Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] (5 page)

T
he only reasons
Jimmy Chee would have admitted for climbing down into Wepo Wash was to give himself a chance to identify—and perhaps even confront—whoever was watching him. He'd give the watcher time to follow. Then he would drop out of sight—probably by moving into a side arroyo somewhere up the wash. Once Chee was out of sight, the watcher would have to make a decision: to follow or not. However he made it, Chee would be able to reverse the roles. He'd become the stalker.

That was the plan. But now he was in the wash, and just a hundred yards up the hard-packed sandy bottom from where he stood, the sun glinted from the remains of the aircraft. The wreckage was
fbi
and
dea
business. A Navajo Tribal Policeman would not be welcome here without a specific invitation. But Chee was curious. And to his watcher, a visit to the wreckage would seem a logical reason for this walk.

The ground around the site was thoroughly trampled now and the plane itself had been ransacked. Wing and stabilizer panels had been peeled open, a gas tank removed, and holes punched in the thin aluminum skin of the rudder, in what must have been a search for the cargo it had carried. Chee stared up the wash, up the plane's landing path, frowning. As he remembered, it had struck an upthrust of basalt which jutted from the floor of the wash. The wash had flowed around the extrusion on both sides, eroding the earth and leaving a black stone island in a sea of sand. If there wasn't room to land up-wash from this wall of stone, and there seemed to be plenty of space, there was obviously room enough to miss it to the right or left. Why hadn't the pilot avoided it? Surely he hadn't simply landed blindly in the dark. Chee walked upwash, out of the trampled area. He kept his eyes on the sand, looking for the answer. The watcher could wait.

A little more than an hour later, he heard the sound of a car engine. By then he knew why the plane had crashed. But he had new questions.

The car was a dark-blue Ford Bronco. It pulled to a stop beside the wreckage. Two persons emerged. A man and a woman. They stood a moment, looking upwash toward Chee, and then walked to the aircraft. Chee walked toward them. The man was tall, hatless, gray-haired, wearing jeans and a white shirt. The woman was hatless, too. She was rather small, with short dark hair that curled around her face. Not
fbi
. Probably not
dea
, although anybody could be
dea
. They stood beside the wreckage, looking at the plane but waiting for him. Chee saw the man was older than he had looked from a distance—perhaps in his early fifties. One of those men who take care of themselves, join racquet clubs, jog, lift weights. His face was long, with deep lines along the nose, and eyes which, because of large black pupils, looked somewhat moist and luminous. The woman glanced at Chee and then stared at the wreckage. Her oval face, drained of color, looked shocked. She was in her fifties, Chee guessed, but at the moment she looked as old as time. Something about her tugged at Chee's memory. The man's expression was defensive, the look of someone caught trespassing, who expects to be asked who he is and what he's doing. Chee nodded to him.

"We came out to see the aircraft," the man said. "I was his attorney and this is Gail Pauling."

"Jim Chee," Chee said. He shook the man's hand and nodded to the woman.

"Jim Chee," the woman said. "You're the one who found my brother."

Chee knew now what she reminded him of. Her brother was the pilot. "I don't think he had any suffering," Chee said. "It must have happened in an instant. Too quick to know what happened."

"And what did happen?" Miss Pauling asked. She gestured toward the outcrop. "I can't believe he would just fly right into this."

"He didn't, exactly," Chee said. "His wheels touched down about fifty yards up there. He was on the ground."

She was staring at the wreckage, her face still stunned. Chee wasn't sure she had heard him. "Something must have happened to him," she said, as if to herself. "He would never have flown right into this."

"It was in the dark," Chee said. "Didn't they tell you that?"

"They didn't tell me anything," Miss Pauling said. She seemed to really see Chee for the first time. "Just that he crashed, and he was dead, and the police think he was flying in some contraband, and that a policeman named Jim Chee was the one who saw it all."

"I didn't see it," Chee said. "I heard it. It was a couple of hours before dawn. The moon was down." Chee described what had happened. The lawyer listened intently, his moist eyes studying Chee's face. Chee didn't mention hearing the shot, or the other sounds.

