Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 06 - The Ghostway

by The Ghostway(lit)

  Berger denied it, emphatically. He recast his palsied hands in the roles of Gorman and the blond man. The hand representing Gorman dipped its fingertip affirmatively. The hand representing the blond man shook its fingertip negatively.

  "I see," Chee said. "Gorman wanted to go. The blond man said not to." He glanced at Berger, who was agreeing. "So Gorman was going, the blond man tried to stop him, they fought, and Gorman went. Good a guess as any?"

  Berger shrugged, unhappy with that interpretation. He pointed to the dial of his watch.

  "Time?" Chee was puzzled.

  Berger tapped the dial, pointing to where the hour hand was. Then he moved his finger around the dial, counterclockwise.

  "Earlier?" Chee asked.

  Berger nodded.

  "You mean this happened earlier? This business about Gorman wanting to go and the blond man telling him not to?"

  Berger was nodding vigorously.

  "Before the fight? Before the evening Gorman hurt Blond Man's hand? A day before? Two days?"

  Berger was nodding through all this. Two days before was correct. "And Gorman told you about that?"

  "Right," Berger said.

  "Do you know why Gorman wanted to go?"

  "Worried," Berger said. He tried to say more, failed, shrugged it off.

  The red-faced young man Chee had noticed earlier was slouching across the lawn toward them, whistling between his teeth. The woman spun her wheelchair and hurried it down the fence away from him. "Mean old bitch," the young man said, and hurried after her.

  "Do you know what was written on the postcard? The one with the picture on it?"

  Berger didn't.

  "The woman said it was like a postcard," Chee said. "Was it?"

  Berger looked puzzled.

  "Did it have a stamp on it?"

  Berger thought, closed his eyes, frowning. Then he shrugged.

  "She was a very observant woman," Chee said. "I wonder if either one of you happened to see a Navajo girl show up at Gorman's apartment yesterday. Little. Skinny teenager, wearing a navy pea coat. You see her?"

  Berger hadn't. He looked after the woman, wheeling furiously across the grass with the red-faced man hurrying after her. "Smart," he said. "Sometimes."

  "I had an aunt like that," Chee said. "Actually my mother's aunt. When she could remember she was very, very smart. Yesterday our friend couldn't remember anything."

  "Excited," Berger said. He tried to explain. Failed. Stopped. Stared down at his feet. When he looked up again, he was excited. And he had a plan.

  "War," he said. He held up two fingers.

  Chee thought about that. "World War Two," he guessed.

  "Son," Berger said. He tried to go on and failed.

  "In the war," Chee said.

  Berger nodded. "Navy."

  "He was killed," Chee guessed.

  Berger shook that off. "Big shot," he said. "Rich." That exhausted Berger's supply of words. His mouth twisted. His face turned pink. He pounded at the walker.

  The red-faced young man had caught the woman's wheelchair and was pushing her toward the porch. She sat, eyes closed, face blank. So her son was rich and important, Chee thought. What was Berger trying to tell him with that. Her son had been in the navy forty years ago, now he was rich and important, and that was related to something causing her to be excited yesterday.

  "Hey!" Chee shouted, suddenly understanding. "Yesterday. Yesterday morning she saw a sailor, is that it?"

  Berger nodded, delighted at the breakthrough.

  "Maybe she saw a sailor," Chee told Berger. "Maybe she saw Margaret Sosi in her pea jacket. What's that woman's name?"

  Berger got it out the first try. "Ellis."

  "Mrs. Ellis," Chee shouted. "Did you see a sailor yesterday? At the apartments?"

  "I saw him," Mrs. Ellis said.

  "He looked like your son. In a blue pea coat?"

  "I don't have a son," Mrs. Ellis said.

  Chapter 15

  The man mcnair called henry brought Vaggan his water in a crystal glass. Vaggan had said, "No ice, please," but the man named Henry hadn't listened, or hadn't cared. Henry's expression had suggested that he found bringing Vaggan a glass of water distasteful. He was a plump, soft man, with a soft voice and shrewd eyes that he allowed to give him an expression of haughty contempt. Vaggan placed the glass on the coffee table, aware of the two ice cubes floating in it but not looking at it.

  "You're a day late," McNair said. "I called you yesterday morning, and I said there was a hurry for this." McNair opened a black onyx box on his desk, extracted a cigaret, and tapped it against his thumbnail. "I don't like people who work for me to be late."

  Vaggan was feeling fine. He'd gotten home from the Leonard business before dawn, showered, done his relaxing exercises, and slept for six hours. Then he'd exercised again, weighed, and had a breakfast of wheat germ, alfalfa sprouts, and cheese while he watched the noon TV news. The NBC channel had led with Leonard being rushed through the emergency room doors and propelled away with one bloody ear visible. He switched quickly to ABC-TV and caught the tag end of his own voice, recorded from his final telephone call, explaining about the welshed debt. The Man could hardly ask more. Perfect. He'd switched off the set then and called the McNair number. He'd told the man who answered-probably Henry-to tell McNair he'd be there at 2 p.m.

