Threepersons Hunt

by Brian Garfield

“I doubt that would do any good.”

  “If Joe knows who it is, he may have a rifle pointed at him right now. Tell him to identify himself—at least we can try to give him some protection.”

  “I’ll try to get in touch with the person who established the trust. I can’t promise anything.”

  “But Joe knows who it is, doesn’t he.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Joe was taking the rap for him. He must have know who it was.”

  “I’m not buying that part of it,” Kendrick said.

  “Not out loud, anyway. If you’d known about it you could be disbarred or maybe worse.”

  Kendrick’s eyes narrowed. “Watch your mouth now.”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it. You can’t admit you knew anything about Joe’s innocence. If you had evidence that you didn’t present at the trial, you could be in a lot of trouble for keeping it to yourself.”

  “You’re out of line, Watchman.”

  “And you’re out on a limb. I want that name.”

  “I can’t give it to you. Look I’ll put it out on the table for you, face up. I defended Joe Threepersons the best way I knew how. I did a damned good job. Any other lawyer would have lost him to a life term at best. I got him off with second-degree. It was after Joe went to prison that this person asked me to set up an anonymous trust to support Maria and the little boy. The client didn’t explain any motives to me and I didn’t ask—I thought it was a generous thing for the client to do. Now you won’t find any malfeasance in that so let’s just quit throwing raw meat on the floor.”

  “It must have been a sizable trust.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The curio shop. The house. The private school.”

  Kendrick’s eyes flickered. “You could find out anyway, I suppose. I received a capital sum of sixty-five thousand dollars from the client, exclusive of my own fees and commissions. Out of that we made the down payment on her house and paid the first six months of the lease on the Katchina Boutique. The fixtures and inventory were also paid for out of capital. It left something like fifty thousand dollars out of the original sixty-five, and I invested that in ten percent corporate bonds. I paid over the interest every month to Maria—it came to four-hundred-odd a month, and on top of that she had commissions on whatever she sold in the curio shop. The shop was self-sustaining after the first few months. She had a good business head, she hired the help herself. The shop wasn’t a fantastic success but she made a good living out of it.” Kendrick spread his hands out expressively. “It wasn’t a big fortune, after all. The fifty thousand dollars’ capital was to revert to the client in any case. Maria was only getting the interest on it.”

  “It’s a lot of money any way you want to cut it,” Watchman said. “There’s one thing you’d better think about. This client of yours could be a killer.”

  “You’re off base a mile. The money doesn’t prove Joe didn’t murder Ross Calisher. There could be a dozen reasons for it, beginning with honest charity.”

  “Tell me something. When you come across a case of a gunshot death right after a husband-and-wife dispute, do you believe the story that it was a gun-cleaning accident?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t like coincidences,” Watchman said. “She gets the money a week after Joe goes to prison.”

  “Well Joe couldn’t support her from prison. Of course there’s that connection. It doesn’t prove a thing about his innocence or guilt.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t to you. But that client of yours could end up dead within the next few days or maybe the next few hours if you don’t give me a name.”

  “I’ll get in touch with the client. That’s all I can do. I can’t say a word without the client’s permission.”

  “I hope you don’t end up explaining that to the client’s corpse.” Watchman turned on his heel and tramped to the Volvo.

  Victorio trotted to catch up. When Watchman looked past him Kendrick was gone. Victorio said, “Man I want to talk to you.”

  “You’ve been doing that all day.”

  “I didn’t know anything about that trust fund. It changes things. Look, why don’t we run over to the Arrow, I’ll buy us a beer.”

  8.

  The one-armed barkeep sat on a stool at the end of the bar with a fingernail inserted in his nostril. He was very carefully not looking in Watchman’s direction.

  Victorio appeared from the men’s room feeling for the top of his zipper. He called down the length of the bar: “You want another firewater?”

