Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  Chee sat up straight. "No, sir," he said.

  "You catch that Yazzie who's bootlegging all that wine?"

  "No, sir."

  "Found that kid did the cutting on the Ute Reservation?"

  "Not yet." It was going to be worse than he'd expected. He'd only had the Ute stabbing added to his case list Friday.

  Largo was peering down into the file folder in which he kept Chee's reports. It was a bulky file, but Largo apparently decided to shorten the ordeal a little. He flipped rapidly through it, then closed it and turned it face down on his desk. "All this still-unfinished business then?" he asked. "You got plenty to keep your mind occupied?"

  "Yes, sir," Chee said. "Plenty of work to do."

  "I got the impression that you had time on your hands," Largo said. "Looking for something to keep you occupied."

  Chee waited. Largo waited. Ah, well, Chee thought, might as well get it over with. "How's that, sir?" he asked.

  "You pulled the file on the Gorman business," Largo said. His expression asked why.

  "Just curious," Chee said. Now he would get a lecture on respecting jurisdictions, on minding his own business.

  "You find anything interesting in there?"

  The question surprised him. "Not much in there at all," he said.

  "No reason for there to be," Largo said. "It's not our case. What were you looking for?"

  "Nothing specific. I wondered who Gorman was. And who was the man who came after him. The one Gorman shot at the laundry. What Gorman was doing in Shiprock. How Begay fit in. Things like that."

  Largo made a tent of his fingers above the desk top and spent a moment examining it. "Why were you curious?" he asked, without taking his eyes off his fingers. "Fight in a parking lot. The survivor runs to his kinsman to hide out and heal. Everything looks normal. What's bothering you?"

  Chee shrugged.

  Largo studied him. "You know," he said, "or anyway you heard from me, that an fbi agent got killed back in California in this one. The Agency is always touchy. This time they're going to be extra touchy."

  "I was just curious," Chee said. "No harm done."

  "I want you to tell me what made you curious."

  "It wasn't much," Chee said. He told Largo about the way Gorman's corpse had been prepared, with its hair unwashed, and of wondering why Begay had not moved Gorman outside before the moment of death.

  Largo listened. "You tell Sharkey about this?"

  "He wasn't interested," Chee said.

  Largo grinned.

  "Maybe no reason to be," Chee admitted. "I don't know much about Begay. Lots of Navajos don't know enough about the Navajo way of getting a corpse ready. Lots of 'em wouldn't care."

  "Younger ones, maybe," Largo said. "Or city ones. Begay isn't young. Or city. What do you know about him?"

  "They call him Hosteen, so I guess the people up there respect him. That's about it."

  "I know a little more than that," Largo said. "Begay is Tazhii Dinee. In fact, I'm told his aunt is the ahnii of that clan. He's lived up there above Two Gray Hills longer than anybody can remember. Has a grazing permit. Runs sheep. Keeps to himself. Some talk that he's a witch."

  Largo recited it all in a flat, uninflected voice, putting no more emphasis on the last sentence than the first.

  "There's some talk that just about everybody is a witch," Chee said. "I've heard you were. And me."

  "He seems to have a good reputation," Largo said. "People up there seem to like him. Say he's honest. Takes care of his relatives." That was the ultimate compliment for a Navajo. The worse insult was to say he acted like he didn't have any relatives. In Navajo country, families come first.

  Chee wanted to ask Largo why he had learned so much about an old man who kept to himself high in the Chuska Mountains. As Largo had said, the Gorman shooting was an fbi case-white-man business completely outside the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribal Police. Instead of asking, he waited. He'd worked for Largo two years, first at the Tuba City subagency and now here at Shiprock. Largo would tell him exactly what Largo wanted him to know and all at Largo's own pace. Chee knew very little about the Tazhii Dinee-only that the Turkey People were one of the smallest of the sixty or so Navajo clans. If Begay's aunt was the clan's ahnii, its matriarch/judge/fountain-of -wisdom, then his was a most respected family and he would certainly know enough of the Navajo Way to properly prepare a kinsman for burial.

