naming where it came from. There was Farmington, New Mexico, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Tucson, Los Angeles, and so forth. Eleven different places. But all of them from western states.”
“Enough to make you suspicious.”
“More than that,” Rostic said. “I call in the list of places. Gallup checked the files on Shewnack. Six of the eleven had the sort of out-of-the-way robberies that fit our idea of Shewnack’s mode of operations. When they checked later, the other seven looked like they fit, too.”
“You mean the same MO?” Leaphorn asked. “Carefully planned. No fingerprints left behind. Places with no security cameras. Relatively small communities? And how about leaving accomplices behind to take the rap?”
“That, too, in some of them.”
“Were there any live witnesses left in any of those?”
Rostic laughed. “How come you waited so long to ask about leaving witnesses behind? Of course he didn’t.”
Leaphorn sighed, feeling sort of sick. “I guess I didn’t want to hear it.”
“I can’t blame you. In most cases it worked pretty much like the Handy robbery. If they got a good look at him, he shot ’em.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Usually twice. The dead tell no tales.”
“A very careful man from what little I know about him,” Leaphorn said. “Did it make you wonder why he’d left those Wanted posters out on the front seat of his car?”
Rostic looked thoughtful. “No, not then, but now that you mention it, you’d think he’d have tucked them away out of sight. Most likely packed in with his stuff locked up in the car trunk.”
“That was going to be one of my questions. Had Totter, or the fire department boys, or the other cops gotten all that out by the time you got there?”
“No. They’d broken one of those wing windows to reach in and get that folder with the posters in it, but the car was still locked. When we got the call, Delbert James was in charge, and he told the sheriff that if the victim was Shewnack, it was very important, and he should make damn sure everything was secure and not messed with until we could take over.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“I see you grinning,” Rostic said, and laughed. “I know how you local cops feel about that. To tell the truth, I can’t say I blame you. The feds come in, take over, screw everything up because they don’t know the territory. They take the credit if a bust gets made, and if it doesn’t they write up reports on how the locals made all the mistakes.”
“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “But we don’t blame it on you guys doing the work. We blame it on the Washington politicians looking over your shoulders.”
“As you should,” Rostic said. “They’re the ones we blame.”
“And sometimes we notice we’ll be dealing with a special agent who just g
ot in from Miami, or from Portland, Maine, and he’s giving our people directions when—”
Leaphorn cut that complaint short, noticing that even now just thinking of the couple of horrible examples he was about to use was causing him to lose his temper.
“I can finish that for you,” Rostic said. “We’re giving your people directions when this is the first time we’ve set foot on the reservations, and if we wanted to get to Window Rock we’d have to ask what road to take.”
“Something like that,” Leaphorn said.
“Or as Captain Largo often told me, ‘It ain’t that we think you federals are plain stupid. It’s just that you don’t know nothing yet. It’s the total absolute invincible ignorance that trips you up.’”
“That’s about it,” Leaphorn said, chuckling at Rostic’s imitation of Largo’s emphatic way of expressing himself. “But right now I am very glad you did take over and made sure nobody got into whatever Shewnack had locked safely away in his car trunk.”
“He had some things locked in the glove compartment, too. One particularly useful item. An almost empty pint bottle of cognac. Very expensive stuff.” Rostic was smiling as he related this. “And being glass, a gold mine of the very first fingerprints we ever had of the murderous bastard.”
“Wonderful,” Leaphorn said. “This is just exactly what I hoped you could tell me. And how did they match with the prints the bureau must have collected from all those other places where you had noticed his MO.”
“Also got prints off his stuff in the car trunk. And other evidence, too. For example, a fancy little gold-trimmed paper weight that had been part of the loot in a convenience story robbery in Tulsa. And an expensive little leather zipper bag that still had the Salt Lake City victim’s name and address stitched in the lining. Couple of other things, too. A pair of those fancy soft-soled shoes good for sneaking up on people with, and which leave that soft rubber streak on hard floors if you’re not careful. The rubber matches what the crime scene boys had scraped up from the floor at the Tucson killing.”
“Sort of like he kept souvenirs of his crimes,” Leaphorn said. “How about money? Sergeant Garcia went out to the Totter fire site and found that Delonie there.”
“The assistant bandit at Handy’s?”
“Yeah. He was out on parole. He told us he’d heard Shewnack had burned up there, and he figured, slick as Shewnack was, he would have hidden the loot from his latest robbery somewhere. And Delonie was digging around, looking for it. He said he hadn’t found anything.”
“Neither did we,” Rostic said. “We had the same idea. He wasn’t the kind of man who would trust Mr. Totter, or anyone else, not to steal his money.”
Rostic finished his hamburger. Shook his head. “I guess we could credit him pretty positively with most of those suspicious cases. That would get him up close to the record for a serial killer.”
Leaphorn drained his cup. Put it down without comment.
“You have any more questions? About the fire or anything?” Rostic asked.
“Well, you didn’t answer my question about the prints on that cognac bottle. Did they match?”
“Of course not,” Rostic said. “Any more questions?”
“How about you? You satisfied?”
Rostic peered at him. Sighed. “Well, hell,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, exactly, but when a guy is as slick as Shewnack seemed to be…Well, you always feel sort of uneasy about it. Not quite as confident as you’d like to be.”
“That’s my problem, too,” Leaphorn said. “You have time for another cup?”
“I’m retired,” Rostic said. “I can either sit here and exchange war-against-crime stories with you or go on home and play Free Cell games on my computer. And by the way, you never told me what got you interested in this old case.”
