Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 17] (12 page)

“Hey,” Moya said. “Stay there. We need to talk to you.”

“We’re breaking up on this damn cell phone now,” Chandler said. “I can’t hear you. Just static. Can you read me? Hello? Hello? Officer Moya. Hello? Well, if you can still hear me, I’ll check in here. I want to find out what happened to Sherman.”

With that, Chandler just listened. Heard Moya yelling at him. Heard Moya cursing. Finally heard Moya give up and break the connection. Then he shut off his own cell phone, shook his head, and started working on the problems this had left him.

The worst one was that notebook Sherman carried in his jacket pocket. There might be some chance Sherman hadn’t jotted his name in his book. An awfully good chance he’d noted his telephone number at the Grand Hotel. It wouldn’t take much detective work to send them after the man who had called Sherman’s cell
phone number. But there was nothing he could do about that now.

What he had to do now was find out what happened to Billy Tuve. Had Tuve shot Sherman? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. If not, who had? Probably one of those other people Plymale had warned him were trying to find the diamonds. Or, as Plymale wanted him to believe, to find the bones. And his job for Plymale was just to keep that from happening. He could probably have accomplished that simply and easily by erasing Tuve from the game. But he had never trusted Plymale. Killing Tuve would have wiped out his chance for his big payoff—a satchel full of prime diamonds.

And now where was Billy Tuve? The competitive team Plymale had described seemed to have eliminated Sherman. From what little he had learned from that damned Arizona state cop, Tuve’s stuff hadn’t been left behind in Sherman’s car. From that, Chandler’s logical mind developed the only logical conclusion. The bad guys had come for Tuve. Sherman had resisted. They shot Sherman. They took Tuve away with them, and the only possible use they had for him was identical to Chandler’s own. They’d take him to the canyon bottom and use him to find the diamonds. But where? Somewhere very close to the termination of the Hopi Salt Trail, near where the Hopis harvested their ceremonial salt. The jeep-driver guide he had hired to take him to the bottom tomorrow had been full of information about sacred places in the canyon, and the Salt Shrine was near the point where the Little Colorado Canyon dumped its water into the Colorado River. No jeep trail would take them anywhere near that, the driver said, but he could drop them at the
head of a trail he’d noticed in his
Hiking the Grand Canyon
book that ended at the river, just an easy walk upstream to the shrine.

Back at his car, Chandler opened the trunk and took out a small aluminum valise. He unlocked it on the front seat and extracted two cans—one a Burma Shave shaving cream dispenser, the other a can of Always Fresh deodorant, both of which had been reengineered by some previous owner so that their tops screwed off, and both of which had been slipped out of an old evidence locker. Chandler presumed they’d previously been used to carry purchase-size packs of crack cocaine. He imagined them tucked in a grocery store sack with bread, soup cans, etc., offering a relatively safe way for the dope dealer to smuggle the stuff to the user. For him, they offered a simple way to get his pet little .25-caliber pistol past airport security x-ray machines.

Now he screwed off the tops, extracted pistol barrel, working parts, magazine, etc., wiped off the thick deposit of shaving cream covering the parts, blew the cream out of the barrel, cleaned it with a rod he kept in the can for that purpose, and reassembled the weapon. He’d had it made at a specialty machine shop in Switzerland on one of his skiing trips there, and it worked with typical Swiss efficiency. He clicked a round into the chamber, ejected it into his hand, and put it back into the chamber.

It worked perfectly. When Ms. Joanna Craig arrived with Tuve at the Hopi shrine tomorrow, he’d be down there waiting.

Joe Leaphorn found he had a way to get in touch with Sergeant Chee after all. He found Chee’s cell phone number where he had jotted it on the margin of his desk calendar. And now that cell phone began ringing in Chee’s jacket pocket. Chee was standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, watching Cowboy Dashee planting some painted prayer sticks at an odd-looking rock formation.

Chee snorted out a Navajo version of an expletive, extracted the phone, clicked it on, and said, “Chee.”

“Joe Leaphorn,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still interested in that Billy Tuve business?”

