"I'd really like to have a couple of those flyers," Leaphorn said. "One for Jim Chee. I think he and Dashee are going to take Tuve down in the Canyon and try to find the man he got the diamond from."
That produced a long pause.
"After God knows how many years?" Louisa said. "How in the world are they going to find him? No name or anything. That sounds impossible."
"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "All they know is where the swap was made and that the old fellow with the diamonds was an Indian, but not a Hopi or Navajo, and after the swap deal was agreed on, he had to go down the canyon maybe a half-mile to get the stone. Their guess is he must have been some sort of hermit-maybe a Havasupai shaman-who had the diamonds cached in a cave."
"What's your guess?"
"My guess is they won't find anyone, but you know them both. Jim will feel better because he did what he could to help his old friend, and Cowboy will rest easier because he did his duty to his family and his fellow Bear Clan member."
Louisa sighed. "Sure," she said. "You'd do the same thing, wouldn't you?"
Before he could think of an honest answer to that, Louisa had something to add.
"Hermit, you said. That old woman I talked to yesterday was telling about the last shaman they had-he died back in the 1960s, I think it was-and how a man from the Kaibab Paiute Reservation was a friend of the shaman and was always hanging around Peach Springs. From what she told me, he was living on a sort of part-time basis with a Havasupai woman. She said he was a `far-looking man,' the Supai name for people who can see into the future, find things, all that. Sort of like your Navajo crystal-gazer shaman. Anyway, he got into some sort of trouble and left Peach Springs and went away somewhere and disappeared. Supposed to have made himself some sort of nest in one of those undercut places up a side canyon and was living off crawdads, frogs, and stuff he could get off of the tourist rafters who are always floating down the river through there. She said people sometimes crossed the river there to learn things from him. Get him to take a peek into the distant future for them."
"Hmmm," Leaphorn said.
Louisa laughed. "Too bad they didn't ask him how to find those diamonds you and Chee seem so interested in. My source at Peach Springs said he seemed to do a lot of business with people after that airplane disaster. Lots of lost things to be found."
"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "Such as friends and relatives. And including a torn-off left arm with a package of diamonds attached."
"I could bring you a couple copies of that flier," Louisa said. "But if you need it faster, I heard whoever did it ran the same message as little advertisements in the Navajo News, and the Flagstaff paper, and other papers around there. Easy to find out and easy to get a copy."
"Really?" Leaphorn said. He was thinking of how much it must have cost to get all this printing and advertising done, thinking about what Captain Pinto had said, of Pinto's speculation about the importance Washington was putting on the federal part of this peculiar situation. He was thinking this was getting much more interesting.
"Joe? You still there?"
"Can you do me a favor, Louisa? Could you find out everything you can learn about this possible hermit? His name? Is he still alive? Did he stay on the Peach Springs side of the river? Does anyone know where he might be? Anyway, just let me know anything you can find out about him."
"Okay, Joe. But if I do, you're going to have to promise me you'll keep me informed. I don't want to read about something spectacular in the Farmington Times or the Gallup Independent."
"Okay," Leaphorn said. "I promise."
"One other thing you might be interested in. Among the various new legends and revisions of old ones that disaster spread around is a renewed interest in Masaw. You remember him?"
"The Hopi kachina spirit who is a sort of guardian of this world. The one who greeted them when they came up out of the fourth world, and told them where to live, and not to be afraid of death. Masaw, or Skeleton Man, or Maasau'u, or-"
"Or two or three other names," Louisa said. "Anyway some old man, maybe that hermit I mentioned, was supposed to be trying to start a sort of Skeleton Man sect. To get people to quit being so obsessed with having those one hundred and twenty-seven bodies showering down on them."
"Sort of like all that therapy business in Colorado after all those kids got shot at the school, I guess," Leaphorn said.
"Sort of," Louisa agreed. "And listen, if Chee and Officer Dashee are coming down here, let me know where I can find them. Cell phones are pretty chancy, but sometimes they work. I'm talking to you on mine right now."
"Fair enough," Leaphorn said. "And when you're back here, I want to show you the little leather pollen pouch that the diamond Shorty McGinnis showed me had been kept in. It has an animal-looking symbol sewed into it. New to me but I thought you might recognize it."
"These days it would probably be something out of a Disney movie," Louisa said.
After they clicked off, it occurred to him that he hadn't told Louisa where to find Chee or Dashee. In fact, he didn't know himself.
Where had he jotted down that cell phone number? Back of an envelope maybe. He'd sort through his waste-basket. Hope to get lucky. Or call the NTP office at Shiprock. Maybe someone there would have it.
13
Joanna Craig had followed Tuve on his homeward trip. His uncle had put him into a very dusty and much-dented pickup. Pickup trucks in Indian country are as common as taxicabs in Manhattan, but this one helped Joanna's cause by carrying in its bed a huge box, big enough to house a king-sized refrigerator, with a gaudy red Kitchen Aide label.
