“You think that might be why the Breedlove Corporation would pay me the twenty thousand?”
She looked over her glasses at him. “That’s an unkind thought,” she said, “but I confess it occurred to me.”
“Even though Hal’s widow owns the place now?”
“She owns it, unless they can prove she had something to do with killing him. We had our lawyer look into that. She wanted to extend a mortgage on the place.” She looked mildly apologetic. “Can’t take chances, you know, with your investors’ money.”
“Did you extend the mortgage?”
Mrs. Rivera folded her arms again. But finally she said, “Well, yes, we did.”
Leaphorn grinned. “Could I guess then that you don’t think she had anything to do with killing Breedlove? Or anyway, nobody is ever going to prove it?”
“I just own a piece of this bank,” Mrs. Rivera said. “There’s people I’m responsible to. So I’d have to agree with you. I thought the loan was safe enough.”
“Still do?”
She nodded, remembering. Then shook her head.
“When it happened, I mean when he just disappeared like that, I had my doubts. I always thought Elisa was a fine young lady. Good family. Raised right. She used to help take care of her grandmother when the old lady had the cancer. But you know, it sure did look suspicious. Hal inherits the Lazy B and then the very same week—or pretty close to that, anyway—he’s gone. So you start thinking she might of had herself another man somewhere and—well, you know.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Leaphorn said. “What do you think now?”
“I was wrong,” she said.
“You sound certain,” Leaphorn said.
“You live in Window Rock,” she said. “That’s a little town like Mancos. You think some widow woman there with a rich husband lost somewhere could have something going with a boyfriend and everybody wouldn’t know about it?”
Leaphorn laughed. “I’m a widower,” he said. “And I met this nice lady from Flagstaff on some police work I was doing. The very first time I had lunch with her, when I got back to the office they were planning my wedding.”
“It’s the same way out here,” Mrs. Rivera said. “About the time everybody around here decided that Hal was gone for good, they started marrying Elisa off to the Castro boy.”
Leaphorn smiled. “You know,” he said, “we cops tend to get too high an opinion of ourselves. When I was up here asking around after Hal disappeared I went away thinking there wasn’t a boyfriend in the background.”
“You got here too quick,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Here at Mancos we let the body get cold before the talking starts.”
“I guess nothing came of that romance,” Leaphorn said. “At least she’s still a widow.”
“From what I heard, it wasn’t from lack of Tommy Castro’s trying. About the time she got out of high school everybody took for granted they were a pair. Then Hal showed up.” Mrs. Rivera shrugged, expression rueful. “They made a kind of foursome for a while.”
“Four?”
“Well, sometimes it was five of ’em. This George Shaw, he’d come out with Hal sometimes and Eldon would go. He and Castro were the old heads, the coaches. They’d go elk hunting together. Camping. Rock climbing. Growing up with her dad raising her, and then her big brother, Elisa was quite a tomboy.”
“What broke up the group? Was it the country boy couldn’t compete with the big-city glamour?”
“Oh, I guess that was some of it,” she said. “But Eldon had a falling-out with Tommy. They’re too much alike. Both bull-headed.”
Leaphorn digested that. Emma’s big brother hadn’t liked him, either, but that hadn’t bothered Emma. “Do you know what happened?”
“I heard Eldon thought Tommy was out of line making a play for his little sister. She was just out of high school. Eight or ten years between ’em, I guess.”
“So Elisa was willing to let big brother monitor her love life,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t hear about that happening much these days.”
“Me neither,” Mrs. Rivera said, and laughed. “But you know,” she said, suddenly dead serious, “Elisa is an unusual person. Her mother died when she was about in the second grade, but Elisa takes after her. Has a heart big as a pumpkin and a cast-iron backbone, just like her mother. When old man Demott was losing the ranch it was Elisa’s mama who held everything together. Got her husband out of the bars, and out of jail a time or two. One of those people who are aways there in the background looking out for other people. You know?”
Mrs. Rivera paused at this to see what Leaphorn thought of it. Leaphorn, not sure of where this was leading, just nodded.