Leaphorn waved at the waiter, ordered coffee refills. “Then I’ll tell you about Grandma Peshlakai, the theft of two five-gallon lard cans full of pinyon sap from the work shed behind her hogan, how she came to recover the empty cans at Totter’s Trading Post, and how she discovered that Totter had died before he could be brought to justice and—”
“Wait at minute,” Rostic said. He stopped sugaring his coffee and was looking very interested. “Back up. You’re telling me Totter stole the old woman’s pinyon sap? What the devil for? And he’s dead? I want to hear more of this.”
And so Leaphorn told him, and before the tale was finished so was a third cup of coffee and two more doughnuts. When it was finished, Rostic considered what he’d heard for a long silent moment.
“Couple of questions,” he said. “Tell me why Totter stole the pinyon sap. And tell me why you’re so interested in him now if he’s dead and gone.”
“If he stole the sap, and the only real evidence supporting that is empty buckets at the trading post, then it might have been something like this,” Leaphorn said, “and I warn you, it is based on guesswork.” With that, Leaphorn recounted the discussion he and Garcia had had speculating that Shewnack had planned to rob Totter, had tried it, had been killed by Totter, and Totter had decided that instead of dealing with a homicide trial he would use the sap to rush the fire along, convert both body and gallery to ashes, thereby disposing of homicide evidence and cashing in on his fire insurance without leaving behind the sort of evidence arson investigators look for.
“You mean the sap?” Rostic said, looking quizzical.
Leaphorn nodded. “Everybody burns pinyon. And that sap burns very, very hot.”
“So how about the profit from the fire. You think Totter took the valuable stuff out first?”
“Now we come to this damned rug, the photograph of which sucked me into this business. Somebody seems to have taken that rug out. I’ll bet it was the most valuable item Totter had. I saw it in Totter’s gallery before the fire, and there it was on the wall of a mansion outside of Flagstaff after the fire. Unless somebody made a copy of it. Which seems to be very doubtful.”
Rostic was chewing on his lower lip, face full of thought, frowning at Leaphorn, then producing a rueful grin. “That would make the bureau look sort of foolish, wouldn’t it? But maybe it’s right. It seems to make a certain amount of sense.” He shook his head. “But now I want you to tell me how you’d like it if you had to go to a judge and try to get him to sign an arrest warrant for Totter. Of course you don’t have to worry about that now, with him dead. But think about what you have. If you could get a judge to go even that far, how about trying to get him indicted? You think you could?”
Leaphorn laughed. “Not unless he was willing to confess.”
“Tell me about Totter being dead,” Rostic said. “How did that happen?”
“All I know is the Gallup Independent printed a little obituary notice, just saying he died of complications after a heart attack. Brief illness, I think it said. Died in an Oklahoma City hospital. Said he was buried in the VA cemetery at Oklahoma City, born in Ada, Oklahoma, never married, no survivors listed, any contributions for flowers should go to some charity.”
Rostic looked skeptical.
“Who brought it in?”
“U.S. mail, with some money attached to pay the publication fee.”
“Sent by whom?”
“Come on,” Leaphorn said, sounding defensive, remembering how he had felt as a rookie cop being grilled by his boss. “All I know is what a secretary at the paper remembered about it. Bernie Manuelito went in there to get me a copy of it. I have the obit at home, and I remember it ran just two years or so after the fire.”
“Okay, then,” Rostic said. “I am getting more and more interested. The obit mentioned burial in the Veterans Administration cemetery in Oklahoma City. You sure they have one there?”
“No,” Leaphorn said.
Rostic thought. “You know,” he said. “I think I’ll check on this.”
“It would be easy for you,” Leaphorn said. “Just call the FBI official there.”
“Hah!” Rostic said. “First they’d re
fer me to the agent in charge, and he’d want to know my name, identification details, whether I was still in the bureau, and was this my case, and the violation of which federal law was involved, and what was the bureau’s interest in it. Then, after about fifteen minutes of that, he’d tell me to send him a written report specifying the crime being investigated, and—” Rostic noticed Leaphorn’s expression and stopped.
“You see what I mean? I used to work out of that Oklahoma City office. It always went strictly by the book. I’ll bet it still does.”
“I can understand that,” Leaphorn said. “I was thinking I might go back there myself. Or maybe get Bernie to go.”
“Investigating a crime in Navajo jurisdiction? How do you explain that?”
“To tell the truth, Bernie’s sort of on administrative leave now, and she’s now Mrs. Jim Chee.”
“Sergeant Chee? Your assistant in the criminal investigation office?”
“Yes. They just got married. I’d ask her to do it sort of semi-unofficially, as a favor. Pay her travel expenses, and so forth.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Rostic said. “I have an old friend back there, a longtime reporter. Guy named Carter Bradley. He was manager of United Press operations in Oklahoma when I was with the bureau there. Sort of famous for knowing everybody who knew anything. Not just knowing who knew. That’s usually easy for reporters. But Carter knew who would be willing to talk about it. I think he’d do it for me.”
“But if you knew him way back then, he’s probably retired by now.”
Rostic laughed. “Exactly. Just like us. Retired. Bored stiff. Wanting something interesting to do. Give me that obituary and I’ll call him, give him the situation, and tell him what we need to know.”
“I haven’t got it with me here,” Leaphorn said. “But I remember it. Which wasn’t much.”
“We’ll find out who paid his hospital bill. Who arranged to get him buried, if he had any criminal record back there in his home state, everything useful. Do it right now.”
Rostic had reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a cell phone, punched some buttons, said: “Yep. Here he is. What do I ask him?”
The Shape Shifter Page 11
