The Ghostway

THE GHOSTWAY

Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn & Chee 07

For Margaret Mary

With special thanks to Sam Bingham and those students at Rock Point Community School who took time to help me understand how Navajos deal with the chindis of Dine' Bike'yah in 1984.

Chapter 1

Hosteen joseph joe remembered it like this. He'd noticed the green car just as he came out of the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat. The red light of sundown reflected from its windshield. Above the line of yellow cottonwoods along the San Juan River the shape of Shiprock was blue-black and ragged against the glow. The car looked brand new and it was rolling slowly across the gravel, the driver leaning out the window just a little. The driver had yelled at Joseph Joe.

"Hey!" he'd yelled. "Come here a minute." Joseph Joe remembered that very clearly. The driver looked like a Navajo, but yelling at him like that was not a Navajo thing to do because Joseph Joe was eighty-one years old, and the people around Shiprock and up in the Chuska Mountains called him Hosteen, which means "old man" and is a term of great respect.

Joseph Joe had put his laundry sack into the back of his daughter's pickup truck and walked over to the car. He noticed its plates weren't yellow, like New Mexico's, or white, like Arizona's. They were blue.

"I'm looking for a man named Gorman," the driver had said. "Leroy Gorman. A Navajo. Moved here little while ago."

"I don't know him," Joseph Joe had said. He had said it in Navajo, because when he got close he saw he had been right. The man was a Navajo. But the driver just frowned at him.

"You speak English?" the driver asked.

"I don't know Leroy Gorman." Hosteen Joe said it in English this time.

"He's been around here several weeks," the driver said. "Young fellow. Little older than me. Medium-sized. Hell, small as this place is, I'd think you'd have seen him."

"I don't know him," Joseph Joe repeated. "I don't live in this town. I live at my daughter's place. Out there near the Shiprock." Joseph Joe had gestured toward the Arizona border and the old volcano core outlined by the sunset. "Don't live in here with all these people," he explained.

"I'll bet you've seen him," the driver said. He took out his billfold and fished a photograph out of it. "This is him," the driver said and handed the photograph to Hosteen Joe.

Joseph Joe looked at it carefully, as courtesy demanded. It was a Polaroid photograph, like the ones his granddaughter took. There was something written on the back of it, and an address. The front was a picture of a man standing by the door of a house trailer, which was partly shaded by a cottonwood tree. Hosteen Joe took off his glasses and wiped them off carefully on his sleeve and looked a long time at the young man's face. He didn't recognize him, and that's what he said when he handed the driver his photograph. After that, he didn't remember the rest of it quite as clearly because just then it all began to happen.

The driver was saying something to him about the trailer, maybe about Gorman living in it or trying to sell it or something, and then there was the sound of a car braking on the highway, tires squealing a little, and the car backing up and whipping around and driving into the Wash-O-Mat parking lot. This car was new too. A Ford sedan.

It stopped just in front of the driver's car. A man wearing a plaid coat got out of it and walked toward them and then stopped suddenly, apparently noticing Joseph Joe for the first time. Plaid Coat said something to the driver. As Joseph Joe remembered, it was "Hello, Albert," but the driver didn't say anything. Then Plaid Coat said, "You forgot to do what you were told. You've got to come along with me. You're not supposed to be here." Or something like that. And then he had looked at Joseph Joe and said, "We've got business, old man. You go away now."

Hosteen Joe had turned then and walked back toward his daughter's truck. Behind him he heard the sound of a car door opening. Then closing. A yell. The sharp clap of a pistol shot. And then another shot, and another, and another. When he turned he saw Plaid Coat on the gravel and the driver holding himself up by clinging to the door of his car. Then the driver got in and drove away. When the car got to the asphalt, it turned toward the river and toward the junction, which would either take it west toward Teec Nos Pos or south toward Gallup.

People were running out of the Wash-O-Mat by then, yelling questions. But Hosteen Joe just looked at Plaid Coat, sprawled on his side on the gravel with a pistol on the ground beside him and blood running out his mouth. Then he got into his daughter's truck.

The driver was Navajo, but this was white man's business.

Chapter 2

Funny how a premonition works," the deputy said. "I been in this business almost thirty years, and I never had one before."

Jim Chee said nothing. He was trying to recreate precisely and exactly the moment when he had known everything was going wrong with Mary Landon. He didn't want to think about the deputy's premonitions. He'd said something to Mary about his house trailer being too small for both of them, and she'd said, "Hey, wait a minute, Jim Chee, what have you done about that application with the fbi?" and he'd told her that he'd decided not to mail it. And Mary had just sat there in the Crownpoint Cafe, not looking at him or saying anything, and finally she'd sighed and shook her head and said, "Why should you be any different from everybody else?" and laughed a laugh with absolutely no humor in it. He was remembering all this and concentrating on his driving, following the rocky track which led along this high hump of the Chuska Mountains. The moon was down and the night was in that period of implacable cold darkness that comes just before the first gray light of dawn. Chee was driving with only his parking lights—just as Sharkey had told him to drive. That meant going slowly and risking a wrong turn at any of the places where the trail divided itself to go wandering off toward a spring, or someone's hogan, or a sheep dip, or who knows what. Chee wasn't worried about the slowness. Sharkey's plan was to get to the hogan of Hosteen Begay long enough before daylight to let them get into position. There was plenty of time. But he was worried about a wrong turn. And his mind was full of Mary Landon. Besides, the deputy had said it all before.

Now the deputy was saying it all again.

"Had a funny feeling from the very first," the deputy said. "When Sharkey was telling us about it back there in Captain Largo's office. Felt the skin tightening on the back of my neck. Kind of a coldness. And prickling on the arms. Somebody's going to get hurt, I thought. Somebody's going to get their butt shot off."

Chee sensed the deputy was looking at him, waiting for him to say something. "Um," Chee said.

"Yes," the deputy agreed. "I got a feeling that Gorman fella's laying up there with his pistol cocked, and when we walk in somebody's going to get killed."

Chee eased the Navajo Tribal Police carryall around a washout. In his rearview mirror he could see the parking lights of Sharkey's pickup truck. The fbi agent was staying about a hundred yards behind him. The deputy now interrupted his monologue to light a cigaret. In the flare of the kitchen match, the man's face looked yellow—an old and sinister face. The deputy's name was Bales and he was old enough, with even more years weathered into his skin by the high-country sun of San Juan County. But not sinister. His reputation was for easygoing, over-talkative mildness. Now he exhaled smoke.

"It's not a feeling that I'm going to get shot," Bales said. "It's a sort of general feeling that somebody will."

Chee was conscious again that Bales was waiting for him to say something. This white man's custom of expecting a listener to do more than listen was contrary to Chee's courteous Navajo conditioning. He'd first become aware of it his freshman year at the University of New Mexico. He'd dated a girl in his sociology class and she'd accused him of not listening to her, and it had taken two or three misunderstandings before he'd finally fathomed that while his people presume that if they're talking, you are listening, white people require periodic reassurance. Deputy Sheriff Bales was requiring such reassurance now, and Chee tried to think of something to say.

"Somebody already got shot," he said. "Couple of people got shot, including Gorman."

"I meant somebody new," Bales said.

"If it's not you," Chee said, "that leaves me, or Sharkey, or that other fbi agent he brought along. Or maybe Old Man Begay."

"I don't think so," Bales said. "I think it would need to be one of us, the way this premonition feels." Satisfied now that Chee was listening, Bales inhaled deeply and allowed a moment of silence while he savored the taste of the tobacco.

Mary Landon had stirred her coffee, looking at it and not at him. "You've made up your mind to stay," she'd said. "Haven't you. When were you going to tell me?" And he'd said what? Something stupid or insensitive, probably. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said. But he remembered her words—vividly, clearly, exactly.

"Whatever you say about it, it just has one meaning. It means I come second. What comes first is Jim Chee, being Navajo. I'm to be sort of an appendage to his life. Mrs. Chee and the Navajo children." He'd interrupted her, denying that accusation, and she had said the Navajo Way was important to him only when it reinforced what he already wanted to do. She'd said that before, and he knew exactly what was coming. The Navajos, she'd reminded him, married into the wife's clan. The husband joined the wife's family. "How about that, Jim Chee?" she'd asked. There was nothing he could say to her.

The deputy exhaled again and rolled down the window a bit to let the cold air suck out the smoke. "Always chaps my butt the way the fbi won't ever tell you anything," he said. "The subject is Albert Gorman." Bales raised the pitch of his voice a notch in a weak attempt to mimic the West Texas sound of Agent Sharkey. " 'Gorman is believed armed with a thirty-eight-caliber pistol.' " Bales switched back to his own rusty voice. "Believed, hell. They took a thirty-eight slug out of the guy he shot." Bales switched voices again. " 'Los Angeles informs us that it is particularly important to apprehend this subject alive. He is wanted for questioning.'" Bales snorted. "Ever arrest anyone who wasn't wanted for questioning about something?" Bales chuckled. "Like how many beers he had before he started driving."

Chee grunted. He eased the carryall around a place where the soil was cut away from a ridge of stone. The rearview mirror assured him again that Sharkey's pickup was still behind him.

"I don't see how we can compromise," Mary Landon had said. "I just don't see how we can work it out." And he'd said, "Sure, Mary. Sure we can." But she was right. How could you compromise it? Either he stayed with the Navajo Police or he took a job off the reservation. Either he stayed Navajo or he turned white. Either they raised their children in Albuquerque, or Albany, or some other white city as white children or they raised them on the Colorado Plateau as Dinee. Halfway was worse than either way. Chee had seen enough of that among displaced Navajos in the border towns to know. There was no compromise solution.

"You know what we heard?" the deputy said. "We heard that this business was tied up with an fbi agent getting killed out in L.A. We heard that Gorman and Lerner, the guy he shot at the laundry, was both working for some outfit on the Coast. Some outfit that stole cars. Big operation. And some big shots got indicted. And an fbi agent got knocked off. And that's why the Feds are so hot to talk to this Gorman."

"Um," Chee said. He steered the carryall cautiously around a juniper, but not cautiously enough. The left front wheel dropped into a hole the parking lights hadn't revealed. The jarring jolt shook the deputy's hat down over his eyes.

"The car the dead guy was driving," the deputy said. "It was rented there at the Farmington airport. They tell you that?"

"No," Chee said. As a matter of fact, they hadn't told him anything much—which was exactly what Chee had learned to expect when he was running errands for the Federals. "Got a little job for you," Captain Largo said. "We need to find that fellow in the parking lot." It had seemed an odd thing to say, since the Shiprock agency of the Navajo Tribal Police, along with every other cop along the Arizona-New Mexico border, had all been looking for that fellow. But Chee had also come to expect Largo to say odd things. Largo had then explained himself by handing Chee a folder. It included a copy of the photograph of Albert Gorman that the fbi had provided, a rap sheet showing several arrests and one conviction for larceny of motor vehicles, and some biographical statistics. There were no blank spaces on the forms used by the Los Angeles Police Department for the sort of information Chee needed: Gorman's mother's name and her clan, which Albert Gorman had been "born to," and the clan of Gorman's father, which Albert had been "born for." Unless Albert Gorman had forgotten how to be a Navajo in Los Angeles or, as sometimes happened off the reservation, had never learned the Navajo Way, the homes of these clansmen would be the place to look for Albert Gorman. Largo knew that.

"What I want you to do is drop everything else you're fooling around with. Just come up with this guy," Largo had said. "He didn't pass the roadblocks at Teec Nos Pos, and we had a car there fifteen minutes after the shooting, so he didn't go west. And he didn't get to the roadblock at Sheep Springs, so he didn't get through us going south. So unless he turned east to Burnham, and that road doesn't go anyplace, he must have gone up into the Chuskas."

Chee had agreed to that, mentally changing the "must have" into a "most likely."

Largo pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the wall map, a bulky man with a barrel chest and thin hips—the top-heavy wedge shape so common among western Navajos. He waved a finger around a portion of the map encompassing the Shiprock massif, the Carrizo and Lukachukai mountains, the north end of the Chuskas, and the country between them. "Narrows it down to this little area," Largo said. "See how quick you can find him."

The little area was about the size of Connecticut, but its population wouldn't be more than a few hundred. And the few hundred would be people who would unfailingly notice and remember anything unusual. If Gorman had driven his green sedan into the country south of Teec Nos Pos, or west of Littlewater, it would have been seen and talked about and remembered—the subject of speculation. It was simply a matter of driving and driving and driving, and talking and talking and talking, for however many days it took to track it down. "How quick I find him depends on how lucky I get," Chee said.

