“Did he tell you what crime?”
“I said, ‘What crime? How serious?’ And he said we can’t talk about it. And, if we told you, you would be an accessory before the fact. He was smiling when he said that. Notice, he said we.”
“We,” Chee repeated. “Any idea who? Is he part of some sort of Indian Power organization? Is somebody working with him on this ‘free the bones’ project?”
“Well, he’s always talking about his Taho Society but I think he’s the only member. This time I think he meant Gomez.”
“Why Gomez?”
“I don’t know. Gomez brings him to my office. I call Highhawk at Highhawk’s place, and Gomez answers the telephone. Gomez always seems to be around. Did you know Gomez bonded him out after you picked him up in Arizona?”
“I didn’t,” Chee said. “Maybe they’re just friends.”
“I wanted to ask you about that,” Janet said. “Did they come to the Yeibichai together? Did you get the feeling they were friends? Old friends?”
“They were strangers,” Chee said. “I’m sure of that.” He remembered the scene, described it to Janet—Gomez arriving first, waiting in the rental car, disinterested, making contact with Highhawk. He described the clear, obvious fact that Highhawk didn’t know Gomez. “I’d say that Gomez came to the Yeibichai just to find Highhawk. But how could he have known Highhawk was coming, if they were really strangers?”
“That’s easy. The same way the FBI knew where to arrest him,” Janet said. “He told everybody, the woman he rents his apartment from, his neighbors, his drinking buddies, the people he works with at the Smithsonian, told everybody, that he was coming out to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai for his shima’sa’ni’.”
“He used that word? Maternal grandmother?”
“Well, he told them he had found this old woman in his Bitter Water Clan. He claims his maternal grandmother was a Bitter Water Dineh. And he claims the old woman had invited him to her Yeibichai.”
Chee found he was getting interested in all this. “Well, whatever, when I saw them, Gomez was trying to get acquainted with a stranger. Either that, or they’re both good actors. And who would they be trying to fool?” Chee didn’t wait for an answer to that rhetorical question. He was thinking about what Janet had said about the crime not yet committed. Something serious. Something “we” couldn’t talk about.
“I’d say you have a very flaky client,” Chee added. “Any reason to think this isn’t just some neurotic Lone Ranger trying to impress a pretty lawyer?”
“There’s a little bit more,” Janet Pete said. “His telephone is tapped.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “He tell you that?”
“I heard the click. The interference on the line. I called him just before I called you. In fact, that’s what actually motivated me to make this call.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “I thought maybe you were missing me.”
“That too,” Janet said. “That, and somebody’s been following me.”
“Ah,” Chee said. He was remembering Janet Pete. How she had handled him when she thought he was mishandling one of her clients the first time they had met; how she had dealt with the situation when he’d damaged a car she was buying. Janet Pete was not a person who would be easy to spook.
“If not exactly following me, then keeping an eye on my place. And on me. I see this guy outside my apartment. I see him in the newsstand below where we work. I see him too often. And I never saw him until I got tied up with this Highhawk business.”
Chee had been holding Mary Landon’s letter in his left hand, folding and unfolding it between his fingers. Now he dropped it into his out-basket on top of the little folder which held his round-trip Continental Airlines ticket to Milwaukee. He thought he might go to Washington, drop in at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. See what it looked like. Talk to a couple of people he knew back there. See what it would feel like to work for the Bureau.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m coming to Washington anyway. Next day or two. I have some business at the FBI office. I’ll let you know exactly when and you set it up for me to talk to Highhawk. And Gomez, too, if you can. That is, if you want to see what I think of it.”
“I do.” A long pause. “Thanks, Jim.”
“It’ll be good to see you,” he said. “And I want to meet your boyfriend, the rich and famous attorney.”
At least it would be better than two weeks lying around the trailer. And he had detected something in Janet Pete’s voice that he’d never heard before. She sounded frightened.
Chapter Eight
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Sunday Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had felt a lot better about the man with pointed shoes. His sense of the natural order of things had been restored. While in many ways Joe Leaphorn had moved into the world of the whites, his Navajo requirement for order and harmony remained. Every effect must have its cause, every action its necessary result. Unity existed, universal and eternal. And now it seemed that nothing violating this natural order had happened in the sagebrush plain east of Gallup. Apparently Pointed Shoes had flashed his bankroll in the wrong place, perhaps at a poker game in the observation car. The man with the knife had killed him, stopped the train, put the body under a convenient cover of chamisa brush, and gotten back on with the victim’s wallet.
There were some holes in that theory, some unanswered questions. For example, what the devil had happened to the false teeth? What was the connection with the Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai? But basically much of the disharmony had seeped out of this homicide. Leaphorn could think of other things. He thought about cleaning his house, and getting ready for his vacation. As with most Navajo Tribal Policemen, vacation time for Leaphorn came after the summer tourist season ended and before winter brought its blizzards with their heavy work load of rescue operations. If Leaphorn wanted to take his vacation, now was the time. He had already postponed it once, simply because in the absence of Emma he could think of nothing he would enjoy doing. But he should take it. If he didn’t, his friends would notice. He would see more of those subtle little indications of their kindness and their pity that he had come to dread. So he would think of someplace to go. Something to do. And he would think of it today. Just as soon as he got the dishes done, and the dirty clothes down to the laundromat. But when the phone rang just as he was getting ready to go to lunch Monday he still hadn’t thought of anything. Lunch was going to be with Kennedy. Kennedy was in Window Rock on some sort of Bureau records-checking business and was waiting for him at the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation Motor Inn. He had decided he would ask Kennedy for suggestions about what to do with eighteen days off. Leaphorn picked up the receiver and said “Leaphorn,” in a tone which he hoped expressed hurry.
The voice was Bernard St. Germain’s. Leaphorn had time for this call.
“Pretty good guess you made,” St. Germain said. “Not perfect, but close.”
“Good,” Leaphorn said. Now, he thought, Pointed Shoes becomes a homicide committed in interstate commerce. A federal case. Now the Bureau would be involved. More than eleven thousand FBI agents, well dressed, well trained, and highly paid, would be unleashed to attach an identity to the man with pointed shoes. The world’s most expensive crime lab would be involved. And if Pointed Shoes was important and a solution seemed imminent, law enforcement’s best-funded and most successful public relations machinery would spring into action. Kennedy, his old friend, with whom he was about to have lunch, would have to get to work.