“He never delivered the remains,” said Halbert, smiling. He turned to Lowery. “Did he, Emmett?”
“Jesus Christ, Martin!” said Lowery. “Don’t talk to him, for godsakes. Shoot him!”
“He kept the body,” Halbert told me. “And with it, a detailed description of what he and my father had done. A sort of insurance policy, he told my father. And, courtesy of my father’s generosity, it provided him an annuity for the rest of his life. An annuity that Emmett inherited. Courtesy of my own generosity.” He smiled at Lowery. “Isn’t that right, Emmett?”
Lowery was affronted. “Dammit, Marty, I never asked for much. You know that. A tiny fraction of what you’ve made off those leases. Admit it.”
Halbert smiled once more. “Oh, I admit it, Emmett. You’ve been most reasonable. You’ve taken only insignificant little bites, like a mosquito. Annoying, certainly, but nothing I couldn’t live with.”
He turned back to me, smiling still. A man amused by the twists and turns of life. “It was Emmett who told me what my father had done. He sent me a copy of Jordan’s confession and suggested that he and I work out an arrangement. Emmett had taken over the blackmail from Jordan when Jordan died. And he thought it only fair that I take over the responsibility for payment from mine.” He turned back to Lowery. “About a month after my father’s death, wasn’t it, Emmett?”
Lowery scowled. “Why should you be the only one to benefit?”
“Why indeed?” said Halbert, smiling. He turned to me. “You learned all this from the Indian, I suppose. The son of Lessing’s guide.”
“Peter Yazzie,” I said. “After Lessing’s death, his father helped Jordan Lowery arrange things with Chee.”
Halbert nodded. Brow slightly furrowed as though he were puzzled, he said, “Why do you suppose he kept silent all this time?”
“He was protecting his father. Just like you were. Just like Emmett was.”
“But why tell Alice? If he’d only kept his mouth shut, none of this would’ve happened.”
“Guilt,” I said He had been, Daniel Begay told me, a man with a heavy burden of guilt. For his father, for what his father had helped do to the tribal lands. It had come as a relief to tell Alice Wright the truth. And then, when he learned of Alice’s death, the guilt had returned. He had wanted, Daniel Begay told me, to die. It was for that, to find death, that he had gone up into the mountains. He had found it.
Martin Halbert shook his head, as though guilt were something he didn’t entirely comprehend. Probably it was.
He looked at me. “Tell me. How did you know that Emmett and I were connected?”
“I knew your fathers were. I knew Emmett had probably been the one who slashed my tires. But I wasn’t sure, not really, until you stepped up out of that arroyo.”
He smiled again. “You were attacking poor Emmett to get him flustered. What if you’d been wrong?”
“I would’ve apologized to poor Emmett. But I didn’t think I was wrong. It made sense that if Alice Wright had learned the truth from Peter Yazzie, you’d be the one she’d call. You were the one, unfortunately, that she respected. I think that after Alice called you, you probably tried to get in touch with your friend Pablo. But he was in Juarez by then, and you had to go over to Alice’s on your own. Where’d you find Pablo anyway? On one of the oil rigs?”
He ignored the question. “Mr. Croft, I want you to understand something. My father, as I told you, could be a ruthless man. But I believe to this day that he was also a great man. Do you know what those leases have done for the Navajos? They’ve provided income. They’ve provided jobs, food, clothing, medicine, a chance for a better life. Additionally, and entirely of his own volition, my father channeled some of his own profits back to the tribe in the form of a scholarship fund. Hundreds of Indian children, children who might otherwise be raising sheep, have gone on to get a college degree. Today they’re doctors, lawyers, artists.”
I shrugged. “Nothing wrong, necessarily, with raising sheep.”
Halbert smiled. “I haven’t noticed you carrying a shepherd’s crook, Mr. Croft. And don’t you understand? That was all in the past. Think of what we can do now.” He leaned forward, his eyes shining with the brightness of a true believer. “When we begin to develop the Reservation’s geothermal resources, to harness that tremendous untapped energy, we can bring the benefits of civilization to thousands more of those people. Consider it, Mr. Croft. An unlimited source of clean, nonpolluting power.”
