Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 15 - The Wailing Wind

by The Wailing Wind(lit)

  Leaphorn made another call to Denton's place.

  "No," said Mrs. Mendoza, "he's still not home. Like I told you."

  "Maybe you could help me, then," Leaphorn said. "Do you remember the car Mr. McKay drove? What color it was?"

  "I don't pay much attention to cars," said Mrs.Mendoza, sounding out of patience.

  "I just thought you might have remembered what color it was."

  "Why don't you ask his lady about that car? I think she has it. Anyway, she came up here and drove it off."

  "Well, thank you," Leaphorn said. "I will." And he put down the phone and sat a moment feeling stupid. Of course. There would be no reason for the police to impound that vehicle. Judging from what he knew about McKay, the car was probably owned by Peggy. And judging from what he knew about public officials in general, there was no reason to believe anyone would have taken on the authority of having it towed into storage.

  Peggy McKay answered the telephone on the first ring. Yes, she remembered Leaphorn, and yes, she had gotten a friend to drive her out to Denton's place to recover her car. What kind of car was it? A pale-blue Ford Escort. Yes, she still had it.

  Leaphorn thought of the remarkable messiness of Mrs. McKay's house. "Do you know if the car has been through a car wash since your husband's death?"

  Hesitation now, while Peggy McKay considered that.

  "Not really," she said. "I hosed it off myself last spring after a muddy spell."

  "I'd like to come over and take a look at it, if that's all right with you," Leaphorn said.

  "Sure. Why not? I'll be home all day."

  Just out of the driveway, he saw Louisa's car rolling up the street and stopped. So did she, and rolled down her window.

  I'm going into Gallup to talk to Mrs. McKay again," he shouted. "Then maybe if he's home, I'll go see Denton."

  "Why?"

  "I want to tell him he's a liar and I don't want anything to do with him," Leaphorn said.

  "Good for you," said Louisa. "And when you get back I've got some information for you."

  "Like what?" Leaphorn said. But she had closed the window and was parking her car under her favorite tree across the street.

  Peggy McKay hadn't bothered to park her Ford Escort in the shade. It sat in her drive, with its windows rolled down and its grimy pale-blue finish bearing evidence that it hadn't been through a car wash since its hosing last spring. Mrs. McKay appeared in her doorway as Leaphorn got out of his pickup.

  "Feel free," she said, pointing to the car and laughing, "but don't get it dirty."

  "Thanks," Leaphorn said.

  "Have you had any luck? I mean, finding Mrs. Denton?"

  "Not yet," Leaphorn said. He opened the passenger's-side door of the Escort. The interior reminded him of Mrs. McKay's living room.

  "I'm not sure whether I told you," she said, coming down from the porch into her driveway. "I think Denton got off way too easy for shooting Marvin. I think it was a plain premeditated murder."

  She was staring at Leaphorn, awaiting a response.

  "The whole thing left a lot of unanswered questions," he said. And, when that didn't seem adequate, added: "Some pieces left out of the puzzle."

  "What are you looking for in my car?"

  "I guess you could say I'm just hoping to find one of the missing pieces."

  "To find Linda Denton?"

  "Yes," Leaphorn said.

  "Not in that car, you won't," Mrs. McKay said. She walked back into her house and shut the door.

  Leaphorn made another quick inspection of the front-seat area, looked into the back-seat space, opened the trunk of his own car and extracted the cardboard box he kept there to stash his grocery purchases and prevent them from rattling around. He put the box on the driveway and began extracting odds and ends from Mrs. McKay's floorboards-starting with a Baby Ruth wrapper, a crumpled tissue, a paper cup, a wrapper from a McDonald's hamburger, and a cigarette butt. Leaphorn inspected each item, at least with a glance, before adding it to his pile. By the time he had completed his search of both sides of the front seat and moved to the back, his box was almost half filled with wildly assorted trash, evidence that Mrs. McKay was a regular customer of various fast-food establishments and a person who saved Wal-Mart advertising sections, discount coupons, empty cigarette packages, and even the high heel from a black slipper.

  The only thing he found under the floor mats was a torn section from an Arizona road map, and it seemed to have no relevance.

  Some of the stuff he set aside on a handkerchief he'd spread on the front seat-but very little. That included the quarter and dime he'd extracted from behind the passenger's-side seat, an assortment of long blonde hairs he'd carefully picked from under the passenger's-side headrest, a set of pliers he'd extracted from the glovebox, and a Chase Hardware sack and the sales slip he'd found crumpled inside it.

  Leaphorn took time now to inspect the pliers and the slip. The slip had been issued the day before McKay was killed and covered the pliers (an expensive $24.95 set), a crowbar, and a roll of plumber's tape. He had found neither the tape nor the crowbar in the car. Leaphorn found himself imagining Linda Denton being hit on the head with one and bound with the other, and he made a mental note to ask Mrs. McKay about the purchases.

