A Thief of Time

by Tony Hillerman

  Maxie looked at him. “Well, she’s not sure about that,” she said.

  “Maybe not, but this BC57 site was one of the last ones built—just before everybody disappeared. They dated a roof beam to 1292, and some of the charcoal in what might have been a kiln fire to 1298. So she was working just about the time they turned out the lights here and walked away. And Ellie is beginning to think she might be able to pin down where she went.”

  “That’s the really big deal out here.” Davis waved her arms. “Where’d the Anasazi go? The big huge mystery that all the magazine writers write about.”

  “Among a couple of other big questions,” Elliot said. “Like why they built roads when they didn’t have wheels, or pack animals, and why they left, and why they lived in this place in the first place with so damn little wood, or water, or good land, and…” Elliot shrugged. “The more we learn, the more we wonder.”

  “This man who was coming out to see her the week after she disappeared, do you know who he was?”

  “Lehman,” Davis said. “He came.” She smiled ruefully. “Plenty sore about it. He came on a Wednesday and it had rained Tuesday night and you know how that road gets.”

  “And he’s…” Leaphorn began to ask.

  “He’s the hotshot in Ellie’s field,” Elliot said. “I think he was chairman of her dissertation committee when she got her doctorate at Madison. Now he’s a professor at University of New Mexico. Two or three books on Mimbres, and Hohokam, and Anasazi pottery evolution. Top guru in the ceramics field.”

  “Ellie’s equivalent of our Devanti,” Davis said. “She pretty well had to persuade Lehman she knew what she was talking about. Like in migrations, Elliot and I have to deal with our top honcho.”

  “Doctor Delbert Devanti,” Elliot said. “Arkansas’s answer to Einstein.” The tone was sardonic.

  “He’s proved some things,” Maxie Davis said, her voice flat. “Even if he didn’t go to Phillips Exeter Academy, or Princeton.”

  There was silence. Elliot’s long, handsome face had become stiff and blank. Maxie glanced at him. In the glance Leaphorn read…what? Was it anger? Malice? She turned to Leaphorn. “Please note the blue blood’s lofty contempt for the plebeians. Devanti is definitely a plebe. He sounds like corn pone.”

  “And is often wrong,” Elliot said.

  Davis laughed. “There is that,” she said.

  “But you give people the right to be wrong if they came out of the cotton patch,” Elliot said. His voice sounded normal, or almost normal, but Leaphorn could see the tension in the line of his jaw.

  “More of an excuse for it,” Maxie said, mildly. “Maybe he overlooked something while he was working nights to feed his family. No tutors to do his digging in the library.”

  To that, Randall Elliot said nothing. Leaphorn watched. Where would this tension lead? Nowhere, apparently. Maxie had nothing more to say.

  “You two work as a team,” Leaphorn said. “That right?”

  “More or less,” Davis said. “We have common interests in the Anasazi.”

  “Like how?” Leaphorn asked.

  “It’s complicated. Actually it involves food economics, nutrition tolerances, population sizes, things like that, and you spend a lot more time working on programming statistical projections in the computer than you do digging in the field. Really dull stuff, unless you’re weird enough to be into it.” She smiled at Leaphorn. A smile of such dazzling charm that once it would have destroyed him.

  “And Randall here,” she added, “is doing something much more dramatic.” She poked him with her elbow—a gesture that almost made what she was saying mere teasing. “He is revolutionizing physical anthropology. He is finding a way to solve the mystery, once and for all, of what happened to these people.”

  “Population studies,” Elliot said in a low voice. “Involves migrations and genetics.”

  “Rewrites all the books if it works,” Maxie Davis said, smiling at Leaphorn. “Elliots do not spend their time on small things. In the navy they are admirals. In universities they are presidents. In politics they are senators. When you start at the top you have to aim high. Or everybody is disappointed.”

  Leaphorn was uncomfortable. “It would be a problem,” he said.

  “But not one I had,” Maxie Davis said. “I’m white trash.”

  “Maxie never tires of reminding me of the silver spoon in my crib,” Elliot said, managing a grin. “It doesn’t have much to do with finding Ellie, though.”

  “But you have a point,” Leaphorn said. “Dr. Friedman wouldn’t have missed that appointment with Lehman without a good reason.”

