The Fallen Man jlajc-12

by Tony Hillerman

  “I guessed that’s why you were out there,” he said. “What’d you find out?” Chee couldn’t pass up this opportunity to needle the Legendary Lieutenant. Besides, Leaphorn was working for McDermott. So Chee said, “Nothing. Maryboy was dead when I got there.”

  “No. No.” Leaphorn let his impatience show. “I meant what had you learned that caused you to go out there? In the night?” The moment had come:

  “I learned that on the morning of September 18, 1985, a dark green, square, ugly recreational vehicle with a ski rack on its roof was driven to the usual climbers’ launch site on Maryboy’s grazing lease. Three men got out and climbed Ship Rock. Maryboy had given them trespass permission. Now, to bring things up to date, I learned yesterday that John McDermott hands this same Hosteen Maryboy one hundred dollars for trespass rights for another climb. I presume that George Shaw and others intend to climb the mountain, probably just as quickly as they can get a party organized. So, I went out to learn if Hosteen Maryboy remembered who had paid him for climbing trespass rights back in 1985.”

  Chee recited this slowly, watching Leaphorn’s face. It became absolutely still. Breathing stopped. The green vehicle was instantly translated into Breedlove’s status truck, the date into a week before Hal had begun his vanishing act, and two days before his all-important thirtieth birthday. All that, and all the complex implications suggested, had been processed by the time Chee finished his speech. Leaphorn’s first question, Chee knew, would be how he had learned this. Whether the source of this information was reliable. Well, let him ask it. Chee was ready.

  Leaphorn sighed.

  “I wonder how many people knew that George Shaw was looking for a team to climb that mountain with him,” Leaphorn said.

  Chee looked at the ceiling, clicked his tongue against his teeth, and said, “I have no idea.” Why did he continue trying to guess how the Legendary Lieutenant’s mind worked? It was miles and miles beyond him.

  Leaphorn abruptly clapped his hands together.

  “Now you’ve given us the link that can fit the pattern together,” Leaphorn said, with rare exuberance. “Finally something to work with. I spent most of my time for months trying to think this case through and I didn’t come up with this. Emma was still healthy then, and she thought about it, too. And I’ve spent a lot of thought on it since then, even though we officially gave up. And in—how many days was it?—less than ten, you come up with the link.”

  Chee found himself baffled. But Leaphorn was beaming at him, full of pride. That made it both better and worse.

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  “But we still don’t know who killed Hosteen Maryboy,” Chee said, thinking at least he didn’t know.

  “But now we have something to work on,” Leaphorn said. “Another part of the pattern takes shape.” Chee said, “Umm,” and tried to look thoughtful instead of confused.

  “Breedlove’s skeleton is found on Ship Rock,” Leaphorn said, holding up a blunt trigger finger. “Amos Nez is promptly shot.” Leaphorn added a second finger. “Now, shortly thereafter, just as arrangements are being made for another climb of Ship Rock, one of the last people to see Breedlove is shot.” He added a third finger.

  “Yes,” Chee said. “If we have all the pertinent facts it makes for a short list of suspects.”

  “I can add a little light to that,” Leaphorn said. “Actually, it’s what I came in to tell you. Eldon Demott told me some interesting things about Hal. The key one was that he’d quarreled with his father, and his family. He had decided to cut the family corporation out of the mining lease as soon as he inherited the ranch.”

  “Did the family know that?”

  “Demott presumed they did. So do I. He probably told them himself. Demott understood Hal had tried to get money out of his father, and got turned down, and came home defiant. But even if he tried to keep it secret, the money people seemed to have known about it. Hal was in debt. Borrowing money. And if the money people knew, I’m sure the word got back to the Breedlove Corporation.”

  “Ah,” Chee said. “So we add George Shaw to the list of people who would be happy if Hal Breedlove died before he celebrated the pertinent birthday.”

  “Or even happier to prove that Hal Breedlove was murdered by his wife, which would mean she couldn’t inherit. I would guess that would put the ranch back into probate. And the Breedlove family would be the heir.” They sat for a while, thinking about it.

  “If you want a little bit more confusion, I turned up a possible boyfriend for Elisa,” Leaphorn said. “It turns out their climbing team was once a foursome.” He explained to Chee what Mrs. Rivera had told him of Tommy Castro and what Demott had added to it.

  “Another rock climber,” Chee said. “You think he killed Hal to gain access to the widow? Or the widow and Castro conspired to get Hal out of the way?”

  “If so, they didn’t do much about it. As far as we know, that is.”

  “How about Shaw as the man who left Breedlove dying on the ledge? Or maybe gave him a shove?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I think I like one of the Demotts a little better.”

  “How about the shootings?”

  “About the same,” Leaphorn said.

  They thought about it some more, and Chee felt himself being engulfed with nostalgia. Remembering the days he’d worked for Leaphorn, sat across the desk in the lieutenant’s cramped second-floor office in Window Rock trying to put the pieces of something or other together in order to understand a crime. Stressful as it had been, demanding as Leaphorn tended to be, it had been a joyful time. And damn little paperwork.

  “Do you still have your map?” Chee asked.