  With the larger trash items out of the way, he removed the rear seat. Under it he found more trash, but nothing more interesting than an advertising flier for last year's Navajo Tribal Fair. Then he borrowed the flashlight from the glovebox, slid belly down onto the front floorboards, and pursued a close-up search there. The light and his probing hand harvested three business cards he'd missed (all from a State Farm Insurance salesman), a sock, another lost dime, what seemed to be a white marble but was actually a gum ball, a bright-red bead, and a small disk of clear glass that Leaphorn presumed at first was the lost face of a cheap watch.

  He was wrong about that. When he held it up for in spection, he saw it was a lens. In fact, it was a progressive-focus lens prescribed and ground for those who need one focal length for reading, another for driving and other distances. Leaphorn slipped it into an envelope he saved from the trash, added the strands of hair, and sat awhile thinking. He was remembering one of the photographs on Wiley Denton's wall. Beautiful young Linda, her long blonde hair disheveled by the breeze, smiling at the photographer, wearing silver-rimmed glasses.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Leaphorn gave Mrs. McKay the coins, showed her the lens he'd found, asked her if she or any of her friends wore such glasses, and when she could think of none, he avoided her obvious question by refusing to speculate and saying he'd try to find out. Then he showed her the sales slip from the hardware store.

  "Any idea what these were for?"

  "What's this," Mrs. McKay said, peering at the slip. "Is that 'crowbar'?"

  "That's the way I read it."

  "We don't have one. I don't even know what it is."

  "It's a steel bar with a sort of hook end used for prying things," Leaphorn said. "How about the other items?"

  "I can hardly believe it," she said, and laughed. "We have a drip under the sink. For months we had a drip, and Marvin said not to worry, he'd fix it. I guess he finally got around to it." But as she tried to go on, her voice broke. She looked away. "I mean, I guess he was going to."

  Leaphorn had intended to borrow Mrs. McKay's telephone to call home, but grief prefers privacy. He drove out to a motel parking lot on old U.S. 66 and called his Window Rock number from the pay phone. Louisa answered.

  "Are you at Wiley Denton's house?" she asked.

  "Not yet," he said. "That's my next stop."

  "He's in oil and gas leases, that sort of thing, isn't he? If he is, ask him if he knows anything about the ownership of Mock Land and Cattle Company or Apache Pipe."

  "What's up?" Leaphorn asked. "I think that cattle company is Bill Mock's outfit. Or used to be. Probably owned by his heirs now. He operated a good-sized feedlot operation in Sandoval County, and a ranch."
>
  "Feedlot?"

  "Where buyers fatten up range cattle before they send them off to become sirloins and hamburgers," Leaphorn said. And Apache Pipe, I think that's Denton. Years ago, he went into it with the Jicarilla tribe to finance the gas-collection system for the gas wells, but I heard he bought out the tribe's interest."

  "Denton's," said Louisa. "How about that."

  "Tell me," Leaphorn said.

  "That land on top of Mesa de los Lobos is the typical Checkerboard Reservation jumble, which won't surprise you. Much of the north slope of the mesa is reserved Navajo land, and a lot of the south side was in the allocation the government gave to the railroad. Some of that somehow went back into public domain ownership-probably some swapping back and forth with private ownership, and you Navajos bought back a piece of it, and other chunks were sold off by the railroad to various private owners. I'll guess you knew a lot of that already."

  "Some of it," Leaphorn said.

  "The parcel I think you and Sergeant Chee might be interested in is a six-section block at the head of the Coyote Canyon drainage. Somebody named Arthur Sanders and Sons bought it from the outfit handling land sales for the railroad in 1878. That must have become Sanders Cattle, because in 1903 William L. Elrod bought it from them. Since then, there's two more transfers of title, looks like due to deaths and inheritances, but the company with the title to the six sections is still Elrod Land and Cattle Company. You got that?"

  "I've got it," Leaphorn said. "I imagine Chee will want to find out if the Elrod people know what's going on down at the bottom end of their canyon. And thanks. This must have been a lot of hard work for you."

  "Hold it. Hold it," Louisa said. "I haven't got to the hard-work part yet, where it gets complicated."

  "Oh?"

  "Elrod also has a grazing lease on a small tract of Bureau of Land Management land adjoining its property. There's some sort of legal question about whether that lease will be renewed. Argument over whether Elrod overgrazed it, I think it is. Anyway, Elrod dropped its application to renew on that, and the existing lease expires September one."

  "September one," Leaphorn said. "Couple more weeks to run then. Any significance to that?"

  "I don't know, but maybe. There's an option to buy, contract to sell recorded, which is tied to the Bureau of Land Management lease. Effective when the lease expires. The clerk at the blm office said Apache would probably apply for the lease, but hasn't yet. She said the little tract is just a sort of cut-off corner, and she didn't think anyone else would want it."

  "The purchase price didn't happen to be on the record?"

  "They never are," Louisa said.

  "Let's see," Leaphorn said. "Six sections at six hundred forty acres per section would be almost four thousand acres. With dry country grazing land close to worthless, I doubt if the price would matter to Denton."

