The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “Oh, come on in. Dashee won’t mind.”

  “This book’s more interesting,” she said, “and he would mind.”

  And of course she was right. When they parked, Leaphorn had seen Deputy Sheriff Albert “Cowboy” Dashee sitting in a booth beside the window looking out at them, his expression glum. Now, as he sat across from Dashee, watching him order coffee, Leaphorn was remembering that this Hopi had struck him as a man full of good humor. A happy man. There was no sign of that this morning.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” Dashee said. “I need to talk to you about Jim Chee.”

  “About Chee?” This wasn’t what Leaphorn had expected. In fact, he’d had no idea what to expect. Something about the Hopi killing the Navajo policeman, perhaps. “You two are old friends, aren’t you?”

  “For a long, long time,” Dashee said. “That makes this harder to deal with.”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “Jim always considered you a friend, too,” Dashee said. He grinned ruefully. “Even when he was sore at you.”

  Leaphorn nodded again. “Which was fairly often.”

  “The thing is, Jim got the wrong man in this Benjamin Kinsman homicide. Robert Jano didn’t do it.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No. Robert wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know,” Dashee said. “But I grew up with Robert Jano. I know you hear this all the time, but—” He threw up his hands.

  “I know people myself who I just can’t believe would ever kill anyone—no matter what. But sometimes something snaps, and they do it. Temporary insanity.”

  “You’d have to know him. If you did, you’d never believe it. He was always gentle, even when we were kids trying to be tough. Robert never seemed to really lose his temper. He liked everybody. Even the bastards.”

  Leaphorn could see Dashee was hating this. He’d pushed his uniform cap back on his head. His face was flushed. His forehead was beaded with perspiration.

  “I’m retired, you know,” Leaphorn said. “So all I get is the secondhand gossip. But what I hear is that Chee caught the man red-handed. Jano was supposed to be leaning over Kinsman, blood all over him. Some of the blood was Jano’s. Some of the blood was Kinsman’s. Was that about it?”

  Dashee sighed, rubbed his hand across his face. “That’s the way it must have looked to Jim.”

  “You talked to Jim?”

  Dashee shook his head. “That’s the advice I wanted. How do I go about that? You know how he is. Kinsman was one of his people. Somebody kills him. He must feel pretty strong about that. And I’m a cop, too. It’s not my case. And being a Hopi. The kind of anger that’s grown up between us and you Navajos.” He threw up his hands again. “It’s such a damned complicated situation. I want him to know it’s not just sentimental bullshit. How can I approach him?”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said, thinking that everything Dashee had said did indeed sound like sentimental bullshit. “I understand your problem.”

  The coffee arrived, reminding Leaphorn of Louisa waiting outside. But she had the thermos they’d brought and she would understand. Just as Emma always understood. He sipped the coffee without noticing anything, except that it was hot.

  “Did they let you talk to Jano?”

  Dashee nodded.

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “I know his lawyer,” Dashee said. “Janet Pete.”

  Leaphorn grunted, shook his head. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “I saw her at the hospital the day Kinsman died. The prosecution bunch was gathering and she showed up, too. I’d heard she’s been appointed as a federal defender.”

  “That’s it,” Dashee said. “She’ll do a good job for him, but it sure as hell won’t make dealing with Jim any easier.”

  “They were about to get married once, I think,” Leaphorn said. “And then she went back to Washington. Is that on again?”

  “I hope not,” Dashee said. “She’s a city gal. Jim’s always going to be a sheep-camp Navajo. But whatever, it’s going to make him touchy as hell, being on opposite sides of this. He’ll be hard to deal with.”

  “But Chee was always reasonable,” Leaphorn said. “If it was me, I’d just go and lay it out for him. Just make the best case you can.”

  “You think it will do any good?”

  “I doubt it,” Leaphorn said. “Not unless you give him some sort of evidence. How could it? If what I hear at Window Rock is right, Jano had a motive. Revenge as well as avoiding arrest. Kinsman had already nailed him before for poaching an eagle. He got off light then, but this would be a second offense. More important, I understand there was no other possible suspect. Besides, even if you persuade Chee he’s wrong, what can he do about it now?”