“Sure,” Chee said.

“I mean, trying to find where he got that diamond? If you are, I’ve heard some things that might be useful.”

“Still very interested,” Chee said. “Not that any of us have much hope of finding anything.”

That produced a silence. “But I’ll bet you’re going anyway, though. Right?”

Chee glanced around him. Cowboy was standing beside his car, helping Bernie with something. “Lieutenant,” he said. “This Billy Tuve is Cowboy’s cousin. Brain-damaged guy. And Cowboy has always been there for me when I needed a hand. From way back in high-school days. I think Cowboy’s going to climb down and make this search even if there isn’t any real hope. We’re sort of trying to decide that now.”

“You said ‘any of us.’ You and Cowboy and Tuve?”

“Cowboy and me and Bernie Manuelito. Tuve was supposed to come, but when Cowboy went to get him, he was gone. Somebody showed up at his mother’s house and he went off with them. That makes finding anything even more doubtful.”

“Probably the sheriff’s office came and got him. Sounds like the bond deal went sour. Why is Bernie going?”

“It wasn’t the sheriff’s office,” Chee said. “Maybe it was the woman who bailed him out.”

“Odd,” Leaphorn said. “But why is Bernie going? That’s a hell of a tough climb.”

“I don’t know why she’s going.”

Leaphorn laughed. “Want me to make a guess?”

“Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what you called for,” Chee said, sounding unhappy. Bernie was standing beside him now, holding a backpack, asking
Who?
with a hand gesture.

Chee let her wait while Leaphorn related what
Louisa had told him about the reward for the arm bones, about the rumors growing out of the airline disaster she’d been hearing among the canyon-bottom tribes. “You think any of that will help?”

Chee sighed. “Enough to tip the scales, maybe. Sounds like that hander-out-of-diamonds might still be alive, anyway.”

“Who is it?” Bernie asked. “Is that Billy Tuve?”

“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Chee said, “Bernie is here now. Why don’t you ask her why she wants to climb down there?” And he handed Bernie the cell phone.

“Lieutenant,” Bernie said, grinning at Chee, “it’s just like I told Jim. I think it would be fun. And he and Cowboy need somebody to look after them.”

“Be careful,” Leaphorn said.

“I will,” Bernie said. “You know where I live. I’m good at climbing up and down rocks.”

“I didn’t mean just that, Bernie,” Leaphorn said. “I guess you know that the FBI has been pulled into this. Got Captain Pinto to work on it. The federals wanted him to find out everything possible about a diamond that Shorty McGinnis was supposed to have. That means Washington got interested in it, and that means it’s a big deal for somebody or other.”

“Sergeant Chee told me a little about it,” Bernie said.

“He probably doesn’t know much more than I do,” Leaphorn said. “I hope he told you he and Cowboy weren’t the only ones after those diamonds.”

“I don’t think he did,” Bernie said.

“Plus, there’s an offer of big money for the bones of one of the victims. For burial.”

“Is there more to it than just that?”

“Who knows for sure? But anyway, young lady, remember if Washington is involved, it means very influential people are interested, and that usually means a lot of money is in the balance. That can make it dangerous. So be careful. And try to keep in touch. Just in case you need some help keeping them out of trouble, let me know when you get down to the river if there’s a way to call from there.”

Getting down to the river took almost six hours, which Dashee thought wasn’t too bad, even though he had done it in his late teens in something under five. He’d taken a little extra care at the points where the faithful left little pollen offerings to the Salt Trail’s protective spirits and choked off his habit of exchanging barbs with Chee.

Dashee’s uneasy silence was not just nervousness caused by worry about what the reaction might be among the spirits that oversaw Hopi behavior. He was also worried about the reaction of the elders in his own clan and kiva if they learned he had escorted two Navajos down this sacred pathway. To strictly traditional Hopis, the Dinee were still remembered as “head breakers”—barbarians so uncivil that they slew enemies with the old “rock on the skull” technique.