“So there Elisa was after Hal was out of the picture. Tommy was beginning to court her again, and Eldon wanted to run him off. They even got into a yelling match down at the High Country Inn. So there’s Elisa with two men to take care of—and knowing how she is I have a theory about that.” She paused again. “It’s just a theory.”
“I’d like to hear it,” Leaphorn said.
“I think she loved them both,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But if she married the Castro boy, what in the wide world was Eldon going to do? It was her ranch now. Eldon loved it but he wouldn’t stay around and work for Tommy, and Tommy wouldn’t want him to.” She sighed. “If we had a Shakespeare around here, they could have made a tragedy out of it.”
“So this Castro was a rock climber, too,” Leaphorn said. “Does he still live here?”
“If you got gas down at the Texaco station you might have seen him. That’s his garage.”
“What do you think? Did this affection for Castro linger on after she married Hal?”
“If it did, she didn’t let it show.” She thought about that awhile, looked sad, shook her head. “Far as you could tell being an outsider, she was the loyal wife. I couldn’t see much to love in Hal myself but every woman’s different about that and Elisa was the sort who—the more that was wrong with a man, the more she’d stand behind him. She mourned for him. Matter of fact, I think she still does. You hardly ever see her looking happy.”
“How about her brother, then? You said he was sort of strange.”
She shrugged. “Well, he liked to climb up cliffs. To me, that’s strange.”
“Somebody said he taught Hal the sport.”
“That’s not quite the way it was. After old Edgar got the place away from Demott’s daddy, Hal and Shaw would come out in the summers. Shaw had been climbing already. So he didn’t need much teaching. And Demott and Castro were already into climbing some when they had time. Eldon was about six or eight years older than Hal and more of an athlete. From what I heard he was the best of the bunch.”
A customer came in and the cool smell of autumn and the sound of laughter followed him through the doorway from the street. Leaphorn could think of just one more pertinent question.
“You mentioned Hal Breedlove had overdue note payments when he disappeared. How’d that get paid off?”
It was the sort of bank business question he wasn’t sure she would answer. Neither was she. But finally she shook her head and laughed.
“Well, you sort of guessed right about not having it secured the way we should have. Old family, and all. So we weren’t pressing. But we’d sold off another loan to a Denver bank. Made it to a feedlot operator who liked to go off to Vegas and try to beat the blackjack tables. With people like that you make sure you have it secured. Wrote it on sixty-two head of bred heifers he had grazing up in a Forest Service lease. The Denver people foreclosed on it and they called us for help on claiming the property.”
She laughed. “Those Denver people had sixty-two head of cows out in the mountains grazing on a Forest Service lease and not an idea in the world about what to do with them. So I told ’em Eldon Demott might round them up for ’em and truck them over to Durango to the auction barn. And he did.”
“He got paid enough for that to pay off Breedlove’s note?”
; She laughed again. “Not directly. But I mentioned we made the loan on bred heifers. So we sold the Denver bank a mortgage on sixty-two head, but when Demott went to get ’em, they weren’t pregnant anymore. They were mama cows.”
She paused, wanting to see if Leaphorn understood the implications of this. Leaphorn said: “Ah, yes. He didn’t get back from Las Vegas to brand ’em.”
“Ah, yes, is right,” Mrs. Rivera said. “In fact he didn’t get back at all. The sheriff has a warrant out for him. So there was Eldon with sixty-two cows loaded up and all those calves left over. They were all still slicks. Not any of ’em branded yet. Nobody in the world had title to ’em. Nobody owned ’em but the Lord in heaven.”
“Enough to pay off the note?”
“He might’ve had a little bit left over,” she said, and looked at Leaphorn over her glasses. “Wait a minute now,” she said. “Don’t you get any wrong ideas. I don’t actually know what in the world happened to those calves. And I’ve been talking way too much and it’s time to get some work done.”
