At Ease with the Dead

by Walter Satterthwait

  He smiled his small smile, and he shrugged. “Boyd just likes me, I guess.”

  Hollister, Arizona, and Peter Yazzie were at least a hundred and thirty miles away. If that was where they were going, Pablo and Ramon had a big head start on us.

  I was worried now, and the worry made me feel that the Subaru was only loafing along, despite the ninety I could read on the speedometer. The barren, unrelenting sameness of the landscape only increased the sense of sluggish, and probably futile, progress. It was as though we were driving in slow endless circles around the same empty arroyos, the same ragged hills.

  I tried bringing the car up to ninety-five, but the tires needed aligning and the station wagon began to shiver as though it had malaria. If I kept that up, we’d fall apart before we hit the interstate. I eased back to ninety.

  Daniel Begay turned and asked me, “You think it was the two Mexicans who cut down the telephone poles?”

  “Could be,” I said. “They’re in Arizona somewhere. They may be trying to stop everyone from finding out about Peter Yazzie. They didn’t realize that the El Paso cops have already gotten through to the trading post.”

  “They must’ve brought those chainsaws with ’em. From Texas.”

  I nodded. “If they bought them around here, or rented them, they would’ve drawn attention to themselves.” I smiled at him. “You want a job as a private detective?”

  “Don’t they know we got cars up here? Cutting off the phone, that’s not gonna stop people from knowing things.”

  “No, but it’ll slow the process down. That may be all they want—to get to Peter Yazzie before anyone else does.”

  “How do they know about Peter Yazzie?”

  “Alice Wright knew something, something about Yazzie, and I think that was what got her killed. She must’ve talked to Yazzie on Thursday night, after she called the trading post. And maybe she made the mistake of telling the killer what she knew.”

  “But the other Mexican, the one in the Chevy, he said they weren’t in El Paso when she was killed.”

  “Maybe they weren’t. Those three are hired meat. They’re following orders. Whoever’s giving the orders is the one who killed Alice Wright.”

  “And now he wants them to kill Peter Yazzie.”

  I nodded. “Maybe,” I said. “I hope not, but maybe.”

  He sat there quietly for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe the state cops, maybe they’ll get to Peter Yazzie in time.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I knew that if Pablo and Ramon had cut the Ardmore phone lines early this morning, they could have been in Winslow before noon.

  Daniel Begay said, “This could be all wrong, too. Maybe it was only kids who cut down the poles.”

  I nodded. “Could’ve been.”

  But I don’t think either of us believed that.

  I didn’t want to stop at Thoreau, but the Subaru needed fuel. I whipped into the gas station, handed a twenty to Daniel Begay, asked him to get the tank filled, then trotted over to the pay phone with my notebook. I dialed the Ardmore Trading Post. Busy. Dialed Peter Yazzie. No answer. I flipped through the notebook, found Grober’s home number in El Paso, and dialed that.

  When he answered, his voice was jolly: “Hello hello.” I heard a woman giggling in the background.

  “Phil, this is Joshua, listen to me—”

  “Hey, Josh, how ya doin’, buddy? Connie’s over here, we’re having ourselves a Crisco party.”

  “Phil—”

  “’Cept we’re not usin’ Crisco. Nasty stuff. Fattening, too. Connie brought some coconut oil. We both smell like macaroons.” I heard the woman giggle again, and then Grober say, “Whoops.” The phone clunked against something.

  “Phil?”

  Laughter in the background, Grober’s and the woman’s.

  “Phil?”

  “Hey, Josh.” A bit breathless. “Phone got away from me there. Slippery little sucker. What’s up? Whoa! Connie!”

  “Phil, goddammit, listen to me. You have a pen there?”

  “Sure, you betcha. No need to get your bowels in an uproar. Connie, hand me the pen, honey. Right. Yeeoww!” Laughter from Grober, wild feminine giggles off to the side. “Hand it to me, I said. Geeze, no respect at all. Gimme that. ’Kay, Josh, whatta you got? I think this thing’ll still write.” More giggles.

