Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

  For Margaret Mary

  With special thanks to Sam Bingham and those students at Rock Point Community School who took time to help me understand how Navajos deal with the chindis of Dine' Bike'yah in 1984.

  Chapter 1

  Hosteen joseph joe remembered it like this. He'd noticed the green car just as he came out of the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat. The red light of sundown reflected from its windshield. Above the line of yellow cottonwoods along the San Juan River the shape of Shiprock was blue-black and ragged against the glow. The car looked brand new and it was rolling slowly across the gravel, the driver leaning out the window just a little. The driver had yelled at Joseph Joe.

  "Hey!" he'd yelled. "Come here a minute." Joseph Joe remembered that very clearly. The driver looked like a Navajo, but yelling at him like that was not a Navajo thing to do because Joseph Joe was eighty-one years old, and the people around Shiprock and up in the Chuska Mountains called him Hosteen, which means "old man" and is a term of great respect.

  Joseph Joe had put his laundry sack into the back of his daughter's pickup truck and walked over to the car. He noticed its plates weren't yellow, like New Mexico's, or white, like Arizona's. They were blue.

  "I'm looking for a man named Gorman," the driver had said. "Leroy Gorman. A Navajo. Moved here little while ago."

  "I don't know him," Joseph Joe had said. He had said it in Navajo, because when he got close he saw he had been right. The man was a Navajo. But the driver just frowned at him.

  "You speak English?" the driver asked.

  "I don't know Leroy Gorman." Hosteen Joe said it in English this time.

  "He's been around here several weeks," the driver said. "Young fellow. Little older than me. Medium-sized. Hell, small as this place is, I'd think you'd have seen him."

  "I don't know him," Joseph Joe repeated. "I don't live in this town. I live at my daughter's place. Out there near the Shiprock." Joseph Joe had gestured toward the Arizona border and the old volcano core outlined by the sunset. "Don't live in here with all these people," he explained.

  "I'll bet you've seen him," the driver said. He took out his billfold and fished a photograph out of it. "This is him," the driver said and handed the photograph to Hosteen Joe.

  Joseph Joe looked at it carefully, as courtesy demanded. It was a Polaroid photograph, like the ones his granddaughter took. There was something written on the back of it, and an address. The front was a picture of a man standing by the door of a house trailer, which was partly shaded by a cottonwood tree. Hosteen Joe took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully on his sleeve and looked a long time at the young man's face. He didn't recognize him, and that's what he said when he handed the driver his photograph. After that, he didn't remember the rest of it quite as clearly because just then it all began to happen.

  The driver was saying something to him about the trailer, maybe about Gorman living in it or trying to sell it or something, and then there was the sound of a car braking on the highway, tires squealing a little, and the car backing up and whipping around and driving into the Wash-O-Mat parking lot. This car was new too. A Ford sedan.

  It stopped just in front of the driver's car. A man wearing a plaid coat got out of it and walked toward them and then stopped suddenly, apparently noticing Joseph Joe for the first time. Plaid Coat said something to the driver. As Joseph Joe remembered, it was "Hello, Albert," but the driver didn't say anything. Then Plaid Coat said, "You forgot to do what you were told. You've got to come along with me. You're not supposed to be here." Or something like that. And then he had looked at Joseph Joe and said, "We've got business, old man. You go away now."

  Hosteen Joe had turned then and walked back toward his daughter's truck. Behind him he heard the sound of a car door opening. Then closing. A yell. The sharp clap of a pistol shot. And then another shot, and another, and another. When he turned he saw Plaid Coat on the gravel and the driver holding himself up by clinging to the door of his car. Then the driver got in and drove away. When the car got to the asphalt, it turned toward the river and toward the junction, which would either take it west toward Teec Nos Pos or south toward Gallup.

  People were running out of the Wash-O-Mat by then, yelling questions. But Hosteen Joe just looked at Plaid Coat, sprawled on his side on the gravel with a pistol on the ground beside him and blood running out his mouth. Then he got into his daughter's truck.

  The driver was Navajo, but this was white man's business.

  Chapter 2

  Funny how a premonition works," the deputy said. "I been in this business almost thirty years, and I never had one before."

  Jim Chee said nothing. He was trying to recreate precisely and exactly the moment when he had known everything was going wrong with Mary Landon. He didn't want to think about the deputy's premonitions. He'd said something to Mary about his house trailer being too small for both of them, and she'd said, "Hey, wait a minute, Jim Chee, what have you done about that application with the fbi?" and he'd told her that he'd decided not to mail it. And Mary had just sat there in the Crownpoint Cafe, not looking at him or saying anything, and finally she'd sighed and shook her head and said, "Why should you be any different from everybody else?" and laughed a laugh with absolutely no humor in it. He was remembering all this and concentrating on his driving, following the rocky track which led along this high hump of the Chuska Mountains. The moon was down and the night was in that period of implacable cold darkness that comes just before the first gray light of dawn. Chee was driving with only his parking lights-just as Sharkey had told him to drive. That meant going slowly and risking a wrong turn at any of the places where the trail divided itself to go wandering off toward a spring, or someone's hogan, or a sheep dip, or who knows what. Chee wasn't worried about the slowness. Sharkey's plan was to get to the hogan of Hosteen Begay long enough before daylight to let them get into position. There was plenty of time. But he was worried about a wrong turn. And his mind was full of Mary Landon. Besides, the deputy had said it all before.