Back at his car, Leaphorn fished his cellular telephone from the glove compartment, dialed his Window Rock number, and punched in the proper code to retrieve any messages accumulated by his answering machine. The first call was from George Shaw, asking if he had anything to report and saying he could be reached at room 23, Navajo Inn. The second call was from Sergeant Addison Deke at the Chinle police station.
“Better give me a call, Joe,” Deke said. “It probably doesn’t amount to anything but you asked me to sort of keep an eye on Amos Nez and you might like to hear about this.”
Leaphorn didn’t check on whether there was a third call. He dialed the Arizona area code and Chinle police department number. Yes, Sergeant Deke was in.
He sounded apologetic. “Probably nothing, Joe,” he said. “Probably wasting your time. But after we talked, I told the boys to keep it in their minds that whoever shot Nez might try it again. You know, keep an eye out. Be looking.” Deke hesitated.
Leaphorn, who almost never allowed impatience to show, said, “What did they see?”
“Nothing, actually. But Tazbah Lovejoy came in this morning—I don’t think you know him. He’s a young fellow out of recruit training two years ago. Anyway Tazbah told me he’d run into one of those Resource Enforcement Agency rangers having coffee, and this guy was telling him about seeing a poacher up on the rim of Canyon del Muerto yesterday.”
Sergeant Deke hesitated again. This time Leaphorn gave him a moment to organize his thoughts.
“The ranger told Tazbah he was checking on some illegal firewood cutting, and he stopped at that turnout overlook down into del Muerto. Wanted to take a leak. He was getting that done, standing there, looking out across the canyon, and he kept seeing reflections off something or other across the canyon. No road over there, you know, and he wondered about it. So he went to his truck and got his binoculars to see what he could see. There was a fellow over there with binoculars. The reflections turned out to be coming off the lenses, I guess. Anyway, he had a rifle, too.”
“Deer hunter, maybe,” Leaphorn said.
Deke laughed. “Joe,” he said. “How long’s it been since you’ve been deer hunting? That’d be out on that tongue of the plateau between del Muerto and Black Rock Canyon. Nobody’s seen a deer over there since God knows when.”
“Maybe it was an Anglo deer hunter then. Did he get a good look at him?”
“I don’t think so. The ranger thought it was funny. Hunter over there and nothing to hunt. But I guess he was going to call it attempted poaching, or conspiracy to poach. So he drove back up to Wheatfields campground and tried to get back in there as far as he could on that old washed-out track. But he gave up on it.”
“Did he get a good enough look to say man or woman?”
“I asked Tazbah and he said the ranger didn’t know for sure. He said they were thinking man, on grounds a woman wouldn’t be stupid enough to go hunting where there wasn’t anything to shoot at. I thought you’d like to know about it because it was just up the canyon a half mile or so from where that sniper shot old Amos.”
“Which would put it just about right over the Nez place,” Leaphorn said.
“Exactly,” Deke said. “You could jump right down on his roof.”
ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE was parked at sunrise on the access road to Beclabito Day School because he wanted to talk to Officer Teddy Begayaye at a private place. Officer Begayaye would be driving to the office from his home at Tec Nos Pos. Chee wanted to tell him that vacation schedules were being posted today, that he was getting the Thanksgiving week vacation time he had asked for. He wanted Begayaye to provide him some sort of justification (beyond his twelve years of seniority) for approving it. Another member of Chee’s criminal investigation squad wanted the same days off, namely, Officer Manuelito. She had applied for them first, and Chee wanted to give her some reason (beyond her total lack of seniority) why she didn’t get it—thereby avoiding friction in the department. Thus Chee had parked where Begayaye could see him instead of hiding his patrol car behind the day school sign in hope of nabbing a speeder.
But now Chee wasn’t thinking of vacation schedules. He was thinking of the date he had tonight with Janet Pete, back from whatever law business had taken her to Washington. Janet shared an apartment at Gallup with Louise Guard, another of the DNA lawyers. Chee had hopes that Louise, as much as he liked her, would be away somewhere for the evening (or, better, had found herself another apartment). He wanted to show Janet a videotape he’d borrowed of a traditional Navajo wedding. She had more or less agreed, with qualifications, that they would do the ceremony the Navajo way and that he could pick the haatalii to perform it. But she clearly had her doubts about it. Janet’s mother had something more socially correct in mind. However, if he lucked out and Ms. Guard actually had shoved off for somewhere, he would hold the videotape for another evening. He and Janet hadn’t seen each other for a week and there were better ways to occupy the evening.