"Get lucky, then," Largo said. "And when you find him, just call in. Don't try to arrest him. Don't go anywhere near him. Don't do nothing to spook him. Just get on the radio and get word to us, and we tell the Agency." Largo was leaning against the map, staring at Chee, expression neutral at best. "Understand what I'm saying? Don't screw it up. It's an fbi case. It is not, repeat not, a case for the Navajo Tribal Police. It's an Agency case. It is not our affair. It is not the affair of Officer Jim Chee. Got it?"

"Sure," Chee said.

"Chee finds. Chee calls in. Chee leaves it at that. Chee does not do any freelance screwing around," Largo said.

"Right," Chee said.

"I mean it," Largo said. "I don't know much about it, but from what I hear, this guy is tied up somehow or other with some big case in Los Angeles. And an fbi agent got killed." Largo paused long enough to allow Chee to consider what that meant. "That means that when the fbi says they want to talk to this guy, they really want to talk to him. You just find him."

And so Chee had found him and now, having found him, was guiding in the fbi to finish the job, with Deputy Bales along to properly represent the San Juan County Sheriffs Department.

Deputy Bales stifled a yawn. "Yeah," he said. "The dead guy came in on a chartered plane. Or anyway, the people at the airport said a private plane flew in, and he got out of it and rented the car. A hood out of Los Angeles. With a long rap sheet."

"Um," Chee said. He'd heard about the plane and the rented car and the police record. The homicide was exotic enough to be fuel for gossip. The fbi told nobody anything. But the Farmington police told the New Mexico State Police, who told the Sheriffs Office, who told the Navajo cops, who told the Bureau of Indian Affairs law and order people, who told the Arizona Highway Patrol. In the small, dull world of law enforcement, anything unusual is a precious commodity, worth weeks of conversation.

"I wonder if he really is wounded," the deputy said.

"Pretty sure about that," Chee said. "Old Joseph Joe is supposed to have seen him hanging on the car door, looking hurt. And when I looked in the car, there was blood on the front seat."

"Been wondering about that," the deputy said. "How'd you find it?"

"Just took time," Chee said. "You know how it is. Just keep asking until you ask the right person."

It had taken three days to find the right person, a boy getting off the bus from the Toadlena school. He'd seen the green sedan going by on the road that led from Two Gray Hills southward toward Owl Springs. Chee had stopped at the Two Gray Hills Trading Post and got a fix on who lived down that road and how to find their places. Then another hard afternoon of driving on doubtful trails. "Found it about dark yesterday," he added.

Bales had tilted his hat far back on his head. "And Sharkey decides to wait and catch him about daylight, when he's sleeping. Or when we hope he's sleeping. Course we don't even know he's there."

"No," Chee said. But he had no doubt at all that Albert Gorman was there. This terrible road led to the Begay hogan and nowhere else. And from his abandoned car, Gorman's tracks led toward the Begay place. They were the uncertain, wavering tracks of a man either drunk or badly hurt. And finally, there was what he'd learned at the trading post at Two Gray Hills on his way back. The trader wasn't there, but the woman handling the cash register had told him that, yes, Old Man Begay had a visitor.

"Hosteen Begay came in three-four days ago and asked what medicine to buy for somebody who hurt himself and had a lot of pain," she'd said. She'd sold him a bottle of aspirin and a stamp for an envelope he'd wanted mailed.

For several hundred yards the dim parking lights had been picking up the black gloss of spilled crankcase oil. Now they reflected from a green Plymouth sedan, blocking the trail. Chee parked his truck behind it, cut the lights and the engine, and climbed out.

Sharkey had the window of his pickup down. He was leaning out, looking at Chee.

"About three quarters of a mile up the track here," Chee said, pointing.

It was then he noticed for the first time that fog was forming. A trace of it drifted like gray smoke through the beam of Sharkey's lights just as he turned them off, and then the smell of fog was in Chee's nostrils and the dampness on his face.

Chapter 3

In the high, dry mountains of the Colorado Plateau, fog is out of its element. It forms as part of a climatic accident, produced when a cold front crosses a mountain range and collides with warmer air on the opposite slope. And it survives no longer than a fish out of water. By dawn, when the four of them reached the place of Hosteen Begay, the fog had already lost its character as a solid blinding cloud. Now it survived only in pockets, as patches and fragments. Chee stood at the edge of one such fragment, exactly where Sharkey had told him to stand—on the slope west of the meadow where Begay had built his hogan. His role was to make sure that if Gorman tried to escape he would not escape in that direction. Chee rested a hip against a boulder. He waited and watched. At the moment, he watched Deputy Bales, who stood beside a ponderosa pine, right hand against the tree trunk and his left holding a long-barreled revolver, its muzzle pointing at the ground. The bottom of the tree trunk and Bales's lower legs were obscured by the mist, making—in the dim light—man and tree seem somehow detached from solid earth. Over the meadow, the fog was almost solid, frayed only here and there by the very beginning of a cold dawn breeze. Chee glanced at his watch. In eleven minutes it would be sunrise.

The hogan was a little below where Chee and the deputy waited. Through the ebbing mist, Chee could make out its conical roof, which seemed to be formed of slabs sliced from ponderosa logs in their first trip past the blade at the sawmill. The mist eddied and obscured this and eddied again. The short tin smoke pipe jutting from the center of the roof cone seemed to be blocked, closed by something pressed up into it from inside the hogan. Chee stared, straining his vision. He could think of just one reason to block a hogan's smoke hole.

Chee clicked his tongue, producing a nondescript sound just loud enough to catch the deputy's attention. Then he motioned his intention to move. Bales looked surprised. He tapped the face of his wristwatch, reminding Chee of the few minutes left. Just at sunrise, Sharkey and his man would be at the hogan's east-facing door. If Hosteen Begay emerged to bless the new day in the traditional fashion, they would pull him out of harm's way, rush into the hogan, and overpower Gorman. If he didn't appear, they'd rush in anyway. That was the plan. Chee had a feeling now that it would be an exercise in futility.

He moved along the slope away from Bales toward the north side of the hogan. From what Chee had learned of Hosteen Begay at Two Gray Hills he was an old-fashioned man, a traditional man, a man who knew the Navajo Way and followed it. He would have built this hogan as Changing Woman taught—with a single doorway facing the direction of dawn, the direction of all beginnings. North was the direction of darkness, the direction of evil. It was through the north wall of a hogan that a corpse must be removed in the sad event of death striking someone inside. Then the smoke hole would be plugged, the entrance boarded, and the place abandoned—with the corpse hole left open to warn the People that this had become a death hogan. The body could be removed, but never the malicious chindi of the dead person. The ghost infection was permanent.

Chee had circled about a hundred yards, keeping out of sight. Now he was almost due north of the place. Through the thinning mist he could see the dark hole where the logs of the wall had been chopped away. Someone had indeed died inside the hogan of Hosteen Begay and left his ghost behind.

Chapter 4

The thing to do is find the body—if there is one," Sharkey said. "You take care of that, Chee. We'll see what we can find around here."

Sharkey was standing at the hogan doorway, a small, hard-looking man of maybe forty-five with blond hair, short-cropped and curly.

"Here's some more old bandage." Bales's voice came from behind Sharkey, inside the hogan. "Dried blood on this one, too."

"What else are you finding?" Chee asked. "Any bedroll?"

"See if you can find where they put the body," Sharkey said, his voice impatient.

"Sure," Chee said. He already had an idea where the body might be. From the description they had of Gorman he wouldn't be particularly heavy. But Begay was an old man, and carrying a full-sized corpse wouldn't be easy. Probably he'd have dragged it on the blankets that had been its bed. And the best convenient burial site was obvious. A line of cliffs towered over Begay's little meadow to the northwest, their base littered with giant sandstone boulders tumbled out of their walls. It was the ideal place to put a body where it would be safe from predators. Chee headed for the talus slope.

Sharkey's agent was climbing out of the arroyo that ran behind the hogan. He nodded at Chee. "Nothing in the corral or the sheep pens," he said. "And the manure looks old."

Chee nodded back, wishing he could remember the man's name and wondering what "old" meant when he defined animal droppings. Yesterday or last year? But he wasn't particularly interested in any of this. It was Sharkey's business, and none of his own. Gorman might be a Navajo by blood but he was a white man by conditioning, by behavior. Let the whites bury the whites, or however that quotation went. He needed to get back to Shiprock, back to his own work and his own problems. What was he going to do about Mary Landon?

Chee followed the only relatively easy pathway into the boulders, noticing very quickly that he'd guessed right. Something heavy had been dragged here, leaving a trail of broken weeds and disturbed dust. Then Chee noticed, just up the talus slope ahead of him, the raw scar where rocks had been dislodged—pried and pushed to cause gravity to produce a rock-slide. The easy way to cover a body. Then he saw blue denim.

The body had been placed atop a slab of stone that had tumbled out of the cliff eons earlier. The corpse was out of reach of coyotes there, and the stones pushed down atop it had made it safe from birds. The denim that had caught Chee's eye was the bottom of a trouser leg. He walked around the burial, inspecting it. He could see nothing of the head and little of the body, just the sole of the right shoe and, through a gap between stones, a bit of the shoulder of a blue shirt.

Something was bothering Chee, something a touch out of harmony with things as they should be. What? He climbed the slope and inspected the burial site from above. Just an unnatural-looking slide of rocks. He looked beyond it, inspecting the place of Hosteen Begay. The sun was up now, high enough above the horizon to be warm on his face. Below, the hogan was still in shadow. A neat place, well made, with a well-made brush arbor beside it, and a fairly new Montgomery Ward storage shed, and a welded pipe rack for the oil drums in which Hosteen Begay kept his water for cooking and drinking, and a shed in which he kept feed for his livestock. A good place. Beyond it, through a fringe of ponderosas, the morning sun had lit the rolling gray velvet of the San Juan basin. Sheep country—buffalo grass, grama, sage, chamiza, and snakeweed— punctuated by the soaring black gothic spires of Shiprock and, beyond Shiprock, 50 miles away, the smudge that marked the smokestacks of the Four Corners power plant.

Chee drank in the view, letting the grandeur of immense space lift his spirits. But something still nudged at his consciousness. Something didn't fit. In this great harmony, something was discordant.

Chee looked down at the hogan again, studying it. Bales was beside the brush arbor. The two fbi agents were out of sight—perhaps inside the death hogan, where their ignorance protected them from the malice of Gorman's chindi. A perfect site. It had everything. Firewood. Summer grass. Spring water for livestock in the arroyo behind the hogan. Beauty in the site and in the view. And the isolation, the sense of space, which the Pueblo Indians and whites called loneliness but the Navajos treasured. True, winters would be snowed in here, and bitter cold. The place must be well over 8,000 feet. But the hogan had been built for winter. It must have been terribly hard for the old man to abandon it. And why had he?

It was this question, Chee realized, that had been bothering him. Why hadn't the old man done what the Dinee had done for a hundred generations when they saw death approaching? Why hadn't he moved the dying Gorman out of the hogan, out under the eye of Father Sun, into the pure open air? Why hadn't he made this kinsman a death bed under the arbor, where no walls would have penned in his chindi when death released it, where the ghost could have lost itself in the vastness of the sky? Gorman must have died a slow, gradual death brought on by lost blood, internal damage, and infection. Death would have been nothing strange to the old man. The Navajos were not a culture that hides its people away in hospitals at their dying time. One grew up with the death of one's old people, attending death, respecting it. Begay must have seen this death coming for hours, heard it in Gorman's lungs, seen it in his eyes. Why hadn't he moved the man outside in the fashion of the People? Why had he allowed this valued homeplace to be eternally infected with ghost sickness?

Sharkey appeared in the hogan doorway and stood staring up toward Chee. Chee stared back, unseen among the boulders. Bales and the other agent were invisible now. What was the man's name? It came to him suddenly: Witry. Another thought suddenly occurred to Chee. Could the body under the rocks be Begay's? Could it be that Gorman had killed the old man? It didn't seem likely. But Chee found that his bleak mood had changed. Suddenly he was interested in this affair.

He stepped out where Sharkey could see him. "Up here!" he shouted.

Removing the rocks was quick work.

"I left the photographs in the truck," Sharkey said. "But he fits Gorman's description."

The body obviously couldn't be Hosteen Begay. Far too young. Mid-thirties, Chee guessed. It lay on the stone, face up, legs extended, arms by the sides. A plastic bread sack, its top twisted shut, was beside the right hand.

"Here's what killed him," Bales said. "Hit him right in the side. Probably tore him all up, and the bleeding wouldn't stop."

Sharkey was looking at Chee. "I guess there's no way to get a vehicle in here," he said. "I guess we'll have to carry him out to the pickup."