A couple of times she'd needed the help. Tuve's uncle had ducked into a service station at Ganado, and she would have lost him had she not seen the big box sticking up as she rolled past on the highway. She would have lost him again just past the Polacca settlement when he made a turn she hadn't anticipated, and then been lured into following another pickup, same shade of blue, same degree of dustiness. But she had again spotted the Kitchen Aide advertisement, did an illegal U-turn across the highway, and followed the box up a narrow road that struggled up the slopes of First Mesa to serve the little stone villages of Walpi, Hano, and Sichomovi and whatever lay beyond them.
And now there it was, box and truck, parked down a short stretch of weedy track that led to a flat stone house and its supporting storage shed, sheep pen, outhouse, and the rusty remains of an earlier pickup. She saw no sign of Tuve, his uncle, or anyone else, and drove past. She found a cluster of junipers where she could park mostly out of sight and watch the house. She would wait, and worry, and reconsider her strategy for doing what she absolutely had to do, must do, was destined to do. Usually she thought of it as getting justice. When she was angry, she admitted her goal was revenge, but now that she was here, she knew it was fate. Fate had moved her along. This was the only way she could destroy Dan Plymale. And that was her dream and her destiny.
No need for the car's air conditioner in the cool, dry air of the Hopi Mesa. She rolled down the window, got her binoculars out of the glove box, and focused on the Tuve home place. The truck was empty. Nothing stirred but a faint plume of smoke that came from the horno oven behind the house. She had already considered and rejected the idea of simply knocking on the door, introducing herself, and explaining to Tuve's mother and uncle why she had put up bail for Billy Tuve and why she desperately needed his help. She was certain she could sway Billy-had seen the sympathy showing in his face in her hotel room. But mother and uncle were older, would be skeptical, would be more religious, would be impossible to persuade that the Salt Trail rules could be bent. She'd have to wait for an opportunity to get Billy alone. At least wait until after his uncle had left. Without someone there to interrupt her, Joanna was sure she could use that combination of his own self-interest and his sympathy for her own plight to persuade him. And probably his mother, too.
Whether Tuve could find the man who supplied him his trouble-making gem seemed less likely, and even if he did, whet
her that would lead her to her father's bones was another unanswerable question. But she would recover those bones. And they would prove she was heir to the Clarke fortune and bring Dan Plymale and his phony, greed-driven Eternal Peace Foundation crashing down in bankrupt ruins.
Someone had emerged from the rear of the Tuve house. She shifted to the passenger window, getting a clearer view, and focused on a woman, plump, walking slowly, carrying a basket to a clothesline strung between the storage shed and a nearby tree, hanging out a shirt, a pair of denims, socks, underwear. Probably what Tuve had been wearing when he was taken to jail.
Joanna dropped the binoculars on the seat and squirmed into a more comfortable position. Ready for more waiting, more planning, more remembering. And for reinforcing the absolute confidence she must have to finish this job. She would because she must. Because it was her fate. Fate had been painfully slow, but it had finally led her here, and it would take her to those bones, and they would give her-finally-the peace of knowing she had done her duty. The peace of taking on her own name, of having it legally changed to Joanna Clarke. Having finally revenged her mother. And her father. And herself.
Revenge had been her purpose since she was in high school, living with her mother and her mother's elderly husband in his lavish summer home in the Montana mountains, and finally learning that Craig was a fiction and that her father was John Clarke.
The elderly husband had been dying of some variation of cancer, probably had been dying when her mother, just thirty at the time, married him, an old gray man with a chauffeur-driven car. Joanna had been a flower girl at the wedding, only nine but old enough even then to wonder why her mother was the bride of a frail-looking grandfather. It wasn't until her mother's death the year after she'd graduated from the University of Montana that she knew the rest of the story. Or knew her real name.
Her mother's lawyer had given her the letter-a thick envelope with a stamped wax seal. On it her mother had written: "To be given to my daughter, Joanna Clarke, in the event of my death."
A man emerged from the front door of the Tuve house. Joanna refocused the binoculars. Tuve's uncle, with Tuve standing in the open door saying something to him. Uncle climbed into the pickup, the motor started, the truck backed down the track, turned on to the road, and headed slowly down the way they had come. Billy Tuve disappeared from the doorway, closed the door. Joanna switched her view to the back of the house, located Tuve's mother at the sheep pen, the gate open now, the sheep emerging. Joanna turned her view to the pickup, disappearing now over the mesa rim. Back to Tuve's mother. She was following the sheep, presumably to where they would be grazing. The front door was still closed. She would wait about five minutes. Then she would call on Billy Tuve, and persuade him, and take him to the top of the Salt Trail, and down it to realize her destiny.
Destiny, however, did not allow her a full five minutes. Just as she turned the ignition key to start the engine to drive down to Tuve's house, to complete this phase of her project, another car emerged over the rim, a white sedan moving fast. Joanna decided she would wait another minute to allow it to pass. It didn't. It slowed, turned down the track to the Tuve house, stopped there. A man emerged, a big man. Billy Tuve appeared at the front door. They met in the doorway and talked. To Joanna, her binoculars focused, they appeared to be arguing. Billy made a negative gesture. The argument resumed. Billy disappeared inside. The man waited on the doorstep. And waited. Joanna glanced at her watch. Two minutes passed. Four minutes. The man leaned against the door frame, shifted his hat to shade his face from the sun.