  “Hell, no,” Maxie said. “That’s what I told that idiot at the sheriff’s office.”

  “Do you know why he was coming? Specifically.”

  “She was going to bring him up-to-date,” Elliot said.

  “She was going to hit him with a bombshell,” Maxie said. “That’s what I think. I think she finally had it put together.”

  There was something in Elliot’s expression. Maybe skepticism. Or disapproval. But Davis was enthusiastic.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing much, really. But I could just sense it. That things were working out. But she wouldn’t say much.”

  “It’s not traditional,” Elliot said. “Not among us scientists.”

  Leaphorn found himself as interested in what was going on with Elliot as in the thrust of the conversation. Elliot’s tone now was faintly mocking. Davis had caught it, too. She looked at Elliot and then back at Leaphorn, speaking directly to him.

  “That’s true,” she said. “Before one boasts, one must have done something to boast about.”

  She said it in the mildest of voices, without looking at Elliot, but Elliot’s face flushed.

  “You think she had found something important,” Leaphorn said. “She didn’t tell you anything, but something caused you to think that. Something specific. Can you think what it was?”

  Davis leaned back on the couch. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her hand, in a gesture that looked casual, on Elliot’s thigh. She thought.

  “Ellie was excited,” she said. “Happy, too. For a week, maybe a little longer, before she left.” She got up from the couch and walked past Leaphorn into the bedroom. Infinite grace, Leaphorn thought.

  “She’d been over in Utah. I remember that. To Bluff, and Mexican Hat and—” Her voice from the bedroom was indistinct.

  “Montezuma Creek?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Yes, all that area along the southern edge of Utah. And when she came back”—Davis emerged from the bedroom carrying a Folgers Coffee carton—“she had all these potsherds.” She put the box on the coffee table. “Same ones, I think. At least, I remember it was this box.”

  The box held what seemed to Leaphorn to be as many as fifty fragments of pots, some large, some no more than an inch across.

  Leaphorn sorted through them, looking for nothing in particular but noticing that all were reddish brown, and all bore a corrugated pattern.

  “Done by her potter, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “Did she say where she got them?”

  “From a Thief of Time,” Elliot said. “From a pot hunter.”

  “She didn’t say that,” Davis said.

  “She went to Bluff to look for pot hunters. To see what they were finding. She told you that.”

  “Did she say which one?” Leaphorn asked. Here might be an explanation of how she had vanished. If she had been dealing directly with a pot hunter, he might have had second thoughts. Might have thought he had sold her evidence that would put him in prison. Might have killed her when she came back for more.

  “She didn’t mention any names,” Davis said.

  “Hardly necessary,” Elliot said. “Looking for pot hunters around Bluff, you’d go see Old Man Houk. Or one of his friends. Or hired hands.”

  Bluff, Leaphorn thought. Maybe he would go there and talk to Houk. It must be the same Houk. Th
e surviving father of the drowned murderer. The memories flooded back. Such tragedy burns deep into the brain.

  “Something else you might need to know,” Davis said. “Ellie had a pistol.”

  Leaphorn waited.

  “She kept it in the same drawer with that purse.”

  “It wasn’t there,” Leaphorn said.

  “No. It wasn’t,” Davis said. “I guess she took it with her.”

  Yes, Leaphorn thought. He would go to Bluff and talk to Houk. As Leaphorn remembered him, he was a most unusual man.

  SEVEN

  JIM CHEE SAT on the edge of his bunk, rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, cleared his throat, and considered the uneasiness that had troubled his sleep. Too much death. The disturbed earth littered with too many bones. He put that thought aside. Was there enough water left in the tank of his little aluminum trailer to afford a shower? The answer was perhaps. But it wasn’t a new problem. Chee long ago had developed a method for minimizing its effects. He filled his coffeepot ready for perking. He filled a drinking glass as a tooth-brushing reserve and a mustard jar for the sweat bath he was determined to take.

