The First Eagle jlajc-13

by Tony Hillerman

  "You remember the last time you saw her? And where she was?"

  "Nice-looking woman, was she?" Woody said, and glanced up at Chee, not wanting to give the wrong impression. "I don't mean pretty, but good bone structure." He laughed. "Cute wouldn't be the word, but you might say handsome. Looked like she might have been an athlete."

  "She was around here?"

  "I think it was over at Red Lake that I saw her. Filling the gas tank on a Health Service Jeep, if that's the right woman. She asked me about the van, if I was the man doing rodent research on the reservation. She asked me to let them know if I saw any dead rodents. Let her know if I saw anything that suggested the plague was killing the rodents."

  He pushed himself up from the cot. "By golly, I think she gave me a card with a phone number on it." He sorted through a box labeled OUT on his desk, said "Ah," and read: "'Catherine Pollard, Vector Control Specialist, Communicable Disease Division, Arizona Department of Public Health.'"

  He handed the card to Chee, grinned, and said: "Bingo."

  "Thanks," Chee said. It didn't sound like bingo to him.

  "And, hey," Woody added. "If the time's important you can check on it. When I drove up there was a Navajo Tribal Police car there and she was talking to the driver. Another woman." Woody grinned. "That one you really could call cute. Had her hair in a bun and the uniform °n, but she was what we used to call a dish."

  "Thanks again," Chee said. "That would be Officer Manuelito. I'll ask her."

  But he wouldn't. The timing didn't matter, and if he asked Bernie Manuelito about it, he'd have to ask her why she hadn't reported that Kinsman had been hitting on her. That was a can of worms he didn't want to dig into. Claire Dineyahze, who as secretary in Chee's little division, always knew such things, had already told him. "She doesn't want to cause you any trouble," Claire had said. Chee had asked her why not, and Claire had given him one of those female "you moron" looks and said: "Don't you know?"

  Chapter Fourteen

  AS THEY DROVE NORTHWARD out of Cameron, Leap-horn explained to Louisa what was troubling Cowboy Dashee.

  "I can see his problem," she said, after spending a while staring out the windshield. "Partly professional ethics, partly male pride, partly family loyalty, partly because he feels Chee is going to think he's trying to use their friendship for a personal reason. Is that about it? Have you decided what you're going to do about it?"

  Leaphorn had pretty much decided, but he wanted to give it some more thought. He skipped past the question. "It's all of that, I guess. But it's even more complicated. And why don't you pour us some coffee while we're thinking about it."

  "Didn't you just drink about two cups in there?" Louisa asked. But she reached back and extracted her thermos from the lunch sack.

  "It was pretty weak," Leaphorn said. "Besides, I believe the caffeine helps my mind work. Didn't I read that somewhere?"

  "Maybe in a comic book," she said. But she poured a cup and handed it to him. "What's the more complicated part that I'm missing?"

  "Another friend of Cowboy Dashee's is Janet Pete. She's been assigned as Jano's public defender. Janet and Chee were engaged to be married a while back and then they had a falling-out."

  "Ouch," Louisa said, and grimaced. "That does complicate matters some."

  "There's more," Leaphorn said, and sipped his coffee.

  "It's starting to sound like a soap opera," Louisa said. "Don't tell me that the deputy sheriff was the third party in a love triangle."

  "No. It wasn't that."

  He took another sip, gestured out of the windshield at the cumulus clouds, white and puffy, drifting on the west wind away from the San Francisco Peaks. "That's our sacred mountain of the west, you know, made by First Man himself, but—"

  "He built it with earth brought up from the Fourth World in the usual version of the myth," Louisa said. "But if it 'wasn't that,' then what was it?"

  "I was going to tell you that in the stories told out here on the west side of the reservation, some of the clans also call it 'Mother of Clouds.'" He pointed through the windshield. "You can see why. When there's any humidity, the west winds hit the slopes, rise, the moisture cools with altitude, the clouds form, and the wind drifts them, one after another, out over the desert. Like a cat having a litter of kittens."

  Louisa was smiling at him. "Mr. Leaphorn, am I to conclude that you don't want to tell me what it was with Miss Pete and Jim Chee if it wasn't another man?"