"We could bring a horse in," Chee said. "Haul him out that way."

Sharkey picked up the sack and opened it.

"Looks like a jar of water. And cornmeal," he said. "That make sense?"

"Yes," Chee said. "That's customary."

Sharkey poured the contents of the sack carefully out on the rock, leaving Gorman's persona to make its four-day journey into the underground world of the dead with neither food nor water. "And here's his billfold. Cigaret lighter. Car keys. Comb. Guess it was the stuff he had in his pockets." Sharkey fished through the various compartments of the wallet, laying the odds and ends he extracted on the boulder beside Gorman's knee and then sorting through them. The driver's license was first. Sharkey held it in his left hand, tilted Gorman's face toward him with the right, and made the comparison of face to photograph.

"Albert A. Gorman," Sharkey read. "The late Albert A. Gorman. Eleven thousand seven hundred thirteen La Monica Street, Hollywood, Cal." He counted quickly through the money, which seemed to be mostly hundred-dollar bills, and whistled through his teeth. "Twenty-seven hundred and forty-odd," he said. "So crime paid fairly well."

"Hey," Witry said. "His shoes are on the wrong feet."

Sharkey stopped sorting and looked at Gorman's feet. He was wearing brown low-cut jogging shoes—canvas tops, rubber soles. The shoes had been reversed, right shoe on left foot.

"No," Chee said. "That's right."

Sharkey stared at him quizzically.

"I mean," said Chee, "that's the way it's done. In the traditional way, when you prepare a corpse for burial you reverse the moccasins. Switch 'em." Chee felt his face flushing under Sharkey's gaze. "So the ghost can't follow the man after death."

Silence. Sharkey resumed his examination of the artifacts from Gorman's billfold.

Chee looked at Gorman's head. There was dirt on his forehead, and his hair was dusty from the rockfall that had buried it. But it was more than dusty. It was tangled and greasy—the hair of a man who had lain for days dying.

"Lots of money," Sharkey said. "visa, Mastercard, California driver's license. California hunting license. Membership card in Olympic Health Club. Mug shots of two women. Coupon to get two Burger Chefs for the price of one. Social Security card. That's it."

Sharkey felt in the pockets of Gorman's jacket, unbuttoned it and checked his shirt pockets, turned the pockets of his trousers inside out. There was absolutely nothing in Gorman's pockets.

Walking back to the carryall, Chee decided he had a second puzzle to add to the question of why Hosteen Begay had not saved his hogan from the ghost. Another piece of carelessness. Begay had in some ways prepared his relative well. Albert A. Gorman had gone through the dark hole that leads into the underworld with plenty of money he could no longer spend. No ghost could follow his confusing footprints. He had been left with the symbolic food and water for the journey. But he would arrive unpurified. His dirty hair should have been washed clean in yucca suds, combed, and braided. Boiling yucca roots takes time. Had something hurried Hosteen Begay?

Chapter 5

The beginning of winter bulged down out of Canada, dusted the Colorado Plateau with snow, and retreated. Sun burned away the snow. The last late Canada geese appeared along the Sun Juan, lingered a day, and fled south. Winter appeared again, dry cold now. It hung over the Utah mountains and sent outriders of wind fanning across the canyon country. At the Shiprock subagency office of the Navajo Tribal Police the wind shrieked and howled, buffeting the walls and rattling the windows, distracting Jim Chee from what Captain Largo was saying and from his own thoughts about Mary Landon. The Monday morning meeting had lasted longer than usual, but now it was ending. The patrolmen, shift commanders, dispatchers, and jailers had filed out. Chee and Taylor Natonabah had been signaled to stay behind. Chee lounged in his folding chair in the corner of the room. His eyes were on Largo, explaining something to Natonabah, but his mind was remembering the evening he had met Mary Landon: Mary watching him in the crowd at the Crownpoint rug auction, Mary sitting across from him at the Crownpoint Cafe, her blue eyes on his as he told her about his family—his sisters, his mother, his uncle who was teaching him the Mountain Way and the Shooting Way and other curing rituals of the Navajo Way, preparing him to be a yataalii, one of the shaman medicine men who kept the People in harmony with their universe. The genuine interest on Mary's face. And Mary, finally, when he had given her a chance to talk, telling him of her fifth-graders at Crownpoint elementary, of the difference between the Pueblo Indian children she'd taught the year before at the Laguna-Acoma school and these Navajo youngsters, and of her family in Wisconsin. He'd known, he thought now, even on that first meeting, that this white woman was the woman he wanted to share his life with.

A fresh blast of wind rattled sand against the windows and seeped through some crack somewhere to move icy air around Chee's ankles. His memory skipped ahead to the weekend he'd taken Mary back on the plateau to his mother's summer hogan south of Kayenta. When he'd asked his mother later what she'd thought of Mary, his mother had said, "Will she be a Navajo?" And he had said, "Yes, she will be." Now he knew he had been wrong. Or probably wrong. Mary Landon would not be a Navajo. How could he change that? Or, if he couldn't change it, could Jim Chee stop being a Navajo?

Now Natonabah was leaving, zipping up his fur-lined jacket, his face flushed, his mouth grim. Clearly the captain had, in his low-key way, expressed disapproval. Chee quit thinking about Mary Landon and reexamined his conscience. He'd already done that automatically when Largo had signaled him to stay behind and had thought of no violations of Largo's rules and regulations. But now Captain Largo's large round face considered him, even blander and milder than usual. Often that meant trouble. What had he done?

"You all caught up on your work?"

Chee sat up straight. "No, sir," he said.

"You catch that Yazzie who's bootlegging all that wine?"

"No, sir."

"Found that kid did the cutting on the Ute Reservation?"

"Not yet." It was going to be worse than he'd expected. He'd only had the Ute stabbing added to his case list Friday.

Largo was peering down into the file folder in which he kept Chee's reports. It was a bulky file, but Largo apparently decided to shorten the ordeal a little. He flipped rapidly through it, then closed it and turned it face down on his desk. "All this still-unfinished business then?" he asked. "You got plenty to keep your mind occupied?"

"Yes, sir," Chee said. "Plenty of work to do."

"I got the impression that you had time on your hands," Largo said. "Looking for something to keep you occupied."

Chee waited. Largo waited. Ah, well, Chee thought, might as well get it over with. "How's that, sir?" he asked.

"You pulled the file on the Gorman business," Largo said. His expression asked why.

"Just curious," Chee said. Now he would get a lecture on respecting jurisdictions, on minding his own business.

"You find anything interesting in there?"

The question surprised him. "Not much in there at all," he said.

"No reason for there to be," Largo said. "It's not our case. What were you looking for?"

"Nothing specific. I wondered who Gorman was. And who was the man who came after him. The one Gorman shot at the laundry. What Gorman was doing in Shiprock. How Begay fit in. Things like that."

Largo made a tent of his fingers above the desk top and spent a moment examining it. "Why were you curious?" he asked, without taking his eyes off his fingers. "Fight in a parking lot. The survivor runs to his kinsman to hide out and heal. Everything looks normal. What's bothering you?"

Chee shrugged.

Largo studied him. "You know," he said, "or anyway you heard from me, that an fbi agent got killed back in California in this one. The Agency is always touchy. This time they're going to be extra touchy."

"I was just curious," Chee said. "No harm done."

"I want you to tell me what made you curious."

"It wasn't much," Chee said. He told Largo about the way Gorman's corpse had been prepared, with its hair unwashed, and of wondering why Begay had not moved Gorman outside before the moment of death.

Largo listened. "You tell Sharkey about this?"

"He wasn't interested," Chee said.

Largo grinned.

"Maybe no reason to be," Chee admitted. "I don't know much about Begay. Lots of Navajos don't know enough about the Navajo way of getting a corpse ready. Lots of 'em wouldn't care."

"Younger ones, maybe," Largo said. "Or city ones. Begay isn't young. Or city. What do you know about him?"

"They call him Hosteen, so I guess the people up there respect him. That's about it."

"I know a little more than that," Largo said. "Begay is Tazhii Dinee. In fact, I'm told his aunt is the ahnii of that clan. He's lived up there above Two Gray Hills longer than anybody can remember. Has a grazing permit. Runs sheep. Keeps to himself. Some talk that he's a witch."

Largo recited it all in a flat, uninflected voice, putting no more emphasis on the last sentence than the first.

"There's some talk that just about everybody is a witch," Chee said. "I've heard you were. And me."

"He seems to have a good reputation," Largo said. "People up there seem to like him. Say he's honest. Takes care of his relatives." That was the ultimate compliment for a Navajo. The worse insult was to say he acted like he didn't have any relatives. In Navajo country, families come first.

Chee wanted to ask Largo why he had learned so much about an old man who kept to himself high in the Chuska Mountains. As Largo had said, the Gorman shooting was an fbi case—white-man business completely outside the jurisdiction of the Navajo Tribal Police. Instead of asking, he waited. He'd worked for Largo two years, first at the Tuba City subagency and now here at Shiprock. Largo would tell him exactly what Largo wanted him to know and all at Largo's own pace. Chee knew very little about the Tazhii Dinee—only that the Turkey People were one of the smallest of the sixty or so Navajo clans. If Begay's aunt was the clan's ahnii, its matriarch/judge/fountain-of -wisdom, then his was a most respected family and he would certainly know enough of the Navajo Way to properly prepare a kinsman for burial.

"Gorman was the son of Begay's youngest sister," Largo said. "The Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated a bunch of that clan in Los Angeles in the nineteen forties and fifties. In fact, Begay seems to have been among the few of that outfit that didn't go. I think one of his daughters also stayed. Lived over around Borrego Pass. Dead now. And a few Tazhii Dinee are supposed to have moved over to the Cañoncito Reservation. But the clan doesn't amount to much any more." Largo walked to the window and stood, back to Chee, inspecting the weather in the parking lot.

"We've got a girl missing from St. Catherine Indian School," Largo said. "Probably a runaway. Probably nothing much." The captain exercised the storyteller's pause-for-effect. "She's the granddaughter of Hosteen Begay. Told a friend she was worried about him. The nuns at St. Catherine called the police there at Santa Fe because they said she wasn't the type that runs away. Whatever type that is." Largo paused again, still looking at something or other in the parking lot. "Attended her morning classes on the fourteenth. Didn't show up for classes after lunch."

Chee didn't comment. The bloody business in the parking lot had happened the night of the eleventh. On the twelfth Old Man Begay had walked into the Two Gray Hills Trading Post, bought his futile bottle of aspirin, and mailed a letter. How long would it take a letter to get from Two Gray Hills to Santa Fe? Two days?

Largo walked back to his desk, found a package of cigarets in the drawer, and lit one. "The other thing," he said through the cloud of blue smoke, "is the fbi is unusually uptight about this one. Very grim. So I did some asking around. It turns out one of their old-timers got killed a couple of months ago, like I told you. He was on something that ties in with this business." Largo turned away from his parking lot inspection to gaze at Chee. "You been a cop long enough to know how it is when a cop gets killed?"

"I've heard," Chee said.

"Well, anyway, they never want us interfering in their jurisdiction. So think how sore they'd get if it happened when they've got an agent dead. And nobody to hang it on."

"Yeah," Chee said.

"Unfortunately," Largo said, "you're the logical one to handle this missing St. Catherine girl."

Chee let that pass. What Largo meant was that he had a reputation for being nosy. He couldn't deny it.

"You want me to be careful," Chee said.

"I want you to turn on the brain," Largo said. "See if you can pick up the girl. If you run into anything that bears on what happened to Gorman, then you back off. Tell me. I tell Sharkey. Everybody's happy."

"Yes, sir," Chee said.

Largo stood by the window, looking at him. "I really mean it," he said. "No screwing around."

"Yes, sir," Chee said.

Chapter 6

The girl's name was sosi. Margaret Billy Sosi. Age seventeen. Daughter of Franklin Sosi, no known address, and Emma Begay Sosi (deceased) of Borrego Pass. The form listed Ashie Begay, grandfather, care of Two Gray Hills Trading Post, as the "person to be notified in event of emergency." The form was a photocopy of an admissions sheet used at the Santa Fe boarding school, and there was nothing on it, or on the attached Navajo Tribal Police missing persons report form, that told Chee anything he didn't already know. He slipped the two sheets back into their folders and turned to the copies he made from the Gorman homicide report.

The wind, blowing from due north now, gusted around his pickup truck and rattled particles of parking lot debris against its door. Chee did not consciously dislike the wind. It was part of the totality of day and place, and to dislike it would be contrary to his Navajo nature. But it made him uneasy. He read quickly through the Gorman file, covering first the chronology of what had happened at the laundry and then turning to the investigating officer's transcription of his interview with Joseph Joe, looking for the oddity that had bothered him when he had first gone through the report.

