Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 15 - The Wailing Wind

by The Wailing Wind(lit)

  Chee parked just down the street from the fbi offices, pushed the buzzer, identified himself, and was clicked in. He made his way through the metal detector and past the row of cubicles where agents did their paperwork, then found Osborne awaiting him in a hearing room. They exchanged the usual greetings.

  "Well," said Osborne, "what's new?"

  "I've had to change my thinking about James Peshlakai," Chee said. "I think you'll want to take a close look at him."

  "Why? Something happen?"

  "Remember what I started telling you about a curing ceremony that traditionals have after being involved with death, or corpses, or violence? Well, I checked on that. Peshlakai has arranged one."

  Osborne was sitting behind his desk, studying Chee. He nodded.

  "He contacted a singer and arranged it the same day Doherty's body was found. In the morning."

  Osborne's expression was inscrutable. "Was it something called a Big Star Way?" he asked. "Is that it?"

  Short silence while Chee digested this. "Well, yes," he said. "That's the one."

  "He told us he had to be out of jail in October to have that done."

  "Out? You picked him up?"

  "We got a warrant. Searched his place and his truck. The truck seems to be clean, so far anyway, but there was dried blood on a shirt. He'd tried to wash it, but getting blood out isn't easy. Blood on a pair of pants, too. It's not Peshlakai's blood type, but it matches Doherty's. The forensic people are doing DNA checks now."

  Chee had taken a chair across from Osborne. He got up now, hesitated. Sat down again. He felt like a fool. And yet something still seemed wrong about this. One thing, specifically: No one is more conditioned against violence than those who spend years and years learning the curing ways of the Dineh.

  "I guess he's held in the county jail?" Chee said. "I'd like to talk to him."

  "Why not," Osborne said. "I hope you have better luck than we did."

  "Did he say he wanted a lawyer?"

  "We told him the court would appoint him a public defender. All he said was something like it being a bad business. It wasn't good to talk about."

  "That's it?"

  "Pretty much. Except we've found another slug in the sand out at that old placer site. It's the right caliber to match Peshlakai's rifle, but we don't have a report from the laboratory yet. And then he told us he had to be released in time for the sing, or whatever you call it."

  "The slug could have been shot at anything," Chee said.

  "Obviously," Osborne said. "They're looking for traces of blood, or bone, or fabric on it."

  "Have you learned anything about the cellphone?"

  Osborne considered that a moment. He opened his desk drawer, extracted a pencil, tapped it on the desk, and said: "Cellphone? Like what?"

  "Like I was surprised he had one. Do you know where he got it? Or why?"

  "The why looks obvious to me," Osborne said. "No telephone lines in there."

  "I meant, who would he be calling? Who would he know who'd have a telephone number. That sort of thing. I presume you checked his calling log."

  Osborne tapped with the pencil again, looking thoughtful.

  Chee grinned. "Let me guess what you're thinking. You're remembering that when you checked in here, you were warned that one of your predecessors got in trouble for saying some things that maybe he shouldn't have said to me, and it was generally believed I had unethically and illegally taped that call-or at very least had caused people to believe I had taped it. Therefore, you're being careful. I don't blame you. Part of that is true, or partly true. But we have a different situation here. We're on the same side of this one, in the first place. Besides, I don't have any way to tape this."

  Osborne was grinning, too.

  "Since you're not wired, I'll admit I heard about that business, and I also heard it turned out you were right. We had the wrong guy in that one. But this time it looks like we have the right one. And if we don't, if the dna turns out wrong or we don't find other evidence, then he's free as a bird."

  He reopened the drawer, put the pencil away. "So what are you asking me?"

  "Who Peshlakai was calling on that cellphone."

  "Not much of anybody," Osborne said. "He had it a couple of years and only thirty-seven calls were logged in that time. Most of them to his daughter over at Keams Canyon. A couple of other kinfolks, a doctor in Gallup."

  "How about any calls to Wiley Denton?"

  Osborne looked thoughtful. "Denton?" he said. "Now, why would Mr. Peshlakai be calling Mr. Denton?"

  "How about like you'd call a taxi," Chee said, swallowing a twinge of resentment at this game playing. "Perhaps he wanted a ride home."

  "From where?"

  "How about from where he'd parked Mr. Doherty's body in Mr. Doherty's pickup truck?"

  Osborne laughed. "I guess that would play," he said. "Why do all cops think so much alike?"

  "Why don't you just tell me?"

  "I don't know," Osborne said. "Yes, Peshlakai called Mr. Denton a total of thirteen times. Two of them were the first calls charged to the telephone and calls twelve and thirteen were recorded the day Doherty was killed."

  Chee considered this, remembering the conversation with Bernie, Leaphorn, and Professor Bourbonette at Leaphorn's home. He shook his head. As Bernie had said, now all they needed was a motive that fit a traditionalist shaman and a wealthy white man with a missing wife and an obsession with finding a legendary gold mine.