  Chee climbed down the riverbank carrying the jar, a paper cup, and a tarpaulin. At his sweat bath in the willows beside the San Juan, he collected enough driftwood to heat his rocks, filled the cup with clean, dry sand, started his fire, and sat, legs crossed, waiting and thinking. No profit in thinking of Janet Pete—that encounter represented a humiliation that could be neither avoided nor minimized. Any way he figured it, the cost would be $900, plus Janet Pete’s disdain. He thought instead of last night, of the two bodies being photographed, being loaded into the police van by the San Juan County deputies. He thought of the pots, carefully wrapped in newspapers inside the garbage bags.

  When the rocks were hot enough and the fire had burned itself down to coals, he covered the sweat bath frame with the tarp, slid under it. He squatted, singing the sweat bath songs that the Holy People had taught the first clans, the songs to force contamination and sickness from the body. He savored the dry heat, conscious of muscles relaxing, perspiration seeping from his skin, trickling behind his ears, down his back, wet against his flanks. He poured a palmful of water from the jar into his hand and sprinkled it onto the rocks, engulfing himself in an explosion of steam. He inhaled this hot fog deeply, felt his body slick with moisture. He was dizzy now, free. Concern for bones and Buicks vanished in the hot darkness. Chee was conscious instead of his lungs at work, of open pores, supple muscles, of his own vigorous health. Here was his hozro—his harmony with what surrounded him.

  When he threw back the tarp and emerged, rosy with body heat and streaming sweat, he felt light of head, light of foot, generally wonderful. He rubbed himself down with the sand he’d collected, climbed back to the trailer, and took his shower. Chee added to the desert dweller’s habitual frugality with water the special caution that those who live in trailers relearn each time they cover themselves with suds and find there’s nothing left in the reservoir. He soaped a small area, rinsed it, then soaped another, hurried by the smell of his coffee perking. His Navajo genes spared him the need to shave again for probably a week, but he shaved anyway. It was a way to delay the inevitable.

  That was delayed a bit more by the lack of a telephone in Chee’s trailer. He used the pay phone beside the convenience store on the highway. Janet Pete wasn’t at her office. Maybe, the receptionist said, she had gone down to the Justice building, to the police station. She had been worried about her new car. Chee dialed the station. Three call-back messages for him, two from Janet Pete of DNA, the tribal legal service, one from Lieutenant Leaphorn. Leaphorn had just called and talked to Captain Largo. The captain then had left the message for Chee to call Leaphorn at his home number in Window Rock after 6:00 P.M. Had Pete left any messages? Yes, with the last call she had said to tell him she wanted to pick up her car.

  Chee called Pete’s home number. He tapped his fingers nervously as the telephone rang. There was a click.

  “Sorry I can’t come to the phone now,” Pete’s voice said. “If you will leave a message after the tone sounds, I will call you.”

  Chee listened to the tone, and the silence following it. He could think of nothing sensible to say, and hung up. Then he drove over to Tso’s garage. Surely the damage hadn’t been as bad as he remembered.

  The damage was exactly as he’d remembered. The car squatted on Tso’s towing dolly, discolored with dust, the front wheel grotesquely misaligned, paint scraped from the fender, the little clips that once held Janet Pete’s favorite chrome strip holding nothing. A small dent in the door. A large dent marring the robin’s-egg blue of the rear fender. Looking crippled and dirty.

  “Not so terrible,” Tso said. “Nine fifty to eleven hundred dollars and it’s good as it was. But she really ought to fix all those problems it had when you first drove it in.” Tso was wiping the grease from his hands in a gesture that reminded Chee of greedy anticipation. “Grabby brakes, slack steering, all that.”

  “I’m going to need some credit,” Chee said.

  Tso thought about that, his face full of remembered debts, of friendships violated. Chee’s thoughts of Tso, always warm, began turning cool. While they did, Janet Pete’s motor pool sedan pulled up beside the building. The front door opened. Janet Pete emerged. She looked at the Buick, at two other cars awaiting Tso’s ministrations, and gave Chee a dazzling smile.

  “Where’s my Buick?” she asked. “How did it run? Did you…”

  The question trailed off. Janet Pete looked again at the Buick.

  “My God,” she said. “Was anybody killed?”

  “Well,” Chee said. He cleared his throat. “You see, I was driving down…”

  “Bad shocks,” Tso said. “Slack steering. But Chee here took it out anyway. Sort of a safety check.” Tso shrugged, made a wry face. “Could have been killed,” he said.