Joanna suddenly felt sick. She knew who this man must be. He would be a man named Sherman. The man who had been at the Park Service Center just before her, asking questions about where victims of that plane crash were buried, and then asking about who had been handing out the sheets offering a reward for information about them.
"You just missed him," the clerk had told her. "He was really curious about your reward offer. He said his name was Sherman and he needed to find you. I asked him if he knew anything about the diamonds and he just laughed."
The name Sherman might be phony, Joanna thought, but whatever it was, it might as well be Plymale. He'd be bought and paid by that lawyer, just one of the tentacles answering to Dan Plymale. Which meant Plymale had got to Billy Tuve before her.
As she thought that, Billy Tuve reappeared in the doorway. He was carrying a zippered bag of blue canvas which seemed fairly heavy as he swung it into the back seat of Sherman's car. They drove away down the mesa road and over the rim.
Joanna, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Following was easier this time because she was almost sure she knew where they were going and the vehicle was an easy-to-spot white sedan. But what would she have to do when they got there? She pulled her purse over beside her, snapped it open, reached inside, extracted a pistol, and steeled herself for what lay ahead.
The pistol, like most everything she was doing, as well as her fierce malice, her nightmare dreams, dated back to the letter her mother had left her. She could remember it, word for word.
Dearest Joanna:
I have lied to you all these years because I didn't want you to inherit the pain I have lived through since your father died. But I believe you must know. Lieutenant David Shaw, killed in Vietnam after your conception, was a lie. He didn't exist. He was my cover story. Your father was John Clarke Jr., killed in that awful airliner collision in Arizona about six months before your birth. He was flying home for our wedding. His father (your grandfather, although he never would have admitted it) was a widower. He had already told John, his only child, that he would not attend the ceremony. He told me in a letter that I was "gold-digging white trash, in no way fit for his family."
Much of the rest of that first page recounted other such insults. It told how the elder Clarke, already the victim of two heart attacks, had suffered a stroke during those days when the hunt was on for the bodies of airline crash victims. He died without recovering from the coma and his affairs were taken over by his law firm, the Plymale firm, which represented a tax-exempt foundation the old man had started.
The law firm was Plymale, Stevens, Ebersten, and Daly, and one of its junior members was Dan Plymale Jr., son of the senior partner. The firm seemed to have suspected that Joanna's mother had conceived young Clarke's child. The senior Plymale contacted her, told her she had no claim to any share of the estate, but offered her ten thousand dollars to sign a legal disclaimer. She had discussed this with Hal Simmons, who told her that the senior Clarke's will left the bulk of his estate to John, or descendants of John if John preceded him in death. If no such descendants existed, the bulk of the estate went to the foundation he had initiated with the guidance of Dan Plymale. The executor of the estate, and the director of the charity foundation, was to be Plymale's law firm.
She had given Hal Simmons copies of the love letters John had written her, including those discussing her pregnancy, along with the final letter. In that, Clarke said he would be "home tomorrow to hold you in my arms, and take you down to the church and thereby make that little child we have conceived legal and respectable-and to hell with what Daddy Clarke thinks of it."
Simmons met with the Plymales, father and son. He showed them the letters and proposed a negotiated settlement. The Plymales refused, saying the letters were not sufficient evidence. However, in view of the pregnancy, they offered to increase the ten-thousand-dollar settlement offer to thirty thousand dollars, providing that the fetus would be aborted, and proof of the abortion provided.
Joanna remembered precisely what her mother had written: "Remember, Joanna, the twenty thousand dollars they added to the offer. That was the value they put on your life. Twenty thousand dollars the fee for killing you in my womb."
Twenty thousand dollars! When she heard that was the estimated value of her father's diamond, the diamond poor Billy Tuve had tried to pawn for twenty dollars, the irony struck deep. She had laughed and then she'd cried, and then she'd
wondered if that had been the very diamond her father had been bringing home to her mother as a wedding gift, and then she had cried again. And now it turned out to be that this diamond, or another one just like it, was leading her to her destiny.
Simmons told her mother that the Plymales probably had the right reading of the laws. They would need more evidence to prove that her unborn child was the product of Clarke's seed. With some of the money her mother had inherited from her husband's estate and perhaps the promise of a generous contingency agreement, Simmons retained a national private investigation firm to learn everything possible about John Clarke, his jewelry business, the last months of his life, and the circumstances of his death.
The information had come in slowly. First the knowledge that her father had been bringing a package of specially cut diamonds back to New York from Los Angeles. That information had come from a dealer in Manhattan's diamond district who had been awaiting them. Seventy-four stones, ranging in weight from 3.7 carats to 7.2, all of them perfect blue-whites, one specially cut for her mother-just as John Clarke had told her in his terminal letter. And in that final letter, her father had drawn a neat little sketch of the gem, showing how the cutter had shaped it for her.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 17 - Skeleton Man Page 11