  If Leaphorn heard the question he didn’t show it. He said, “The problem here is time.” Lost again, Chee said, “Time?”

  “Think how different things would be if Hal Breedlove’s thirtieth birthday had been a week after he disappeared, instead of a week before,” Leaphorn said.

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “Wouldn’t that have simplified things?”

  “Then the presumption that went with his disappearance would have been foul play. A homicide to prevent the inheritance.”

  “Right,” Chee said.

  Leaphorn rose, recovered his Cubs cap from Chee’s table.

  “Do you think you can get Largo to make Ship Rock off limits to climbers for a few days?”

  “Do I tell him why?” Chee asked.

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  “Tell him that mountain climbers have this tradition of leaving a record behind when they reach a difficult peak. Ship Rock is one of those. On top of it, there’s a metal box—one of those canisters the army uses to hold belted machine gun ammunition. It’s waterproof, of course, and there’s a book in it that climbers sign. They jot down the time and the date and any note they’d like to leave to those who come later.”

  “Shaw told you that?”

  “No. I’ve been asking around. But Shaw would certainly know it.”

  “You want to keep Shaw from going up and getting it,” Chee said. “Didn’t you tell me you were working for him?”

  “He retained me to find out everything I could about what happened to Hal Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “How can I learn anything I can depend on from that book if Mr. Shaw gets it first?”

  “Oh,” Chee said.

  “I want to know who was in that party of three who made the climb before Hal disappeared. Was one of them Hal, or Shaw, or Demott, or maybe even Castro? Three men, Hosteen Sam said. But how could he be sure of gender through a spotting scope miles away? Climbers wear helmets and they don’t wear skirts. Was one of the three Mrs. Breedlove? If Hal was one of them and he got to the top, his name will be in the book. If it isn’t, that might help explain why he we
nt back after he vanished from Canyon de Chelly: to try again. If he got to the top that time, his name and the date will be there. I want to know when he made the climb that killed him.”

  “It wasn’t in the first forty-three days after he disappeared,” Chee said.

  “What?” Leaphorn said, startled. “How do you know that?”

  Chee described Hosteen Sam’s ledger, his habit of rolling his wheelchair to the window each day after his dawn prayers and looking at the mountain. He described Sam’s meticulous entry system. “But there was no mention of a climbing party from September eighteenth, when he watched the three climb it and then complained to Maryboy about it, through the first week of November. So if Hal climbed it in that period he had to somehow sneak in without old Sam seeing him. I doubt if that’s possible, even if he knew Sam would be watching—which he wouldn’t—or had some reason to be sneaky. I’m told that that’s the starting point for the only way up.”

  “I think we need to keep that ledger somewhere safe,” Leaphorn said. “It seems to be telling us that Breedlove was alive a lot longer than I’d been thinking.”

  “I’ll call Largo and get him to stall off climbing for a while,” Chee said. “And I’ll call my office. Manuelito knows Lucy Sam. She can go out and take custody of that ledger for a little while.”

  “You take care of yourself,” Leaphorn said, and headed for the door.

  “Wait a second. If we get the climbing stopped, how are you going to get someone up there to look at the register?”

  “I’m going to rent a helicopter,” Leaphorn said. “I know a lawyer in Gallup. A rock climber who’s been up Ship Rock himself. I think he’d be willing to go up with me and the pilot, and we put him down on the top, and he takes a look.”

  “And brings down the book.”

  “I didn’t want to do that. I’m a civilian now. I don’t want to tamper with evidence. We’ll take along a camera.”

  “And make some photocopies?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s going to cost a lot of money, isn’t it?”

  “The Breedlove Corporation is paying for it,” Leaphorn said. “I’ve got their twenty thousand dollars in the bank.” 22

  THE KOAT-TV WEATHER MAP

  the previous night had shown a massive curve of bitterly cold air bulging down the Rocky Mountains out of Canada, sliding southward. The morning news reported snow across Idaho and northern Utah, with livestock warnings out. The weather lady called it a “blue norther” and told the Four Corners to brace for it tomorrow. But at the moment it was a beautiful morning for a helicopter ride, if you enjoyed such things, which Leaphorn didn’t.

  The last time he’d ridden in one of these ugly beasts he was being rushed to a hospital to have a variety of injuries treated. It was better to go when one was healthy, he thought, but not much.

  However, Bob Rosebrough seemed to be enjoying it, which was good because Rosebrough had volunteered to climb down the 65 of 102

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  copter’s ladder to the tip of Ship Rock, photograph the documents in the box there, and climb back up.

  “No problem, Joe,” he’d said. “Climbing down a cliff can be harder than climbing up it, but ladders are different. And I sort of like the idea of being the first guy to climb down onto the top of Ship Rock.” Liking the idea meant he wouldn’t accept any payment for taking the day off from his Gallup law practice. That appealed to Leaphorn. The copter rental was taking eight hundred dollars out of the Breedlove Corporation’s twenty thousand retainer, and Leaphorn was beginning to have some ethical qualms about how he was using that fee.