  "Gorman was the son of Begay's youngest sister," Largo said. "The Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated a bunch of that clan in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties and fifties. In fact, Begay seems to have been among the few of that outfit that didn't go. I think one of his daughters also stayed. Lived over around Borrego Pass. Dead now. And a few Tazhii Dinee are supposed to have moved over to the Ca¤oncito Reservation. But the clan doesn't amount to much any more." Largo walked to the window and stood, back to Chee, inspecting the weather in the parking lot.

  "We've got a girl missing from St. Catherine Indian School," Largo said. "Probably a runaway. Probably nothing much." The captain exercised the storyteller's pause-for-effect. "She's the granddaughter of Hosteen Begay. Told a friend she was worried about him. The nuns at St. Catherine called the police there at Santa Fe because they said she wasn't the type that runs away. Whatever type that is." Largo paused again, still looking at something or other in the parking lot. "Attended her morning classes on the fourteenth. Didn't show up for classes after lunch."

  Chee didn't comment. The bloody business in the parking lot had happened the night of the eleventh. On the twelfth Old Man Begay had walked into the Two Gray Hills Trading Post, bought his futile bottle of aspirin, and mailed a letter. How long would it take a letter to get from Two Gray Hills to Santa Fe? Two days?

  Largo walked back to his desk, found a package of cigarets in the drawer, and lit one. "The other thing," he said through the cloud of blue smoke, "is the fbi is unusually uptight about this one. Very grim. So I did some asking around. It turns out one of their old-timers got killed a couple of months ago, like I told you. He was on something that ties in with this business." Largo turned away from his parking lot inspection to gaze at Chee. "You been a cop long enough to know how it is when a cop gets killed?"

  "I've heard," Chee said.

  "Well, anyway, they never want us interfering in their jurisdiction. So think how sore they'd get if it happened when they've got an agent dead. And nobody to hang it on."

  "Yeah," Chee said.

  "Unfortunately," Largo said, "you're the logical one to handle this missing St. Catherine girl."

  Chee let that pass. What Largo meant was that he had a reputation for being nosy. He couldn't deny it.

  "You want me to be careful," Chee said.

  "I want you to turn on the brain," Largo said. "See if you can pick up the girl. If you run into anything that bears on what happened to Gorman, then you back off. Tell me. I tell Sharkey. Everybody's happy."

  "Yes, sir," Chee said.

  Largo stood by the window, looking at him. "I really mean it," he said. "No screwing around."

  "Yes, sir," Chee said.

  Chapter 6

  The girl's name was sosi. Margaret Billy Sosi. Age seventeen. Daughter of Franklin Sosi, no known address, and Emma Begay Sosi (deceased) of Borrego Pass. The form listed Ashie Begay, grandfather, care of Two Gray Hills Trading Post, as the "person to be notified in event of emergency." The form was a photocopy of an admissions sheet used at the Santa Fe boarding school, and there was nothing on it, or on the attached Navajo Tribal Police missing persons report form, that told Chee anything he didn't already know. He slipped the two sheets back into their folders and turned to the copies he made from the Gorman homicide report.

  The wind, blowing from due north now, gusted around his pickup truck and rattled particles of parking lot debris against its door. Chee did not consciously dislike the wind. It was part of the totality of day and place, and to dislike it would be contrary to his Navajo nature. But it made him un
easy. He read quickly through the Gorman file, covering first the chronology of what had happened at the laundry and then turning to the investigating officer's transcription of his interview with Joseph Joe, looking for the oddity that had bothered him when he had first gone through the report.

  "Subject Joe said Gorman had called him to the car and engaged him briefly in conversation. Joe said that as he walked away from the Gorman vehicle, the rented vehicle driven by Lerner came into the lot."