  "I'd just be passing along gossip. That's all I have. Just guesswork and gossip."

  "You don't start something like that with someone and just leave it hanging. Not if you're going to be trapped in the front seat with them all day. They'll nag you. They'll get mad and surly."

  "Well, then," Leaphorn said, "maybe I better make up some sort of a story."

  "Do it."

  Leaphorn sipped coffee, handed her the empty cup.

  "Miss Pete's half Navajo. On the paternal side. Her dad's dead and her mother's a socialite rich lady. Ivy League type. Janet came out here to work for DNA after quitting a job with some big Washington law firm, which handled tribal legal work. Now we get to the gossipy part."

  "Good," Louisa said.

  "The way the gossips tell it, she and one of the big-shot lawyers were very good friends, and she quit the job because they had a breakup, and she was very, very, very angry with the guy. She was sort of his protegee from way back when he was a professor and she was his law student."

  Leaphorn stopped talking and glanced at Louisa. He found himself thinking how much he had come to like this woman. How comfortable he felt with her. How much more pleasant this drive was because she was there on the seat beside him.

  "You enjoying this so far?"

  "So far, so good," she said. "But I wonder if it's going to have a happy ending."

  "I don't know," Leaphorn said. "1 doubt it. But anyway. Out here, she and Jim meet because she's defending Navajo suspects and he's arresting them. They get to be friends and—" Leaphorn paused, gave Louisa a doubtful look. "Now this is about fifthhand. Pure hearsay. Anyway, the gossips had it that what Miss Pete had told Chee about her ex-boss and boyfriend had Jim hating the guy, too. You know, thinking he was a real gold-plated manipulative jerk who had simply used Janet. Understand?"

  "Sure," Louisa said. "Probably true, too."

  "Understand, it's just gossip."

  "Get on with it," Louisa said.

  "So Chee tells her some of the information he s learned in a case he's working on. It involved a client of her old Washington law firm and her old boyfriend. So she passes it along to her old boyfriend. Jim figures she's betrayed him. She figures he's being unreasonable, that she was just being friendly and helpful. No harm done, she says. Chee's just being jealous. They have an angry row. She moves back to Washington with no more talk of marriage."

  "Oh," Louisa said. "And now she's back."

  "It's all just gossip," Leaphorn said. "And you didn't get any of it from me."

  "Okay," Louisa said, and shook her head. "Poor Mr. Dashee. What did you tell him?"

  "I told him I'd talk to Jim the first chance I get. Probably today." He made a face. "That won't be so easy either, talking to Chee. I'm his ex-boss and he's sort of touchy with me. And, after all, it's none of my business."

  "Well, it shouldn't be."

  Leaphorn took his eyes off the road long enough to study her expression. "What do you mean by that?"

  "You should have just told Mrs. Vanders you were too busy. Or something like that." Leaphorn let that pass.

  "You're retired, you know. The golden years. Now's the time to travel, do all those things you wanted to do."

  "That's true," Leaphorn said. "I could trot down to the senior center and play—whatever they do down there."

  "You're not too old to get into golf."

  "I already did that," Leaphorn said. "At a federal law-enforcement seminar in Phoenix. The feds stay at those three-hundred-dollar-a-night resort places w
ith the big golf courses. I went out with some FBI agents and knocked the ball in all eighteen holes. It wasn't hard, but once you've done it, I don't know why you'd want to do it again."

  "You think you're going to like this being a private detective any better?"

  Leaphorn smiled at her. "I think it may be a lot harder to get the hang of than golf," he said. "Even the FBI agents mastered golf. They don't have much luck at detecting."

  "You know, Joe, I have a feeling that Mr. Dashee might be right about what Pollard's aunt has in mind. I think the old lady might not really want you to find her niece."

  "You may be right about that," Leaphorn said. "But still, that would make it a lot more interesting than knocking a golf ball around. Why don't we find Chee and see what he thinks."

  They spent the rest of the drive to Tuba City with Louisa plowing through Catherine Pollard's hodgepodge of papers.

  Leaphorn had already gone through them once, quickly. Pollard wrote fast, producing a tiny, erratic script in which all vowels looked about the same, and an h might be a k, or an I, or perhaps another of her many uncrossed t's. This unintended code was made worse by a personal shorthand, full of abbreviations and cryptic symbols. Not knowing what he was looking for, he'd found nothing helpful.

