The Fallen Man jlajc-12

by Tony Hillerman

  No mention of Tommy Castro. “Just the three of you?” Leaphorn asked.

  Demott hesitated. “Pretty much.”

  “Tommy Castro didn’t go along?”

  Demott flushed. “Where’d you hear about him?”

  Leaphorn shrugged.

  Demott drew in a deep breath. “Castro and I were friends in high school and, yeah, he and I climbed together some. But then when Elisa got big enough to learn and she’d come along, Tommy began to make a move on her. I told him she was way too young and to knock it off. I put a stop to that.”

  “He still climb?”

  “I have no idea,” Demott said. “I stay away from him. He stays away from me.”

  “No problem with Hal, though.”

  “He was more her age and more her type, even though he was citified and born with the old silver spoon.” Demott thought about that. “You know,” he said, “I think he really did love this place as much as we did. He’d talk about getting his family to leave it to him as his part of the estate. Had it all figured out on paper. It wasn’t worth near as much as the share he’d get otherwise, but it was what he wanted. That’s what he’d say. Prettiest place on earth, and he’d make it better. Improve the stream where it was eroding.

  Plant out some ponderosa seedlings where we had a fire kill. Keep the herd down to where there wouldn’t be any more overgrazing.”

  “I didn’t see much sign of overgrazing now,” Leaphorn said.

  “Not now, you don’t. But before Hal’s daddy died he always wanted this place to carry a lot more livestock than the grass could stand. He was always putting the pressure on my dad, and after dad passed away, putting it on me. As a matter of fact he was threatening to fire me if I didn’t get the income up to where he thought it ought to be.”

  “You think he would have done it?”

  “We never will know,” Demott said. “I wasn’t going to overgraze this place, that’s for damn sure. But just in time Breedlove had his big heart attack and passed away.” He chuckled. “Elisa credited it to the power of my prayers.” Leaphorn waited. And waited. But Demott was in no hurry to interrupt his memories. A breeze came down the stream, cool and fresh, rustling the leaves behind Leaphorn and humming the little song that breezes sing in the firs.

  “It’s a mighty pretty day,” Demott said finally. “But blink your eyes twice and winter will be coming over the mountain.” 52 of 102

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  “You were going to tell me what went wrong with Hal,” Leaphorn said.

  “I got no license to practice psychiatry,” Demott said. He hesitated just a moment, but Leaphorn knew it was coming. It was something Demott wanted to talk about—and probably had for a long, long time.

  “Or theology, either,” he continued. “If that’s the word for it. Anyway, you know how the story goes in our Genesis. God created Adam and gave him absolutely everything he could want, to see if he could handle it and still be obedient and do the right thing. He couldn’t. So he fell from grace.”

  Demott glanced at Leaphorn to see if he was following.

  “Got kicked out of paradise,” Demott said.

  “Sure,” Leaphorn said. “I remember it.” It wasn’t quite the way he’d always heard it, but he could see the point Demott might make with his version.

  “Old Breedlove put Hal in paradise,” Demott said. “Gave him everything. Prep school with the other rich kids, Dartmouth with the children of the ruling class—absolutely the very goddamn best that you can buy with money. If I was a preacher I’d say Hal’s daddy spent a ton of money teaching his boy to worship Mammon—however you pronounce that. Anyway, it means making a god out of things you can buy.” He paused, gave Leaphorn a questioning glance.

  “We have some of the same philosophy in our own Genesis story,” Leaphorn said. “First Man calls evil ‘the way to make money.’

  Besides, I took a comparative religion course when I was a student at Arizona State. Made an A in it.”

  “Okay,” Demott said. “Sorry. Anyway, when Hal was about a senior or so he flew into Mancos one summer in his own little airplane. Wanted us to grade out a landing strip for it near the house. I figured out how much it would cost, but his daddy wouldn’t come up with the money. They got into a big argument over it. Hal had already been arguing with him about taking better care of this place, putting money in instead of taking it all out. I think it was about then that the old man got pissed off. He decided he’d give Hal the ranch and nothing else and let him see if he could live off it.”

  “Figuring he couldn’t?”

  “Yep,” Hal said. “And of course the old man was right. Anyhow Breedlove eased up on the pressure for profits some and I got to put in a lot of fencing we needed to protect a couple of the sensitive pastures and get some equipment in there for some erosion control along the Cache. Elisa and Hal got married after that. Everything going smooth. But that didn’t last long. Hal took Elisa to Europe. Decided he just had to have himself a Ferrari. Great car for our kind of roads. But he bought it. And other stuff. Borrowed money. Before long we weren’t bringing in enough from selling our surplus hay and the beef to cover his expenses. So he went to see the old man.”

  At this point Demott’s voice was thickening. He paused, rubbed his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “Warm for this time of year,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said, thinking it was a cool, dry sixty degrees or so even with the breeze gone.

  “Anyway, he came back empty. Hal didn’t have much to say but I believe they must have had a big family fight. I know for sure he tried to borrow from George—that’s George Shaw, his cousin who used to come out and climb with us—and George must have turned him down, too. I think the family must have told him they were going ahead with the moly strip mine deal, and to hell with him.”