  Now the deputy was saying it all again.

  "Had a funny feeling from the very first," the deputy said. "When Sharkey was telling us about it back there in Captain Largo's office. Felt the skin tightening on the back of my neck. Kind of a coldness. And prickling on the arms. Somebody's going to get hurt, I thought. Somebody's going to get their butt shot off."

  Chee sensed the deputy was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. "Um," Chee said.

  "Yes," the deputy agreed. "I got a feeling that Gorman fella's laying up there with his pistol cocked, and when we walk in somebody's going to get killed."

  Chee eased the Navajo Tribal Police carryall around a washout. In his rearview mirror he could see the parking lights of Sharkey's pickup truck. The fbi agent was staying about a hundred yards behind him. The deputy now interrupted his monologue to light a cigaret. In the flare of the kitchen match, the man's face looked yellow-an old and sinister face. The deputy's name was Bales and he was old enough, with even more years weathered into his skin by the high-country sun of San Juan County. But not sinister. His reputation was for easygoing, over-talkative mildness. Now he exhaled smoke.

  "It's not a feeling that I'm going to get shot," Bales said. "It's a sort of general feeling that somebody will."

  Chee was conscious again that Bales was waiting for him to say something. This white man's custom of expecting a listener to do more than listen was contrary to Chee's courteous Navajo conditioning. He'd first become aware of it his freshman year at the University of New Mexico. He'd dated a girl
in his sociology class and she'd accused him of not listening to her, and it had taken two or three misunderstandings before he'd finally fathomed that while his people presume that if they're talking, you are listening, white people require periodic reassurance. Deputy Sheriff Bales was requiring such reassurance now, and Chee tried to think of something to say.

  "Somebody already got shot," he said. "Couple of people got shot, including Gorman."

  "I meant somebody new," Bales said.

  "If it's not you," Chee said, "that leaves me, or Sharkey, or that other fbi agent he brought along. Or maybe Old Man Begay."

  "I don't think so," Bales said. "I think it would need to be one of us, the way this premonition feels." Satisfied now that Chee was listening, Bales inhaled deeply and allowed a moment of silence while he savored the taste of the tobacco.

  Mary Landon had stirred her coffee, looking at it and not at him. "You've made up your mind to stay," she'd said. "Haven't you. When were you going to tell me?" And he'd said what? Something stupid or insensitive, probably. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said. But he remembered her words-vividly, clearly, exactly.

  "Whatever you say about it, it just has one meaning. It means I come second. What comes first is Jim Chee, being Navajo. I'm to be sort of an appendage to his life. Mrs. Chee and the Navajo children." He'd interrupted her, denying that accusation, and she had said the Navajo Way was important to him only when it reinforced what he already wanted to do. She'd said that before, and he knew exactly what was coming. The Navajos, she'd reminded him, married into the wife's clan. The husband joined the wife's family. "How about that, Jim Chee?" she'd asked. There was nothing he could say to her.

  The deputy exhaled again and rolled down the window a bit to let the cold air suck out the smoke. "Always chaps my butt the way the fbi won't ever tell you anything," he said. "The subject is Albert Gorman." Bales raised the pitch of his voice a notch in a weak attempt to mimic the West Texas sound of Agent Sharkey. " 'Gorman is believed armed with a thirty-eight-caliber pistol.' " Bales switched back to his own rusty voice. "Believed, hell. They took a thirty-eight slug out of the guy he shot." Bales switched voices again. " 'Los Angeles informs us that it is particularly important to apprehend this subject alive. He is wanted for questioning.'" Bales snorted. "Ever arrest anyone who wasn't wanted for questioning about something?" Bales chuckled. "Like how many beers he had before he started driving."

  Chee grunted. He eased the carryall around a place where the soil was cut away from a ridge of stone. The rearview mirror assured him again that Sharkey's pickup was still behind him.

  "I don't see how we can compromise," Mary Landon had said. "I just don't see how we can work it out." And he'd said, "Sure, Mary. Sure we can." But she was right. How could you compromise it? Either he stayed with the Navajo Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Either they raised their children in Albuquerque, or Albany, or some other white city as white children or they raised them on the Colorado Plateau as Dinee. Halfway was worse than either way. Chee had seen enough of that among displaced Navajos in the border towns to know. There was no compromise solution.

  "You know what we heard?" the deputy said. "We heard that this business was tied up with an fbi agent getting killed out in L.A. We heard that Gorman and Lerner, the guy he shot at the laundry, was both working for some outfit on the Coast. Some outfit that stole cars. Big operation. And some big shots got indicted. And an fbi agent got knocked off. And that's why the Feds are so hot to talk to this Gorman."

  "Um," Chee said. He steered the carryall cautiously around a juniper, but not cautiously enough. The left front wheel dropped into a hole the parking lights hadn't revealed. The jarring jolt shook the deputy's hat down over his eyes.