  Now Louisa read and he listened, amazed. "How can you decipher that woman's handwriting?" he said. "Or are you just guessing at it?"

  "Schoolteacher skill," Louisa said. "Most students give you computer printouts for the long papers these days, but in olden times you got a lot of practice plowing through bad penmanship. Repetition develops skill." She went slowly through the papers, translating.

  The first fatal case this spring had been a middle-aged woman named Nellie Hale, who lived north of the Kaibito chapter house and who had died in the hospital at Farmington the morning of May 19, ten days after being admitted. Pollard's notes were mostly information collected from family and friends about where Nellie Hale had been during the first weeks of May and the last few days of April. They reported checks made around the Hale hogan, the examination of a prairie dog town near Navajo National Monument where the victim had visited her mother (the dogs had fleas but neither fleas nor dogs had the plague), and the discovery of a deserted colony at the edge of the Hale grazing permit. Fleas collected from the burrows were carrying the plague. The burrows were dusted with poison and the case of Nellie Hale put on the back burner.

  That brought them to Anderson Nez. Pollard's notes showed the date he died as June 30 in the hospital at Flagstaff, with "date of admission?" followed by "find out!" She had filled the rest of the page with data accumulated from quizzing family and friends about where his prior travels had taken him. This showed he left home on May 24 en route to Encino, California, to visit his brother. He had returned on June 22. Here Louisa paused.

  "I can't make this out," she said, pointing.

  He looked at the page. "It's 'i g h,'" he said. "I think I'd figure out that's short for 'in good health.' Notice she underlined it. I wonder why?"

  "Double underlines," Louisa said, and resumed reading. Anderson Nez had left the next afternoon for the Goldtooth area and "job with Woody," according to Pollard's notes. "Did you notice he was working for Dr. Woody?" Louisa asked. Then she looked embarrassed. "Of course you did."

  "Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

  "Very," Louisa said. "Did you notice those dates? She was looking for sources of infection starting back three weeks or so before the dates of the deaths. Is that how long it takes for the bacteria to kill you?"

  "I think that's the usual time range that's been established, and I guess that explains why she underlined the 'i g h.' In good health on the twenty-second. Dead on the thirtieth," Leaphorn said. "Anything more about Nez?"

  "Not on this page," she said. "And I haven't found any mention of that third case you mentioned."

  "That was a boy over in New Mexico," Leaphorn said. "They wouldn't handle that here."

  They rolled past the Hopi outpost village of Moenkopi and into Tuba City and parked on the packed-dirt lot of the Navajo Tribal Police station. There Leaphorn found Sergeant Dick Roanhorse and Trixie Dodge, old friends from his days in the department, but not Jim Chee. Roanhorse told him Chee had headed out early for the Kinsman homicide crime scene and hadn't called in. He took Leaphorn into the radio room and asked the young man in the dispatcher's chair to try to get Chee on the radio. Then it was nostalgia time.

  "You remember when old Captain Largo was out here, and the trouble he had with you?" Trixie asked.

  "I'm trying to forget that," Leaphorn said. "I hope none of you people are giving Lieutenant Chee that kind of headache."

  "Not that kind. But he's got one," Roanhorse said, and winked.

  "Well, now," Trixie said. "If you mean Bernie Manuelito, I wouldn't call that trouble."

  "You would if you were her supervisor," Roanhorse said, and noticed Leaphorn's uncomprehending look. "Bernie has what we used to call a crush on the lieutenant, and I guess he's more or less engaged to this woman lawyer, and everybody around here knows it. So he has to walk on eggs all the time."

  "Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I'd call that a problem." He remembered now that when the word came on the grapevine at Window Rock that Chee was transferred from Shiprock to Tuba, people thought that was ironic. When he asked why, the answer was that when Officer Manuelito heard Chee was going to marry Janet Pete, she'd gotten herself transferred to Tuba to get away from him.

  The dispatcher came to the door. "Lieutenant Chee said he'd be waiting for you," the young man said. "You take U.S. 264 seven miles south from the 160 junction, then turn right on the dirt road that connects there, and then about twenty miles down the dirt. There's a track that connects there leading back toward Black Mesa. Lieutenant Chee said he'll be parked there."