  Watchman nodded and inhaled the fumes of his nearly empty beer. It was all surmise. He wanted to believe Angelina but her word was unsupported; she might have seen Joe that night in Cibecue but suppose her watch had been an hour slow? Kendrick was right: there could be any number of explanations for the trust fund, half of them unconnected with Calisher’s death. Joe had confessed and produced the murder weapon. Everything else was hearsay and the people who talked to Watchman had attitudes that were colored by their feelings for or against Joe; either way they would naturally tend to make pinks red and greys black.

  But he kept coming back to the original proposition because it accounted for the facts, even if it was full of holes. It explained a lot of things that otherwise looked like coincidence. Coincidences offened Watchman’s sense of orderliness. If Joe weren’t innocent there were too many of them to explain: the coincidence that brought money to Maria when Joe went to prison; the coincidence that sprung Joe efficiently from Florence less than thirty-six hours after Maria’s death; the coincidence that connected Joe Threepersons to three murders, at least two of which he could not possibly have committed; the coincidence that placed a .375 magnum in Joe’s hands at a time when everything else suggested he had escaped and armed himself in order to avenge the deaths of his wife and son.

  There could have been any number of explanations but if you had to put your money on just one of them it had to be Angelina’s theory. From that it followed that Joe was not hiding up. He wasn’t the quarry, he was the hunter; he wouldn’t disappear into a hidden lair, he’d come out. He’d come out shooting.

  The incestuousness of the past was disturbing: all the people, ostensibly enemies, who kept crossing paths in the Threepersons case. Kendrick marrying Charlie Rand’s ex-wife. Calisher maybe sleeping with Joe’s wife. Harlan Natagee, the alleged sorcerer, sending his red-power thugs out to harass Rand while Rand allegedly sent his own thugs to rifle Kendrick’s files. Angelina seeing Joe and Maria at Cibecue when Joe insisted he had been shooting Ross Calisher in a place two hours’ drive from there. Boundaries and water rights; reds and whites. Maria: levelheaded and ambitious, or tart and fast as a doxy? Joe Threepersons: a red man with a white job, and the victim of both worlds. It was taking a long time to accrete an impression of Joe: a young man gone to seed, clinging to the hem of hope and watching the fabric crumble away upon the death of Maria and Joe Junior. A savage killer bent on brutal revenge? Or a confused man hiding in the mountains battling his own conscience?

  Victorio sat down and pushed a fresh beer in front of him. “I hate a noisy silence.”

  Pools of poor light fell into the room from the nicked wall-lamps and the red discs in the ceiling. The place was gloomy and empty with a stale late-afternoon silence.

  “It comes down to money,” Victorio said. “You see that. The sixty-five thousand.”

  “You’re talking about Charles Rand, aren’t you.”

  “Anybody else around here got that kind of money? Don’t you see how it fits together, man?”

  Watchman considered the beer. “If your people are anything like my people they don’t talk about how much money they’ve got salted away. Unless they haven’t got any, then you hear about it. People like Will Luxan, Harlan Natagee, that medicine man, what’s his name?”

  “Rufus Limita?”

  Watchman nodded. “They’ve probably got cash socked away somewhere. Not ever
y red man on a Reservation is dirt poor. It’s bad form to show it, that’s all.”

  “How come you don’t want to believe it’s Rand? It’s got to be Rand, damn it.” Victorio’s head moved quickly with his impatient talk; strands of black hair had come loose of his headband and fell over his eye.

  Watchman said, “Think about it. If the money man was Charles Rand he’d hardly choose Dwight Kendrick to be his executor.”

  Victorio’s eyes brightened and then shifted away; he scowled. “God knows I’d love to see something pinned on that son of a bitch Rand.” Victorio drained his beer and wiped his upper lip. “Maybe he found Calisher in the wrong bed. Gwen slept around.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “God knows. You know how rumors are.”

  “She was having an affair with Kendrick before she divorced Rand, I gather.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. The first I knew of it was after she got the divorce. After that Kendrick started dating her, and they got married about a year or a year and a half later. Actually I don’t think Rand knew about it at the time. But what’s that got to do with this? Gwen could have been sleeping with Calisher too.”