  "The car the dead guy was driving," the deputy said. "It was rented there at the Farmington airport. They tell you that?"

  "No," Chee said. As a matter of fact, they hadn't told him anything much-which was exactly what Chee had learned to expect when he was running errands for the Federals. "Got a little job for you," Captain Largo said. "We need to find that fellow in the parking lot." It had seemed an odd thing to say, since the Shiprock agency of the Navajo Tribal Police, along with every other cop along the Arizona-New Mexico border, had all been looking for that fellow. But Chee had also come to expect Largo to say odd things. Largo had then explained himself by handing Chee a folder. It included a copy of the photograph of Albert Gorman that the fbi had provided, a rap sheet showing several arrests and one conviction for larceny of motor vehicles, and some biographical statistics. There were no blank spaces on the forms used by the Los Angeles Police Department for the sort of information Chee needed: Gorman's mother's name and her clan, which Albert Gorman had been "born to," and the clan of Gorman's father, which Albert had been "born for." Unless Albert Gorman had forgotten how to be a Navajo in Los Angeles or, as sometimes happened off the reservation, had never learned the Navajo Way, the homes of these clansmen would be the place to look for Albert Gorman. Largo knew that.

  "What I want you to do is drop everything else you're fooling around with. Just come up with this guy," Largo had said. "He didn't pass the roadblocks at Teec Nos Pos, and we had a car there fifteen minutes after the shooting, so he didn't go west. And he didn't get to the roadblock at Sheep Springs, so he didn't get through us going south. So unless he turned east to Burnham, and that road doesn't go anyplace, he must have gone up into the Chuskas."

  Chee had agreed to that, mentally changing the "must have" into a "most likely."

  Largo pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the wall map, a bulky man with a barrel chest and thin hips-the top-heavy wedge shape so common among western Navajos. He waved a finger around a portion of the map encompassing the Shiprock massif, the Carrizo and Lukachukai mountains, the north end of the Chuskas, and the country between them. "Narrows it down to this little area," Largo said. "See how quick you can find him."

  The little area was about the size of Connecticut, but its population wouldn't be more than a few hundred. And the few hundred would be people who would unfailingly notice and remember anything unusual. If Gorman had driven his green sedan into the country south of Teec Nos Pos, or west of Littlewater, it would have been seen and talked about and remembered-the subject of speculation. It was simply a matter of driving and driving and driving, and talking and talking and talking, for however many days it took to track it down. "How quick I find him depends on how lucky I get," Chee said.

  "Get lucky, then," Largo said. "And when you find him, just call in. Don't try to arrest him. Don't go anywhere near him. Don't do nothing to spook him. Just get on the radio and get word to us, and we tell the Agency." Largo was leaning against the map, staring at Chee, expression neutral at best. "Understand what I'm saying? Don't screw it up. It's an fbi case. It is not, repeat not, a case for the Navajo Tribal Police. It's an Agency case. It is not our affair. It is not the affair of Officer Jim Chee. Got it?"

  "Sure," Chee said.

  "Chee finds. Chee calls in. Chee leaves it at that. Chee does not do any freelance screwing around," Largo said.

  "Right," Chee said.

  "I mean it," Largo said. "I don't know much about it, but from what I hear, this guy is tied up somehow or other with some big case in Los Angeles. And an fbi agent got killed." Largo paused long enough to allow Chee to consider what that meant. "That means that when the fbi says they want to talk to this guy, they really want to talk to him. You just find him."

  And so Chee had found him and now, having found him, was guiding in the fbi to finish the job, with Deputy Bales along to properly represent the San Juan County Sheriffs Department.

  Deputy Bales stifled a yawn. "Yeah," he said. "The dead guy came in on a chartered plane. Or anyway, the people at the airport said a private plane flew in, and he got out of it and rented the car. A hood out of Los Angeles. With a long rap sheet."

  "Um," Chee said. He'd heard about the plane
and the rented car and the police record. The homicide was exotic enough to be fuel for gossip. The fbi told nobody anything. But the Farmington police told the New Mexico State Police, who told the Sheriffs Office, who told the Navajo cops, who told the Bureau of Indian Affairs law and order people, who told the Arizona Highway Patrol. In the small, dull world of law enforcement, anything unusual is a precious commodity, worth weeks of conversation.

  "I wonder if he really is wounded," the deputy said.

  "Pretty sure about that," Chee said. "Old Joseph Joe is supposed to have seen him hanging on the car door, looking hurt. And when I looked in the car, there was blood on the front seat."

  "Been wondering about that," the deputy said. "How'd you find it?"

  "Just took time," Chee said. "You know how it is. Just keep asking until you ask the right person."

  It had taken three days to find the right person, a boy getting off the bus from the Toadlena school. He'd seen the green sedan going by on the road that led from Two Gray Hills southward toward Owl Springs. Chee had stopped at the Two Gray Hills Trading Post and got a fix on who lived down that road and how to find their places. Then another hard afternoon of driving on doubtful trails. "Found it about dark yesterday," he added.