Chee nodded.
“I think we should go talk to Highhawk,” Leaphorn said. “Okay?”
“If we can find him,” Chee said. “I called this morning. Called his house. Called his office. No answer. So I called Dr. Hartman. She’s the curator he’s working for at the museum. She hadn’t seen him either. She was looking for him.”
“Let’s go try to find him anyway,” Leaphorn said. He picked up the check.
“I didn’t tell you about last night,” Chee said. He described how Highhawk had taken the telephone call, then left saying he’d be right back, and never returned.
“I think we should go on out there. See if we can find the man. Try his house and if he’s not there, we’ll try the Smithsonian.”
Chee put on his hat and followed.
“Why not?” he said, but even as he said it he had a feeling they weren’t going to find Henry Highhawk.
They took a cab to Eastern Market.
“Stick around a minute until we see if our party is home,” Leaphorn said.
The cabby was a plump young man with a mass of curly brown hair and fat, red lips. He pulled a paperback copy of Passage to Quivera off the dashboard and opened it. “It’s your money,” he said. “Spend it any way you like.”
Leaphorn punched the doorbell. They listened to it buzz inside. He punched it again. Chee walked back down the porch steps and rescued the morning paper from where it had been thrown beside the front walk. He showed it to Leaphorn. He nodded. Punched the doorbell again. Chee walked to the window, shaded the glass with his hands. The blinds were up, the curtains open. The room was empty and dark on this dreary, overcast morning.
“What do you think?” Chee said.
Leaphorn shook his head, rang the bell again. He tried the doorknob. Locked.
“Curtains open, blinds up,” Chee said. “If he came home last night, maybe he didn’t turn on the lights.”
“Maybe not.” Leaphorn tried the door again. Still locked. “I know a cop here,” he said. “I think we’ll give him a call and see what he thinks.”
“FBI?” Chee asked.
“A real cop,” Leaphorn said. “A captain on the Washington police force.”
They took the cab to the public phone booths at the Eastern Market Metro station. Leaphorn made his call. Chee waited, watching the cabby read and trying to decide what the hell Highhawk was doing. Where had he gone? Why had he gone? How was Bad Hands involved in this? He thought of Bad Hands in the role of revolutionary. He thought of how it would feel to have your fingers removed by a torturer trying to make you talk. Leaphorn climbed back into the cab.
“He said he would meet us at a little coffee place in the old Post Office building.”
The cabby was awaiting instructions. “You know how to find it?” Leaphorn asked.
“Is the Pope a Catholic?” the cabby said.
They found Captain Rodney awaiting them just inside the coffee shop door, a tall, bulky black man wearing bifocals, a gray felt hat, and a raincoat to match. The sight of Leaphorn provoked a huge, delighted, white-toothed grin.
“This is Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “One of our officers.”
They shook hands. Rodney’s craggy, coffee-colored face usually registered expression only when Rodney allowed it to do so. Now, just for a moment, it registered startled surprise. He removed the fedora, revealing kinky gray hair cropped close to the skull.
“Jim Chee,” he said, memorizing Chee’s face. “Well, now.”
“Rodney and I go way back,” Leaphorn said. “We survived the FBI Academy together.”
“Two misfits,” Rodney said. “Back in the days when all FBI agents had blue eyes instead of just most of them.” Rodney chuckled, but his eyes never left Chee. “That’s when I first learned that our friend here”—he indicated Leaphorn with a thumb—“has this practice of just telling you what he thinks you have to know.”
They were at a table now and Leaphorn was ordering coffee. Now he looked surprised. “Like what?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”
Rodney was still looking at Chee. “You work for this guy, right? Or with him, anyway.”
“More or less,” Chee said, wondering where this was leading. “Now I’m on vacation.”
Rodney laughed. “Vacation. Is that a fact. You just happen to be three thousand miles east of home at the same time as your boss. I think maybe I was blaming Joe for something that’s a universal Navajo trait.“
“What are we talking about here?” Leaphorn asked.
“About the Navajo Tribal Police sending two men”—he pointed a finger at Leaphorn and then at Chee—“two men, count ’em, to Washington, Dee, Cee, which is several miles out of their jurisdiction, to look for a fellow which us local cops didn’t even yet know there was a reason to be looking for.”
“Nobody sent us here,” Leaphorn said.
Rodney ignored the remark. He was staring at Chee.
“What time did you leave the Smithsonian last night?”
Chee told him. He was baffled. How did this Washington policeman know he had been at the museum last night? Why would he care? Something must have happened to Highhawk.
“Which exit?”
’Twelfth Street.“
“Nobody checked you out?”
“Nobody was there.”
Surprise again registered on Rodney’s face.
“Ah,” he said. “No guard? No security person? How did you get out?”
“I just walked out.”
“The door wasn’t locked.”
Chee shook his head. “Closed, but unlocked.”
“You see anything? Anybody?”
“I was surprised no one was there. I looked around. Empty.”
“You didn’t see a young woman in a museum guard’s uniform? A black woman? The guard who was supposed to be keeping an eye on that Twelfth Street entrance?”
Chee shook his head again. “Nobody was around,” he said. “Nobody. What’s the deal?” But even as he asked the question, he knew the deal. Highhawk was dead. Chee was just about the last person who’d seen him alive.
“The deal is”—Rodney was looking at Leaphorn now—“that I get a call from my old friend Joe here to check on whether there’s any kind of report on a man named Henry Highhawk and I find out this Highhawk is on a list of people Homicide would like to talk to.” Rodney shifted his gaze back to Chee. “So I come down here to talk to my old friend Joe, and he introduces me to you and, what do ya know, you happen to be another guy on Homicide’s wish list. That’s what the deal is.”
“Your homicide people want to talk to Highhawk,” Chee said. “That means he’s alive?”
“You have some reason to think otherwise?” Rodney asked.
“When you said you had a homicide I figured he was the one,” Chee said. He explained to Rodney what had happened last night at the Smithsonian. “Back in just a minute, he said. But he never came back. I went out and wandered around the halls looking for him. Then finally I went home. I called him at home this morning. No soap. I called his office. The woman he works for was looking for him too. She was worried about him.”
Rodney had been intent on every word.
“Went home when?”
“I told you,” Chee said. “I must have left the Twelfth Street entrance a little before ten thirty. Very close to that. I walked right back to my hotel.”
“And when did Highhawk receive this telephone call? The call just before he left?”
Chee told him.
“Who was the caller?”
“No idea. It was a short call.”
“What about? Did you hear it?”
“I heard Highhawk’s end. Apparently he had been trying to tell Highhawk how to fix something. Highhawk had tried and it hadn’t worked. I remember he said it’didn’t turn on,’ and Highhawk said since he was coming down anyway the caller could fix it. And then they set the nine-thirty time and Highhawk told him to remember it was the Twelfth Street entrance.“
“Him?” Rodney said. “Was the caller a man?”