Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  He got up, stretched, sauntered across the grass, fingers stuck in the back pockets of his jeans, sending the woman who was surely watching from behind the curtain the signal of a man killing time. He walked down to the street and looked up and down it. Across from him, a neon sign over the entrance of a decaying brick building read korean gospel church. Its windows were sealed with warped plywood. Next door was a once-white bungalow with a wheelless flatbed truck squatting on blocks before its open garage door. Once-identical frame houses stretched down the block, given variety now by age, remodeling projects, and assorted efforts to make them more livable. The line terminated in a low concrete block building on the corner which, judging from the sign painted on its wall, was a place where used clothing was bought and sold. In general, it was a little worse than the street Chee had lived on as a student in Albuquerque and a little better than the average housing in Shiprock.

  Gorman's side of La Monica Street was of a similar affluence but mostly two-story instead of one. Below his U-shaped apartment house were two more, both larger and both badly needing painting. Up the street, the remainder of the block was filled by a tan stucco building surrounded by lawn and a chain-link fence. Chee ambled along the fence, examining the establishment.

  On the side porch, five people sat in a row, watching him. They sat in wheelchairs, strapped in. Old people, three women and two men. Chee raised a hand, signaling greetings. No reaction. Each wore a blue bathrobe: four white heads and one bald one. Another woman sat in a wheelchair on a concrete walk that ran just inside the fence. She, too, was old, with thin white hair, a happy smile, and pale blue vacant eyes.

  "Hello," Chee said.

  "He's going to come today," the woman said. "He's coming."

  "Good," Chee said.

  "He's going to come today," the woman repeated. She laughed.

  "I know it," Chee said. "He'll be glad to see you."

  She laughed again, looking happily at Chee through the fence. "Got shore leave," she said. "He's coming."

  "Wonderful," Chee said. "Tell him hello for me."

  The woman lost interest in him. She backed her wheelchair down the walk, humming.

  Chee strolled along the fence, looking at the five who lined the porch. This was a side of white culture he'd never seen before. He'd read about it, but it had seemed too unreal to make an impression-this business of penning up the old. The fence was about six feet high, with the top-most foot tilted inward. Hard for an old woman to climb that, Chee thought. Impossible if she was tied in a wheelchair. Los Angeles seemed safe from these particular old people.

  He turned the corner and walked past the front of the place. silver threads rest home, a sign on the front lawn said. Here there were flowers-beds of marigolds, petunias, zinnias, and blossoms of the mild coastal climate that Chee could not identify. Banks of flowers flourishing safe from the old people.

  Silver Threads occupied the entire end of the block. Chee circled it, glancing at his watch, killing time. He turned into the alley separating the rest home from Gorman's apartment complex and walked down it toward Gorman's porch. He'd used up almost ten minutes.

  A man, bent and skinny, was standing inside the fence watching him approach with bright blue, interested eyes. He was standing in a waist-high aluminum walking frame, its four legs planted in the grass.

  "Hello," Chee said.

  "You Indian?" the man asked. He had trouble with "Indian," stopping mid-word, closing his eyes, exhaling breath, trying again until he pronounced it.

  "Yes," Chee said. "I'm Navajo."

  "Indian lives there," the man said. He removed a hand from the walker and gestured toward Gorman's apartment.

  "Do you know him?" Chee asked.

  The old man struggled for words, shook his head, sighed. "Nice," he said finally. "Talks."

  Chee smiled. "His name is Albert Gorman. That the one?"

  The man was frowning angrily. "Don't smile," he said. "Nobody talks to me but that." His face twisted with a terrible effort, but he couldn't manage the rest of it. "Him," he said finally and looked down at his hands, defeated.

  "It's a good thing to be friendly," Chee said. "Too many people never have time to talk."

  "He's not home," the man said. Chee could see he wanted to say something else, and waited while his fierce will struggled with his stroke-blighted mind, making it work. "Gone," he said.