  Engaged him briefly in conversation. About what? Why had Gorman driven from Los Angeles to be shot at a laundromat? It seemed to Chee that an answer to the first question might offer some clue to the answer of the second. It certainly seemed a logical question-something he would have asked Old Man Joe. Why hadn't it been asked? Chee glanced at the name of the investigating officer. It was Sharkey. Sharkey seemed smart.

  Chee read through the rest of the report. Lerner had chartered a plane at a Pasadena airport, flown to Farmington, and rented an Avis car. Judging from the time elapsed, he had driven directly and rapidly to Shiprock. Looking for Gorman, obviously. How had he found him at the laundry? That could have been easy enough if he knew the car Gorman was driving. He would have been looking for it, and the highway in from Farmington passed directly by the lot where Gorman was parked. That left the question of why. The data in the report on Gorman himself made him seem trivial enough-simply a car thief. Lerner, from the report and what gossip Chee had heard, was a minor Los Angeles hoodlum. The chartered plane seemed grotesquely glossy and expensive for an incident involving such unimportant people.

  Chee put the report back in its folder and looked quickly through the papers he'd picked up from his in-basket. Nothing much. A Please Return Call slip showing that "Eddie" had called about "Blue Door." Eddie pumped gas at night at the Chevron station beside the San Juan bridge. His mother was an alcoholic, Eddie did not like bootleggers, and the Blue Door Bar at the reservation boundary outside Farmington was a haunt for those who hauled beer, wine, and whiskey into the reservation's outback. Eddie meant well, but unfortunately his tips never seemed to lead anywhere.

  The next memo informed all officers of the theft of a pinto mare from the Two Gray Hills Trading Post; of a pickup order on a man named Nez who had beaten his brother-in-law with a hammer at the family sheep camp above Mexican Water, and of the confirmation of identification of a middle-aged woman found dead beside the Shiprock-Gallup highway. Cause of death was also confirmed. She'd been run over by a vehicle while sprawled, unconscious from alcohol, on the pavement. Chee took a second look at the identification. He didn't know the name, but he knew the woman, and a score like her, and their husbands and their sons. He had arrested them, and manhandled them into his patrol car, and cleaned up after them, and eased their bodies onto stretchers and into ambulances. In the milder seasons, they drank themselves to death in front of trucks on U.S. 666 or Navajo Route 1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.

  That wind buffeted his truck, stirring a cold draft around his face. Chee turned on the ignition and started his engine. Where was Mary Landon at this moment? Teaching her fifth-graders at Crownpoint. Chee remembered the afternoon he had stood on the walk outside the windows of her classroom and watched her-a silent pantomime through the glass. Mary Landon talking. Mary Landon laughing. Mary Landon coaxing, approving, explaining. Until one of her students had seen him standing there and looked at him, and he had fled in embarrassment.

  He turned his mind away from that and rolled the pickup out of the lot. He would see Eddie about the Blue Door later. The stolen pinto mare and the angry brother-in-law and the rest of it could wait. Now the job was to find Margaret Billy Sosi, aged seventeen, granddaughter of Ashie Begay, clanswoman of a dead man whom people called Albert Gorman, who seemed to have been running, but not running fast enough or far enough. And thus the first step to finding Margaret Billy Sosi was finding Hosteen Joseph Joe and asking him the question Sharkey hadn't asked, which was what Albert Gorman had said to him at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat.