"Subject Joe said Gorman had called him to the car and engaged him briefly in conversation. Joe said that as he walked away from the Gorman vehicle, the rented vehicle driven by Lerner came into the lot…"

Engaged him briefly in conversation. About what? Why had Gorman driven from Los Angeles to be shot at a laundromat? It seemed to Chee that an answer to the first question might offer some clue to the answer of the second. It certainly seemed a logical question—something he would have asked Old Man Joe. Why hadn't it been asked? Chee glanced at the name of the investigating officer. It was Sharkey. Sharkey seemed smart.

Chee read through the rest of the report. Lerner had chartered a plane at a Pasadena airport, flown to Farmington, and rented an Avis car. Judging from the time elapsed, he had driven directly and rapidly to Shiprock. Looking for Gorman, obviously. How had he found him at the laundry? That could have been easy enough if he knew the car Gorman was driving. He would have been looking for it, and the highway in from Farmington passed directly by the lot where Gorman was parked. That left the question of why. The data in the report on Gorman himself made him seem trivial enough—simply a car thief. Lerner, from the report and what gossip Chee had heard, was a minor Los Angeles hoodlum. The chartered plane seemed grotesquely glossy and expensive for an incident involving such unimportant people.

Chee put the report back in its folder and looked quickly through the papers he'd picked up from his in-basket. Nothing much. A Please Return Call slip showing that "Eddie" had called about "Blue Door." Eddie pumped gas at night at the Chevron station beside the San Juan bridge. His mother was an alcoholic, Eddie did not like bootleggers, and the Blue Door Bar at the reservation boundary outside Farmington was a haunt for those who hauled beer, wine, and whiskey into the reservation's outback. Eddie meant well, but unfortunately his tips never seemed to lead anywhere.

The next memo informed all officers of the theft of a pinto mare from the Two Gray Hills Trading Post; of a pickup order on a man named Nez who had beaten his brother-in-law with a hammer at the family sheep camp above Mexican Water, and of the confirmation of identification of a middle-aged woman found dead beside the Shiprock-Gallup highway. Cause of death was also confirmed. She'd been run over by a vehicle while sprawled, unconscious from alcohol, on the pavement. Chee took a second look at the identification. He didn't know the name, but he knew the woman, and a score like her, and their husbands and their sons. He had arrested them, and manhandled them into his patrol car, and cleaned up after them, and eased their bodies onto stretchers and into ambulances. In the milder seasons, they drank themselves to death in front of trucks on U.S. 666 or Navajo Route 1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.

That wind buffeted his truck, stirring a cold draft around his face. Chee turned on the ignition and started his engine. Where was Mary Landon at this moment? Teaching her fifth-graders at Crownpoint. Chee remembered the afternoon he had stood on the walk outside the windows of her classroom and watched her—a silent pantomime through the glass. Mary Landon talking. Mary Landon laughing. Mary Landon coaxing, approving, explaining. Until one of her students had seen him standing there and looked at him, and he had fled in embarrassment.

He turned his mind away from that and rolled the pickup out of the lot. He would see Eddie about the Blue Door later. The stolen pinto mare and the angry brother-in-law and the rest of it could wait. Now the job was to find Margaret Billy Sosi, aged seventeen, granddaughter of Ashie Begay, clanswoman of a dead man whom people called Albert Gorman, who seemed to have been running, but not running fast enough or far enough. And thus the first step to finding Margaret Billy Sosi was finding Hosteen Joseph Joe and asking him the question Sharkey hadn't asked, which was what Albert Gorman had said to him at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat.

Chapter 7

Finding joseph joe proved simple enough. In cultures where cleanliness is valued and water is scarce, laundries are magnets—social as well as service centers. Chee took for granted that the people at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat would know their customers. He was correct. The middle-aged woman who managed the place provided Joseph Joe's full family genealogy and directions to his winter place. Chee rolled his patrol car southward across the San Juan bridge with the north wind chasing him, then west toward Arizona, and then south again across the dry slopes of snakeweed and buffalo grass toward the towering black spire of basalt that gave the town of Shiprock its name. It was the landmark of Chee's childhood—jutting on the eastern horizon from his mother's place south of Kayenta, and a great black thumb stuck into the northern sky during the endless lonely winters he spent at the Two Gray Hills Boarding School. It was there he'd learned that the Rock with Wings of his uncle's legends had, eons ago, boiled and bubbled as molten lava in the throat of an immense cinder cone. The volcano had died, millions of years had passed, abrasive weather—like today's bitter wind—had worn away cinders and ash and left only tough black filling. In today's bleak autumn light, it thrust into the sky like a surreal gothic cathedral, soaring a thousand feet above the blowing grass and providing—even at five miles' distance—a ludicrously oversized backdrop for Joseph Joe's plank and tarpaper house. "I already told the white policeman about it," Hosteen Joe told Chee. Joe poured coffee into a plastic Thermos bottle cap and into a white cup with re-elect mcdonald for tribal progress printed around it, handed Chee the political cup, took a sip from the other, and began telling it all again.

Chee listened. The wind seeped through cracks, rustling the Farmington Times Joe was using as a tablecloth and stirring the spare clothing that hung on a wire strung across a corner of the room. Through the only south window, Chee could see the tall cliffs of Shiprock, now obscured by blowing dust, now black against the dust-stained sky. Joseph Joe finished his account, sipped his coffee, waited for Chee's reaction.

Chee took a courtesy sip. He drank a lot of coffee. ("Too much coffee, Joe," Mary would say. "Someday I will reform you into a sipper of tea. When I get you, I'm going to make sure you last a long time.") He enjoyed coffee, respected its aroma, its flavor. This was awful coffee: old, stale, bitter. But Chee sipped it. Partly courtesy, partly to cover his surprise at what Joseph Joe had told him.

"I want to make sure I have everything right," Chee said. "The man in the car, the man who drove up first, said he wanted to find somebody he called Leroy Gorman?"

"Leroy Gorman," Joe said. "I remember that because I thought about whether I had ever known anybody by that name. Lots of Navajos call themselves Gorman, but I never knew one they called Leroy Gorman."

"The man you were talking to, his name was Gorman too. Did the white policeman tell you that?"

"No," Joe said. He smiled. "White men never tell me much. They ask questions. Maybe they were brothers."

"Probably the same family, anyway," Chee said. "But it sounds like this white policeman didn't ask you enough questions. I wonder why he didn't ask you about what Gorman said to you."

"He asked," Joseph Joe said. "I told him."

"You told him about Gorman asking you where to find Leroy Gorman."

"Sure," Joseph Joe said. "Told him the same thing I told you."

"Did you tell the policeman about the picture Gorman showed you?"

"Sure. He asked me a bunch of questions about it. Wrote it down in his tablet."

"That picture," Chee said. "A house trailer? Not a mobile home? Not one of those things that has a motor and a steering wheel itself, but something you pull behind a car?"

"Sure," Joseph Joe said. He laughed, his wrinkled face multiplying its creases with amusement. "Used to have a son-in-law lived in one. No room for nothing."

"Two things," Chee said. "I want you to remember everything you told the white policeman about the picture—everything in it. And then I want you to see if you can remember anything you didn't tell him. Was it just a picture of a trailer? Was it with a bunch of other trailers? Hitched behind a car? One man in the picture, standing there?"

Joseph Joe thought. "It was a color picture," he said. "A Polaroid." He walked to a tin trunk against the wall, opened the lid, extracted a photo album with a black cardboard cover. "Like this one," he said, showing Chee a Polaroid photo of Joseph Joe standing beside his front door with a middle-aged woman. "Same size as this," he said. "Had the trailer in the middle, and a tree sort of over it, and just dirt in front."

"Just one man in it?"

"Standing by the door. Looking at you."

"What kind of tree?"

Joe thought. "Cottonwood. I think cottonwood."

"What color leaves?"

"Yellow."

"What color trailer?"

"It was aluminum," Joe said. "You've seen 'em. Round on both ends. Round shape. Big things." Joe indicated the bigness with his hands and laughed again. "Maybe if my son-in-law had one that big, he'd still be my son-in-law."

"And the picture," Chee said. "You said he took it out of his wallet. Did he put it back in again?"

"Sure," Joe said. "Not in those little pockets where you keep your license and things. Too big for that. He put it in with the money. In the money place."

"You tell the white policeman that?"

"Sure," Joe said. "He was like you. He asked a lot of questions about the picture."

"Now," Chee said. "Did you think of anything you didn't tell him?"

"No," Joseph Joe said. "But I can think of some things I haven't told you."

"Tell me," Chee said.

"About the writing," Joe said. "On the back side it had an address written, and something else, but I couldn't see what it was. I don't read. But I could see it was something short. Just two or three words."

Chee thought about it on the way back. Why had Sharkey said nothing of the picture in his report, or of Albert Gorman trying to find Leroy Gorman? Had that part been deleted before the Navajo Tribal Police received their version? What kind of a game was the Agency playing? Or was it Sharkey's game, and not the fbi's?

"The fbi wants you," Mary said. "You impressed them at the Academy. They accepted you when you applied. They'd accept you again if you applied again. And they'd keep you close to the reservation. You'd be more valuable to them here. Why would they move you someplace else?" And he'd said something about not to count on it. Something about in Washington an Indian was an Indian, and they'd be as likely to have him working with the Seminoles in Florida, just like they have a Seminole over in Flagstaff working with the Navajos. And Mary had said nothing at all, just changed the subject. As Chee changed it now, forcing his memory away from the soreness.

He remembered Sharkey standing beside Gorman's body, Gorman's wallet in his hand, piling its contents on the boulder. No photograph of a trailer. Had Sharkey palmed it? Hidden it away? Chee's memory was excellent, the recall of a People without a written memory, who keep their culture alive in their minds, who train their children to memorize details of sand paintings and curing ceremonials. He used it now, re-creating the scene, what Sharkey had said and done, Sharkey looking into the money compartment of the wallet, removing the money, looking again, inspecting flaps and compartments: Sharkey seeking a Polaroid photograph that wasn't there.

Chapter 8

The light was turning red. The sun had dipped beneath the western horizon, and the clouds in the west—dazzling yellow a few moments earlier—were now reflecting scarlet. Soon it would be too dark to see. Then Chee would confront his decision. He would either walk back to his pickup truck, go home, and write off this idea as a waste of time or he would search the one place he hadn't searched. That meant taking out his flashlight and stepping through the hole into darkness. At one level of his intellect it seemed a trivial thing. He would crouch, step over the broken siding, and find himself standing erect inside the abandoned death hogan of Hosteen Begay. To the Jim Chee who was an alumnus of the University of New Mexico, a subscriber to Esquire and Newsweek, an officer of the Navajo Tribal Police, lover of Mary Landon, holder of a Farmington Public Library card, student of anthropology and sociology, "with distinction" graduate of the fbi Academy, holder of Social Security card 441-28-7272, it was a logical step to take. He had repeated the long, bumpy drive into the Chuskas, made the final two-mile trudge from his pick-up to this place, to see what he could find at this hogan. How could his logical mind justify not searching it?

But "Jim Chee" was only what his uncle would call his "white man name." His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos. Since he had gone to Albuquerque to study at the University of New Mexico, he did not often think of himself as Long Thinker. But he did now. He stood on the talus slope above where he had found the Gorman corpse looking down at the Begay hogan as a Navajo would look at it. The east-facing door was boarded shut. (He had resealed it before he'd left, repairing the damage done by Sharkey.) The smoke hole was plugged. The chindi, which had left the body of Gorman at the moment of Gorman's death, was trapped inside—a summation of all in the dead man's life that was evil and out of harmony with the Navajo Way.

Everything in Long Thinker's training conditioned him to avoid chindis. "If you have to be out at night, go quietly," his mother had taught him. "The chindis wander in the darkness." And his uncle: "Never speak the name of the dead. Their chindi thinks you are calling it." He had come to terms with these ghosts in high school and reduced them to rational terms at the university, converting them into something like the dietary taboos of Jews and Moslems, the demons of Christians. But from this talus slope, in the dying light, in the dead stillness of this autumn evening, the rationality of the university was canceled.

And there was another side to all this. "You did it," Mary Landon would say. "When you stepped through that corpse hole, you proved that you can be a Navajo on an emotional plane but an assimilated man intellectually." And he would say, "No, Mary, you simply don't understand," and she would say…

He turned away from that and considered what he'd learned. Almost nothing. He'd driven straight from the place of Joseph Joe and started his work here with a meticulous examination of the hogan yard. He'd learned that Hosteen Begay used his sweat bath more than most, that he kept goats as well as sheep, and that he owned two horses (one newly shod).