  It was an easy hour's drive. He killed the remaining time reading through his new copies of Survival and Soldier of Fortune. He clipped out an article on common medicinal herbs of the Pacific Coast and circled an advertisement of Freedom Arsenal offering an FN-LAR assault rifle for $1,795. He'd looked at an FN in a Pasadena sporting goods store-the same model built by Fabrique National in Belgium for NATO paratroops. He'd been impressed, but the price there had been $2,300, plus California sales tax. With the Leonard money, he could afford either price, but most of that money would have to go to the contractor to finish the concrete work on his storage bunker, and he also wanted to install a solar generator and add to his stock of ammunition. However, there'd be more money coming in from McNair. Vaggan felt fine.

  He left at 1 p.m., giving himself a bit more time than he needed to drive into the Flinthills district, where the McNair family had bought itself a hill and built itself an estate and raised its offspring. And now he sat in the McNair office, or study, or library, or whatever such rooms were called in such houses, and here across the desk was McNair himself. McNair interested him. Very few men did.

  "I am never late," Vaggan said. "Maybe Henry didn't tell you." He glanced over his shoulder at Henry, who was standing stiffly beside the doorway. "Henry," he said. "Come here."

  Henry hesitated, looking past Vaggan at McNair. But he came.

  "Here," Vaggan said. He extracted the two ice cubes from the glass and held them out to Henry. "You can have these," he said. "I said no ice."

  Henry's face flushed. He took the cubes and stalked out of the room.

  Vaggan took out his handkerchief and dried his fingers.

  "Hard to get reliable help," he said to McNair.

  McNair had understood the subtlety of the point Vaggan was making, appreciating how the threat had been made without ever being spoken. He made a wry face and nodded.

  "Henry," he called.

  Henry reappeared at the door.

  "Bring Mr. Vaggan a glass of water, please."

  "Yes, sir," Henry said.

  "So what needs doing?" Vaggan said.

  "More Navajo business," McNair said. He had a heavy, rawboned face, pale and marked with the liver marks common with lightly pigmented people when they age. His eyes were an odd color, something near green, sunken under heavy, bristling gray brows. His expression was sour. "More trouble from the Gorman screw-up," he added. "A young woman named"-McNair looked down at a note pad on his desk-"named Margaret Sosi came to Los Angeles from Shiprock. She had a photograph of Leroy Gorman, and she came to Albert's place in West Hollywood looking for him. I want you to find her."


  "Just find her," Vaggan said.

  McNair grinned, more or less, showing white, even teeth. Henry had not had even teeth. It seemed to Vaggan that it was one of the few remaining signs left in America of social position versus family poverty. Rich people could afford orthodontists.

  "I don't get involved with what happens after you find her. Just make sure she doesn't make any trouble." He lit the cigaret with a silver lighter extracted from the end of the onyx box. "Absolutely sure. I do not want her talking to anybody."

  He exhaled a cloud of smoke.

  "And I want that picture. I want it brought to me, personally. I want an end to it."

  Vaggan said nothing. A map of Scotland printed on something that looked like parchment dominated the wall behind McNair. Its borders were decorated by patches of plaid which Vaggan presumed were the tartans of the Scottish clans. A bagpipe and a heavy belt holding a scabbarded sword hung beside it. A claymore, Vaggan thought. Wasn't that the Scottish name for it? Down the wall were photographs. People in kilts. People in fox-hunting coats. A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, an autograph scrawled across the bottom.

  "Here's her description," McNair said. He held out a sheet of typing paper.

  "I hope you have a little more than that," Vaggan said. "If you want her found this year."

  "I have an address."

  "Addresses help," Vaggan said.

  "If she's still there," McNair said. "It was yesterday morning when I called you."

  "Maybe we'll be lucky," Vaggan said. "Anyway, it's a place to pick up the trail."

  McNair was holding the typing paper, folded, between his fingers, tapping the edge of the fold against the desk, looking at Vaggan.

  "How'll you do it?"

  "What? Find her?"

  "Kill her."

  Henry had replaced the water with another crystal glass and disappeared. No ice cubes. Vaggan sipped, looking over the rim of the glass at McNair. He was thinking of tape recordings, but he could think of nothing McNair could gain by taping this conversation. Still, it was an odd question. Vaggan answered with a shrug and put down the glass. McNair interested him more and more. But the job was suddenly less appealing. Such things should be strictly business. No pleasure mixed in.

  "I would have thought you'd have a favorite method," McNair said. His expression was bland, but the greenish eyes in their deep sockets were avid.

  It should be purely business, Vaggan thought. Otherwise things get too complicated. Hard to calculate, which made them needlessly risky.

  Did he need this job? Did he still want to work for McNair?

  "If I did your work, I'd have a favorite method," McNair repeated.

  Vaggan shrugged again, took another sip of the tepid tap water. Outside, the McNair lawn sloped away toward the Pacific. The glass was like green velvet.