  Chapter 7

  Finding joseph joe proved simple enough. In cultures where cleanliness is valued and water is scarce, laundries are magnets-social as well as service centers. Chee took for granted that the people at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat would know their customers. He was correct. The middle-aged woman who managed the place provided Joseph Joe's full family genealogy and directions to his winter place. Chee rolled his patrol car southward across the San Juan bridge with the north wind chasing him, then west toward Arizona, and then south again across the dry slopes of snakeweed and buffalo grass toward the towering black spire of basalt that gave the town of Shiprock its name. It was the landmark of Chee's childhood-jutting on the eastern horizon from his mother's place south of Kayenta, and a great black thumb stuck into the northern sky during the endless lonely winters he spent at the Two Gray Hills Boarding School. It was there he'd learned that the Rock with Wings of his uncle's legends had, eons ago, boiled and bubbled as molten lava in the throat of an immense cinder cone. The volcano had died, millions of years had passed, abrasive weather-like today's bitter wind-had worn away cinders and ash and left only tough black filling. In today's bleak autumn light, it thrust into the sky like a surreal gothic cathedral, soaring a thousand feet above the blowing grass and providing-even at five miles' distance-a ludicrously oversized backdrop for Joseph Joe's plank and tarpaper house. "I already told the white policeman about it," Hosteen Joe told Chee. Joe poured coffee into a plastic Thermos bottle cap and into a white cup with re-elect mcdonald for tribal progress printed around it, handed Chee the political cup, took a sip from the other, and began telling it all again.

  Chee listened. The wind seeped through cracks, rustling the Farmington Times Joe was using as a tablecloth and stirring the spare clothing that hung on a wire strung across a corner of the room. Through the only south window, Chee could see the tall cliffs of Shiprock, now obscured by blowing dust, now black against the dust-stained sky. Joseph Joe finished his account, sipped his coffee, waited for Chee's reaction.

  Chee took a courtesy sip. He drank a lot of coffee. ("Too much coffee, Joe," Mary would say. "Someday I will reform you into a sipper of tea. When I get you, I'm going to make sure you last a long time.") He enjoyed coffee, respected its aroma, its flavor. This was awful coffee: old, stale, bitter. But Chee sipped it. Partly courtesy, partly to cover his surprise at what Joseph Joe had told him.

  "I want to make sure I have everything right," Chee said. "The man in the car, the man who drove up first, said he wanted to find somebody he called Leroy Gorman?"

  "Leroy Gorman," Joe said. "I remember that because I thought about whether I had ever known anybody by that name. Lots of Navajos call themselves Gorman, but I never knew one they called Leroy Gorman."

  "The man you were talking to, his name was Gorman too. Did the white policeman tell you that?"

  "No," Joe said. He smiled. "White men never tell me much. They ask questions. Maybe they were brothers."

  "Probably the same family, anyway," Chee said. "But it sounds like this white policeman didn't ask you enough questions. I wonder why he didn't ask you about what Gorman said to you."

  "He asked," Joseph Joe said. "I told him."

  "You told him about Gorman asking you where to find Leroy Gorman."

  "Sure," Joseph Joe said. "Told him the same thing I told you."

  "Did you tell the policeman about the picture Gorman showed you?"

  "Sure. He asked me a bunch of questions about it. Wrote it down in his tablet."

  "That picture," Chee said. "A house trailer? Not a mobile home? Not one of those things that has a motor and a steering wheel itself, but something you pull behind a car?"

  "Sure," Joseph Joe said. He laughed, his wrinkled face multiplying its creases with amusement. "Used to have a son-in-law lived in one. No room for nothing."

  "Two things," Chee said. "I want you to remember everyt
hing you told the white policeman about the picture-everything in it. And then I want you to see if you can remember anything you didn't tell him. Was it just a picture of a trailer? Was it with a bunch of other trailers? Hitched behind a car? One man in the picture, standing there?"

  Joseph Joe thought. "It was a color picture," he said. "A Polaroid." He walked to a tin trunk against the wall, opened the lid, extracted a photo album with a black cardboard cover. "Like this one," he said, showing Chee a Polaroid photo of Joseph Joe standing beside his front door with a middle-aged woman. "Same size as this," he said. "Had the trailer in the middle, and a tree sort of over it, and just dirt in front."

  "Just one man in it?"

  "Standing by the door. Looking at you."

  "What kind of tree?"

  Joe thought. "Cottonwood. I think cottonwood."

  "What color leaves?"

  "Yellow."

  "What color trailer?"