Recent additions to Begay's garbage dump included an empty lard can, an empty Shurfine flour sack, and tin cans that had held peaches, creamed corn, and pork and beans. The garbage told him that Begay dipped snuff (an addiction unusual among Navajos), that he did not use beer, wine, or whiskey, and (judging from the discarded Dr. Scholl's footpads) that he suffered from bunions. None of that was helpful.

Nor had he found anything helpful in the second stage of his hunt, an equally careful sweep up and down the arroyo behind the hogan and around the wooded slopes above and below Begay's little meadow. He simply confirmed what he'd learned on his original inspection. Begay had, as would be expected of any prudent shepherd, taken his flocks to downhill pastures weeks ago, before early winter storms could trap them. And when he'd abandoned this place, he'd ridden the newly shod horse and led the other, heavily loaded. He'd headed downhill, probably for some shortcut he knew to reach the road to Two Gray Hills. Maybe, Chee thought, he could follow those tracks far enough to get some hint of his destination. But that seemed wildly unlikely. Time, wind, and the dry season made tracking doubtful, and even if he could track, his work would also certainly simply lead him to the road to the trading post.

Today's wind had been the sort any tracker hates—dry and abrasive, blasting sand against the face and erasing signs. But it had died away in late afternoon, and now the total calm of an autumn high-pressure area had settled over the high country. From his place on the talus slope Chee could see, across Begay's empty homestead, a hundred miles to the southeast all the way to the dark blue bump on the horizon that was Mount Taylor, Mary Landon's favorite mountain. (Now Mary would be finished with her school day, finished with her supper, out for her evening walk—sitting someplace, probably, looking at it from much closer quarters. Chee could see her vividly, her eyes, the line of her cheek, her mouth…)

Old Man Begay had taken time to clean out his hogan and pack his stuff on his horses. Why hadn't he taken the time to collect the few yucca roots required to make the suds to wash his kinsman's hair? What had hurried him? Had it been fear? An urgent need to attend to some duty? Chee stared down at the homestead, trying to visualize the old man smashing with his ax at the broken wall where the corpse hole was formed, destroying what must have been important to him for much of his life.

Then he heard the sound.

It came to him on the still, cold air, distant but distinct. It was the sound of a horse. A whinny. The sound came from the arroyo—from the spring or from Begay's corral just beyond it. Chee had been there two hours earlier and had spent thirty minutes establishing from tracks and manure that no animal had been there for days. Nor was this the season for open range grazing this high in the mountains. Livestock had been taken, long since, to lower pastures, and even strays would have moved downhill, out of the intense morning cold. Chee felt excitement growing. Ashie Begay had come home to collect something he'd forgotten.

The horse was exactly where Chee expected it to be—at the spring. It was an elderly pinto mare, roan and white, fitting the description of the one stolen from Two Gray Hills. It wore a makeshift rope halter on its ugly hammer head. Another bit of rope secured it to a willow. Hardly likely that Hosteen Begay, who owned horses of his own, would have taken it. Who had? And where was he?

The night breeze was beginning now as it often did with twilight on the east slope of mountains. Nothing like the morning's dry gusts, but enough to ruffle the mare's ragged mane and replace the dead silence with a thousand little wind sounds among the ponderosas. Under cover of these whispers, Chee moved along the arroyo rim, looking for the horse thief.

He checked up the arroyo. Down the arroyo. Along the ponderosa timber covering the slopes. He stared back at the talus slope, where he had been when he'd heard the horse. But no one could have gotten there without Chee seeing him. There was only the death hogan and the holding pen for goats and the brush arbor, none of which seemed plausible. The thief must have tied his horse and then climbed directly up the slope across the arroyo. But why?

Just behind him, Chee heard a cough.

He spun, fumbling for his pistol. No one. Where had the sound come from?

He heard it again. A cough. A sniffling. The sound came from inside Hosteen Begay's hogan.

Chee stared at the corpse hole, a black gap broken through the north wall. He had cocked his pistol without knowing he'd done it. It was incredible. People do not go into a death hogan. People do not step through the hole into darkness. White men, yes. As Sharkey had done. And Deputy Sheriff Bales. As Chee himself, who had come to terms with the ghosts of his people, might do if the reason was powerful enough.

But certainly most Navajos would not. So the horse thief was a white. A white with a cold and a runny nose.

Chee moved quietly to his left, away from the field of vision of anyone who might be looking through the hole. Then he moved silently to the wall and along it. He stood beside the hole, back pressed to the planking. Pistol raised. Listening.

Something moved. Something sniffed. Moved again. Chee breathed as lightly as he could. And waited. He heard sounds and long silences. The sun was below the horizon now, and the light had shifted far down the range of colors to the darkest red. Over the ridge to the west he could see Venus, bright against the dark sky. Soon it would be night.

There was the sound of feet on earth, of cloth scraping, and a form emerged through the hole. First a stocking cap, black. Then the shoulders of a navy pea coat, then a boot and a leg—a form crouching to make its way through the low hole.

"Hold it," Chee said. "Don't move."

A startled yell. The figure jumped through the hole, stumbled. Chee grabbed.

He realized almost instantly he had caught a child. The arm he gripped through the cloth of the coat was small, thin. The struggle was only momentary, the product of panic quickly controlled. A girl, Chee saw. A Navajo. But when she spoke, it was in English.

"Turn me loose," she said, in a breathless, frightened voice. "I've got to go now."

Chee found he was shaking. The girl had handled this startling encounter better than he had. "Need to know some things first," Chee said. "I'm a policeman."

"I've got to go," she said. She pulled tentatively against his grip and relaxed, waiting.

"Your horse," Chee said. "You took her last night from over at Two Gray Hills."

"Borrowed it," the girl said. "I've got to go now and take her back."

"What are you doing here?" Chee asked. "In the hogan?"

"It's my hogan," she said. "I live here."

"It is the hogan of Hosteen Ashie Begay," Chee said. "Or it was. Now it is a chindi hogan. Didn't you notice that?"

It was a foolish question. After all, he'd just caught her coming out of the corpse hole. She didn't bother to answer. She said nothing at all, simply standing slumped and motionless.

"It was stupid going in there," Chee said. "What were you doing?"

"He was my grandfather," the girl said. For the first time she lapsed into Navajo, using the noun that means the father of my mother. "I was just sitting in there. Remembering things." It took her a moment to say it because now tears were streaming down her cheeks. "My grandfather would leave no chindi behind him. He was a holy man. There was nothing in him bad that would make a chindi."

"It wasn't your grandfather who died in there," Chee said. "It was a man named Albert Gorman. A nephew of Ashie Begay." Chee paused a moment, trying to sort out the Begay family. "An uncle of yours, I think."

The girl's face had been as forlorn as a child's face can be. Now it was radiant. "Grandfather's alive? He's really alive? Where is he?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "Gone to live with some relatives, I guess. We came up here last week to get Gorman, and we found Gorman had died. And that." Chee pointed at the corpse hole. "Hosteen Begay buried Gorman out there, and packed up his horses, and sealed up his hogan, and went away."

The girl looked thoughtful.

"Where would he go?" Chee asked. The girl would be Margaret Sosi. No question about that. Two birds with one stone. One stolen pinto mare and the horse thief, plus one missing St. Catherine's student. "Hosteen Begay is your mother's father. Would he…?" He remembered then that the mother of Margaret Billy Sosi was dead.

"No," Margaret said.

"Somebody else then?"

"Almost everybody went to California. A long time ago. My mother's sisters. My great-grandmother. Some people live over on the Cañoncito Reservation, but…" Her voice trailed off, became suddenly suspicious. "Why do you want to find him?"

"I want to ask him two questions," Chee said. "This is a good hogan here, solid and warm, in a place of beauty. Good firewood. Good water for the cattle. Enough grass. Hosteen Begay must have seen that his nephew was dying. Why didn't he do as the People have always done and move him out into the air so the chindi could go free?"

"Yes," Margaret Sosi said. "I'm surprised he didn't do that. He loved this place."

"I have heard Hosteen Begay lived the Navajo Way," Chee said.

"Oh, yes," Margaret said. "My grandfather always walked in beauty."

"He would have known how to take care of a corpse then? How to get it ready for its journey?"

The girl nodded. "He taught me about that.

About putting a little food and water with the body. And things it needs for four days."

"And what you do so the chindi will not follow it?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "After you make the yucca suds and wash the hair, you reverse the shoes." She pantomimed the act of switching. "So the chindi will be confused by the footprints." As she finished the sentence her voice trailed off, and she glanced at the corpse hole, the irregular broken doorway into the darkness of the hogan. She looked, and Chee felt her shiver under his hand. Seventeen, by the record, he thought, but she looks about fifteen.

"I wouldn't have gone in there if I had known it wasn't Grandfather." She looked up at Chee. "What do I have to do? What can you do when you've been where you catch the ghost sickness? How do I get rid of the chindi?"

"You're supposed to take a sweat bath," Chee said. "And as soon as you can you have a sing. Tell your family about it. They'll call in a Listener, or a Hand Trembler, to make sure you have the right ceremonial. Usually it would be part of the Night Way, or the Mountaintop Way. Then your family will hire a singer, and…" It was occurring to Chee that Margaret Sosi didn't have much family to depend on for such familial duties. "Is there somebody who can do that for you?"

"My grandfather would do it," she said.

"Anyone else? Until we find him?"

"I guess just about everybody went to Los Angeles," she said. "A long time ago."

"Look, Margaret," Chee said. "Don't worry about it. Let me tell you about chindi. Do you know much about religion?"

"I go to a Catholic school. We study religion."

"A lot of religions have rules about what not to do, what not to eat, things like that. The Koran tells the Moslems not to eat pigs. When the wise men were writing that, a lot of diseases were spread by eating pork. It was smart to avoid it. Same with some of the Jewish rules about foods. Most religions, like us Navajos, have rules against incest. You don't have intercourse within your own family. If you do, inbreeding makes bad stock. And with us, Changing Woman and Black God taught us to stay away from where people have died. That's wise too. Avoids spreading small-pox, bubonic plague fleas, things like that."

Even in the twilight, Chee could see Margaret's face was skeptical.

"So the ghost is just disease germs," she said.

"Not exactly," Chee said. "There's more to it than that. Now we know about germs, so when we violate the taboo about a death hogan we know how to deal with any germs we might catch. But we also know we've violated our religion, broken one of the rules the People live by. So we feel guilty and uneasy. We no longer have hozro. We no longer live in beauty. We're out of harmony. So we need to do what Changing Woman taught us to do to be restored in the Navajo Way."

Margaret's expression was slightly less skeptical. "Did you go in there?"

"No," Chee said. "I didn't."

"Are you going to?"

"Only if I have to," Chee said. "I hope I don't have to." The answer surprised him. He had avoided the hogan, and the decision, all afternoon. Suddenly he understood why. It had something to do, a great deal to do, with Mary Landon—with remaining one of the Dinee or with stepping through into the white man's world.

"I would break the taboo because it is my job," he said. "But maybe it won't be necessary. You stay right here. I've got a lot of questions I need to ask you."

The hole had been made by chopping the logs forming part of the lower wall of the hogan away from the frame that held them. Chee aimed his flashlight through the hole. In the center, directly under the smoke hole, five partly burned logs lay on the hearth, their charred ends pointing neatly inward. Just beside the hearth, Begay's cooking stove stood, a heavy cast-iron affair that he must have taken apart to haul in. Nothing else had been left behind. A clutter of cardboard boxes lay near the boarded east entrance with a red Folger's coffee can standing near them. Except for that, the packed earthen floor was bare. Chee swung the flash around, examining the walls. Wooden crating had been fashioned into shelving on both sides of the east entrance and a wire was strung along the south wall, about chest high. Chee guessed Begay had hung blankets across it, screening off about a third of the hogan's floor space for privacy. He let the beam of the flashlight drift along the logs, looking for anything that might have been left in the crevices. He saw nothing.

He switched the flash back to the cardboard cartons. Obviously Sharkey and Bales had examined them. Must have. No reason for him to go inside. What would he do if he went in? Run his fingers between the logs. Poke into cracks. Looking for what? There was no reason to go inside. No reason to step through the hole into the darkness. What would he tell Margaret Sosi to make her believe that?

As soon as he turned away from the hole, into the redder darkness of the dying twilight, he realized he wouldn't have to answer that question. Margaret Sosi was gone.

"Margaret!" he shouted. He exhaled through his teeth, a snorting sound expressing anger and disgust. Of course she was gone. Why wouldn't she be? Gone with the important questions left unanswered. Unasked, in fact, because he, in his shrewdness, had left them for the last, until the girl had time to come to trust him. The obvious questions.

