Threepersons Hunt

by Brian Garfield

  He swallowed the last of the cheese and dropped the Styrofoam coffee cup in the trash liner and went out to the lot.

  Someone came out of the building and stopped to peer around and when Watchman put the car in motion the uniformed figure loped toward him waving a sheet of paper.

  It was Wilder. Watchman pulled up beside him. “What form did I forget to fill out?”

  “Glad I caught you. They thought you’d already gone.” Wilder handed him the paper. “Just came in the mail. Here’s a copy of the envelope.”

  Two Xeroxes. Watchman took them. “A Xerox of an envelope?”

  “I sent the originals down to the lab. But read it.”

  The envelope was addressed to the Highway Patrol with a little typed notation at the lower left: “Attn. Officer In Charge Of Threepersons Case.” That made Watchman look at the postmark. “Globe, Ariz., July 6, P.M.”

  Dear Sir,

  With reference to the escaped convict Joe Threepersons, this is to inform you that he was not guilty of the murder that he was in prison for.

  Watchman turned it over but it was only a Xerox and there was nothing on the back of it. He looked at Wilder. “What the hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Joe didn’t write this himself.”

  “Okay, detective, why didn’t he?”

  “One, he was still bottled up in Florence when this was mailed in Globe. Two, I doubt Joe knows how to use a typewriter. Three, I doubt he’d be able to spell, let alone compose a letter in business style.”

  “Go to the head of the class. What do you make of it?”

  “No signature. I thought anonymous tips like that usually came on the phone.”

  “Usually they do. But we get letters. Maybe it’s somebody with a recognizable voice. A speech defect or something.”

  Watchman thrust his hand out the car window to give the Xeroxes back but the lieutenant said, “You keep them, it’s your case. We’ve got the originals down in the lab. I’ll let you know if anything turns up by way of finger-prints. We’ll find out what kind of machine it was typed on, but I doubt we can spend the time to find out who wrote it. Could be some crackpot. Most likely is.”

  “Or somebody with enough interest in Joe to try and persuade us to go easy on him.”

  “Yeah, it could be the sister. Maybe she’s a trained business secretary or something.”

  “Living on the Reservation?” Watchman folded the Xeroxes. “I’ll find out when I talk to her.”

  “It makes sense,” Wilder said. “I mean she might figure we’d be less inclined to shoot him on sight if we thought there was a chance he was innocent.”

  “Is there?”

  “A chance? Come on, Sam. He had the gun in his pocket and he made a voluntary confession. Far as I know he never tried to rescind it.”

  “Then it’s kind of strange, this letter.”

  “But it’s got you wondering, hasn’t it.”

  “Aeah.”

  “I suspect that’s what it was supposed to do, Sam.”

  6.

  Driving up toward the mountains, east out of Phoenix along U.S. 60, you pass a dirt road below Superior that curls south from the highway into scrubby hills. It is marked “APACHE TEARS ROAD.” Watchman passed the sign at sixty-five.

  In the 1880s the Apaches had a stronghold on top of a sheer cliff below Superior. They staged attacks from there on Pima towns and white settlers until the blueleg Cavalry surrounded the stronghold and besieged it. When the Apaches ran out of ammunition the braves elected to leap from the cliff rather than suffer the indignity of capture. In the morning their women buried the dead at the foot of the cliff and their tears drenched the earth and instantly froze into dark pebbles of pure volcanic Obsidian glass. That is the legend. Today the lapidaries sell the Apache Tears as costume jewelry. Most of them come from pockets at the foot of Apache Leap Mountain.

  Watchman took the bypass ramp around the town of Superior. He drove on up through the discolored slag piles of Miami and into the chrome, plastic and neon town of Globe, with its miners’ saloons and used-car arenas and drive-in root-beer stands.

  Out of Globe the highway makes a wide turn into more hills studded with scrubs: greasewood and paloverde and manzanita, here and there the spines of yucca, century plant and cactus.

