The Fallen Man jlajc-12

by Tony Hillerman

  “Why not try the chile relleños?”

  Janet grimaced. “That’s what you said last time. This time I’m trying the fish.”

  “Too far from the ocean for fish,” Chee said. But now he remembered that his last time here the cook had converted the relleños to something like leather. Maybe he’d order the chicken-fried steak.

  “It’s trout,” Janet said. “A local fish. The waiter told me they steal ’em out of the fish hatchery ponds.”

  “Okay then,” Chee said. “Trout for me, too.”

  “You look totally worn-out,” she said. “Is Captain Largo getting to be too much for you?”

  “I spent the day with a redneck New Mexico brand inspector,” Chee said. “We drove all the way up to Mancos with him talking every inch of the way. Then back again, him still talking.”

  “About what? Cows?”

  “People. Mr. Finch works on the theory that you catch cattle rustlers by knowing everything about everybody who owns cattle. I guess it’s a pretty good system, but then he passed all that information along to me. You want to know anything about anybody who raises cows in the Four Corners area? Or hauls them? Or runs feedlots? Just ask me.”

  “Finch?” she said. “I’ve run into him twice in court.” She shook her head, smiling.

  “Who won?”

  “He did. Both times.”

  “Oh, well,” Chee said. “It’s too bad, but sometimes justice triumphs over you public defenders. Were your clients guilty?”

  “Probably. They said they weren’t. But this Finch guy is smart.” Chee did not want to talk about Finch.

  “You know, Janet,” he said. “Sometime we need to talk about . . . “ She put down the menu and looked at him over her glasses. “Sometime, but not tonight. What took you and Mr. Finch to Mancos?” No. Not tonight, Chee thought. They would just go over the same ground. She’d say that if the police were doing their jobs properly there really wasn’t a conflict of interest if a public defender was the wife of a cop. And he’d say, yeah, but what if the cop had arrested the very guy she was defending and was a witness? What if she were cross-examining her own husband as a hostile witness? And she’d fall back on her Stanford Law School lecture notes and tell him that all she wanted to extract from anyone was the exact truth. And he’d say, but sometimes the lawyer isn’t after quite 100 percent of the truth, and she’d say that some evidence can’t be admitted, and he’d say, as an attorney it would be easy for her to get a job with a private firm, and she’d remind him he’d turned down an offer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety and was a cinch for a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs law-and-order division if he would take it. And he’d say, that would mean leaving the reservation, and she’d say, why not? Did he want to spend his life here? And that would open a new can of worms. No. Tonight he’d let her change the subject.

  The waiter came. Janet ordered a glass of white wine. Chee had coffee.

  “I went to Mancos to tell a widow that we’d found her husband’s skeleton,” Chee said. “Mr. Finch went along because it gave him an excuse to contemplate the cows in the lady’s feedlot.”

  “All you found were dry bones? Her husband must have been away a lot. I’ll bet he was a policeman,” she said, and laughed.

  Chee let that pass.

  “Was it the skeleton they spotted up on Ship Rock about Halloween?” she asked, sounding mildly repentant.

  Chee nodded. “He turned out to be a guy named Harold Breedlove. He owned a big ranch near Mancos.”

  “Breedlove,” Janet said. “That sounds familiar.” The waiter came—a lanky, rawboned Navajo who listened attentively to Janet’s questions about the wine and seemed to understand them no better than did Chee. He would ask the cook. About the trout he was on familiar ground. “Very fresh,” he said, and hurried off.

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  Janet was looking thoughtful. “Breedlove,” she said, and shook her head. “I remember the paper said there was no identification on him. So how’d you get him identified? Dental chart?”

  “Joe Leaphorn had a hunch,” Chee said.

  “The legend-in-his-own-time lieutenant? I thought he’d retired.”

  “He did,” Chee said. “But he remembered a missing person case he’d worked on way back. This guy who disappeared was a mountain climber and an inheritance was involved, and—”

  “Hey,” Janet said. “Breedlove. I remember now.”

  Remember what? Chee thought. And why? This had happened long before Janet had joined the DNA, and become a resident reservation Navajo instead of one in name only, and entered his life, and made him happy. His expression had a question in it.

  “From when I was with Granger-hyphen-Smith in Albuquerque. Just out of law school,” she said. “The firm represented the Breedlove family. They had public land grazing leases, some mineral rights deals with the Jicarilla Apaches, some water rights arrangements with the Utes.” She threw out her hands to signify an endless variety of concerns. “There were some dealings with the Navajo Nation, too. Anyway, I remember the widow was having the husband declared legally dead so she could inherit from him.

  The family wanted that looked into.”

  She stopped, looking slightly abashed. Picked up the menu again. “I’ll definitely have the trout,” she said.

  “Were they suspicious?” Chee asked.

  “I presume so,” she said, still looking at the menu. “I remember it did look funny. The guy inherits a trust and two or three days later he vanishes. Vanishes under what you’d have to consider unusual circumstances.” The waiter came. Chee watched Janet order trout, watched the waiter admire her. A classy lady, Janet. From what Chee had learned about law firms as a cop, lawyers didn’t chat about their clients’ business to rookie interns. It was unethical. Or at least unprofessional.