Why did you run away from school, run to your grandfather's hogan, steal a horse in your hurry to get here? Why did you tell your friend at St. Catherine you were worried about your grandfather? What did you expect to find here? What did you hear? How did you hear it?

Chee stared out into the darkness, seeing nothing but the shape of trees outlined against the night sky. She couldn't be far, but he would never find her. She would simply sit down and wait, silently, while he floundered around. He could walk within six feet of her and not see her unless she betrayed herself with panic. With Margaret Sosi, he thought, there was no chance of that whimper of fear, that panicky movement that would betray concealment. She was young and thin, but Chee had seen enough to respect her nerve. He remembered the quick control of fear when he'd grabbed her. The quick tug to test his grip. Margaret Sosi would not lose her courage.

And tonight, she'd need it. The air against his cheek was already icy. In the thin, dry air here, 9,000 feet above sea level, the temperature would drop another 30 degrees before sunrise.

Chee cupped his hands and shouted toward the mountain slope. "Margaret. Come back. I won't arrest you."

He listened, waiting for the echo to subside, and heard nothing.

"Margaret. I'll take you wherever you want to go."

Listened again. Nothing.

"I'm leaving the horse. Take it back where you got it. Find a warm place."

Again, silence.

On his way back to the pickup, Chee detoured down into the arroyo and jammed his lunch sack between the willow limbs where the mare's halter was tied. One of his two bologna sandwiches was left in it, and an orange. The mare snorted and rubbed against his shoulder, wanting company as much as food.

Chapter 9

Jim chee was about two thirds of the way through his account of what he had seen and heard at the places of Hosteen Joe and Hosteen Begay when Captain Largo raised his large brown hand, palm out, signaling a halt. Largo picked up the telephone, got the switchboard.

"Call Santa Fe. St. Catherine Indian School. Get me that sister I talked to earlier. The principal. Tell her I need to talk to that friend of the Sosi girl. Need some more information from her. See if you can get me that girl on the telephone. Ring me back when you get her. Okay?"

Then he turned back to Chee and heard the rest of it without comment or question. His black eyes watched Chee without expression, drifting away now and then to study his thumbnail, then back to study Chee.

"First piece of advice I need from you," he said when Chee had finished, "is what to tell Sharkey when he finds out the Navajo Tribal Police have been questioning one of his witnesses in a federal murder case."

"You mean Joseph?"

"Of course, Joseph," Largo said, shifting his eyes from thumbnail to Chee. "I don't have any trouble explaining why you went to Begay's hogan. You went there looking for a runaway girl, and Sharkey has to swallow that one because you're lucky, as usual. She was there."

"Tell him I talked to Joseph for the same reason," Chee suggested.

"Doesn't work."

"I guess not," Chee admitted. "Change the subject then. Ask him why the Agency left that stuff out of the report they sent you. Ask him why no mention was made of Gorman coming to Shiprock looking for somebody else named Gorman. Ask him why the picture of the trailer…" Chee didn't finish the sentence. Largo's expression said he wasn't liking this suggestion.

"What am I going to tell Sharkey?" he repeated. "Are you going to give me an explanation, or do I have to tell him that one of our men violated department regulations and the direct and specific orders of his commanding officer and is therefore being suspended without pay to teach him some better manners?"

"Tell him the girl disappeared right after all this happened, and she's Hosteen Begay's granddaughter and we think—"

The telephone interrupted him. Largo picked it up. "Good," he said. "What's her name again?" He listened, then pushed the selector button.

"Miss Pino? This is Captain Largo of the Navajo Tribal Police in Shiprock. Could you give us a little more information to help us find Margaret Sosi?… What?… No, no, we think she's all right. What we need is a clearer idea of just why she left when she did."

Largo listened.

"A letter?" he said. "When?… Did she say anything about what her grandfather said in it?… Uh-huh. I see. Did she mention the name?… Sure. I can understand that. Would you remember it if you heard it? Was it Gorman?… You're sure. How about the first name… Her uncle?… Okay. Go over it again, would you please? Everything you remember she said."

Largo listened, jotting notes now and then on his pad.

"Well, thank you very much, Miss Pino. This is very helpful… No, we think she's safe enough. We just want to find her." Largo looked at Chee with no expression whatever and added, "Again."

"One other thing. Did she say when she planned to come back?… Okay. Well, thanks again."

Largo replaced the receiver, gently.

"You are one lucky Navajo," he said, "which is almost as good as being smart."

Chee said nothing.

"It turns out I can tell Sharkey that Margaret Sosi got a letter from her grandfather mailed the day after the shooting, and in this letter he told her about some danger. Warned her to stay away from Shiprock and not to go around Gorman."

"Danger?"

"That's all she told the Pino girl. Or all the Pino girl could remember her saying about it. She said Margaret told her her grandfather must be very upset, because writing a letter was very hard for him to do. She said she was worried about him and she was going to see about him."

"That was the letter he mailed from Two Gray Hills," Chee said.

"Probably," Largo said. "Been nice if you'd have asked her some things like that. Something practical. You know, Sharkey's going to be curious about that. He's going to say, 'Now, your policeman had this girl in his custody. But he didn't ask her why she came to the hogan. Or find out about the letter. Or find out that her grandfather warned her about something dangerous. Or anything useful.' And Sharkey is going to say, 'What do your officers chat about in cases like this? I mean, how do they keep the conversation going until they let the suspect walk away?' What do I tell Sharkey about that?"

"Tell him we talked about ghosts," Chee said.

"Ghosts. Sharkey will enjoy that."

"I heard you asking the Pino girl if Margaret Sosi mentioned a first name for Gorman," said Chee, changing the subject. "You thinking the same thing I am?"

"I'm thinking we don't know for sure which Gorman she was supposed to stay away from. The one who had already been shot or the one that one was looking for."

"The occupant of the aluminum house trailer," Chee said.

"Maybe," Largo said. He scratched his nose. "Or maybe he was just having his picture taken." He got up, stretched, walked to the window, and scrutinized the parking lot. "Put it together," he said, finally, "and what have you got? Albert Gorman, a car thief, drives from L.A. to Shiprock, looking for Leroy Gorman. A minor hoodlum rents himself an expensive plane ride and comes after Albert. They shoot each other. Gorman goes to his uncle's place, gets there in the night, tells the old man what happened. Next day Uncle Begay goes out to the trading post and mails a letter to Margaret Sosi. Tells her something or other is dangerous and to stay away from Shiprock and to stay away from Gorman. Which Gorman? I'd guess it wouldn't be the Gorman with the bullet in him. Old as Begay was, he's seen enough hurt people to know when one's bad hurt. He'd have known Albert wasn't dangerous to anybody. The warning would be about Leroy. Stay away from Leroy."

"Yes," Chee said. "Probably, anyway."

Largo abandoned the parking lot and sat again behind his desk. He regained his interest in his thumbnail, holding the heel of his hand on the desk top, thumb rampant, flexing slowly when he inspected it. "I am going to call Sharkey," he said. "I think we better find that Sosi girl." He glanced from thumb to Chee. "Again," he added.

"Yes," Chee said. "I think so."

"And Leroy Gorman," Largo said. "You think Sharkey has that photograph? Of the trailer?"

"No." Chee described Sharkey's search of Albert Gorman's wallet.

"So either Gorman got rid of the photograph or somebody else took it out of his wallet. Old Man Begay, maybe. Or Joseph Joe didn't know what the hell he was talking about."

While he was saying that, Largo was picking up his telephone. He told the operator to call the fbi in Farmington and get Sharkey for him. "You sure Joe told Sharkey about the photograph, about Albert Gorman looking for Leroy Gorman?"

"I'm sure."

"That son of a bitch," Largo said. He didn't mean Joe.

Sharkey was in.

"This is Largo," Largo said. "We have a teenage girl missing, which looks like it's tied in with this Gorman shooting of yours. Name's Margaret Billy Sosi. You heard anything we should know about?"

Largo listened.

"She's a student at St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe. Granddaughter of Ashie Begay. She got a letter he mailed the day after the shooting. Her granddaddy told her something about staying away from Shiprock and not to go around Gorman because it was dangerous."

Largo listened.

"I don't know why," he said, and listened again. "Well, it was worth a call anyway," he said. "She cut out from school after she got the letter and went up to the Begay place. We were puzzled about why old Ashie Begay would think Gorman was dangerous when he had a bullet in him—dying right there in the hogan, you know. Could there be another Gorman the old man was talking about?"

Largo listened very briefly.

"We can't ask her because"—he glanced at Chee—"she got away and disappeared again. What? Granddaughter. Margaret Sosi is Ashie Begay's granddaughter. You guys got anything that would point us to looking for another Gorman around here? A dangerous one?"

Largo listened again. He covered the mouthpiece with his palm, looked at Chee, said, "Lying son of a bitch," and listened some more.

"Well," he said, "we went out and talked to Joseph Joe to see if Albert Gorman had said anything to him, and he told us that Albert was looking for a guy named Leroy Gorman." Largo winked at Chee. "I guess Joe forgot to tell you about that. And Joe said Gorman showed him a photograph of an aluminum house trailer, which was where this Leroy Gorman was supposed to be living. You know anything—"

Largo looked slightly surprised. "All right," he said. "We'll keep in touch."

He hung up, looking suspiciously at the telephone and then at Chee.

"Sharkey tells me that Joe didn't say anything to them about Albert Gorman looking for anybody, or about a picture, and that there was no picture on Gorman's body."

"Interesting," Chee said,

"Wonder what's going on," Largo said. "I don't think Sharkey's lying just to keep in practice."

"No," Chee said. He was thinking that he would start hunting the aluminum house trailer.

"I think we better see if we can find that house trailer," Largo said.

Chapter 10

Finding an aluminum trailer in Shiprock, New Mexico, required only persistence. The town is the most populous of the hundreds of dots that mark populated places on the vastness of the Navajo Big Reservation. Even so, it counts less than 3,000 permanent residents. Knowing the trailer was parked under a cottonwood tree simplified the search. On the arid Colorado Plateau, cottonwoods grow only along streams, or beside springs, or in places where the runoff from snowmelt augments their water supply. In and around Shiprock, natural cottonwood habitat was limited to the San Juan river bottom and a few places along Salt Creek Wash and Little Parajito Arroyo. Chee checked the San Juan first, working upstream from the old U.S. 666 highway bridge and then downstream. He found hundreds of cottonwoods, and scores of places where a trailer might be parked, and dozens of trailers of all descriptions, including aluminum. Just before noon, he found an aluminum trailer parked under a cottonwood. It had taken a little less than two hours.

It was parked perhaps a mile below the bridge, near the end of a dirt track which led behind the Navajo Northern District Health Clinic, went past a pump station of the Shiprock town water system, and finally petered out on a low bluff overlooking the San Juan River. Chee parked just off the track and inspected his discovery.

The glossy metal reflected a pattern of sun and shadow in streaks caused by the bare branches above. Nothing on the ground indicated occupancy—neither litter nor the boxes, barrels, broken furniture, cots, or other effluvia of life that those who occupy trailers or hogans or other crowded spaces tend to leave outside to make room inside. There was nothing on the ground except a yellow mat of fallen cottonwood leaves.

Chee was instantly aware of this departure from the normal, as he always was of any deviation from the harmony of the expected. He noticed other peculiarities too. The trailer looked new, or almost new. Its glossy skin was clean and polished. Trailers that housed Shiprock Navajos and those who lived among them would more typically have the look of second-, third-, and fourth-hand models, wearing the dents, scrapes, and rust marks of hard wear and poor maintenance. Second, Chee noticed the trailer was tied to two black wires, telephone and electric power. The powerline was no surprise, but telephones were relatively rare on the reservation. The Navajo telephone book, which covered more territory than all the New England States and included Hopi country as well as Navajo, was small enough to fold neatly into one's hip pocket, and nearly all the numbers in it were for some sort of government or tribal office or a business. Residential telephones were unusual enough to draw Chee's attention. He took off his uniform jacket and hat and put on his nylon windbreaker. As he walked toward the trailer he became aware that the telephone was ringing. The sound was faint at first, muffled by distance and whatever insulation the walls of such trailers held, then louder as he came nearer. It rang as if it had always been ringing, as if it would ring on through the noon hour, and into the evening, and forever. Chee stopped at the retractable metal step below the trailer door, hesitated, then tapped on the metal. The telephone's ring coincided with the knock. He waited, knocked again into the silence, listened. No response. He tried the knob. Locked.