  “But they didn’t,” Leaphorn said. “Why not?”

  “I think it was because the old man had his heart attack a little bit after that. When he passed away it hung everything up in probate court for a while. This ranch was in trust for Hal. He didn’t get it until he turned thirty, but of course the family didn’t control it anymore. That’s sort of where it stood for a while.”

  Demott paused. He inspected his newly washed hand. Leaphorn was thinking, too, about this friction between Hal and his family and what it might imply.

  “When I had my visit with Mrs. Rivera at the bank,” Leaphorn said, “she told me things were starting to brew on the moly mine development again just before Hal disappeared. But this time she thought it was going to be a deal with a different mining company.

  She didn’t think the family corporation was involved.”

  Demott lost interest in his hand.

  “She tell you that?”

  “That’s what she said. She said a Denver bank was involved in the deal somehow. It was way too big an operation for her little bank to handle the money end of it.”

  “With Mrs. Rivera in business we don’t really need a newspaper around here,” Demott said.

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  “So I was thinking that if the family told Hal they were going to run right over him, maybe he decided he’d screw them instead.

  He’d make his own deal and cut them out.”

  “I think that’s probably about the way it was,” Demott said. “I know his lawyer told him all he had to do was slow things down in court long enough to get to his birthday. Then he’d have clear title and he could do what he wanted. That’s what Elisa wanted him to do. But Hal was a fella who just could not wait. There were things he wanted to buy. Things he wanted to do. Places he hadn’t seen yet. And he’d borrowed a lot of money he had to pay back.”

  Demott produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “Elisa didn’t
know about that. She didn’t know he could use the ranch as collateral when he didn’t own it yet. Came as quite a shock. But he had his lawyer work out some sort of deal which put up some sort of overriding interest in the place as a guarantee.”

  “Lot of money?”

  “Quite a bit. He’d gotten rid of that little plane he had and made a down payment on a bigger one. After he disappeared we let them take the plane back but we had to pay back the loan.”

  With that, Demott rose and collected his tools. “Back to work,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t know anything that would help you.”

  “One more question. Or maybe two,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still climbing?”

  “Too old for it,” he said. “What’s that in the Bible about it? About when you get to be a man you put aside the ways of the boy.

  Something like that.”

  “How good was Hal?”

  “He was pretty good but he was reckless. He took more chances than I like. But he had all the skills. If he’d put his mind to it he could have been a dandy.”

  “Could he have climbed Ship Rock alone?”

  Demott looked thoughtful. “I thought about that a lot ever since Elisa identified his skeleton. I didn’t think so at first, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t even try it myself. But Hal . . . “ He shook his head. “If he wanted something, he just had to have it.”

  “George Shaw went out to the Maryboy place the other day and got permission for a climb,” Leaphorn said. “Next day or two. Any idea what he thinks might be found up there?”

  “George is going to climb it?” Demott’s tone was incredulous and his expression shocked. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “All I know is that he told me he paid Maryboy a hundred dollars for trespass rights. Maybe he’ll get somebody to climb it but I think he meant he was going up himself.”

  “What the hell for?”

  Leaphorn didn’t answer that. He gave Demott some time to answer it himself.

  “Oh,” Demott said. “The son of a bitch.”

  “I would imagine he thinks maybe somebody gave Hal a little push.”

  “Yeah,” Demott said. “Either he thinks I did it, and I left something behind that would prove it—and he could use that to void Elisa’s inheritance—or he did it himself and he remembers that he left something up there that would nail him and he wants to go get it.”

  Leaphorn shrugged. “As good a guess as any.”

  Demott put down his tools.

  “When Elisa came back from having the bones cremated she told me none of them had been broken,” he said. “Some of them were disconnected, you know. That could have been done in a fall, or maybe the turkey vultures pulled ’em apart. They’re strong enough to do that, I guess. Anyway, I hope it was a fall, and he didn’t just get hung up there to starve to death for water. He could have been a damn good man.”

  “I never knew him,” Leaphorn said. “To me he was just somebody to hunt for and never find.”

  “Well, he was a good, kind boy,” Demott said. “Big-hearted.” He picked up his tools again. “You know, when the cop came up to show Elisa Hal’s stuff I saw that folder he had with him. He had it labeled ‘Fallen Man.’ I thought, Yes, that described Hal. The old man gave him paradise and it wasn’t enough for him.”

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  LUCY SAM HAD SEEMED GLAD TO SEE CHEE.

  “I think they’re going to be climbing up Tse´ Bitáíágain,” she told Chee. “I saw a big car drive down the road toward Hosteen Maryboy’s place two days ago, and it stayed a long time, and when I saw it coming back from there, I drove over there to see how he was doing and he told me about it.”

  “I heard about it, too,” Chee said, thinking how hard it was to keep secrets in empty country.

  “The man paid Hosteen Maryboy a hundred dollars,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we should let them climb up there, even for a thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t think so either,” Chee said. “They have plenty of their own mountains to play around on.”