  “A little while ago you were just as eager to see Joe’s head in that basket.”

  Victorio grinned. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

  “How far would you go to help?”

  “Help what? Find Joe or clear him?”

  “One may lead to the other.”

  Victorio shook his head. “I don’t know any more about it than you do but I guess I’d be willing to try. I keep remembering that yarn you heard about my car being down there that morning in front of Maria’s house. If Joe heard the same yarn you heard it still could be me he’s gunning for.” He felt the knot of his necktie and poked his jaw forward to stretch his throat against his collar.

  Watchman pushed his chair back and stood. “Let’s go talk to Jimmy Oto.”

  “Me?”

  “He knows you.”

  “I doubt that means much. You ever see a bulldozer shoving rocks over military graves in the movies? That’s Jimmy.”

  “I’m not asking you to hold my hand. But he might say something to you that he wouldn’t say to me.”

  “I doubt it. But if you say so.”

  9.

  Watchman filled the Volvo at Will Luxan’s pumps and Victorio told him where to drive: back into Whiteriver and then left up a dirt-road fork. “You may not believe it when you see where he lives. It’s where the local derelicts go when they go slumming.”

  “Things weren’t all that rich where I grew up, either.”

  Victorio went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Babies dying with sores on their mouths. You know eight Apaches have starved to death on this Reservation in the past ten years and five of them lived up here in Cuncon. They get in hock to the trading post, up to their asses, and once they get too far in the hole the store won’t let them buy anything except for cash. It used to be you could always count on your relatives but that was before welfare. And the old ones that haven’t got any family left and can’t read the welfare forms to fill them out—they’re the ones you find by the smell. Man it breaks your heart. The Indian Bureau gets that damned appropriation from Congress every year, a thousand dollars for every Indian in the country, and it all ends up in some white crook’s pocket and these people starve to death. You know the life expectancy down here? Forty-six years.”

  “That’s some better than the Navajos.”

  “Cuncon,” Victorio said. “You know what Cuncon means?”

  “No.”

  “Big shit.” Victorio laughed out of the side of his mouth. “No shit. It means big shit. Except in the anthropology books, they call it large feces.”

  “Sure.”

  “In the old days the people up there shat big turds because they had plenty to eat. The soil was damned good, they had all kinds of corn and pumpkins and stuff. But that was because they didn’t farm it full time. Right now you can’t even grow cactus up there, it’s right down to sand and bedrock. But those Twagaidn clans never moved away from there.” Victorio was talking from the gut and his speech was beginning to lose its veneer of law-school polish; the cadences were older, he sounded more like an Apache.

  He seemed to realize it; he twisted the side of his mouth defensively. “Anyhow you want to look out when we get out of the car. It’s the kind of dump where you can end up in a garbage can with a pleat in your skull.”

  The road narrowed and deteriorated. Past the last valley farms it climbed into dry hills. It went north for a mile, the car’s elongated shadow racing alongside, and then turned past the back of a hogback ridge until the Volvo lost the race and the shadow was out ahead. “Jesus,” Victorio said, “you think this heap’s going to hold together?”

  “I pray a lot about that. It’s beginning to sound like a busted shock absorber to me.”

  The road went through a roller-coaster dip and climbed between the shoulders of eroded hills; half a mile farther it entered a narrow climbing canyon, clinging to a shelf against one steep wall.

  “Next bend’s a killer, you might want to tap your horn.”

  The road curled slowly along the side of the cliff and swung abruptly out of sight three hundred yards ahead. Watchman shifted down into second. Victorio pointed past him to the left. “You can see Cuncon down there now.”

  Beyond the bend the opposite ridge had crumbled away in prehistoric time, leaving a wide cut through which could be seen a tilted dusty table of earth. Maybe a dozen wickiups were scattered around; their condition looked wretched. It seemed ten degrees hotter up here but that was probably visual, the reflex association of heat with barren dust: nothing bigger than weeds grew among the rocks anywhere in sight.