Chee walked away from the trailer and stood beside the cottonwood's trunk, thinking. Below, on a path leading down to the riverbank and along it, a man was walking. He was whistling, coming up the path toward Chee. He wore neatly fitted denims, a long-sleeved shirt of blue flannel, a denim vest, and a black felt hat with a feather jutting from its band. When the path tilted upward so that Chee could see his face, he recorded a man on the young side of middle age, clean-shaven, slender, distinctly Navajo in bone, with a narrow, intelligent face. He walked with an easy grace, swinging the heavy stalk of a horseweed like a cane. He walked now through a tunnel of sunlit yellow where the willows and alders arching over the path had not yet lost all their foliage, still not seeing Chee. But suddenly, he heard the persistent summons of the telephone bell.

He dropped the stick and sprinted for the trailer, hesitating when he noticed Chee, then regaining stride.

"Got to catch the phone," he said as he ran past. He had his key out when he reached the door, unlocked it deftly, scrambled inside. Chee stood at the steps by the open door, waiting.

"Hello," the man said, and waited. "Hello.

"Hello." He waited again, then whistled into the speaker. "Anybody home?" He waited, then whistled again, waited again, watching Chee. Whoever had dialed his number had apparently put down the phone and left it to ring. "Hello," the man repeated. "Anybody there?" This time he seemed to receive an answer.

"Yes, this is Grayson… Well, I wasn't far. Just went for a walk down the river." Then he listened. Nodded. Glanced at Chee, his expression curious. "Yes," he said. "I will." He leaned his hip against the trailer's cooking stove and reached into a drawer to extract a note pad and pen. "Give it to me again." He wrote something. "All right. I will."

He hung up and turned to face Chee.

Chee spoke in Navajo, introducing himself as born to the Slow Talking Clan, born for the Bitter Water People, naming his mother and his deceased father. "I am looking for a man they call Leroy Gorman," he concluded.

"I don't understand Navajo," the man said.

Chee repeated it, clan memberships and all, in English. "Gorman," the man said. "I don't know him."

"I heard he lived here. In this trailer."

The man frowned. "Just me here," he said.

Chee was conscious that the man hadn't identified himself. He smiled. "You're not Leroy Gorman then," Chee said. "Is that a safe bet?"

"Name's Grayson," the man said. He stuck out his hand and Chee shook it. A hard, warm grip.

"Wonder how I got the wrong information," Chee said. "This is the place." He gestured at road, tree, river, and trailer. "Supposed to be an aluminum airflow trailer like this. Strange."

Grayson was studying Chee. Behind his smile his face was stiff with tension, the eyes watchful.

"Who is he, this Gorman? Who told you he lived here?"

"I don't really know him," Chee said. "I was just supposed to deliver a message."

"A message?" The man stared at Chee, waiting.

"Yeah. To Leroy Gorman."

The man waited, leaning in the doorway. Past him Chee could see dishes beside the sink, but except for that the interior of the trailer was utterly neat. The man was a Navajo, Chee was sure of that from his appearance. Since he didn't speak the language, or pretended not to, and since he didn't follow Navajo courtesy, he might be a Los Angeles Navajo. But he said he wasn't Leroy Gorman.

"You're the second person to show up today looking for this Gorman guy," he said. He laughed, nervously. "Maybe Gorman himself will show up next. You want to leave that message with me so I can pass it along if he does?"

"Who was the first one?"

"A girl," Grayson said. "Cute little skinny girl. Late teens."

"She tell you her name?"

"She did. I can't think of it."

"How about Margaret? Margaret Sosi."

"Yeah," Grayson said. "I think so."

"How little? How was she dressed?"

"About so," Grayson said, indicating shoulder height with a gesture of his hand. "Thin. Wearing a blue coat like in the navy."

"What did she want?"

"Seemed to think I was this Gorman. And when she understood I wasn't, she wanted to ask me about her grandfather. Had he been here. Things like that. Don't remember his name. She wanted to find this Gorman because he was supposed to know something about where her grandfather was." Grayson shrugged. "Something like that. Didn't make much sense." Chee put his foot on the step, shifted his weight. He wanted the man to invite him inside, to extend the conversation. Who was Grayson? What was he doing here?

"Maybe I could leave that message," he said. "You got a place I could write it down?"

Grayson hesitated a heartbeat. "Come on in," he said.

He provided a sheet from his note pad and a ballpoint pen. Chee sat on the built-in couch beside the table and printed, in a large, slow hand:

leroy gorman—albert got killed. get in touch with chee at

He hesitated. The tribal police switchboard operator responded to calls with "Navajo Tribal Police." Chee imagined Grayson hearing that and hanging up, his curiosity satisfied. He wrote in the number of the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat and added:

leave message.

Chee didn't look up while he printed. He wanted Grayson to be reading the message—and he was sure that he had. He folded the paper, and refolded it, and wrote on the final fold:

for leroy gorman, private.

He handed it to Grayson.

"Appreciate it," Chee said. "If he does show up."

Grayson didn't look at the note. His face was tense. "Sure," he said. "But it ain't likely. Never heard of him until that girl showed up."

"Did she say where she was going when she left?"

Grayson shook his head. "Just said something about going off to find some old woman somewhere. Didn't mean much to me."

It didn't mean much to Jim Chee either, except that finding Margaret Sosi probably wouldn't be easy.

Chapter 11

Finding margaret sosi, Chee thought, would take a lot more time and hard work than finding an aluminum trailer under a cottonwood tree. Maybe she'd gone to Los Angeles. Maybe she hadn't. Chee remembered himself at seventeen. Easy enough to talk about Los Angeles, and to dream about it, but for a child of the reservation it represented a journey into a fearful unknown—a visit to a strange planet. He could never have managed it by himself. He doubted if Margaret Sosi would have taken that long and lonely leap into God-knew-what. More likely she was hunting Old Man Begay on the Big Reservation. Maybe she was tracking down members of their clan who'd moved to the Cañoncito. That was exactly what Chee would begin doing. Unfortunately, members of the Turkey Clan seemed to be scarce. But Chee's route back to his office led past the intersection of U.S. 666 and Navajo Route 1. The 7-Eleven store there served as depot for both Greyhound and Continental Trailways. It would only take a minute to check, and Chee took it. A middle-aged Navajo named Ozzie Pete managed both the store and bus ticket sales. No. No tickets had been sold to Los Angeles for weeks. Maybe months. For the past several days he was dead sure he had sold no tickets at all to a skinny teenage girl in a navy pea coat.

From his office, Chee called south to the trading posts at Newcomb and Sheep Springs. Same questions. Same answers. He called Two Gray Hills. The mare was back in the corral, neither better nor worse for its abduction, but no one had seen anyone who looked like Margaret Sosi. So much for that.

Chee tilted his chair back against the wall and crossed his boots on his wastebasket. What now? He had no idea how to start looking for Turkey Clan people. It could only be purely random. Driving around, stopping at trading posts, chapter houses, watering points, every place where people collected, to ask questions and leave word. Sooner or later someone would either be Turkey Clan or know someone who was. And since the Turkey Clan was virtually extinct it would more likely be later rather than sooner before he made connections. Chee did not feel lucky. He dreaded the job. But the only alternative to starting it was to see if he could think of an alternative.

He thought.

What had Margaret done when she slipped away from him at the hogan? Taken the mare back to Two Gray Hills, obviously. Before that she had, perhaps, taken time to take a sweat bath. Hosteen Begay's sweat bath was handy and in plain view from where she'd tied the mare. Perhaps she had made sure Chee was gone, built a fire, heated the stones, poured spring water over them, and cleansed herself in the healing steam to rub away Gorman's ghost. Chee himself had taken a steam bath in his trailer home—putting his frying pan, superheated on the stove, on the floor of his shower and pouring boiling water from his teakettle onto the hot metal to create an explosion of steam. He'd felt limp, very clean, and generally better when he'd finished his rubdown. The same would have been true of Margaret. Say she'd taken the bath, ridden the mare down to U.S. 666 and turned it loose to find its way back to Two Gray Hills, and then caught an early-morning ride back into Shiprock. Then she'd gone to Grayson's trailer looking for Leroy Gorman. How the devil had she found it? Perhaps Hosteen Begay had told her where it was when he wrote her, warning her away from Gorman. More proof that Margaret Sosi didn't scare easily. Not when her grandfather was involved. Chee thought some more. Perhaps this explained what had happened to the Polaroid photograph. Perhaps Hosteen Begay had taken it from the dying Albert Gorman and mailed it to Margaret. Whatever was on that photograph had brought Albert Gorman racing to Los Angeles to find Leroy Gorman. Would Hosteen Begay use it to keep Margaret away? The Margaret Sosi who didn't scare?

Chee sighed, took his feet down, and reached for the telephone. Maybe she had gone to L.A., scary as it seemed to him. Anyway, until he knew for sure, he had a reason not to start hunting elsewhere.

By midafternoon Chee knew everything about bus schedules from Shiprock southward toward Gallup and westward through Teec Nos Pos, including who drove which bus and where they lived. He knew that one Greyhound driver didn't remember having a skinny Navajo girl in a pea coat as a passenger yesterday, and another Greyhound driver was still out on his run and incommunicado. The very first Continental Trailways driver he reached made all this beside the point.

"Yeah," he said. "She flagged me down north of the Newcomb Trading Post. She wanted a ticket to Los Angeles, but she didn't have enough money."

"How much did she have?"

"She had enough to get to Kingman, right there on the California border, and forty cents left over."

"Describe her to me," Chee said.

The driver described Margaret Billy Sosi. "Nice-looking kid," he concluded, "but she looked like she needed some fattening up and her face washed. Looked wore out. What are you fellas after her for?"

"Trying to keep her from getting hurt," Chee said.

Chee called the station at Kingman. The LA-bound bus from points east had arrived on schedule and departed, also on schedule, about fifteen minutes ago. Had anyone noticed a small, thin, tired Navajo girl with black eyes and black hair getting off? She was wearing a navy pea coat and her face needed washing. No one had noticed.

Chee called the Kingman police station, identified himself, and asked for the watch commander. He got a Lieutenant Monroney and described Margaret Sosi for what seemed to be the eleventh time. "I guess she'd be hitchhiking," Chee said. "She's trying to get to Los Angeles."

"And the bus got in when, quarter hour ago? And she's seventeen?"

"Seventeen but looks fifteen. Small."

"Pretty girl?"

"I guess so," Chee said. "Yeah. Kind of thin but she looks okay. Would have needed to have her face washed, though."

"We'll look for her," Monroney said. "And I'll call the California Highway patrol across the line and give them the word. But don't count on anything. A boy, he'd still be out there thumbing. Girl, pretty girl, that age—she'd be picked up. Long gone. But we'll look. Give me your number. We find her, we'll call. Just want her held for runaway, that it? No crime?"

"No crime," Chee said. "But there's a homicide in the background. Just keep her safe."

But maybe it was already too late for that.

Chapter 12

The "eleven thousand seven hundred thirteen La Monica Street" address Sharkey had read from Albert Gorman's driver's license translated into a single-story U-shaped building of faded pale-green stucco. Chee parked his pickup behind an aging Chevy Nova with an off-color fender and looked the place over. The building seemed to house ten or twelve small apartments, with the one on the left end of the U wearing a small sign that said MANAGER. Attached to that, a cardboard placard proclaimed VACANCY.

Chee walked up the narrow pathway to the porch in front of the manager's apartment. Beside the door, opposite the vacancy sign, another sign listed apartment occupants. Chee found no Albert Gorman, but the name slot beside number 6 was empty. He cut across the weedy bermuda grass to the entrance porch of number 6, rang the bell, and waited. Nothing. A mailbox was mounted beside the door, its lid closed. Chee rang the bell again, listened to the buzz it produced inside the apartment, and, while he listened, pushed open the lid of the mailbox.

Two envelopes were in it. Chee moved his body to shield what he was doing from the direction of the manager's office and extracted the envelopes. One was addressed to OCCUPANT and the other to Albert Gorman. It seemed to be a telephone bill, postmarked two days earlier. Chee dropped both envelopes back into the box, rang the bell again, then tried the door. Locked. Again he shielded the action with his body because he was aware that someone was watching him. A woman, he thought, but he'd only had a momentary glimpse of the form standing behind the partly pulled curtain of the office window.

Chee turned from the door and recrossed the weedy lawn. He rang the office manager's doorbell, waited, rang it again, waited again. He glanced at his watch. What could the woman be doing? He rang the bell again, watched the second hand of his watch sweep around a full minute, and then another. The woman did not intend to come to the door. Why not? She had an apartment to rent. He rang the bell again, waited another minute, then turned and started toward his truck.

He heard the door open behind him.