The vehicle rolling down U.S. 64 toward him was a camper truck, dirty and plastered with tourist stickers. Dick Finch’s vehicle. It slowed to a crawl, with Finch making a series of hand signals. Most of them were meaningless to Chee, but one of them said “follow me.”
Chee started his engine and followed, driving eastward on 64 with Finch speeding. Chee topped the ridge. Finch’s truck had already disappeared, but a plume of dust hanging over the dirt road that led past the Rattlesnake pump station betrayed it. Chee made the left turn into the dust—thinking how quickly this arid climate could replace wet snow with blowable dirt. Just out of sight of the highway the camper was parked, with Finch standing beside it.
Finch walked over, smiling that smile of his. Lots of white teeth.
“Good morning,” Chee said.
“Captain Largo wants us to work together,” Finch said. “So do my people. Get along with the Navajos, they tell me. And the Utes and the Zunis, Arizona State Police, the county mounties, and everybody. Good policy, don’t you think?”
“Why not?” Chee said.
“Well, there might be a reason why not,” Finch said, still smiling, waiting for Chee to say, “Like what?” Chee just looked at him until Finch tired of the game.
“For example, somebody’s been taking a little load of heifers now and then off that grazing lease west of your Ship Rock mountain. They’re owned by an old codger who lives over near Toadlena. He rents grass from a fella named Maryboy, and his livestock is all mixed up with Maryboy’s and nobody keeps track of the cattle.”
Finch waited again. So did Chee. What Finch was telling him so far was common enough. People who had grazing leases let other people use them for a fee. One of the problems of catching cattle thieves was the animals might be gone a month before anyone noticed. Finally Chee said: “What’s your point?”
“Point is, as we say, I’ve got reason to believe that the fella picking up these animals is this fella I’ve been trying to nail. He comes
back to the mountain about every six months or so and picks up a load. Does the same thing over around Bloomfield, and Whitehorse Lake, and Burnham, and other places. When I catch him, a lot of this stealing stops. My job gets easier. So a couple of months ago, I found where he got the last ones he took from that Ship Rock pasture. The son of a bitch was throwing hay over a fence at a place where he could back his truck in. Chumming them up like he was a fisherman. I imagine he’d blow his horn when he threw the hay over. Cows are curious. Worse than cats. They’d come to see about it. And they’ve got good memories. Do it about twice, and when they hear a horn they think of good alfalfa hay. Come running.”
Finch laughed. Chee knew exactly where this was leading.
“Manuelito spotted that hay, too,” Chee said. “She noticed how the fence posts had been dug up there, loosened so they can be pulled up. She took me out to show me.”
“I saw you,” Finch said. “Watched you through my binoculars from about two miles away. Trouble is, our cow thief was probably watching, too. He’s baited that place three times now. No use wasting any more hay. It’s time to collect his cows.”
Finch stared at Chee, his smile still genial. Chee felt his face flushing, which seemed to be the reaction Finch was awaiting.
“But he ain’t going to do it now, is he? You can bet your ass he’s got a set of binoculars every bit as good as mine, and he’s careful. He sees a police car parked there. Sees a couple of cops tromping around. He’s gone and he won’t be back and a lot of my hard work is down the goddamn tube.”
“This suggests something to me,” Chee said.
“I hoped it would. I hoped it would make you want to learn a little more about this business before you start practicing it.”
“Actually it suggests that you screwed up. You had about four hours of talking to me on that ride up to Mancos, with me listening all the way. You told me about this Zorro you’re trying to catch—and I guess this is him. But you totally forgot to tell me about this trap you were going to spring so we could coordinate. How could you forget something like that?”
The Fallen Man Page 10