  The road climbs and climbs until without warning the earth falls away: beyond hangs an empty space. But beyond the space the earth resumes and continues to climb. The color of the Salt River Canyon is a sun-bleached greyish tan accented with richer darknesses of eroded rock strata and clumps of growing things. There are glimpses, four thousand feet below the highway lip, of river froth at the bottom.

  The highway runs down to the bottom in switchbacks along the cliff shelf. At the top the crow-flight line from rim to rim is not more than ten or twelve miles but a driver has to spend more than an hour negotiating the heroic passage down, across and up.

  The river marks the boundary between the San Carlos Reservation and the Fort Apache Reservation. On the north side, after a bridge, there is a lonely gas station that sells ice cream, soda pop and water cans for cars that have boiled over trying to make the steep twisting climb.

  Watchman filled up at the station and put the receipt in with his expense vouchers, and began the climb. He hit the residue of the early afternoon’s rain about halfway up: slippery patches where the water had brought the oil in the pavement to the surface. He took it easy getting to the top and that was when the radio squawked into chatter and informed him that the Agency Police had found Joe Threepersons’ spoor at a clan-cluster of wickiups not far ahead of him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AT THREE o’clock two cars came tandem down the rutted track: a Highway Department panel truck preceded by Watchman’s Volvo with Buck Stevens at the wheel.

  Stevens emerged grinning fiercely. “If you’re fixin’ to spend the night out here maybe you ought to make a circle with the wagons. I hear there’s a lot of hostile redskins in these parts.”

  “You want a fat lip, white man.” But Watchman gave him half a smile.

  “I brought your clothes. That’s a pretty shrewd idea, disguising yourself as an Indian.” Stevens’ guileless smile hid none of the sarcasm.

  They talked while Watchman changed into mufti: Levi’s and a plaid shirt and his rundown mountain boots, and a stockman’s hat that drooped at the brim. The crew from the yellow panel truck were jacking up the cruiser and changing tires one by one.

  “You realize you’ve only been on this job six hours and you’ve already gone over budget,” Stevens said. “You know what it cost to get that truck out here with four new tires?” He plucked a stalk of yellow grass from the ground and poked it into the corner of his mouth. It was the color of his hair. “Man stopped me down the road a few miles.”

  “Roadblock?”

  “No. Some cowboy, asked me if I was the trooper assigned to the Threepersons case. He said there’s a man down at the horse camp wants to talk to you real bad.”

  “What man?”

  “Charles Rand.”

  Watchman rammed his shirttails into his Levi’s and cinched up the belt. “May as well have a look at him. He might be able to help.”

  2.

  It looked as out of place as a Cunard liner in the midst of a Portuguese fishing fleet. It was a big silver-grey Rolls Bentley polished to a deep shine. From half a mile away, driving down toward the horse camp, Watchman was able to recognize it.

  Watchman had left Buck Stevens with the Highway Department crew. When the cruiser was reshod he would drive it back to the barn. Watchman drove the rattling old Volvo into the yard of the Apache horse camp and parked it beside the towering Bentley. The Agency Police car was still parked where it had been before; Watchman had the feeling Officer Porvo had been ordered to wait here for Charles Rand’s arrival.

  There was a small group out in the meadow talking—three Indians and three Anglos. They had seen Watchman arrive and they were walking in toward h
im.

  Even at a hundred yards he recognized Charles Rand easily from magazine photographs. The suntanned big face went well with the wide white hat and the white shirt. Rand wore no jacket but his slacks were obviously part of a suit that had cost as much as the average Apache made in six months. He was neither extraordinarly tall nor especially heavy but he carried himself as if he were. He didn’t strut or swagger; he was more prideful than that. His shoulders rode wide, pushed back like a lieutenant general’s; he rolled when he walked.

  The two Anglo cowboys with Rand had the narrow-hipped stride of rodeo riders and they both carried rifles. The two Indians were men Watchman had seen earlier in camp—probably head men in the clan—and then there was Patrolman Pete Porvo with his small high eyes drilling into everything they touched.