  "Yes," Chee said. "He has an uncle who lives on the Navajo Reservation. In New Mexico. He went back there to visit him." Chee felt a twinge of guilt when he said it, as he always did when he was being deceptive. But why tell the old man his friend was dead?

  The old man's expression changed. He smiled. "Kin?"

  "No," Chee said. "But we're both Navajos, so we're kin in a way."

  "He's in bad trouble," the man said, clearly and plainly. Whatever short circuit of nerve tissue impeded his speech, it seemed to come and go.

  Chee hesitated, thinking like a policeman. But what was required here was not the formula in the police manual.

  "Yes, he is. I don't understand it, but when he left here someone went after him. Very bad trouble."

  The old man nodded, wisely. He tried to speak, failed.

  "Did he tell you about it?"

  The man shook his head in the negative. Thought. Canceled the denial with a shrug. "Some," he said.

  A little round woman in a tight, white uniform was approaching across the lawn. "Mr. Berger," she said, "time for us to start or we'll miss our lunch."

  "Shit," Mr. Berger said. He grimaced, picked up the walking frame carefully, and pivoted.

  "Don't talk dirty," the round woman said. "If we were in a wheelchair like we should be, I could push you." She glanced at Chee, found him uninteresting. "That would save us time."

  "Shit," Mr. Berger said again. He moved the walking frame up the lawn, stumbling along inside it. The round woman walked behind, silent and relentless.

  Only the angle of the morning sun had changed on the porch of Gorman's apartment. Chee sat in the metal chair beside the door and thought of Mr. Berger. Then he thought about Grayson: who he might be, and what Grayson was doing in Shiprock, and how he might be connected with this odd business. He tried to guess what might have caused Albert Gorman's confusion about who lived in the aluminum trailer-if in fact it was confusion. And try as he did to avoid it, he thought about Mary Landon. He wanted to talk to her. Immediately. To get up and go to a telephone, and have her called out of her classroom at Crownpoint, and hear her voice: "Jim? Is everything all right?" And he would say. he would say, "Mary, you win." No, he wouldn't say it that way. He'd say, "Mary, you're right. I'm going to send in the application for the fbi job. And when I hang up this telephone, I'm going to walk right to my truck and drive directly, without stopping, to Crownpoint, and that will take me about twelve hours if I don't get stopped by the highway patrol for speeding, and when I get there, you have your bags packed, and tell the principal to get a substitute teacher, and."

  A white Ford sedan pulled up behind his pickup truck. Two men in it. The one on the passenger side got out and hurried up the walk to the manager's office. He was a short man, middle-aged, with a stocky, disciplined body and a round pink face. He wore gray pants and a seersucker coat. The door of the office opened before he reached it. The conversation there was brief. The short man looked over at Chee, saw him, and came directly across the grass toward him. At the Ford, the driver's door opened and a much larger man emerged. He stood for a moment watching. Then he, too, came sauntering toward the Gorman apartment.

  The short man was talking before he reached the porch. "Lady says you're looking for Albert Gorman. That right?"

  "More or less," Chee said.

  "That your truck?"

  "Yes."

  "You from Arizona?"

  "No," Chee said. He had bought the license plates when he was stationed at Tuba City, before his transfer to Shiprock.

  "Where you from?"

  "New Mexico."
/>   The bigger man arrived. Much bigger. Six-foot-four or so, Chee guessed, and broad. Much younger too. Maybe thirty-five. He looked tough. While he waited on the porch, Chee had decided he might expect fbi agents to arrive. These men were not fbi agents.

  "You're a long way from home," Shortman said.

  "Nine hundred miles," Chee agreed. "You fellows know where I can find this Albert Gorman? Or any of his family? Or his friends?"

  "What's your connection with Gorman?" Shortman asked.

  "Don't know him," Chee said. "What's your interest?"