“You don’t know that it’s unlimited. You don’t know that it’s nonpolluting. You don’t know what’ll happen to the rest of the land when you bleed away the energy. And besides, once the Navajos hear about all this, you won’t be getting your geothermal leases.”
He smiled. “Mr. Croft, even in these times, difficult for all of us in the oil business, I’m a very wealthy person. You’re clearly an intelligent man. If I can’t appeal to your idealism, then surely I can appeal to your wallet? Surely we can come to an accommodation?”
“Did you try appealing to Alice Wright’s idealism before you killed her? Did you try appealing to her wallet?”
He lowered his glance for a moment. Not in shame; no, I think this was supposed to be his homage to the dead woman. “That was regrettable,” he said, looking up. “She simply wouldn’t listen. She called me that night and told me what Yazzie had told her. I went over there and I did everything I could, believe me, to reason with her.”
“Yeah. Spare me from reasonable men.”
“I sincerely regret her death. I’ve said that.” He frowned slightly, as though irritated that he’d have to repeat himself. “But no single individual, not even a woman like Alice, has the right to stand in the way of the things we can accomplish. One life, Mr. Croft, balanced against improvements in the lives of thousands.”
“Especially yours,” I said. “And what about Dennis Lessing’s life? Peter Yazzie’s? Leo Chee’s?”
He leaned forward intently. “Mr. Croft—”
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s all over. You’ve got money, and this is Texas, so the odds are you won’t burn. Maybe you won’t even do time. But no matter what happens, everyone in the state will know what your father did. And they’ll know what you did.”
He cocked his head slightly and looked at me. “The most you could possibly have, Mr. Croft, is the testimony of an elderly, and probably senile, Indian. I don’t think anyone will pay too much attention to that.”
“You’re forgetting the three men you sent after Peter Yazzie. Two of them are dead, but the third one’s still alive. He’ll testify.”
He smiled. “About what, exactly? How much does he know? Very little, I should think. And even if he were to know something, which I very much doubt, we both realize that he can be reached. One way or another, given enough time, anyone can be reached.” He smiled again. “So tell me, Mr. Croft, why shouldn’t I simply shoot you now and remove another obstacle?”
I said, “Phil. Not too close.”
The rifle bullet kicked up dirt about four feet away, and an instant later the sound of the shot rolled down the cliffside from the cave where Grober was hiding, and then echoed hollowly back and forth across the canyon.
“Friend of mine,” I told Halbert. “Grober. He likes gadgets. His rifle, for example. That’s a Belgian .308 FN/FAL. It’ll send a slug through a telephone pole. And this, for example.” I turned the collar of my windbreaker, showed him the wireless transmitter pinned to the lining. “Everything you’ve said is on tape. He’s got video up there too. Telescopic lens.” In the dark, at four in the morning, it had taken us over an hour to lug everything up the winding path, Grober grumbling all the while. “Should all be very impressive in court. You’re finished, Halbert.”
For a moment his eyes narrowed, as though he were considering his options. He didn’t really have many.
Thoughtfully, as though debating the merits of a Cabernet, he said, “I could put a bullet in you before your friend could possi
bly fire his rifle.”
“Maybe,” I said. “You ever been gut-shot by an assault rifle? And it wouldn’t erase the tape.”
He frowned suddenly. “Emmett,” he said. “Get in your car. Start the engine. I’ll drive.”
Lowery looked up nervously toward the cave, a round black hole in the gray rock, a hundred yards away. “Marty, that guy’s got a fucking rifle.”
“He’s not going to shoot, so long as we don’t harm Mr. Croft here.” He asked me, “Correct?”
“Probably,” I said. This was, in fact, exactly what I’d told Grober.
Halbert nodded. “Get in the car, Emmett.”
With another glance up the mountain, Lowery stood. He walked toward the car slowly, carefully, as though he were walking through a mine field.
“Give it up,” I told Halbert. “There’s nowhere you can go. There’s nothing you can do.”
“We shall see. I have resources of my own, Mr. Croft. In the car, Emmett.”