  “Take this down.” I gave him Pablo Arguelles’s number. “I’m in Arizona. There’s a guy up here using his answering machine in El Paso as a cut-out. The machine’s at that number. The name is Pablo Arguelles.”

  “Arguelles. ’Kay. You got an address?”

  “Somewhere near Fort Bliss.”

  “’Kay, I’ll find him. Hold on, honey. So whatta we talkin’ here, Josh? You want a tap?”

  Driving along the highway, I had in fact considered having him tap Pablo’s phone. It might be useful to know who left Pablo his messages, and what was said. A tap would mean a break-and-enter for Grober, but he was good at those. And when he learned what kind of answering machine Pablo was using, he’d know what codes it required. He could erase any messages off the machine, from his own phone, before Pablo had a chance to retrieve them.

  But getting into the house might take time—nearby neighbors, maybe a wife or a girlfriend living inside. And I didn’t want Pablo and Ramon, in front of me, to link up with Luis, behind me.

  “No,” I told him. “Just cut the line.”

  “Will do, Josh. Handle it first thing in the morning.”

  “Phil, there’s some serious hurry-up involved in this. You’ve got to do it now.”

  “Holy shit, Connie, that’s cold!” A delighted feminine squeal. “C’mon now, honey, cut it out.” Laughter from both of them. “Josh?”

  “Phil, this is important.”

  “’Kay, okay. I’ll do it now. But I got to charge you double-time. Nothing personal, Josh, but it’s the weekend.”

  “Fine, Phil, whatever. One other thing.”

  “What? Whoa!”

  “Two more names. Ramon Gonzalez, Luis Salamanca. See if you can find out anything about them.”

  “’Kay. Arguelles, Gonzalez, Salamanca. Sounds like the Dodger lineup. Listen, I got those police reports for you. Mailed ’em up yesterday. Express. You should of got ’em today.”

  “Thanks, Phil. I’ve got to go. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “so will Connie.” He laughed.

  I hung up and ran back to the Subaru. Daniel Begay was already in the car.

  Back on the interstate, I glanced at my watch. Six o’clock. An hour and a half to Hollister, if I pushed it. And if I managed to avoid the state police.

  We were heading into a spectacular Southwest sunset, one of those accidents of windblown dust and billowing cloud and brilliant angled light that sweep across the entire horizon and look like a film director’s gaudy notion of the Dawn of Creation.

  To me, just then, the streaks and smears of carmine and crimson made the clouds look as though they’d been stained with blood.

  20

  By a quarter to eight, when we reached Hollister, the sun had long since set. The stars were out and the desert air was chill.

  Daniel Begay knew the street where Peter Yazzie lived—he seemed to know every inch of land between here and Santa Fe—and he gave me directions as I drove. Probably I would’ve been able to find the house on my own. In a town the size of Hollister, there weren’t a lot of wrong turns.

  The house was a small square building, cinderblock plastered to masquerade as adobe. It was unlighted and it looked abandoned. There were no cars in the street in front, and none in the driveway. We left the Subaru, walked up the steps. Outside the car, the cold in the air reached all the way to the bone. Daniel was wearing his gray wool coat; I’d gotten a turtleneck out of the suitcase and put it on beneath my windbreaker.

  Daniel Begay knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked again. Same thing.

  He turned to me. “I know some people. Not far from here.
Maybe they know where he is.”

  “Is there a bar or a restaurant in town? A place where people hang out?”

  “The Coyote Tavern.” He frowned slightly. “Not a very good place.”

  “Why don’t you drop me off and I’ll ask around in there. You can take the car and look up your friends. It’ll save us some time.”

  He nodded. He may have smiled. I wasn’t sure.

  I realized, as soon as I walked into the dim interior of the Coyote Tavern, that I was the odd man out. For one thing, I wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat.

  Like everyone else, I was wearing jeans and boots. But my jeans didn’t look as though I’d been born wearing them, and my boots didn’t look as though I’d be wearing them when I died. Unless I happened to die tonight. There were two or three men at the bar, turning to check me out, who looked like they wouldn’t mind arranging that.