  Under Shortman's coat, Chee could see just the edge of a brown leather strap, which might be part of a harness holding a shoulder holster. Chee couldn't think of anything else it might be. Shortman wasn't interested in answering Chee's question. He reached under his jacket and extracted a leather folder from the inside pocket. "Los Angeles Police Department," he said, letting the folder flop open to display a badge and photograph. "Let's see some identification."

  Chee fished out his wallet, opened it to show his own badge, and handed it to Shortman.

  "Navajo Tribal Police," Shortman read. He eyed Chee curiously. "Long way from home," he said again.

  "Nine hundred miles," Chee repeated. "And now can you tell me anything about this Gorman? We have a girl-" He stopped. The big man was engulfed in laughter. Chee and Shortman waited.

  "Mister," the big man said, "Shaw here can tell you everything about Albert Gorman. Shaw is the world champion expert on everything about Gorman. Gorman is part of Shaw's hobby."

  Chee held out his hand to the short man. "My name is Chee," he said.

  "Willie Shaw," the short man said, shaking hands. "This is Detective Wells. You have time for a talk? Cup of coffee?"

  Wells shook Chee's hand with the soft, gentle grip he'd learned to expect from huge people. "Good thing Shaw is retiring," he said. "Police work is starting to interfere with the hobby."

  "Mr. Chee here will give me a ride, I'll bet," Shaw said. "We'll go to that Vip's down on Sunset." He said it to Wells, but Wells was already walking back to the Ford. "Now," Shaw said, "I want you to start off by telling me what got the Navajo police interested in Albert Gorman."

  Chee kept the explanation simple-just the oddity of Gorman's unfinished burial preparations, the question of where Hosteen Begay had gone, the problem of finding Margaret Sosi and learning from her what Begay had said in his letter. He had finished it by the time they slid into a booth in the coffee shop. Shaw stirred sweetener into his coffee. It was time for questions.

  "The way I got it, Lerner just drove up to Gorman in the parking lot and shot him. Gorman shot back and drove off. Lerner dead in the lot. The Feds find Gorman dead of his gunshot wound later, at his uncle's house. That's it?"

  "Not quite," Chee said. He filled in the details.

  "And Albert had stopped in the lot to talk to an old man there?"

  "Yes," Chee said. "To ask directions." Apparently Shaw had seen the fbi report. Why would he have seen it?

  Wells had driven into the Vip's lot and come in and spotted them.

  "Scoot over," he said, and sat beside Shaw.

  "What did they talk about?" Shaw asked. "Gorman and the old man?"

  It was exactly the right question, Chee thought. Shaw impressed him.

  "What's your interest in Gorman?" Chee asked, keeping his voice very friendly. "I mean, as a Los Angeles police department detective?"

  "In fact, as an arson squad detective," Wells said. "It's a good question. One of these days, the captain is going to ask it. He's going to say, Sergeant Shaw, how come everybody is burning down Los Angeles and you're chasing around after car thieves?"

  Shaw ignored him. "I'd like to find out exactly why Gorman went to New Mexico," he said. "That would be interesting."

  "You going to tell me what I need to know about this end? Help me find the Sosi girl?"

  "Of course," Shaw said. "But I need to know what's behind the Navajos sending a man a thousand miles outside his jurisdiction. It's got to be better than a runaway teenager."

  "They didn't send me," Chee said. "I'm taking vacation time. Sort of on my own. Makes it simpler."

  Wells snorted. "Lordy," he said. "Spare me from this. Two of them in the same booth. The vigilantes ride again."

  "My friend here," said Shaw, tilting his round, red face toward Wells, "thinks police should just stick to their assignments."

  "Like arson," said Wells. "Right now we're supposed to be over on Culver looking into a warehouse fire, which is every bit as much fun as a New Mexico homicide and which the taxpayers are paying us for."

  "You're on your own then?" Shaw said. "Nothing official. A personal interest?"