For Bernie, standing on the sand catching her breath, this descent was already a sort of dream, part of a thrilling close-up look at the nature she loved at its rawest beauty. And it had been a nerve-racking experience as well, where a wrong step on a loose stone could have sent her plunging down five hundred feet, to bounce off a ledge, and fall again, and bounce again, until the journey terminated with her as a pile of broken bones beside the Colorado River.

On the way down, to believe what she was seeing, Bernie found herself recalling the reading she’d done to prepare herself for this. That wavering streak of almost-white between the salmon-colored cliffs catching the sun would be Mesozoic era sandstone, reminders of sand dunes buried when the planet was young, and the bloody red in the strata above that would be staining from dissolved iron ore, and the name for that, required on Professor Elrod’s geology exam, was hematite, and that thought would be jarred away by an inadvertent downward glance which showed her death. Death just as many seconds away as were required for her to fall, and fall, and fall, until the body of Bernadette Manuelito, more formally known for Navajo ceremonial purposes as Girl Who Laughs, smashed into the riverbank below and became nothing more than a bunch of broken, loosely connected body parts.

Now this journey into her imagination was interrupted by Cowboy Dashee.

“Bernie, what’s your idea about that?”

“About what?”

“About what we’ve been talking about,” Dashee said, sounding slightly impatient. “Here we are, right where we were going, and Billy’s not here. So what’s next? How do we start conducting this search?”

Having no useful idea, Bernie shrugged. “Maybe Billy got here before we did and got tired of waiting for us. How about looking around for him?”

Bernie was looking around herself when she said that, seeing a vast wilderness of cliffs in almost every direction, hearing the roar of water tearing over the rapids and above the thunder of the river, the chorus of whistles, trills, and bong sounds that must have been caused by the
various species of frogs that inhabited the canyon. Combined, it made her suggestion sound silly.

“Well, at least we could try,” she added.

“I guess that’s about all we can do now,” Chee said. “Somebody should wait here, where they could see him if he’s still coming down the trail, or if he’s already down, meet him if he comes back looking for us.”

He looked at Dashee. Dashee nodded. He looked at Bernie. “Bernie, you wait here. If Tuve shows up, keep him here until Cowboy and I get back.”

“Sergeant Chee,” Bernie said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the river and the clamor of the mating-season frogs, and maybe even a little louder than that, “I want to remind you that I am no longer Officer B. Manuelito of your Navajo Tribal Police squad. I am a private regular citizen.”

“Sorry,” Chee said, sounding suitably repentant. “I just thought—”

“Okay. I’ll stay here,” Bernie said. Dashee was grinning at her.

“Thanks,” Chee said. “I’m going to suggest that I work my way downstream looking for that sort of side canyon Tuve mentioned, and get back here in…let’s say ninety minutes or so. Quicker if we’ve found something. And Cowboy, would you do the same upstream? Up to the confluence where the Little Colorado runs in to the big river and—”

“Got it,” Dashee said.

Bernie leaned her weary self against a convenient boulder, let her body slip slowly down it until she was sitting comfortably on a sandstone slab. She watched Cowboy working his way along the cluster of boulders upstream
until he disappeared behind the curve of the cliff. She watched Chee moving downstream along the very edge of water, keeping his eyes on the ground. She found herself wishing he would look back, at least a glance, but he didn’t. Found herself wishing she hadn’t sounded so grouchy. Hadn’t
been
so grouchy. When he got back, she would tell him she was sorry. Tell him she was tired. Which was true. And now she would just wait. Maybe find one of those noisy frogs. Tree frogs probably, or maybe red-spotted toads. Take a look at the algae on those damp rocks at water’s edge. Think her thoughts. Wish it hadn’t taken Jim Chee so long to realize that he had fallen in love with her. Wish she had recognized his hang-ups and made her interest in him a little more obvious. Even a
lot
more obvious.