  "Okay," Leaphorn said, thinking that would be the old road across the Moenkopi Plateau to Goldtooth where nobody lived anymore, and on into the empty northwestern edge of the Hopi reservation to Dinnebito Wash and Garces Mesa. It was a drive you didn't start without a full tank of gasoline and air in your spare tire. Maybe it was better now. "Thank you."

  "You think you can find it?"

  Sergeant Roanhorse laughed and whacked Leaphorn on the back. "How soon they forget you," he said.

  But Trixie hadn't exhausted the unrequited romance business as yet. "Bernie's been worried all week about whether she should invite him to a kinaalda her family's having for one of her cousins. She invited everybody else but would it be, you know, pushy or something if she invited the boss? Or would he feel hurt if she didn't? Can't make up her mind."

  "Is that why she's been so hard to get along with the last day or two?" Roanhorse asked.

  "What do you think?" she said. And grinned at him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE sat on a sandstone slab in the shade of a juniper awaiting the arrival of Joe Leaphorn, Former Boss, Former Mentor, and, as far as Chee was concerned, Perpetual Legendary Lieutenant. He admired Leaphorn, he respected him, he even sort of liked him. But for some reason, an impending meeting with the man had always made him feel uneasy and incompetent. He'd thought he'd get over that when Leaphorn was no longer his supervisor. Alas, he hadn't.

  This afternoon he didn't need a Leaphorn conversation to make him feel like a rookie. He'd learned very little prowling around Yells Back, mostly negative, reinforcing what he already knew. Jano had hit Ben Kinsman on the head with a rock. He'd found no trace of blood at the blind where Jano had caught the bird to suggest that Jano's arm had been slashed by the eagle's talons. Nor had he turned up any evidence that he was overlooking any possible witnesses to the crime. He reconsidered what Dr. Woody had told him. Woody had recalled seeing a car coming from the north as he emerged from the track that led toward Yells Back Butte. Possibly it had been Kinsman en route to meet his destiny. Possibly it was the person who had killed Kinsman following him. Or possibly Woody's memory was faulty, or Woody was lying for some r
eason Chee couldn't fathom. Whatever the case, Chee had this uneasy feeling that he was missing something and that Leaphorn, in his gentle way, would point it out.

  Well, now he'd find out. The cloud of dust coming down the road from the north would be the Legendary Lieutenant. Chee got up, put on his hat, and walked down the hill to where his patrol car had been baking in the sun beside the road. The pickup pulled up beside it and two people emerged—Leaphorn and a stocky woman wearing a straw hat, jeans, and a man's shirt.

  "Louisa," Leaphorn said. "This is Lieutenant Chee. I think you met him in Window Rock. Jim, Professor Bourebonette."

  "Yes," Chee said as they shook hands, "it's good to see you again." But it wasn't. Not now. He just wanted to know why Leaphorn was looking for him. He didn't want any complications.

  "I hope this isn't causing you any inconvenience, Leaphorn said. "I told Dineyahze we'd just wait there at the station if you were coming in."

  "No problem," Chee said, and stood there waiting for Leaphorn to get on with it.

  "I'm still trying to find Catherine Pollard," Leaphorn said. "I wondered if you've turned up anything."

  "Nothing helpful," Chee said.

  "She wasn't here the day Kinsman was attacked?"

  "Nope. At least, she wasn't until later in the day," Chee said. "I don't have to tell you how long it takes to get an ambulance into a place like this. By the time the criminalistics team got its photographs and all that, it was late afternoon. But she could have shown up after that."

  Leaphorn was waiting for him to add something. But what could he add?

  "Oh," Chee said. "Of course, she could have gotten here earlier."

  That seemed to be what Leaphorn wanted him to think. The Legendary Lieutenant nodded.

  "I ran into Cowboy Dashee at Cameron today," Leaphorn said. "He'd heard I was looking for Pollard. Knew about the reward we were offering for the Jeep she was driving. He told me a woman who keeps some goats up here had seen a Jeep going up that old road to the Tijinney place before sunrise that morning. He asked me to pass it along to you. In case it might be useful."

  "He did?"