  "Not exactly," Chee said. "The department wants to find the girl, and Old Man Begay. They're more or less missing. And me doing it on time off makes it less complicated." Chee could see Shaw understood the implications of that.

  "Yeah," Shaw said. "It's an fbi case." Some of the caution had left his face, and there was a touch of friendliness there now. And something else. Excitement?

  "You were going to tell me what Gorman talked about in the parking lot," Shaw said.

  Chee told him.

  "Albert was looking for Leroy?" Shaw frowned. "Had a picture of a house trailer?" He extracted a leather-covered notebook from a pocket of his coat, put on his bifocals, and read.

  "Joseph Joe," he muttered. "I wonder why he didn't tell the Feds about that."

  "He did," Chee said.

  Shaw stared at him.

  "He told the fbi everything I've told you."

  Shaw digested that. "Ah," he said. "So."

  "If that interests you," Chee said, "you might like to know that when the fbi emptied out Albert Gorman's pockets, the photograph Gorman had shown Joe wasn't there."

  "Stranger and stranger," Shaw said. "What happened to it?"

  "Two obvious possibilities. Gorman threw it away after he got shot. Or Old Man Begay took it."

  Shaw was reading his notebook. "I suspect you thought of a third possibility," he said, without looking up.

  "That the fbi agent palmed it?"

  Shaw glanced up from his notebook, a look that mixed appraisal and approval.

  "I'm almost certain that didn't happen. I found the body. I was watching. He didn't have a chance."

  "Could you find that trailer? Albert thought it was in Shiprock. Isn't that a small place?"

  "We found it. The man living in it said his name was Grayson. Said he didn't know any Leroy Gorman."

  "Do you know who Leroy Gorman is?" Shaw asked.

  "That's one of the things you were going to tell me."

  "Let me see that identification again."

  Chee dug out his ID folder and handed it to Shaw. Shaw studied it, memorizing the information, Chee guessed. "I'll make a telephone call," he said. "Back in a minute."

  Chee sipped his coffee. Through the window came the sound of traffic, the clamor of an ambulance hurrying somewhere. Wells slid his cup back and forth across his saucer, pushing it with a finger.

  "He's a good man, Shaw," he said. "Great record. But he's going to screw himself up with this. Mess around until he gets into trouble."

  "Why? Why's he so interested?"

  "His friend got killed," Shaw said. "Died, actually." He drained the cup and signaled a waitress for a refill. "However it was, Shaw thinks they killed him, and they're getting away with it. It drives him crazy."

  "He's not happy with the investigation?"

  "There isn't any," Wells said. He waited for the waitress to finish pouring. "The man had a coronary. Natural causes. No sign of foul play."

  "Oh."

  Wells's face was moody. "I've been his partner for four years, and I can tell you he's a dandy. Three commendations. Smart as they get. But he can't seem to turn loose of this Upchurch business."

  "Upchurch. Was he the fbi agent?"

  Wells stared at him.

  "I heard the fbi lost a man on this case," C
hee explained. "And they seem to be acting funny."

  "They're going to be acting even funnier when they find out Shaw-" He stopped. Shaw slid back into the booth.

  "Albert Gorman was a car thief," Shaw began without preamble. "He and Leroy. They're brothers, and they both stole cars for a living. Worked for an outfit called McNair Factoring. Old outfit down on the San Pedro docks. Imports coffee beans, cocoa, raw rubber, stuff like that-mostly from South America, I think, but some from Asia and Africa too. Exports whatever is going out-including stolen cars. It's sort of a specialty. Mostly expensive stuff. Ferraris, Mercedes, Caddies. So forth. Mostly to Argentina and Colombia, but now and then to Manila and wherever they had orders. That's the way they worked. Gorman and the others were on commission. They'd get orders for specific models. Say a Mercedes Four-fifty SL. And a delivery date when the right ship was at the wharf. They'd spot the car, wait until the date, then nail it and drive it right onto the dock. Have it on the ship before the owner missed it. Pretty slick."