  “The one who lived here before,” Lucy Sam said, using the Navajo circumlocution to avoid saying the name of the dead, “he’d say that it would be like us Navajos climbing all over that big church in Rome, or getting up on top of the Wailing Wall, or crawling all over that place where the Islamic prophet went up to heaven.”

  “It’s disrespectful,” Chee agreed, and with that subject out of the way he shifted the conversation to cattle theft.

  Had Hosteen Maryboy mentioned to her that he’d lost some more cattle? He had, and he was angry about it. There would have been enough money in those cows to make the last payments on his pickup truck.

  Had Ms. Sam seen anything suspicious since the last time he’d been here? She didn’t think so.

  Could he look at the ledger where she kept her notes? Certainly. She would get it for him.

  Lucy Sam extracted the book from its desk drawer and handed it to Chee.

  “I kept it just the same way,” she said, tapping the page. “I put down the date and the time right here at the edge and then I write down what I see.”

  As he leafed backward through the ledger, Chee saw that Lucy Sam wrote down a lot more than that. She made a sort of daily journal out of it, much as her father had done. And she had not just copied her father’s system, she also followed his Franciscan padres’ writing style—small, neat lettering in small, neat lines—which had become sort of a trademark of generations of those Navajos educated at St. Michael’s School west of Window Rock. It was easily legible and wasted neither paper nor ink. But readable or not, Chee found nothing in it very helpful.

  He skipped back to the date when he and Officer Manuelito had visited the site of the loose fence posts. They had rated an entry, right after Lucy Sam’s notation that, “Yazzie came. Said he would bring some firewood” and just before, “Turkey buzzards are back.” Between those Lucy had written, “Police car stuck on road under Tse´ Bitáí´. Truck driver helps.” Then, down the page a bit: “Tow truck gets police car.” The last entry before the tow truck note reported, “That camper truck stopped. Driver looked around.”

  That camper truck? Chee felt his face flush with remembered embarrassment. That would have been Finch checking to see how thoroughly they had sprung his Zorro trap. He worked his way forward through the pages, learning more about kestrels, migrating grosbeaks, a local family of coyotes, and other Colorado Plateau fauna than he wanted to know. He also gained some insights into Lucy Sam’s loneliness, but nothing that he could see would be useful to Acting Lieutenant Chee in his role as rustler hunter. If Zorro had come back to collect a load of Maryboy’s cows from the place he’d left the hay, he’d done it when Lucy Sam wasn’t looking.

  But she was looking quite a lot. There was a mention of a “very muddy” white pickup towing a horse trailer on the dirt road that skirted Ship Rock, but no mention of it stopping. Chee made a mental note to check on that. About a dozen other vehicles had come in view of Lucy Sam’s spotting scope, none of them potential rustlers. They included a Federal Express delivery truck, which must have been lost, another mention of Finch’s camper truck, and three pickups that she had identified with the names of local-area owners.

  So what was useful about that? It told him that if Manuelito’s network of watchers would pay off at all, it would require patience, and probably years, to establish suspicious-looking patterns. And it told him that Mr. Finch looked upon him as a competitor in his hunt for the so-called Zorro. Finch wanted him to write off Maryboy’s loose-fence-posts location, but Finch hadn’t written it off himself. He was keeping his eye on the spot. That produced another thought. Maryboy had been losing cattle before. Had either Lucy Sam or her father noticed anything interesting in the past? Specifically, had they ever previously noticed that white truck pulling its ho
rse trailer? He would page back through the book and check on that when he had time. And he would also look through the back pages for school buses. He’d noticed a Lucy Sam mention of a school bus stuck on that same dirt road, and the road wasn’t on a bus route. She had also mentioned “that camper truck” being parked almost all day at the base of the mountain the year before.

  Her note said “Climbing our mountain?”

  Chee put down the ledger. Lucy Sam had gone out to feed her chickens and he could see her now in her sheep pen inspecting a young goat that had managed to entangle itself in her fence. He found himself imagining Janet Pete in that role and himself in old man Sam’s wheelchair. It didn’t scan. The white Porsche roared in and rescued her. But that wasn’t fair. He was being racist. He had been thinking like a racist ever since he’d met Janet and fallen in love with her. He had been thinking that because her name was 55 of 102

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  Pete, because her father was Navajo, her blood somehow would have taught her the ways of the Dine? and made her one of them.

  But only your culture taught you values, and the culture that had formed Janet was blue-blooded, white, Ivy League, chic, irreligious, old-rich Maryland. And that made it just about as opposite as it could get from the traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.

  Well, to hell with that. He got up, refocused the spotting scope, and found the place where the posts had been loosened. That road probably carried no more than a dozen vehicles a week— none at all when the weather was wet. It was empty today, and there was no sign of anything around Mr. Finch’s Zorro trap. Beyond it in the pasture he counted eighteen cows and calves, a mixture of Herefords and Angus, and three horses. He scanned across the Maryboy grassland to the base of Ship Rock and focused on the place where Lucy Sam had told him the climbing parties liked to launch their great adventures. Nothing there now but sage, chamisa, and a redtailed hawk looking for her lunch.