  Rand came forward ahead of the others. Watchman met him at the open corral gate. He dredged the ID wallet out of his hip pocket and flapped it open to display his badge but Rand hardly glanced at it.

  “I’m with the Highway Patrol.”

  “I’m against it, personally.” But Rand smiled. The outdoor eyes crinkled to show he was joshing. He had a slight Texas prairie twang in his voice. “I hear he shot the tires out from under you.”

  “It wasn’t Threepersons. Whoever it was had wheels.”

  “Then he’s got help.” Rand’s lips made a thin line, under pressure. He turned his gaze toward the hills. “Son of a bitch.”

  The others caught up. Watchman was looking at Pete Porvo. The Apache policeman’s face had closed up—with guilt, or with innocent resentment; it was impossible to tell which it was.

  Rand said, “I’d like to get a crew out on his trail before he decides to use that rifle he’s got. You got any objections?”

  “You’d have to talk to the Apache Council about that. It’s their land.”

  “They’re not going to lift a finger and you know it.” Rand was staring at Porvo now. Porvo reacted with a quick grin that came and went almost instantly: a rictus of unease.

  Rand turned his shoulder to the Agency cop and said to Watchman, “Walk off here a little piece with me,” and strolled toward the Bentley.

  Watchman went along with him. Rand was fitting a pair of big-lensed sunglasses into place, hooking them over one ear at a time. “Look. Suppose I brought half a dozen, a dozen men over here and put them under your command. You’ve got jurisdiction here.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Rand.”

  “My men are eager to help.”

  “Sure they are. But you tell me a better way to stir up hard feelings on the Reservation. Having a gang of your cowboys stomping all over it with guns in their hands? Thanks just the same, but I’ll pass.”

  At the door of the Bentley Rand stopped to face him. There was no chauffeur; Rand would be the kind of man who did the driving himself.

  “You’re Navajo.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How’s that going to affect the way you conduct this hunt?”

  “My job’s to find the man, not make excuses. That answer you?”

  “I’ll reserve judgment until I see you perform. So far you’re off to a piss-poor start.”

  Watchman smiled. “I guess I am.”

  “I asked Phoenix to send a manhunt out and they oblige me with one Navajo. It’s got a stink of politics to it and I’ve always had a first-rate sense of smell. I’m putting you on notice—understood?”

  “I think we ought to straighten one thing out, Mr. Rand. You don’t wear the right uniform to give me orders.”

  Rand’s teeth showed. “Sure as God made little green apples, mister, the right word from me and you can get blown clear out of your job. You’re obliged to pay attention when I talk to you, hear?”

  Watchman said nothing. Rand blustered on a little while until he heard himself. Then he stopped, slightly embarrassed but continuing to regard Watchman disdainfully. “Down in Phoenix they figure nobody cares what happens to a no-account Indian. Well I just want it clear this is one Indian who’s got enemies in high places. I want him brought down and I want it done fast.”

  Watchman asked gently: “Why?”

  The sunglasses hid Rand’s reaction. After a moment he said, “Let’s just say I’ve got a grudge against him. It was my foreman he killed.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “My foreman’s just as dead as he was then.”

  “Come off it, Mr. Rand.”

  The Texan put his hand to his mouth and dragged down the corners of his lips as if clawing grit from the crevices.

  “All right, look. I’ve got a property up there that shares thirty miles of boundary with this Reservation. I run beef up there—hell I feed the population of a fair-size city every year. It’s not the biggest industry I’ve got, but I’m still the Texas cowman my daddy made me and this ranch counts heavy with me. You understand what I’m sayin’? Then this worthless Apache kid comes busting up here, ramming around the Reservation, stirring folks up, and before you know it there’s going to be an incident. Now I don’t want an incident. I can’t afford one right now. I want this boy stopped before he can create one.”

  “I’m just a country boy myself, Mr. Rand, and I don’t see the connection between your cows and Joe Three-persons’ incident.”