  Except for the bartender, everyone in the place was an Indian.

  Cigarette smoke lay in blue streamers beneath the low wooden ceiling. Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River” was pumping from the jukebox. There were five or six Formica-topped tables scattered around, all of them occupied. I saw only two women in the crowd, both young, both heavy-set, both with the gleaming round faces of Eskimo maidens. I walked across the room and felt glances probe along my back. Here and there, the soles of my boots met something sticky on the black linoleum floor.

  At the low-slung bar there were two empty stools. To the left of these, five men sat hunched, ignoring me now—they had decided, apparently, that I represented no immediate threat. To the right, three more men. The drink of choice seemed to be the boilermaker. A shot of whiskey, a bottle of Coors.

  The bartender was an aging biker. Big and bearded and brawny, his grizzled long brown hair tied behind his neck in a pony tail, he stood leaning against the back-bar below a lighted Coors sign with his thick arms crossed over his barrel chest. He wore a black leather vest over a black Harley Davidson T-shirt.

  The black T-shirt reminded me of Luis, back on the Crownpoint road. I wondered how he was doing. If he’d managed to hitch a ride, he could be in Crownpoint already. He could already be making arrangements with Pablo.

  Had Grober shut off Pablo’s telephone?

  The bartender’s glance flicked to the bandages on my hands, flicked to the bruises on my face, and his eyes showed nothing. He’d seen bruises and bandages before. He unfolded his arms and put his hands along the edge of the bar as he leaned toward me. He nodded. “What’ll it be?”

  I was tempted to order a Brandy Alexander. With a maraschino cherry. And maybe one of those little paper parasols.

  I told him Jack Daniels on the rocks and a glass of water.

  He pushed himself away from the counter and went to make it.

  I moved the stool aside and stepped up to the bar.

  The place needed a good cleaning. The bar top was tacky, the air held the sour smell of stale beer. I was hopeful, at any rate, that the sour smell was only the smell of stale beer.

  The bartender set the drink in front of me, set the glass of water to its side.

  I gave him a five-dollar bill. He turned to the cash register behind him, tapped a key, and the drawer popped out. He scooped out some cash, pushed the drawer shut.

  He hadn’t rung up the sale. Either he was the owner and scamming the IRS or he was stealing.

  He put my change on the bar. Two bills, two quarters. I took a sip of the bourbon, slid a bill toward him, and asked, “You know a guy named Peter Yazzie?”

  He shrugged. “I know a lot of guys.”

  It’s the movies. They give us all a swell selection of snappy patter.

  “This one’s a Navajo,” I said. “An older man. In his seventies.”

  He put his hands along the edge of the bar again. He looked down at the bar, looked back up at me. “What’re you? Cop?”

  I shook my head. “Private investigator. Look. It’s important. I need to get in touch with him.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, guy. Can’t help any.”

  I was fairly sure that if the bar were empty, if no one were there to hear him—and, naturally, if I’d slipped him some more paper—he would’ve told me.

  I said, “Anyone else been asking about Yazzie?”

  He shook his head.

  I took another sip of bourbon. The first one had gone off in my stomach like a claymore: I hadn’t eaten anything since early this afternoon, before we left Santa Fe.

  I asked him, “What time did you come on?”

  “Seven.”

  “Is the day guy around?”

  “Nope.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  He nodded, picked up the bill, and sauntered to the other end of the bar.

  I turned to my right. The old man sitting there was looking up at me from beneath a straw cowboy hat with a curved brim. Clouded brown eyes, toothless gums.

  “You know Peter Yazzie?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Don’t know nobody,” he said. “Don’t want to.”

  I was making fine progress.

  “Hey,” someone said behind me. I turned.

  It was a round red face he had, jowly, pockmarked, shiny with sweat, and almost level with my own. The cowboy hat was perched at the back of his broad head. Hisshort black hair was matted in strands to his forehead. His narrow eyes were unfocused and rimmed with red. A wispy mustache shaded his overhanging upper lip. Over his denim shirt he wore a vest of stained, battered sheepskin. His hands were empty. He was large.