  "I can't see how you're going to get off," Vaggan said. "From what the story in the L.A. Times had to say, you're indicted on eleven counts, witnesses tying you into the business personally, everything neat and tidy the way it sounded. Why don't you jump bail, cash in a little of this"-he gestured around him at the room-"and make a run for it?" He sipped again. "Actually, there wouldn't have to be any actual running. Just transfer some cash to wherever and get some papers and fly away. Easy. No worry. No risk."

  Vaggan had been studying McNair's face. It registered irritation, then distaste. About what Vaggan had expected.

  "I'm not guilty," McNair said.

  "Not until the jury convicts you," Vaggan said. "Then you are, and the judge raises the bail way up there, and it's all going to be a lot tougher and more expensive."

  "I have never been convicted of anything." McNair said. "No McNair has ever been in prison. Never will be." He got up and stood by the window, his hand resting on a form Vaggan presumed was a sculpture cast in steel. "Besides, if you walk away from it, you can't take this along."

  He seemed to mean the sculpture and what he saw from the window. Or perhaps it meant the bagpipe and being a McNair. Vaggan could appreciate this. One of the rulers. The hard men. An interesting man, Vaggan thought. He'd be dealing with the McNairs after the missiles, the tough ones. He understood the old man better again. The avidity he'd seen was as much like greed as it was cruelty. Cruelty bothered him because it seemed beside the point, a waste of emotions that seemed strange to him. But Vaggan could understand greed perfectly.

  "I have a feeling you're balking," McNair said, still looking out the window. "Why else all this impertinence? All these questions? Will you take care of it for me?"

  "All right," Vaggan said. He got up and took the paper from the old man's fingers, unfolded it, and read. The address was on a street he'd never heard of. He'd get it located on his map, and wait for dark, and get it over with.

  Chapter 16

  Jim chee, who had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people. For a while he managed to keep track of just where he was in relation to where he had been, noticing direction shifts and remembering when he switched from one freeway to another. But soon it overwhelmed him. He concentrated solely on the freeway map, which Shaw had marked for him, and on not missing his turns. The land had risen a little now out of the flatness of the city basin, and there were traces of desert visible in vacant lots, which became vacant blocks, which became entire vacant hillsides, eroded and dotted with cactus and the dry, prickly brush common to land where it rarely rains. The poor side of the city. Chee examined it curiously. He no longer had a sense of where he was in relation to his motel. But there, low on the southwestern horizon, hung the sun. And eastward over those dry ridges lay the desert. And behind him, somewhere beyond the thickening smog of the city, was the cold, blue Pacific. It was enough to know.

  And now just ahead of him was the exit sign Shaw had told him to watch for. He angled the truck cautiously across the freeway lanes and down the exit ramp and rolled to a stop on the parking ramp of a Savemor service station. Here tumbleweeds grew through the broken asphalt. A paunchy, middle-aged man in bib overalls leaned against the cashier's booth, eyeing him placidly. Chee spread his Los Angeles street map across the steering wheel, making sure he was in the right place. The sign said Jaripa Street, which seemed correct. Now the job was to locate Jacaranda, which intersected somewhere and led to the address that Shaw had pried, finally, from Gorman's landlady. Watching Shaw work had been impressive.

  Chee recalled the interview. Two interviews, to be correct, although the first one had been brief. He had rung her doorbell, and rung, and rung until finally she had appeared, staring at him wordlessly past the barely opened door. She had re-inspected his Navajo Tribal Police credentials, still with no sign they impressed her. No, she'd said, she hadn't seen anyone like Margaret Billy Sosi. And then Chee had told her that a witness had seen the girl here.

  "They lied," the woman had said, and closed the door firmly in Chee's face.

  It had taken almost an hour for the dispatcher at lapd to locate Shaw, and maybe twenty minutes later Shaw had arrived-driving up alone in an unmarked white sedan. The second interview had gone much better.

  They'd done this one inside, in the woman's cluttered office-sitting room, and Chee had learned something from the way Shaw had handled it.

  "This man hasn't got any business here," Shaw had said, pointing a thumb at Chee. "He's an Indian policeman. Couldn't arrest anybody in LA. I don't care what you told him. You could tell him to go to hell. But now I'm here."

  Shaw fished out his identification and held it in front of the woman's face. "You and I've done business before, Mrs. Day," he said. "You called me when this guy showed up as
king about Gorman, just like I told you to. I appreciate that. Now I need to find this girl, Margaret Sosi. She was here yesterday. What'd she say to you?"

  Chee was trying to read Mrs. Day's expression. It was closed. Hostile. Was it fearful? Call it tense, he thought.

  "Trashy people are always showing up here, ringing my doorbell." She glanced at Chee. "You can't expect me to remember them."

  "I can," Shaw said. "I do expect it." He stared at her, face hard. "We're going to find the girl, and I'm going to ask her if she talked to you."

  Mrs. Day said nothing.

  "If she did, then I'm going to get the fire marshal's boys interested in this place of yours. Wiring. Exits. Trash removal. You familiar with the fire code for rental property?"