  Which, if you thought about it right, was perhaps true, Chee thought. His displeasure with Tso was swept away by a wave of gratitude.

  He made a depreciating gesture. “I should have been more careful,” he said. “Tso warned me.”

  Janet was staring at the Buick, reconciling what she saw with what she had left. “They told me everything was fine,” she said.

  “Odometer set back,” Tso said. “Brake lining unevenly worn. U-joint loose. Steering loose. Needed lots of work.”

  Janet Pete bit her lip. Thought. “Can I use your telephone?”

  Chee overheard only part of it. Getting past the salesman to the sales manager to the general manager. It seemed to Chee that the general manager mostly listened.

  “Officer Chee doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt, but I haven’t heard from his lawyer…mechanic’s list of defects shows…that’s a third-degree misdemeanor in New Mexico, odometer tampering is. Yes, well, a jury can decide that for us. I think the fine is five thousand dollars. You can pick it up at Tso’s garage in Shiprock. He tells me he won’t release it until you pay his costs. Towing, inspection, I guess. My lawyer told me to make sure that none of your mechanics worked on it until he decides…”

  On the way to get a cup of coffee in Janet Pete’s motor pool sedan, Chee said, “He’ll have his mechanics fix everything.”

  “Probably,” Janet said. “Wouldn’t be much of a lawsuit anyway. Not worth it.”

  “Just letting him sweat a little?”

  “You know, they wouldn’t try that on you. You’re a man. They pull that crap on women. They figure they can sell a woman on the baby blue paint and the chrome stripe. Sell us a lemon.”

  “Um,” Chee said, which provoked a period of silence.

  “What really happened?” Janet asked.

  “Steering failed,” Chee said, feeling uneasy.

  “Come on,” Janet said.

  “Tried to make a turn,” Chee said. “Missed it.”

  “How fast? Come on. What was going on?”

  So Jim Chee explained it, all about the missing trailer,
and the missing backhoe, and Captain Largo, and that led to what he had found last night.

  Janet had heard about it on the radio. Over coffee she was full of questions, not all of them about the crime.

  “I heard you were a hatathali,” she said. “That you sing the Blessing Way.”

  “I’m still learning,” Chee said. “The only one I performed was in the family. A relative. But I know it now. If anybody wants one done.”

  “How do you get time off? Isn’t that a problem? Eight days, isn’t it? Or do you sing the shorter version?”

  “No problem yet. No customers.”

  “Another thing I hear about you—you have a belagana girlfriend. A teacher over at Crownpoint.”

  “She’s gone away,” Chee said, and felt that odd sensation of hearing, from some external point, his voice saying the words. “Gone away to be a graduate student in Wisconsin.”

  “Oh,” Janet said.

  “We write,” Chee said. “I sent her a pregnant cat once.”

  Janet looked surprised. “Testing her patience?”

  Chee tried to think how to explain it. A stupid thing to send to Mary Landon, stupid to mention it now.

  “At the time I thought it had some symbolism,” he said.

  Janet let the silence live, Navajo fashion. If he had more he wanted to say about Mary Landon and the cat, he would say it. He liked her for that. But he had nothing more to say.

  “It was that cat you told me about? Last summer when you’d arrested that old man I was representing. The cat the coyote was after?”

  Chee was stirring his coffee, head down but conscious that Janet Pete was studying him. He nodded, remembering. Janet Pete had suggested he provide his stray cat with a coyote-proof home and they had gone to a Farmington pet store and bought one of those plastic and wire cages used to ship pets on airliners. He had used it, eventually, to ship the abandoned white man’s cat back to the white man’s world.

  “Symbolism,” Janet Pete said. Now she was stirring her coffee, looking down at the swirl the spoon made.

  To the top of her head, Chee said: “Belagana cat can’t adapt to the Navajo ways. Starves. Eaten by coyote. My stray cat experiment fails. I accept the failure. Cat goes back to the world of the belaganas, where there’s more to eat and the coyote doesn’t get you.” It was more than Chee had intended to say. He was torn. He wanted to talk about Mary Landon, about the going away of Mary Landon. But he wasn’t comfortable talking about it to Janet Pete.