  “Whaddy you want with Peter Yazzie?” he said. He was perhaps thirty years old, and from his breath he’d been drinking steadily for at least twenty-five of those.

  “I want to talk to him,” I said.

  “Yeah?” He was weaving very slightly, forward and back. He narrowed his eyes, cocked his head, and said, “I think you should get the fuck outta here.”

  I glanced at the bartender. He was still down at the other end of the bar. He appeared to like it down there.

  I looked at my new best friend.

  White men had plundered his land and raped and robbed and killed his ancestors. White multinational industry was still pillaging the land as we spoke and churning carcinogens into the air above it. A white government agency supervised his life from cradle to grave, treating him and his people at best like wayward children and at worst like animals.

  But it had been a rough week. I was in a bad mood. And the booze I’d taken on an empty stomach was already providing its lift, its sham sense of competence and power.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  He looked me up and down. His eyes narrowed again as his glance found mine. “I’m drunk,” he announced.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Right now, you could take me.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Me maybe, but what about them?” He waved his arm loosely toward the rest of the crowd.

  Most of them were busy talking, either ignoring us or pretending to; and few of them could hear us over the honky-tonk. But at one nearby table, four old men regarded us with mild detached interest, like Nobel Prize winners watching the opening round of “Jeopardy.”

  “What about them,” he said again.

  I turned back to him. “I’ll put my wagons in a circle.”

  It took a while—almost anything would have taken him a while—but then suddenly he was laughing. “Wagons,” he said, and laughed some more. “Good one. Wagons.” He shook his head. “Good one.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Wagons. You’re okay, you know?”

  He turned to the left, nodding, and addressed the rest of the bar: “Hey, he’s okay.”

  No one was thrilled. No one offered to adopt me into the tribe.

  His arm still over my shoulder, he said, “Hey, Wagons, lemme buy you a drink.” That breath could’ve melted chrome.

  “No thanks,” I said. I showed him the Jack Daniels. “I’ve got one.”

  “Well, lemme buy me a drin
k.” He turned to the bartender. “Hey! Jerry! Shot of Seagram’s!” He turned back to me. “You’re the second guy today been askin’ about Peter Yazzie.”

  His name was John. He didn’t tell me his last name. Possibly he’d forgotten what it was. He did tell me that he’d been in the bar all day, which came as no surprise, and that the man asking about Peter Yazzie had arrived at around two o’clock. “Big Mexican guy, a mean-lookin’ dude with a mustache.”

  Pablo. He had come here, and he had beaten us by a full five hours.

  Where the hell was Peter Yazzie? And what had he said to Alice Wright?

  The day bartender, John said, told Pablo that he didn’t know where Peter was, but that Peter’s cousin, William, might be able to help. John wasn’t sure, but he thought Pablo slipped the bartender some cash and got William’s address.

  Apparently, the day man had less scruples than Jerry, the biker. Or maybe just less witnesses.

  “Where does William live?” I asked John.

  He waved a hand vaguely. “North.”

  I didn’t push it.

  John said, “But if old Peter don’ wanna get found, he ain’ gonna get found.” He nodded with a drunk’s slow, deliberate certitude. “No way, Wagons. No way. If he’s up in them mountains up there, ain’ no way nobody gonna find him. Not any damn Mexican, that’s for sure.”

  “Why would he go up into the mountains?”

  He frowned into his empty shot glass. “Didn’ say he did. Didn’ say he didn’.” He looked at me, his head a bit unsteady on his neck, and suddenly he scowled. “You ask an awful lot of questions.”

  Maybe we wouldn’t be blood brothers after all.

  Just then, off to my left, a quiet voice said, “John.”

  We both turned, John a little more slowly than I.

  Daniel Begay stood there, hands on the knob of his cane.

  John’s face lit up. “Hey! Hosteen Begay!”

  Braced against his cane, expressionless, Daniel Begay leaned toward him, looking up into the round face, and said something in Navajo. His voice was low and very soft. I was probably the only other person in the bar who could hear it.

  John’s face fell. His shoulders sank. “Well,” he began, but didn’t finish.