  Louisa laughed. "Not for raising cattle anyway. The blm was calculating you could graze eight units per square mile on it. I guess that's eight cows per section."

  "Cow plus its calf," Leaphorn said.

  "So I guess that you guess that Mr. Denton isn't buying it for grazing calves. He thinks he can find the old Golden Calf gold mine up there. Am I right about that?"

  "Almost," Leaphorn said. "I think he found the Golden Calf a long time ago."

  "Did something you found out today tell you that? Come on home and tell me about it."

  "I will," Leaphorn said. "But now I've got to go see Wiley Denton and let him know I'm calling off any sort of arrangement he thinks we might have."

  Louisa took a moment to think about this.

  "Joe," she said. "I think you should be very careful with this Denton. Don't you think he must be kind of crazy?"

  "I have been thinking that for quite a while," Leaphorn said.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Leaphorn's next call was to Wiley Denton's unlisted number. Mrs. Mendoza answered. Yes, Mr. Denton was now home.

  "You finding anything useful?" Denton asked. "And how about giving me some sort of idea how much you're charging me?"

  "I'll be out to your place in about thirty minutes," Leaphorn said. "I have something I want to show you."

  "Well, how much are you going to charge me?"

  "Absolutely nothing," Leaphorn said, and hung up.

  George Billie was standing by the garage door as Leaphorn stopped at the entry gate. The entry gate slid open, smooth and silent.

  "He said to bring you right in," Billie said after Leaphorn parked his car. Billie held the door open and led Leaphorn down the long carpeted hallway to the office. Denton was sitting behind his desk, staring at Leaphorn, his expression blank.

  "I guess we're even on the 'hanging up the telephone on one another' business," Denton said. "But at least you didn't call me a son of a bitch."

  "No," Leaphorn said. "But I'm going to call you a liar."

  Denton's only reaction to that was to continue the stare and, finally, to scratch his ear.

  "Maybe I'll make that a damned liar," Leaphorn said.

  "I guess I've done a little of that," Denton said. "This oil-leasing business sometimes requires it. But now you're going to tell me what you found. And how badly you're going to rip me off when you bill me for your services."

  "I found this," Leaphorn said. He took the envelope from his shirt pocket, extracted the lens, held it out toward Denton on his finger.

  Denton stared at it, frowned. Said, "What is-" Then he leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, his face a mask of tense muscles. "A lens," he said. "Is that from Linda's glasses?"

  "I don't know," Leaphorn said, and held it out. "Do you think it is?"

  Denton let out a long-held breath, opened his eyes, leaned forward, and held out his hand. Leaphorn put the lens on his palm. Denton picked it up with finger and thumb, very gently, studied it, held it up to the light, and looked through it for a long moment. Then he laid it carefully on the desk blotter.

  "She had beautiful eyes," he said. "Blue as the sky. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw."

  Leaphorn said nothing. Denton's own eyes were watering, and then he was crying. He didn't wipe the tears away. No more tension in his face now, but he looked terribly old.

  "Where'd you find her?" he asked.

  "I didn't find her," Leaphorn said. "I found the lens under the front seat of the car McKay was driving the day you killed him."

  "Just that?"

  "That's all, and a few long blonde hairs caught in the passenger-side front-seat headrest. Peggy McKay has black hair."

  "That bastard," Denton said. "That sick son of a bitch." He rubbed the back of his hand across his face, got up, and walked to the window. He looked out for a moment, then back at Leaphorn. "She had her hair fixed real pretty when she left that morning for that lunch party she was going to. Or said she was going to."

  "And she was wearing her glasses?"

  "She always did," Denton said, returning his gaze out the window. "I wanted to get her fitted with some of those contact lenses you wear right on your eyes, but she said she never could read well with them on. And she was reading all the time."

  "I hear that's common," Leaphorn said.

  "She was far-sighted," Denton said in a choked voice. "Said she just needed longer arms." He forced what sounded a little like a chuckle. "But she said the ones she had were long enough to wrap around me."

  "It sounds like you're certain that lens is from Linda's glasses."

  "Yeah. What else," Denton said, still looking at whatever attracted him outside. "It's the same oval shape. One of those merged-in trifocal grinds."

  "Let's go back to where we started," Leaphorn said. "Get back to that day you asked me if I would look for your wife. See if I could find what happened to her, anyway. And I said I would if you wouldn't lie to me. You've been lying to me, so I'm quitting. But I'd still like some straight answers out of you."

  Denton had turned away from the window. "Lying about what?" The bright backlighting from t
he window made it impossible for Leaphorn to read his expression, but the tone was hostile.

  "About the maps, for starters. McKay wasn't trying to sell you a location in the Zu¤i Mountains. His was on Mesa de los Lobos. Then there's the circumstances of how you shot him. He wasn't just leaving when that happened. He was-"

  "What makes you think that?"

  "McKay was a sort of fancy dresser. He wouldn't have been walking out of here without his expensive leather jacket, which was hanging on that chair over there with no bullet hole in it, and no blood."