  He knew the answer but he asked it anyway. “Did you work on it? The looking into it?”

  “Not directly,” Janet said. She sipped her water.

  Chee looked at her.

  She flushed slightly. “The Breedlove Corporation was John McDermott’s client. His job,” she said. “I guess because he handled all things Indian for the firm. And the Breedlove family had all these tribal connections.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I guess not,” Janet said. “I don’t remember the family having us intervene in the case.”

  “The family?” Chee said. “Do you remember who, specifically?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “John was dealing with an attorney in New York. I guess he was representing the rest of the Breedloves. Or maybe the family corporation. Or whatever.” She shrugged. “What did you think of Finch, aside from him being so talkative?” John, Chee thought. John. Professor John McDermott. Her old mentor at Stanford. The man who had hired her at Albuquerque when he went into private practice there, and took her to Washington when he transferred, and made her his mistress, used her, and broke her heart.

  “I wonder what made them suspicious?” Chee said. “Aside from the circumstances.”

  “I don’t know,” Janet said.

  Their trout arrived. Rainbows, neatly split, neatly placed on a bed of wild rice. Flanked by small carrots and boiled new potatoes.

  Janet broke off a tiny piece of trout and ate it.

  Beautiful, Chee thought. The perfect skin, the oval face, the dark eyes that expressed so much. He found himself wishing he was a poet, a singer of ballads. Chee knew a lot of songs but they were the chants the shaman sings at the curing ceremonials, recounting the deeds of the spirits. No one had taught him how to sing to someone as beautiful as this.

  He ate a bite of trout.

  “If I had been driving a patrol car yesterday instead of my old pickup,” he said, “I could have given a speeding ticket to a guy driving a white Porsche convertible. Really flying. But I was drivin
g my truck.”

  “Wow,” Janet said, looking delighted. “My favorite car. I have a fantasy about tooling around Paris in one of those. With the top down.”

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  Maybe she looked happy because he was changing the subject. Moving away from unhappy ground. But to Chee the trout now seemed to have no taste at all.

  7

  JOE LEAPHORN, UNEASILY CONSCIOUS

  that he was now a mere civilian, had given himself three excuses for calling on Hosteen Nez and thereby butting into police business.

  First, he’d come to like the old man way back when he was picking his brain in the Breedlove missing person case. Thus going to see him while Nez was recuperating from being shot was a friendly thing to do. Second, Canyon de Chelly wasn’t much out of his way, since he was going to Flagstaff anyway. Third, a trip into the canyon never failed to lift Joe Leaphorn’s spirits.

  Lately they had needed a lift. Most of the things he’d yearned to do when retirement allowed it had now been done—at least once.

  He was bored. He was lonely. The little house he and Emma had shared so many years had never recovered from the emptiness her death had left in every room. That was worse now without the job to distract him. Maybe he was oversensitive, but he felt like an intruder down at the police headquarters. When he dropped in to chat with old friends he often found them busy. Just as he had always been. And he was a mere civilian now, no longer one of the little band of brothers.

  Good excuses or not, Leaphorn had been a policeman too long to go unprepared. He took his GMC Jimmy with the four-wheel drive required in the canyon both by National Park Service rules and by the uncertain bottom up Chinle Wash. He had stopped at the grocery in Ganado and bought a case of assorted soda pop flavors, two pounds of bacon, a pound of coffee, a large can of peaches, and a loaf of bread. Only then did he head for Chinle.

  Once there, he made another stop at the district Tribal Police office to make sure his visit wouldn’t tread on the toes of the investigating officer. He found Sergeant Addison Deke at his desk. They chatted about family matters and mutual friends and finally got around to the shooting of Amos Nez.

  Deke shook his head, produced a wry grin. “The people around here have that one all solved for us,” he said. “They say old Nez was tipping us off about who was breaking into tourists’ cars up on the canyon lookout points. So the burglars got mad at him and shot him.”

  “That makes sense,” Leaphorn said. Which it did, even though he could tell from Deke’s face that it wasn’t true.

  “Nez hadn’t told us a damn thing, of course,” Deke said. “And when we asked him about the rumor, it pissed him off. He was insulted that his neighbors would even think such a thing.”

  Leaphorn chuckled. Car break-ins at several of the Navajo Nation’s more popular tourist attractions were a chronic headache for the Tribal Police. They usually involved one or two hard-up families whose boys considered the salable items left in tourist cars a legitimate harvest—like wild asparagus, rabbits, and sand plums. Their neighbors disapproved, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one would get a boy in trouble over.

  Leaphorn’s next stop was seven-tenths of a mile up the rim road from the White House Ruins overlook—the point from which the sniper had shot Nez. Leaphorn pulled his Jimmy off into the grass at the spot where Deke had told him they’d found six newly fired 30.06 cartridges. Here the layer of tough igneous rock had broken into a jumble of room-sized boulders, giving the sniper a place to watch and wait out of sight from the road. He looked directly down and across the canyon floor. Nez would have been riding his horse along the track across the sandy bottom of the wash. Not a difficult shot in terms of distance for one who knew how to use a rifle, but shooting down at that angle would require some careful adjustment of the sights to avoid an overshot. Whoever shot Nez knew what he was doing.