And after a lot of that, the shadows would be working up the canyon walls, and Jim and Cowboy would be back, and they would make a little fire, probably, and eat some of the stuff they had brought, and talk a lot and roll out their sleeping bags, and Jim would probably want to put theirs close together and a distance from Dashee’s, and she would have to deal with that. Her clan taught its daughters that too much intimacy before nuptial promises were officially and ceremonially confirmed before both clans and both families tended to have very bad effects in the married years to come. Therefore, as her mother had put it, “some sand should be kept between you and your police sergeant” until that had happened.

So she would sit here and watch the changing light change the colors on the cliffs, and wait, and think about how good it would be when all this indecision was behind her. But that sort of happy thinking kept drifting away
into questions. Was Jim really the man she thought he was, that he seemed to be? Or was he the hard-voiced sergeant who would never, ever really be her man? Was what she was doing at this very moment—following his orders, waiting for the next instructions, waiting to be told what was going on—indicative of what she was getting into? She didn’t think so. In fact, she didn’t even want to think about it. She wanted to think about where she was—at the very middle of the stupefying grandeur of this canyon, surrounded by all its weird variations of the natural world she knew from the Earth Surface World a mile above her head.

About then the changing light must have touched off some sort of signal to the biology about her. Suddenly the violet-green swallows were out, doing their acrobatic dives, skimming the water for rising insects. Somewhere behind her an owl was out early, making some sort of call that only her oldest uncle could translate, and the spotted toads were adding their grunts to the general birdsong symphony.

Why was she just sitting here? Bernie asked herself. She zipped open the top of her backpack, got out her water bottle, hung her bird-watcher binoculars over her shoulder, then dipped back into the pack for her birder’s notebook. She tore out a blank back page, took out her pen, and started writing.

She left the note on the boulder where she had been sitting, put another rock at a corner to hold it down, and
started walking—first over to the cliff-side tamarisk trees to investigate a bird nest she’d noticed there, and then down toward an outcropping that a long time ago (probably a few billion years ago) had formed a lava flow obstruction and a noisy little rapid in the Colorado.

The flotsam kicked out at the rapid revealed nothing she hadn’t expected, being mostly debris washed down one or another of the little streams that flowed in from the cooler, wetter mesa tops a mile above. She identified the hulls of piñon nuts, Ponderosa needles, twigs from Utah junipers, and a variety of grass samples, many probably blown in but some local needle grass which thrived in this hot, dry bottom. Nothing here she hadn’t expected.

Through her binoculars, she checked the place where Jim and Dashee had left her. No sign of them or of Tuve, nor did she spot anyone on the few points high up in the cliffs of the Salt Trail where she thought he might be descending. She focused in as sharply as she could on the boulder where she had left her note. She couldn’t see that, either. That either meant that one of the men had come back, found it, and was now (she hoped) awaiting her, or that Tuve had arrived, taken it, and went on his way. Or it meant that these lenses were just not potent enough for her to make it out from where she was standing.

She focused down the cliffs. The angle of the sunlight now made it clear why one of the early explorers she had read—John Wesley Powell, she thought it was—had described them as “parapets.” They formed a seemingly infinite row of light and shadow, sort of like looking down a picket fence, with each shadowed space representing a place where drainage from the mesa top had—down through a million or so years of draining off
snowmelt and rainwater—eroded itself its own little canyon in its race to get to the Colorado and on to the Pacific Ocean.

Those canyons would be more interesting than the scene at the riverside. And a side canyon was what both Jim and Cowboy were looking for. An undercut place where their fantastical dispenser of diamonds was living, or had been living. Presuming he had ever existed, which had always seemed doubtful to Bernie.

She skirted past the rapids outcrop and walked downstream. The first opening in the cliff was a dead end for her purposes, blocked with brush and a jumble of boulders swept down by some long-past flash flood. She pushed her way through the barrier far enough to see it offered not much possibility of a cave large enough for occupation.

More walking, with brief checks into four other drain-off cuts in the cliffs, brought her to a more promising-looking drainage mouth. She had been noticing now and then the tracks left by Jim’s boots, mostly in the damp sand very close to the putty-toned water of the Colorado. Now she saw them again. They led across the blow sand leading into the mouth of the same opening that attracted her. They went in, out again, then back toward the river, and on downstream.