The woman's face was incredulous. "He landed in the pitch dark?" she asked. "He used to be in the Tactical Air Force. But on an airfield. And with radar. I worried about it. But I can't believe he'd just land blind."

"He didn't," Chee said. He gestured up the bed of the wash. "He'd landed at least three times before. Just a day or two earlier, the way the tracks look. Probably in the daylight. Practicing, I'd guess. And then when he made this landing, he had lights."

"Lights?" the lawyer asked.

"It looks like battery lanterns," Chee said. "A row of them on the ground."

Miss Pauling was staring up the wash, looking baffled.

"They left their marks," Chee explained. "I'll show you."

He led them down the side of the wash. Was the watcher still out there somewhere? If he was, what would he think of all this? If the watcher was Johnson, or one of Johnson's
dea
people assigned to follow Chee, he'd never believe this meeting was not prearranged. Chee considered that. It didn't bother him.

They walked along the narrow strip of shade cast by the almost vertical wall of the wash. Beyond this shadow, the sunlight glittered from the gray-yellow surface of the arroyo bottom. Heat waves shimmered from the flatness and the only sound was boot soles on the sand.

Behind him the lawyer cleared his throat. "Mr. Chee," he said. "That car you mentioned in your report, driving away—did you get a look at it?"

"You read the report?" Chee asked. He was surprised, but he didn't look around. It was exactly what Largo had predicted.

"We stopped at your police station at Tuba City," the attorney said. "They showed it to me."

Of course, Chee thought. Why not? The man was the attorney of the accident victim. The attorney and the next of kin.

"It was gone," Chee said. "I heard the engine starting. A car or maybe a pickup truck."

"The shot," the attorney asked. "Rifle? Shotgun? Pistol?"

That's an interesting question, Chee thought. "Not a shotgun. Probably a pistol," he said. The memory of the sound echoed in his mind. Probably a large pistol.

"Would you say a twenty-two, or something larger? A thirty-two? A thirty-eight?"

Another interesting question. "I'd be guessing," Chee said.

"Would you mind?"

"I'd guess a thirty-eight, or larger," Chee said. What would the next question be? Chee's guess at who pulled the trigger, maybe.

"I've always been interested in guns," the lawyer said.

And then they were opposite the place where the plane had first touched down. Chee moved out of the shade and walked into the glittering heat. He squatted beside the marks.

"Here," he said. "See? Here's where the right wheel first touched." He pointed. "And there the left wheel. He had the plane almost exactly level."

Near this touchdown point, a line about two inches deep had been drawn across the sand. Chee rose and took a dozen steps down the track. "Here the nose wheel touched," he said. "I think Pauling drew that line to mark the place. And over there… See the tracks?" Chee pointed toward the center of the wash. "That's where he took off both times."

"Or maybe he landed over there and took off here," the lawyer said in his soft voice. He laughed a mild, soft sound. "But what difference is it?"

"Not much," Chee said. "But he did land here. Deeper impression at the impact point, and the bounce marks. And if you go over there and take a close look, you notice the sand is blown back more on the tracks where he lifted off. Engine really revving up then, you know, and idling when he landed."

The attorney's soft eyes were examining Chee. "Yes," he said. "Of course. Can you still read that in the sand?"

"If you look," Chee said.

Miss Pauling was staring down the wash toward the wreckage. "But if he touched down here, he had plenty of time to stop. He had more room than he needed."

"The night he crashed, he didn't touch down here," Chee said. He walked toward the wreckage. A hundred yards, two hundred yards. Finally he stopped. He squatted again, touched a faint indentation in the sand with a fingertip. "Here was the first lantern," he said. He glanced over his shoulder. "And his wheels touched right there. See? Just a few feet past the lantern."

Miss Pauling looked at the wheel tracks and then past them at the wreckage, looming just ahead of them. "My God," she said. "He didn't have a chance, did he?"

"Somebody put out five lanterns in a straight line between here and the rock." Chee pointed. "There were five more lanterns on the other side of the rock."

The lawyer was staring at Chee, lips slightly parted. He read the implications of the lantern placement instantly. Miss Pauling was thinking of something else. "Did he have his landing lights on? Your report didn't mention that."