  Coming up on the bend Watchman hooted twice and listened for an answer; there was none and he put the car dead-slow into the bend, lugging it in second. Hairpin was hardly a word for it; the road virtually doubled back on itself along a steep downward tilt.

  He glanced to his right through the windshield, halfway through the turn. Something glittered at him from the tumble of rocks four hundred feet below.

  He braked, stopped, set the emergency, got out and walked to the lip of the bend.

  The tracks showed where it had gone over. For a moment he had lost sight of it but he found it again by taking two slow side steps; the sun winked off the broken glass and that drew his eyes.

  The battered steel had crumpled a great deal and was not very different in color from the drab rocks around it. What had made him stop the car was the square-cornered shape of the tailgate, sticking up at an odd angle. The cab had been crushed almost flat and one wheel, complete with tire, lay twenty feet away on a flat rock.

  It had come to rest more or less right side up but it had tumbled several times getting there. Various impacts had squashed the whole thing and twisted it into the proportions of a wrecked buckboard wagon.

  Victorio walked up to his shoulder and made sounds in this throat.

  Watchman glanced back at the tracks where the wreck had crumbled two pieces of the edge going over. There was no guardrail.

  Victorio said, “Shit. He sure as hell didn’t get out of that alive.”

  “Let’s go down and have a look.”

  “I wouldn’t leave my car right there. Next guy comes around the bend’ll push you right over to join the pickup down there.”

  Watchman moved the Volvo fifty feet farther down the road and then they started looking for a way to get down into the gorge on foot.

  10.

  He’d seen them worse. The head-ons on the limited access highways, like the one that had wiped out Maria Three-persons. But the pickup was bad, bad enough.

  The door had come off halfway down the mountain and got stuck between boulders. Evidently Jimmy Oto had flung himself out of the opening in a desperate plunge but the pickup had toppled over on him and then slid on down to the bottom. Oto’s body was barely recognizable.

&n
bsp; “Dear sweet God,” Victorio muttered. Watchman looked away. Victorio swung violently away and soon Watchman heard him retching in the rocks.

  He peered into the crushed cab. All the glass had burst; shards of its glittered everywhere. The roof had squashed the steering wheel. The column stick seemed to be in the second-gear position, which was where it would be, going around that bend.

  Victorio came slowly over. “Sweet sweet God … what are you looking for?”

  “How long did he live up here?”

  “I don’t know. Most of his life.”

  “He knew that bend, he could have cornered it blindfolded,” Watchman murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m looking for evidence that it wasn’t an accident.”

  11.

  Somebody might have been waiting in a car. Heard the pickup coming and lunged forward from the concealed side of the bend, and shoved the pickup right over the edge. It could have happened like that. If it had there would be traces of car paint somewhere. He examined every exposed surface but there was nothing but rust and raw broken steel and the mottled grey paint. The nonfunctioning tail-light was still intact, improbably. The rear bumper and fenders hadn’t taken too much punishment.

  Victorio said, “Why would somebody want to do that on purpose?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s too much of a coincidence.”

  “Hell he was always a reckless son of a bitch.”

  “He never got this reckless before. Why today?”

  “Why not today? Everybody dies.” Victorio buried his face in the crook of his elbow and wiggled his head, rubbing his eyes on the cloth. When his arm dropped away he looked stunned.

  “Have they got a phone up here?”

  Victorio didn’t respond. Watchman stood up and spoke louder. “Any phones up here?”

  Victorio shook himself. “No. No phones, no electricity. Hell they’ve only got one well for the whole village.”

  Watchman looked up across the canyon bottom but Cuncon wasn’t in sight from here. There was a mound of pocked massive boulders and it was a hundred feet or more up to the bottom of the earth-cut through which he’d had his glimpse of the settlement from the high road. Here there was nothing but rocks and weeds and the twisted remains of Jimmy Oto and his old pickup truck.