  The view now was spectacular. They were flying south from the Farmington Airport and if Leaphorn had cared to look straight down, which he didn’t, he would have been staring into row after row of dragon’s teeth that erosion had formed on the east side of the uplift known as the Hogback. The rising sun outlined the teeth with shadows, making them look like a grotesquely oversized tank trap—even less hospitable than they appeared from the ground. The slanting light was also creating a silver mirror of the surface of Morgan Lake to the north and converting the long plume of steam from the stacks of the Four Corners Power Plant into a great white feather. The scale of it made even Leaphorn, a desert rat raised in the vastness of the Four Corners, conscious of its immensity.

  The pilot was pointing down.

  “How about having to land in those shark’s teeth?” he asked. “Or worse, parachuting down into it. Just think about that. It makes your crotch hurt.”

  Leaphorn preferred to think of something else, which in its way was equally unpleasant. He thought about the oddity of murder in general, and of this murder in particular. Hal Breedlove disappears. Ten quiet years follow. Then, rapidly, in a matter of days, an unidentified skeleton is found on the mountain, apparently a man who has fallen to his death in a climbing accident. Then Amos Nez is shot. Next the bones are identified as the remains of Hal Breedlove. Then Hosteen Maryboy is murdered. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The pattern was there if he could find the missing part—the part that would bring it into focus. At the center of it, he was certain, was the great dark volcanic monolith that was now looming ahead of them like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral built for giants. On top of it a metal box was cached. In the box would be another piece to fit into the puzzle of Hal Breedlove.

  “The spire on the left is it,” Rosebrough said, his voice sounding metallic through the earphones they were wearing. “They look about the same height from this vantage, but the one on the left is the one you have to stand on top of if you want to say you’ve climbed Ship Rock.”

  “I’m going to circle around it a little first,” the pilot said. “I want to get a feeling for wind, updrafts, downdrafts, that sort of thing.

  Air currents can be tricky around something like this. Even on a calm, cool morning.” They circled. Leaphorn had been warned about what looking down while a copter is spiraling does to one’s stomach. He folded his hands across his safety belt and studied his knuckles.

  “Okay,” Rosebrough said. “That’s it just below us.”

  “It doesn’t look very flat,” the pilot said, sounding doubtful. “And how big is it?”

  “Not very,” Rosebrough said. “About the size of a desktop. The box is on that larger flattish area just below. I’ll have to climb down to get it.”

  “You have twenty feet of ladder, but I guess I could get close enough for you to just jump down,” the pilot said.

  Rosebrough laughed. “I’ll take the ladder,” he said.

  And he did.

  Leaphorn looked. Rosebrough was on the mountain, standing on the tiny sloping slab that formed the summit, then climbing down to the flatter area. He removed an olive drab U.S. Army ammunition box from the crack, opened it, removed the ledger, and tried to protect it from the wind produced by the copter blades. He waved them away. Leaphorn, stomach churning, resumed the study of his knuckles.

  “You all right?” the pilot asked.

  “Fine,” Leaphorn said, and swallowed.

  “There’s a barf bag there if you need it.”

  “Fine,” Leaphorn said.

  “He’s taking the pictures now,” the pilot said. “Photographing one of the pages.”

  “Okay,” Leaphorn said.

  “It’ll just be a minute.”

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  Leaphorn, busy now with the bag, didn’t respond. But by the time the rhetorical minute had dragged itself past and Rosebrough was climbing back into the copter, he was feeling a little better.

  “I took a bunch of different exposures so we’ll have some good ones,” he said, settling himself in his seat and fastening his safety belt. “And I shot the five or six pages bef
ore and after. That what you wanted?”

  “Fine,” Leaphorn said, his mind working again, buzzing with the questions that had brought them up here. “Did you find Breedlove’s name? And who else—” He stopped. He was breaking his own rule. Much better to let Rosebrough tell what he had found without intervention.

  “He signed it,” Rosebrough said, “and wrote ‘vita brevis.’”

  He didn’t explain to Leaphorn that the inscription was Latin and provide the translation—which was one of the reasons Leaphorn liked the man. Why would Breedlove have bothered to leave that epigram? “Life is short.” Was it to explain why he’d taken the dangerous way down in case he didn’t make it? He’d worry about that later.

  “Funny thing,” Rosebrough said. “No one else signed it on that date. I told you I didn’t think he could possibly climb it alone. But it looks like maybe I was wrong.”

  “Maybe the people with him had climbed it before,” Leaphorn said.

  “That wouldn’t matter. You’d still want to have it on the record that you’d done it again. It’s a hell of a hard climb.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said he made it up at eleven twenty-seven A.M.

  and under that he wrote, ‘Four hours, twenty-nine minutes up. Now, I’m going down the fast way.’”

  “Looks like he tried,” the pilot said. “But it took him about eleven years to make it all the way to the bottom.”

  “Could he have climbed it that fast alone?” Leaphorn asked. “Is that time reasonable?” Rosebrough nodded. “These days the route is so well mapped, a good, experienced crew figures about four hours up and three hours down.”

  “How about the fast way down?” Leaphorn asked. To him it sounded a little like a suicide note. “What do you think he meant by that?”