  Dashee hadn’t touched his coffee. He leaned across the table. “Find the person who actually killed Kinsman,” Dashee said. “I want to ask him to do that. Or help me do it.”

  “But as I understand the situation, only Jano and Kinsman were there, until Chee came along answering Kinsman’s call for some backup.”

  “There was a woman up there,” Dashee said. “A woman named Catherine Pollard. Maybe other people.”

  Leaphorn, caught in the process of raising his cup for another sip, said, “Ah,” and put down the cup. He stared at Dashee for a moment. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been asking around,” Dashee said, and produced a bitter laugh. “Something Jim should be doing.” He shook his head. “He’s a good man and a good cop. I’m asking you how I can get him moving. If he doesn’t, I think Jano could get the death penalty. And one day Jim’s going to know they gassed the wrong man. And then you might as well kill him, too. Chee would never get over that.”

  “I know something about Catherine Pollard,” Leaphorn said.

  “I know,” Dashee said. “I heard.”

  “If she was there—and I understand that’s where she was supposed to be going that day— how could she fit into this? Except, of course, as a potential witness.”

  “I’d like to give Jim another theory of the crime,” Dashee said. “Ask him to look at it for a while as a substitute for ‘Jano kills Kinsman to avoid arrest.’ It goes like this: Pollard goes up to Yells Back Butte to do her thing. Kinsman is up there looking for Jano, or maybe he’s looking for Pollard. One way, he runs across her. The other way, he finds her. Just a couple of nights earlier, Kinsman was in a bistro off the interstate east of Flag, and he saw Pollard and tried to take her away from the guy she was with. A fight started. An Arizona highway patrolman broke it up.”

  Leaphorn turned the cup in his hand, considering this. No reason to ask Dashee how he knew this. Cop gossip travels fast.

  Dashee was watching him, looking anxious. “What do you think?” he said. “Kinsman has a reputation as a woman-chaser. He’s attracted and now he’s angry, too. Or maybe he thinks she’ll file a complaint and get him suspended.” He shrugged. “They struggle. She whacks him on the head with a rock. Then she hears Jano coming and flees the scene. Does that sound plausible?”

  “A lot would depend on whether you have a witness who would testify they saw her there. Do you? I mean, beyond that being where she told her boss she’d be working that day?”

  “I got it from Old Lady Notah. She keeps a bunch of goats up there. She remembers seeing a Jeep driving up that dirt road past the butte about daylight that morning. I understand Pollard was driving a Jeep.” Dashee looked slightly abashed. “Just circumstantial evidence. She couldn’t identify the driver. Not even the gender.”

  “Still, it was probably Pollard,” Leaphorn said.

  “And I understand the Jeep is still missing. And so is Pollard.”

  “Right again.”

  “And you’ve been offering a thousand-dollar reward for anyone who can find it.”

  “True,” Leaphorn said. “But if Pollard did it, and Pollard was fleeing the scene, why didn’t Chee see her? Remember, he got there just a few minu
tes after it happened. Kinsman’s blood was still fresh. There’s just that one narrow dirt road into there, and Chee was driving up it. Why didn’t he—”

  Dashee held up his hand. “I don’t know, and neither do you. But don’t you think it could have happened?”

  Leaphorn nodded. “Possibly.”

  “I don’t want to get out of line with this, or sound offensive, but let me add something else to my theory of the crime. Let’s say that Pollard got out of there, got to a telephone, called somebody and told them her troubles and asked for help. Let’s say whoever it was told her where to hide and they’d cover her trail for her.”

  Leaphorn asked: “Like who and how?” But he knew the answer.

  “Who? I’d say somebody in her family. Probably her daddy, I’d say. How? By giving the impression that she’s been abducted. Been murdered.”

  “And they do that by hiring a retired policeman to go looking for her,” Leaphorn said.

  “Somebody respected by all the cops,” Dashee said.