  They knew Chee at the McKinley County Detention Center, of course, but that didn't help. The bureaucratic machinery had worked faster than usual. Someone named Eleanor Knoblock seemed to have been assigned as Hostiin Peshlakai's public defender, and Ms. Knoblock had signed an order providing that no one be allowed to interview her client without arranging it with her and speaking to Peshlakai in her presence. Chee jotted down her telephone number, but he decided to let things rest for the day. He'd already made his full quota of mistakes and had enough problems to worry about.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When his telephone rang, Joe Leaphorn usually dropped whatever he was doing and hurried over to answer it-a habit he suspected was probably common with lonely widowers whose only conversation tends to be talking back to the television set. Having Professor Louisa Bourbonette adopt his guest room as her base of operations for her oral history research had taken some of the edge off that problem, and this morning he wanted to think instead of talk. The solution to the riddle of Linda Denton and the odd and illogical business with Wiley Denton's affairs with gold-mine maps hung just at the edge of his vision-almost in sight, but always dancing away.

  The phone rang again, and again. It occurred to Leaphorn that Louisa had taken her tape recorder up to Mexican Hat yesterday to capture the recollections of an elderly Mormon rancher. She'd returned long after he'd retired for the night, and this damned telephone was certain to awaken her. He picked it up, said a grumpy-sounding "Hello."

  "It's Jim Chee, Lieutenant. Do you have time to listen to a report?"

  "It's Mr. Leaphorn now, Jim," Leaphorn said. "Or just Joe." He'd told Chee that a hundred times, but it didn't seem to stick. "But go ahead."

  "I guess the bottom line is they've arrested Hostiin Peshlakai in the Doherty homicide. Found blood on his clothing that matched Doherty's type, and they're checking for a dna match. They also found another slug at the placer site that matches his caliber. Checking that for everything, too."

  "Be damned," Leaphorn said. "What does Peshlakai say?"

  "He says he doesn't want to talk about it. Didn't ask for a lawyer, but they assigned him a public defender named Knoblock. A woman. Do you know her?"

  "I've met her," Leaphorn said. "Long time ago. She's tough."

  "I couldn't get in to talk to Peshlakai," Chee said.

  Leaphorn chuckled. "That doesn't surprise me. What do you think he'd tell you?"

  "Probably not much. Also, the morning Doherty's body was found-I think before Bernie found it-P
eshlakai contacted a singer and arranged to have a Big Star Way done for him."

  "Well, now," Leaphorn said. "That sounds a little like a confession, doesn't it?" He chuckled. "But can you imagine the U.S. district attorney trying to understand that, and then trying to explain it to a jury in Albuquerque?"

  "Not a confession, more like an implication. Now I'm getting to the part of this that will interest you. Remember that cellphone Bernie noticed in his hogan? Well, he called Wiley Denton on it twice the day Doherty was shot."

  That surprised Leaphorn. He said, "Well, now."

  "Two calls. The first one was eleven minutes long. The second one, less than three minutes."

  Leaphorn sighed and waited. There would be more.

  "Another interesting thing. He'd had the phone a couple of years. Made only thirty-seven calls. The first two he made after he got the phone were also to Wiley Denton."

  "Sounds like Wiley might have bought it for him, you think?"

  "Yeah," Chee said. "But why?"

  "I'll hand that one back to you, Jim. You met the man. Talked to him at his hogan. You think he could be on Denton's payroll for some reason or other?"

  "Maybe," Chee said. "But, no, I don't think so. How about you? Do you think the two of them are involved in some sort of weird conspiracy?"

  "Denton using the old man as a watchman? Maybe I've got to think about this."

  "Well," said Chee, "if you have any constructive ideas, I hope you'll tell me about them. I'm going to make another effort to talk to Peshlakai."

  "Good idea," Leaphorn said. "I think I'll go have another visit with Wiley Denton."

  But Denton's housekeeper said Mr. Denton was not home, and, no, he probably wouldn't be back very soon because he had gone over to the Jicarilla Reservation to look at one of the pump jacks he had on a well over there.

  Leaphorn left a message asking Denton to call, that he needed to talk to him. Then he got out his notebook and the map he'd been sketching out of this complicated affair and went over the way his thinking had developed. At the end of the notes he'd jotted after his talk with the Garcias, he found "Deputy Lorenzo Perez. Maybe he took wailing seriously. Is he the Perez I know?"

  The woman who answered the telephone at the sheriffs office said Deputy Perez had retired a couple of years before. But, yes, Ozzie Price was in.

  "You again, Joe?" Ozzie said. "What now?"

  "I'm looking for Lorenzo Perez," Leaphorn said. "Didn't he used to be undersheriff?"

  "That's him," Ozzie said. "But that was under a different sheriff, and that was before his wife left him and he got into heavy drinking."

  "He's still in Gallup?"

  "Oh, yeah," Ozzie said. "You want to talk to him?"