"I didn't see any light," Chee said. "I think I would have seen the glow."

"So he was depending on whoever put the lanterns out," Miss Pauling said. Then what Chee had said about the lanterns beyond the rock finally reached her. She looked at him, her face startled. "Five more lanterns beyond the rock? Behind it?"

"Yes," Chee said. He felt a pity for the woman. To lose your brother is bad. To learn someone killed him is worse.

"But why…?"

Chee shook his head. "Maybe somebody wanted him to land but not to take off," he said. "I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about the lanterns. All I found was the little depressions. Like this one."

She stared at him wordlessly. Studying him. "You don't think you're wrong."

"Well, no," Chee said. "This little oval shape, with these sharp indentations around the edge—it looks just the size and shape for those dry-cell batteries you attach the lantern bulb to. I'll measure it and check, but I don't know what else it would be."

"No," Miss Pauling said. She released a long breath, and with it her shoulders slumped. A little life seemed to leave her. "I don't know what else it would be, either." Miss Pauling's face had changed. It had hardened. "Somebody killed him."

"These lanterns," the lawyer said. "They were gone when you got here? They weren't mentioned in your report."

"They were gone," Chee said. "I found the trace of them just before you drove up. When I was here before, it was dark."

"But they weren't in the follow-up report either. The one that was made after the airplane was searched and all that. That was done in the daytime."

"That was federal cops," Chee said. "I guess they didn't notice the marks."

The lawyer looked at Chee thoughtfully. "I wouldn't have," he said finally. He smiled. "I've always heard that Indians were good trackers."

A long time ago, in his senior year at the University of New Mexico, Chee had resolved never to let such generalizations irritate him. It was a resolution he rarely managed to keep.

"I am a Navajo," Chee said. "We don't have a word in our language for 'Indians.' Just specific words. For Utes, and Hopis, and Apaches. A white is a
belacani
, a Mexican is a
nakai
. So forth. Some Navajos are good at tracking. Some aren't. You learn it by studying it. Like law."

"Of course," the lawyer said. He was still observing Chee. "But how do you learn it?"

"I had a teacher," Chee said. "My mother's brother. He showed me what to look for." Chee stopped. He was not in the mood to discuss tracking with this odd stranger.

"Like what?" the lawyer said.

Chee tried to think of examples. He shrugged. "You see a man walk by. You go look at the tracks he made. You see him walk by, carrying something heavy in one hand. You look at the tracks. You go again tomorrow to look at the tracks after a day. And after two days. You see a fat man and a thin man squatting in the shade, talking. When they leave, you go and look at the marks a fat man makes when he squats on his heels, and the marks a thin man makes." Chee stopped again. He was thinking of his uncle, in the Chuska high country tracking the mule deer. Showing how the bucks dragged their hooves when rutting, how to estimate the age of a doe by reading the splaying of its cloven toes in its tracks. Of his uncle kneeling beside the track left in the drying mud by a pickup truck, testing the moisture in a ridge of dirt, showing him how to estimate how many hours had passed since the tire had left that print. Much more than that, of course. But he had said enough to satisfy courtesy.

The lawyer had taken out his billfold. He extracted a business card and handed it to Chee.

"I'm Ben Gaines," he said. "I'll be representing Mr. Pauling's estate. Could I hire you? In your spare time?"

"For what?"

"For pretty much what you'd do anyway," Ben Gaines gestured toward the wreck. "Putting together just exactly what happened here."

"I won't be doing that," Chee said. "This isn't my case. This is a first-degree felony. It involves non-Navajos. This was part of the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Reservation, but now it's Hopi. Outside my territory. Outside my jurisdiction. I'm here working on something else. Came down here because I was curious."

"All the better," Gaines said. "There won't be any question of conflict of interest."

"I'm not sure the rules would allow it," Chee said. "I'd have to check with the captain." It occurred to Chee that one way or another he'd be doing what the lawyer wanted. His curiosity would demand it.

Gaines was chuckling. "I was just thinking that it might be just as well if your boss didn't know about this arrangement. Nothing wrong with it. But if you ask a bureaucrat if there's a rule against something, he'll always tell you there is."