  The rock upon which Chee had so carelessly put his weight tumbled down the slope, bounced into space, struck an obtruding ledge, touched off a clattering avalanche of stone and dirt and disappeared amid the weeds far below. Chee shifted his body carefully to his right, exhaled a huge breath and stood for a moment, leaning against the cliff and letting his heartbeat slow a little. He was just below the tabletop of Yells Back Butte, high on the saddle that connected it with Black Mesa. It wasn’t a difficult climb for a young man in Chee’s excellent physical shape, and not particularly dangerous if one kept focused on what he was doing. Chee hadn’t. He’d been thinking of Janet Pete, facing the fact that he was wasting his day off just because she’d implied he hadn’t done a proper job of checking the Kinsman crime scene.

  Now, with both feet firmly placed and his shoulder leaning into the cliff wall, he looked down at where the boulder had made its plunge and thought about that chronic problem of the Navajo Tribal Police—lack of backup. Had he not caught himself he’d be down there in the weeds with broken bones and multiple abrasions and about sixty miles from help. He was thinking of that as he scrambled up the last fifty feet of talus and crawled over the rim. Kinsman would be alive if he hadn’t been alone. The story was the same for the two officers killed in the Kayenta district. A huge territory, never enough officers for backup, never enough budget for efficient communications, never what you needed to get the job done. Maybe Janet had been right. He’d take the FBI examination, or accept the offer he’d had from the BIA law-and-order people. Or maybe, if all else failed, consider signing on with the Drug Enforcement Agency.

  But now, standing on the flat stone roof of Yells Back Butte, he looked westward and saw the immense sky, the line of thunderheads building over the Coconino Rim, the sunlight reflecting off the Vermillion Cliffs below the Utah border, and the towering cauliflower shape of the storm already delivering a rain blessing upon the San Francisco Peaks, the Sacred Mountain marking the western margin of his people’s holy land. Chee closed his eyes against that, remembering Janet’s beauty, her wit, her intelligence. But other memories crowded in: the dreary skies of Washington, the swarms of young men entombed in three-piece suits and subdued by whatever neckties today’s fashion demanded; remembering the clamor, the sirens, the smell of the traffic, the layers upon layers of social phoniness. A faint breeze stirred Chee’s hair and brought him the smell of juniper and sage, and a chittering sound from far overhead that reminded him of why he was here.

  At first glance he thought the raptor was a red-tailed hawk, but when it banked to repeat its inspection of this intruder Chee saw it was a golden eagle. It was the fourth one he’d seen today—a good year for eagles and a good place to find them—patrolling the mesa rimrock where rodents flourished. He watched this one circle, gray-white against the dark blue sky, until it satisfied its curiosity and drifted eastward over Black Mesa. When it turned, he noticed a gap in its fan of tail feathers. Probably an old one. Tail feathers aren’t lost to molting.

  Even with Janet’s directions, it took Chee half an hour to find Jano’s blind. The Hopi had roofed a crack in the butte’s rimrock with a network of dead sage branches and covered that with foliage cut from nearby brush. Much of that was broken and scattered now. Chee climbed into the crack, squatted, and examined the place, reconstructing Jano’s strategy.

  He would have first assured himself that the eagle he wanted routinely patrolled this place. He would have probably come in the evening to prepare his blind—or more likely to repair one members of his kiva had been using for centuries. If he’d changed anything noticeable, he would have waited a few days until the eagle had become accustomed to this variation in his landscape. That done, Jano would have returned early on the morning he was fated to kill Ben Kinsman. He would have brought a rabbit with him, tied a cord to the rabbit’s leg and put it atop the blind’s roof. Then he would have waited, watching through the cracks for the eagle to appear. Since the eyes of raptors detect motion far better than any radar, he would have made sure the rabbit moved when the proper moment came. When the eagle seized it with its talons, he’d pull the rabbit downward, throw his coat over the bird to overpower it, and push it into the cage he’d brought.