  “Then I’ll spell it out. This tribe’s got litigation against me, they’re trying to destroy my beef operation by drying up my water supplies. Now that case could go either way right now. But suppose there’s a big splash of publicity about some poor unfortunate lone Indian that’s being hounded for weeks and weeks by merciless white racist authorities. You see what that does? I can’t afford to let the bleeding-heart press get all het up right now on this killer-boy’s account. That kind of sentimental horseshit weighs too heavy with some of those Federal judges. They claim they’re objective but that’s a lot of crap—they’re just like everybody else in the government; they’re petty bureaucratic hacks and they’re eager to get pushed around by public opinion. Here I’m running more beef on that little old ranch than this whole tribe manages to feed on two million acres, and now they want to take my water away from us so we can all starve. And everybody keeps whining about lo the poor Indian. Poor Indian hell. I’m not about to give up what’s mine for the sake of a bunch of hardscrabble losers that had this country for a thousand years and couldn’t even grow a blade of grass on it.”

  Watchman peeled back his sleeve to look at the time and Rand took the hint. “All right, I didn’t mean to ride my hobbyhorse. But you wanted to know why it’s important to get that killer fast and get him quiet. I’ve told you.”

  “I intend to find him as fast as I can, Mr. Rand. But I’m not up here to do special favors for you.”

  “You find him, that’s all. I don’t care who you do it for. And make sure he doesn’t find you first. You wouldn’t be the first man he killed. He’s a son of a bitch with a rifle.”

  “So I hear. If you were to send those men of yours after him—where would you tell them to start looking?”

  “Now that’s the first smart question you’ve asked me. All right, I’d prowl Whiteriver. I’d send my boys into every tumbledown wickiup in town. That’s where his worthless friends hang out—that’s where his sister lives. He’ll be around there, scrounging food like a pariah dog.”

  “Then I’d better get at it. Unless you had something else to say to me.”

  “I’ll say this much. You’ll likely have to kill him, if he doesn’t kill you first. He’s a real old-fashioned Apache. I don’t know about the Navajos but these Apache still hang onto the old war virtues. Of course they’re not allowed to practice them any more and that’s why they spend more time drunk than working, but they value those old-time notions. When it comes to a boy like Joe Threepersons, he’s likely to figure it’s better to have a lost cause to fight for than no cause at all. He’s not going to quit and give up the first time he sees a cop get close to him.”

  “I’m beginning to admire this guy,” Watchm
an said.

  “Look out he doesn’t give you a chance to admire his marksmanship. All right, I won’t hold you up. But I’m keeping a close eye on this—you just remember I’ve got access to a few ears down in Phoenix.”

  Watchman expected his superiors wouldn’t let him forget it.

  He gave Rand a crisp nod—Rand didn’t offer to shake his hand—and swung toward the Volvo.

  A long time ago he’d given up arguing with men like Rand. Underneath their veneer of anthropological knowledge there beat the hearts of Custer’s kind. Whites like Rand were spoilers who couldn’t leave the land alone; their real attitude, which none of them would admit out loud, was something on the order of If God meant them to be white men He’d have made them white in the first place.

  Sure. And if God meant us to fly in airplanes He’d never have invented the railroad.

  The squabble between the Apaches and the Rands wasn’t fundamentally legal. It was a conflict of ways of thought. These Indians made poor farmers because to plow the ground was to stab the bosom of White Painted Woman. The Sioux Crazy Horse had said, “One does not sell the earth upon which the people walk.”

  Pete Porvo was watching from the corral gate when Watchman turned the car around and drove out.

  3.

  The plateau highway had reddish pavement as if the surrounding red earth had bled across it. Up in the foothills a welcome-to-Apacheland billboard said in detachable bright-red letters “FIRE DANGER EXTREME.”

  He came down a bend past the Assembly of God mission at Cedar Creek, and then past the little Baptist mission where the subject had been schooled and married, Pastor Geo. S. LaSalle, and up a little grade with the serrates of hazy mountains making lavender teeth on the horizons. He was 175 miles out of Phoenix and it was half-past four when he came downhill on the approach to Fort Apache past the cluster of cheap new Mutual Aid Houses.