Lowery opened the passenger side of the car, got in, pulled the door shut. He leaned over, started the engine, then leaned back and stared glumly out at me and Halbert.
Halbert swung his legs off the bench and stood up. He smiled down at me. He waved the gun barrel lightly, taking in the table, the canyon, the cave up the hill; everything connected to the moment. He smiled. “This was all very clever. You’re an enterprising man, Mr. Croft. I’m sorry we didn’t meet at some earlier time.”
“I’m not.”
He lifted his chin. “What I did was right. For my father. For the company. And even, although I doubt you’ll ever understand it, for those Indians on the Reservation.”
“You’re right. I’ll never understand it.”
“No,” he said. “I suppose not.” For a moment he seemed genuinely saddened. And then he smiled again. “Adios, then.” He backed away from me, the gun still pointing at my chest. He circled around the Trans-Am and Lowery opened the driver’s door. Halbert got in. With a sudden rattle and ping of gravel, the car shot forward, fishtailing off the dirt onto the pavement.
I said into the transmitter, “I’m going after them, Phil. Don’t lose that tape.”
It was foolish of me. I knew the rented Chevy would never catch Lowery’s Pontiac.
But I couldn’t let them drive away without doing something. Even if what I did was futile.
He had regretted Alice Wright’s murder. Regretted. Somehow regret seemed a small price to pay for bludgeoning someone to death.
When I got the Chevy onto the road, the Trans-Am was a hundred yards ahead of me. Halbert drove well and quickly, whipping smoothly through the turns. By the time he reached the stop sign at the end of the canyon road, he’d stretched his lead to a hundred and fifty yards.
He stopped at the intersection, showing a nice regard for the rules of traffic, and then squealed off to the right, up Scenic Drive. I didn’t stop, and I barely slowed down, and the rented car skidded across the far lane before I got it pointed where I wanted it.
I couldn’t see him now; the road twisted too much as it climbed up over the brown cities of El Paso and Juarez.
Even on the Reservation, careening over the mountain, I hadn’t driven as recklessly as I drove now. I roared around switchbacks at fifty miles an hour, and metal screeched as the Chevy banged and ripped against the rock wall. I slapped the car into hairpins and careened back out into the wrong lane. Any oncoming traffic would’ve killed me.
And then I spotted the red Trans-Am, far up there to my right. It was on Rim Road, above me, and Halbert was heading for his house.
I saw what happened, and I still don’t know how it happened. The cops never actually figured it out either. Maybe Lowery panicked and grabbed for the wheel. Maybe the brakes or the steering gave way. Or maybe Halbert simply realized that it was all over, that there really was nowhere to go, and that no matter what happened now, his father’s secret was a secret no longer.
Racing up the high road, the Pontiac kept on going straight just as the road began a broad arc to the left. The car smashed through the retaining wall and still it climbed, sailing along the empty gray air for a moment as though, impossibly, it might succeed in soaring like a bird across the broad brown valley.
And then it began to drop. There was no fire when it hit the ground. There usually isn’t, except in the movies.
26
Canyon de Chelly makes McKelligan Canyon look like a scratch doodled in the dirt with a twig.
I was on the rim of the mesa. A few yards from where I stood, the ground fell straight down for nearly a thousand feet. Halfway across the spectacular chasm, and marking the juncture of de Chelly and Monument canyons, the tapering red sandstone monolith of Spider Rock rose eight hundred feet from the burnt-umber talus at the valley floor. Past Spider Rock and past the thin white far-off ribbon of Chinle Wash were the hogans and the winter-bare orchards of the Navajo, burned to ashes once and reduced now by distance to the size of toys.
This was the lower branch of the canyon system. It was in the upper branch, in Canyon del Muerte, that Dennis Lessing had discovered and appropriated the body of Ganado. And now, as I stood here, it was to Canyon del Muerte, somewhere in the rocks, that Ganado was being returned.
A few days had passed. After Halbert and Lowery had sailed off into oblivion, and before I called Sergeant Mendez, I had called Rita. She said that Daniel Begay had spoken to her, and asked her to tell me that nothing had happened on the Reservation.
“What?” I said.