  Chee checked the ground around him, looking for any proof that Jano had been there. He didn’t expect to find anything, and he didn’t. The rock where Jano must have sat while he waited for his eagle was worn smooth. Anyone might have sat there that day, or no one. He found not a trace of the bloodstains Jano might have left here had the eagle gashed him as he caught it. The rain might have washed blood away, but it would have left a trace in the grainy granite. He climbed out of the crack, bringing with him only a bedraggled eagle feather from the sandy floor of the blind and a cigarette butt that looked like it had weathered much more than last week’s shower. The feather was from the body—not one of the strong wingtip or tail feathers valued for ceremonial objects. And neither the feather nor the butt showed any sign of bloodstains. He tossed them back into the blind.

  Chee spent another hour or so making an equally fruitless check around the butte. He came across another blind a half mile down the rim, and several places where stones had been stacked with little painted prayer sticks placed among them and feathers tied to nearby sage branches. Clearly the Hopis considered this butte part of their spiritual homeland, and it probably had been since their first clans arrived about the twelfth century. The federal government’s decision to add it to the Navajo Reservation hadn’t changed that, and never would. The thought made him feel like a trespasser on his own reservation and did nothing good for Chee’s mood. It was time to say to hell with this and go home.

  The desk work required of an acting lieutenant had not helped the muscle tone in Jim Chee’s legs, nor his lungs. He was tired. He stood at the rim, looking across the saddle, dreading the long climb down. An eagle soared over Black Mesa and the shape of another was outlined against the clouds far to the south over the San Francisco Peaks. This was eagle country and always had been. When the first Hopi clans founded their villages on the First Mesa, the elders had assigned eagle-collecting territory just as they’d assigned cornfields and springs. And when the Navajos came along a couple of hundred years later they, too, soon learned that one came to Black Mesa when one’s medicine bundle required eagle feathers.

  Chee took out his binoculars and tried to locate the bird he’d seen against the cloud. It was gone. He found the one hunting over the mesa and focused on it—thinking it might be the one he’d watched earlier. It wasn’t. This one had a complete fan of tail feathers. He swung the binoculars downward, focused on the place where he’d found Jano beside Ben Kinsman’s dying body and tried to re-create how that tragedy must have happened.

  Jano might not have seen Kinsman below, because Kinsman would have concealed himself. But looking down from here, he could hardly have missed noticing Kinsman’s patrol car where he’d left it down the arroyo. Jano had been arrested once for po
aching an eagle. He would have been nervous, and careful.

  So why climb down to be captured? Probably because he had no choice. But why not just release the eagle, hide the cage, climb down and tell the cop he was up here meditating and saying his prayers? Jano’s faded red pickup had been parked below the low point of the saddle and Kinsman had left his patrol car near the arroyo maybe a half mile away. Even without binoculars, Jano would have seen that Kinsman had his escape route blocked.

  Chee scanned the valley again, picking up the ruins of what must have been the tumbled stones that once formed the walls of the Tijinney hogan, its sheep pens and its fallen brush arbor. Beyond the hogan site, a glint of reflected sunlight caught his eye. He focused on the spot. The side mirror of some sort of van parked in a cluster of junipers. What would that be doing up here? Two of last spring’s plague victims had come from this quadrant of the reservation. The van might be Arizona Health Department people collecting rodents and checking fleas. He remembered Leaphorn had told him the woman he was looking for had come up this way working on a plague case.

  On the opposite side of the saddle, away from the van, the Tijinney “death hogan” and the murder site, motion caught Chee’s peripheral vision. He focused on it. A black-and-white goat grazing on a bush. And not just one. He counted seven, but there might be seventeen or seventy scattered through that rough area.

  While counting them, he found the track. Actually, two tracks, probably formed by the vehicle of whomever held this grazing lease and drove in now and then to see about his flock.

  It was not something even a sheep-camp Navajo would dignify by calling a road, but as Chee traced the track back toward the access road through his binoculars, he realized its importance. Jano did have a way out—a way to avoid capture without giving up his eagle. He could have slipped down the other side of the saddle, invisible to the officer waiting to arrest him. He could have left the eagle in some safe place, made the easy climb over the low point of the saddle with nothing to incriminate him. Then he could have recovered his pickup truck, driven back to the gravel road, followed it a mile or two back toward Tuba City, and then circled back on this goatherd’s track to recover his captive bird.