  Leaphorn said he did, and waited. In a long minute, Ozzie provided three numbers. One was a street address, one was Perez's phone number there, and the third was the number of the Old 66 Tavern. "Try that last one most evenings," Ozzie said.

  "Was he sent out on that Halloween call to Fort Wingate? The one we were talking about the other day?"

  "He was," Ozzie said. "And he got all wrapped up in it. I think that was when he was having wife troubles, and maybe it gave him something else to think about. Anyway, he kept nagging at the sheriff to look into it more. He thought Denton had killed his wife out there. Kept thinking it even after it was so damned obvious Denton couldn't have done it." Ozzie laughed. "Denton was busy at home killing McKay."

  Now Leaphorn's phone call found Lorenzo Perez at home, and Perez remembered Lieutenant Leaphorn.

  "Hey," he said. "Hey, now. Talking to you takes me back a ways. You remember that time we caught that rustler that had rebuilt his house trailer so he could drive calves into it?"

  Leaphorn remembered it, but he managed to steer Perez into the Halloween call. "They say you took the call on that one. It always seemed funny to me. Like more than a prank."

  This produced a silence. Leaphorn cleared his throat. "Lorenzo. You still there?"

  "I hope you're not just joking me," Perez said, sounding grim. "I've had enough of that."

  "I'm not. I think something serious was going on out there that night."

  "Well, I got joked about it, and made fun of, until I got just damn sick of it," Perez said. "I kept looking into it when I could. Kept trying to get the sheriff to get the army to do some sort of a general search. We didn't have the manpower to do it, of course, hundred and something thousand acres, lots of old empty buildings and damn near a thousand of those huge old bunkers. But the army could have done it. Would have, I'll bet you, if the sheriff had just got serious about it and made some sort of demand. But he just laughed. Said they didn't even have a missing person report. Nothing at all to go on."

  "I'd like to talk to you about it," Leaphorn said.

  They met at the coffee shop in the Gallup Mall.

  Perez was one of those New Mexico Hispanics whose face suggests Castile and the Conquistadores more than Mexico. His gray hair was cut bristle-short, as was his mustache, and his very dark eyes examined Leaphorn as if looking for some sort of understanding.

  "Driving over," he said, "I was thinking I don't know what I can tell you that's going to help whatever you're doing. I just talked to the kids that night, talked to them several other times, in fact, and kept going out there and nosing around. But I don't know how I can convince you that we had a murder, or something like it, committed out there that night."

  Having said that, he picked up his menu, glanced at it, put it down, and shook his head. "I hate things I can't understand," he said.

  "Me, too," Leaphorn said. He told Perez of his arrangement with Wiley Denton, of what the students he'd talked to had told him, and of his own hunch that Linda Denton might have been the wailing woman.

  "About the only thing I can tell you that you might not know is that Wiley Denton told me he'd given Linda an expensive little disk player. One of those things with headphones that you carry around with you. When she left that morning to go to a lunch with some women friends, she took it with her."

  "No," Perez said. "I didn't know that. The kids thought they heard music. At least Gracella Garcia did."

  "And Mrs. Hano out at the Fort Wingate archives office told me McKay was out there that morning checking on something or other and that he had a woman in the car with him."

  "Hey," said Perez, leaning forward. "Mrs. Denton?"

  "She said she didn't know who it was. She just noticed a woman seemed to be sleeping in the car, and that McKay told her it was his wife."

  "Did you check on that?"

  "It wasn't McKay's wife," Leaphorn said. "She was at work in Gallup. McKay called her there."

  "So he was lying to Mrs. Hano."

  "So it would seem," Leaphorn said.

  "Gracella was the one who seemed so certain about hearing music," Perez said. "A couple of the others thought it might have been the wind whistling, or maybe their imagination."

  "I noticed that," Leaphorn said.

  "She seemed like a pretty level-headed-" Perez stopped. "Wait a minute. When did Mrs. Hano talk to McKay? See the woman sleeping in his car?"

  "About noon, I think," Leaphorn said. "I've got it in my notes."

  "Gracella told me she'd noticed a car out there middle of the afternoon. She said they see army vehicles and trucks out there now and then, but this was a light-colored civilian sedan. What color was McKay's car?"

  "I have no idea," Leaphorn said. "But I'll see if I can find out."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Learning the color of Marvin McKay's sedan proved to be so easy that Leaphorn found his whole attitude toward this dismal affair with Denton brightening. Deputy Price had told him no one had claimed McKay's few personal belongings. Not surprising since, aside from the few dollars in his wallet, they had little if any value. And then Price had described Peggy McKay as a common-law wife-which meant that, sans any proof of her relationship, getting personal items back would be complicated. But the car was anothe
r matter.

  It had been parked at Denton's place, and it almost certainly remained parked there for days since this homicide wasn't one that received any normal criminal investigation. McKay wasn't charged with anything. His role was victim. Who cared about his car? Sooner or later, George Billie might have gotten tired of looking at it, called the sheriff, and had it towed away. Or maybe wired the ignition, drove it away himself, and sold it to the car strippers.