“That’s what he said. That nothing had happened there. That he’d taken care of everything. He was very insistent about my telling you. And so I’ve been sitting here since yesterday, waiting for you to call. I thought you might like to explain what’s going on. I could be wrong, of course.”
“Not wrong. Just premature.”
“Are you all right, Joshua?”
“I’m fine. I’ll call later today.”
An official investigation of the deaths at Peter Yazzie’s cabin would’ve involved more than the Navajo police. The Reservation is federal land, and a murder report automatically brings in the FBI. Daniel Begay had evidently decided to handle the situation on his own.
It’s a big place, the Navajo Reservation, nearly the size of New England. You could lose a couple of bodies inside it as easily as losing splinters of bone in a gravel pit.
Sergeant Mendez had not been delighted to see me. He had not found my story either believable or particularly entertaining. He wanted to know where I’d gotten it, and he was displeased with my evasions, no matter how winningly I presented them.
Since both Lowery and Halbert were dead, I saw no point in producing Grober’s tapes. They implicated me, after all, in two deaths—even if, according to Daniel Begay, the deaths had never occurred.
For a day or two Mendez considered providing me with municipal accommodations. They probably wouldn’t have been any less stimulating than my motel room, where I spent my time recuperating. I called Rita and told her what had happened. She didn’t find my story any more entertaining than Mendez had. I called Lisa Wright once. She was better, but still distant, and she said she was going away for a while, to visit a friend in California. I wished her a good trip. More time passed.
And then the cops found the remains of Ganado.
They were in a metal steamer trunk buried in Lowery’s cellar. With them was the detailed statement that Martin Halbert had mentioned, signed by Emmett Lowery’s father, Jordan.
According to Sergeant Mendez, the house in which the trunk was found had originally belonged to Jordan Lowery. There was evidence, Mendez said, that the trunk had been there at least since the late fifties. But no one could say, with any certainty, whether it had been there since the murder of Dennis Lessing.
If it had, I don’t understand why. It seems to me that both the Lowerys would’ve wanted it someplace farther away, where neither of the Halberts could get to it. Maybe the Lowerys had simply claimed that it had been. Ma
ybe one or the other of them had moved it. Maybe the Halberts had never seriously bothered to look.
I don’t understand, either, the relationship between Emmett and his father. At some point Emmett had found out, or his father had told him, about the arrangement with Martin Halbert’s father. Rita thinks his father told him. In any event, Emmett had, without a qualm, embraced murder and blackmail as his birthright.
Finally, I suppose, I don’t really understand Emmett.
But the piece of evidence that connected the trunk to the late 1950s was something I found suggestive. Lying amid the disarray of bones and beside the brittle folded confession of his father, the police found a single Calla lily. Tied to it with black ribbon was an announcement of the memorial service for Jordan Lowery. The service had been held in September of 1959. Emmett had been eighteen then.
Mendez showed me the lily. It was in a Ziploc evidence bag. Just a thin, bent, shriveled stalk and some gray dessicated petal fragments turning to powder. The sergeant let me open up the bag.
It smelled exactly like dust. Only in a dream could anyone believe that it smelled like a flower.
I heard a distant car behind me. I turned and saw Daniel Begay’s Ford pickup winding over the barren, gently rolling hills. I hadn’t seen him since last night in Chinle, when I brought him the remains. Sergeant Mendez had given them to me in a cheap cardboard suitcase. I’d handed the suitcase in as baggage at the El Paso airport, flown to Flagstaff, then driven to the Reservation with the case on the back seat of the Subaru.
Last night, Daniel Begay had told me how Pablo and Ramon had reached Peter Yazzie’s cabin without being detected. They had come from the east, from the Wide Ruins road. Gary Chee’s brother, the man who was supposed to be watching that approach, had been asleep in his car.
Now, Daniel’s truck pulled in behind my station wagon and stopped. Daniel opened the door, got out, closed the door, and limped slowly over to me. He held out his hand and I took it. He said, very formally, “I thank you again.”
“You should thank Sergeant Mendez, down in El Paso. He could’ve kept the body as evidence.”
At Ease with the Dead Page 21