  The next stop was at the Canyon de Chelly park office on the way in. He chatted with the rangers there and picked up the local gossip. Relative to Hosteen Nez, the speculation was exactly what Leaphorn had heard from Deke. The old man had been shot because he was tipping the cops on the car break-ins. How about enemies? No one could imagine that, and they knew him well. Nez was a kindly man, a traditional who helped his family and was generous with his neighbors. He loved jokes. Always in good humor.

  Everybody liked him. He’d guided in the canyon for years and he could even handle the tourists who wanted to get drunk without making them angry. Always contributed something to help out with the ceremonials when somebody was having a curing sing.

  How about eccentricities? Gambling? Grazing rights problems? Any odd behavior? Well, yes. Nez’s mother-in-law lived with him, which was a direct violation of the taboo against such conduct. But Nez rationalized that. He said he and old lady Benally had been good friends for years before he’d met her daughter. They’d talked it over and decided that when the Holy People taught that a son-in-law seeing his mother-in-law caused insanity, blindness, and other maladies, they meant that this happened when the two didn’t like each other. Anyway, old lady Benally was still going strong in her nineties and Nez was not blind and didn’t seem to be any crazier than anyone else.

  Indeed, Nez seemed to be feeling pretty good when Leaphorn found him.

  “Pretty good,” he said, “considering the shape I’m in.” And when Leaphorn laughed at that, he added, “But if I’d known I was going to live so damn long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

  Nez was sprawled in a wired-together overstuffed recliner, his head almost against the red sandstone wall of a cul-de-sac behind his 19 of 102

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  hogan. The early afternoon sun beat down upon him. Warmth radiated from the cliff behind him, the sky overhead was almost navy blue, and the air was cool and fresh, and smelled of autumn’s last cutting of alfalfa hay from a field up the canyon. Nothing in the scene, except for the cast on the Nez legs and the bandages on his neck and chest, reminded Leaphorn of a hospital room.

  Leaphorn had introduced himself in the traditional Navajo fashion, identifying his parents and their clans. “I wonder if you remember me,” he said. “I’m the policeman who talked to you three times a long time ago when the man you’d been guiding disappeared.”

  “Sure,” Nez said. “You kept coming back. Acting like you’d forgot something to ask me, and then asking me everything all over again.”

  “Well, I was pretty forgetful.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Nez said. “I thought you figured I was maybe lying to you a little bit and if you asked me often enough I’d forget and tell the truth.”

  This notion didn’t seem to bother Nez. He motioned Leaphorn to sit on the boulder beside his chair.

  “Now you want to talk to me about who’d want to shoot me. I tell you one thing right now. It wasn’t no car burglars. That’s a lot of lies they’re saying about me.”

  Leaphorn nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The police at Chinle told me you weren’t helping them catch those people.” Nez seemed pleased at that. He nodded.

  “But you know, maybe the car burglars don’t know that,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they think you’re telling on ’em.” Nez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know better. They’re my kinfolks.”

  “You picked a good place to get some sunshine here,” Leaphorn said. “Lots of heat off the cliff. Out of the wind. And—” Nez laughed. “And nobody can get a shot at me here. Not from the rim anyway.”

  “I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.

  “I figured you had.”

  “I read the police report,” Leaphorn said, and recited it to Nez. “That about right?”

  “That’s it,” Nez said. “The son of a bitch just kept shooting. Af
ter I sort of crawled under the horse, he hit the horse twice more.” Nez whacked his hand against the cast. “Thump. Thump.”

  “Sounds like he wanted to kill you,” Leaphorn said.

  “I thought maybe he just didn’t like my horse,” Nez said. “He was a pretty sorry horse. Liked to bite people.”

  “The last time I came to see you it was also bad news,” Leaphorn said. “You think there could be any connection?”

  “Connection?” Nez said. He looked genuinely surprised. “No. I didn’t think of that.” But he thought now, staring at Leaphorn, frowning. “Connection,” he repeated. “How could there be? What for?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just a thought. Did anybody tell you our missing man from way back then has turned up?”

  “No,” Nez said, looking delighted. “I didn’t know that. After a month or so I figured he must be dead. Didn’t make any sense to leave that pretty woman that way.”

  “You were right. He was dead. We just found his bones,” Leaphorn said, and watched Nez, waiting for the question. But no question came.

  “I thought so,” Nez said. “Been dead a long time, too, I bet.”

  “Probably more than ten years,” Leaphorn said.

  “Yeah,” Nez said. He shook his head, said, “Crazy bastard,” and looked sad.

  Leaphorn waited.

  “I liked him,” Nez said. “He was a good man. Funny. Lots of jokes.”

  “Are you going to play games with me like you did eleven years ago, or you going to tell me what you know about this? Like why you think he was crazy and why you thought he’d been dead all this time.” 20 of 102

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  “I don’t tell on people,” Nez said. “There’s already plenty of trouble without that.”