"Yes?"

Chee turned. She held the door halfway open. She was as tall as Chee, gaunt, and gray—a bony, exotic face which showed Negro blood and perhaps Chinese.

"My name's Jim Chee," Chee said. "I'm looking for a man named Albert Gorman. In apartment six, I think."

"That's right," the woman said. "Apartment six is Gorman."

"He's not in," Chee said. "Do you have any idea where I could find him?"

"I think he'll be back in a little while," the woman said. "You wait. There's a chair there on his porch." She gestured across the lawn, "Just make yourself comfortable."

The accent was marked. Spanish? Probably, but not the sort of Mexican Spanish Chee heard around the reservation. Filipino, perhaps. Chee had heard there were lots of Filipinos in Los Angeles.

"Do you know when he'll be back? Actually, I'm trying to find some of his relatives. Do you—"

"I don't know anything," the woman said. "But he'll be right back. He said if anyone came looking for him to just have them wait. It wouldn't be long."

"I'm a policeman," Chee said, extracting his credentials and showing her. "I'm trying to locate a girl. About seventeen. Small. Thin. Dark. An Indian girl. Wearing a navy pea coat. Has she been here?"

The woman shook her head, expression skeptical and disapproving.

"It would have been early this morning," Chee said. "Or maybe late last night."

"I haven't seen her."

"Does Albert Gorman have any other address you know about? Where he works? Any relatives I could check with?"

"I don't know," the woman said. "You wait. You ask him all that."

"I have a friend looking for an apartment," Chee said. "Could I look at the one you have vacant?"

"Not ready yet. Not cleaned up. Tenant still has his stuff in it. You wait." And with that she closed the door.

"All right," Chee said. "I will wait."

He sat in the chair on the porch of number 6 and waited for whatever his visit here had triggered to start happening. He made no effort to calculate what that might be. The woman, obviously, had called someone when she saw him on Gorman's porch. Apparently she had been told to keep him there, and so she had stalled.

He would stay partly because he was curious and partly because there was no other choice. If he drew a blank here, he knew of no promising alternatives. This address was his only link to the Turkey Clan and Margaret Sosi. Unfortunately, the chair was metal and uncomfortable.

He got up, stretched, sauntered across the grass, fingers stuck in the back pockets of his jeans, sending the woman who was surely watching from behind the curtain the signal of a man killing time. He walked down to the street and looked up and down it. Across from him, a neon sign over the entrance of a decaying brick building read korean gospel church. Its windows were sealed with warped plywood. Next door was a once-white bungalow with a wheelless flatbed truck squatting on blocks before its open garage door. Once-identical frame houses stretched down the block, given variety now by age, remodeling projects, and assorted efforts to make them more livable. The line terminated in a low concrete block building on the corner which, judging from the sign painted on its wall, was a place where used clothing was bought and sold. In general, it was a little worse than the street Chee had lived on as a student in Albuquerque and a little better than the average housing in Shiprock.

Gorman's side of La Monica Street was of a similar affluence but mostly two-story instead of one. Below his U-shaped apartment house were two more, both larger and both badly needing painting. Up the street, the remainder of the block was filled by a tan stucco building surrounded by lawn and a chain-link fence. Chee ambled along the fence, examining the establishment.

On the side porch, five people sat in a row, watching him. They sat in wheelchairs, strapped in. Old people, three women and two men. Chee raised a hand, signaling greetings. No reaction. Each wore a blue bathrobe: four white heads and one bald one. Another woman sat in a wheelchair on a concrete walk that ran just inside the fence. She, too, was old, with thin white hair, a happy smile, and pale blue vacant eyes.

"Hello," Chee said.

"He's going to come today," the woman said. "He's coming."

"Good," Chee said.

"He's going to come today," the woman repeated. She laughed.

"I know it," Chee said. "He'll be glad to see you."

She laughed again, looking happily at Chee through the fence. "Got shore leave," she said. "He's coming."

"Wonderful," Chee said. "Tell him hello for me."

The woman lost interest in him. She backed her wheelchair down the walk, humming.

Chee strolled along the fence, looking at the five who lined the porch. This was a side of white culture he'd never seen before. He'd read about it, but it had seemed too unreal to make an impression—this business of penning up the old. The fence was about six feet high, with the top-most foot tilted inward. Hard for an old woman to climb that, Chee thought. Impossible if she was tied in a wheelchair. Los Angeles seemed safe from these particular old people.

He turned the corner and walked past the front of the place. silver threads rest home, a sign on the front lawn said. Here there were flowers—beds of marigolds, petunias, zinnias, and blossoms of the mild coastal climate that Chee could not identify. Banks of flowers flourishing safe from the old people.

Silver Threads occupied the entire end of the block. Chee circled it, glancing at his watch, killing time. He turned into the alley separating the rest home from Gorman's apartment complex and walked down it toward Gorman's porch. He'd used up almost ten minutes.

A man, bent and skinny, was standing inside the fence watching him approach with bright blue, interested eyes. He was standing in a waist-high aluminum walking frame, its four legs planted in the grass.

"Hello," Chee said.

"You Indian?" the man asked. He had trouble with "Indian," stopping mid-word, closing his eyes, exhaling breath, trying again until he pronounced it.

"Yes," Chee said. "I'm Navajo."

"Indian lives there," the man said. He removed a hand from the walker and gestured toward Gorman's apartment.

"Do you know him?" Chee asked.

The old man struggled for words, shook his head, sighed. "Nice," he said finally. "Talks."

Chee smiled. "His name is Albert Gorman. That the one?"

The man was frowning angrily. "Don't smile," he said. "Nobody talks to me but that…" His face twisted with a terrible effort, but he couldn't manage the rest of it. "Him," he said finally and looked down at his hands, defeated.

"It's a good thing to be friendly," Chee said. "Too many people never have time to talk."

"He's not home," the man said. Chee could see he wanted to say something else, and waited while his fierce will struggled with his stroke-blighted mind, making it work. "Gone," he said.

"Yes," Chee said. "He has an uncle who lives on the Navajo Reservation. In New Mexico. He went back there to visit him." Chee felt a twinge of guilt when he said it, as he always did when he was being deceptive. But why tell the old man his friend was dead?

The old man's expression changed. He smiled. "Kin?"

"No," Chee said. "But we're both Navajos, so we're kin in a way."

"He's in bad trouble," the man said, clearly and plainly. Whatever short circuit of nerve tissue impeded his speech, it seemed to come and go.

Chee hesitated, thinking like a policeman. But what was required here was not the formula in the police manual.

"Yes, he is. I don't understand it, but when he left here someone went after him. Very bad trouble."

The old man nodded, wisely. He tried to speak, failed.

"Did he tell you about it?"

The man shook his head in the negative. Thought. Canceled the denial with a shrug. "Some," he said.

A little round woman in a tight, white uniform was approaching across the lawn. "Mr. Berger," she said, "time for us to start or we'll miss our lunch."

"Shit," Mr. Berger said. He grimaced, picked up the walking frame carefully, and pivoted.

"Don't talk dirty," the round woman said. "If we were in a wheelchair like we should be, I could push you." She glanced at Chee, found him uninteresting. "That would save us time."

"Shit," Mr. Berger said again. He moved the walking frame up the lawn, stumbling along inside it. The round woman walked behind, silent and relentless.

Only the angle of the morning sun had changed on the porch of Gorman's apartment. Chee sat in the metal chair beside the door and thought of Mr. Berger. Then he thought about Grayson: who he might be, and what Grayson was doing in Shiprock, and how he might be connected with this odd business. He tried to guess what might have caused Albert Gorman's confusion about who lived in the aluminum trailer—if in fact it was confusion. And try as he did to avoid it, he thought about Mary Landon. He wanted to talk to her. Immediately. To get up and go to a telephone, and have her called out of her classroom at Crownpoint, and hear her voice: "Jim? Is everything all right?" And he would say… he would say, "Mary, you win." No, he wouldn't say it that way. He'd say, "Mary, you're right. I'm going to send in the application for the fbi job. And when I hang up this telephone, I'm going to walk right to my truck and drive directly, without stopping, to Crownpoint, and that will take me about twelve hours if I don't get stopped by the highway patrol for speeding, and when I get there, you have your bags packed, and tell the principal to get a substitute teacher, and…"

A white Ford sedan pulled up behind his pickup truck. Two men in it. The one on the passenger side got out and hurried up the walk to the manager's office. He was a short man, middle-aged, with a stocky, disciplined body and a round pink face. He wore gray pants and a seersucker coat. The door of the office opened before he reached it. The conversation there was brief. The short man looked over at Chee, saw him, and came directly across the grass toward him. At the Ford, the driver's door opened and a much larger man emerged. He stood for a moment watching. Then he, too, came sauntering toward the Gorman apartment.

The short man was talking before he reached the porch. "Lady says you're looking for Albert Gorman. That right?"

"More or less," Chee said.

"That your truck?"

"Yes."

"You from Arizona?"

"No," Chee said. He had bought the license plates when he was stationed at Tuba City, before his transfer to Shiprock.

"Where you from?"

"New Mexico."

The bigger man arrived. Much bigger. Six-foot-four or so, Chee guessed, and broad. Much younger too. Maybe thirty-five. He looked tough. While he waited on the porch, Chee had decided he might expect fbi agents to arrive. These men were not fbi agents.

"You're a long way from home," Shortman said.

"Nine hundred miles," Chee agreed. "You fellows know where I can find this Albert Gorman? Or any of his family? Or his friends?"

"What's your connection with Gorman?" Shortman asked.

"Don't know him," Chee said. "What's your interest?"

Under Shortman's coat, Chee could see just the edge of a brown leather strap, which might be part of a harness holding a shoulder holster. Chee couldn't think of anything else it might be. Shortman wasn't interested in answering Chee's question. He reached under his jacket and extracted a leather folder from the inside pocket. "Los Angeles Police Department," he said, letting the folder flop open to display a badge and photograph. "Let's see some identification."

Chee fished out his wallet, opened it to show his own badge, and handed it to Shortman.

"Navajo Tribal Police," Shortman read. He eyed Chee curiously. "Long way from home," he said again.

"Nine hundred miles," Chee repeated. "And now can you tell me anything about this Gorman? We have a girl—" He stopped. The big man was engulfed in laughter. Chee and Shortman waited.

"Mister," the big man said, "Shaw here can tell you everything about Albert Gorman. Shaw is the world champion expert on everything about Gorman. Gorman is part of Shaw's hobby."

Chee held out his hand to the short man. "My name is Chee," he said.

"Willie Shaw," the short man said, shaking hands. "This is Detective Wells. You have time for a talk? Cup of coffee?"

Wells shook Chee's hand with the soft, gentle grip he'd learned to expect from huge people. "Good thing Shaw is retiring," he said. "Police work is starting to interfere with the hobby."

"Mr. Chee here will give me a ride, I'll bet," Shaw said. "We'll go to that Vip's down on Sunset." He said it to Wells, but Wells was already walking back to the Ford. "Now," Shaw said, "I want you to start off by telling me what got the Navajo police interested in Albert Gorman."

Chee kept the explanation simple—just the oddity of Gorman's unfinished burial preparations, the question of where Hosteen Begay had gone, the problem of finding Margaret Sosi and learning from her what Begay had said in his letter. He had finished it by the time they slid into a booth in the coffee shop. Shaw stirred sweetener into his coffee. It was time for questions.

"The way I got it, Lerner just drove up to Gorman in the parking lot and shot him. Gorman shot back and drove off. Lerner dead in the lot. The Feds find Gorman dead of his gunshot wound later, at his uncle's house. That's it?"

"Not quite," Chee said. He filled in the details.

"And Albert had stopped in the lot to talk to an old man there?"

"Yes," Chee said. "To ask directions." Apparently Shaw had seen the fbi report. Why would he have seen it?

Wells had driven into the Vip's lot and come in and spotted them.

"Scoot over," he said, and sat beside Shaw.

"What did they talk about?" Shaw asked. "Gorman and the old man?"

It was exactly the right question, Chee thought. Shaw impressed him.

"What's your interest in Gorman?" Chee asked, keeping his voice very friendly. "I mean, as a Los Angeles police department detective?"

"In fact, as an arson squad detective," Wells said. "It's a good question. One of these days, the captain is going to ask it. He's going to say, Sergeant Shaw, how come everybody is burning down Los Angeles and you're chasing around after car thieves?"

Shaw ignored him. "I'd like to find out exactly why Gorman went to New Mexico," he said. "That would be interesting."

"You going to tell me what I need to know about this end? Help me find the Sosi girl?"

"Of course," Shaw said. "But I need to know what's behind the Navajos sending a man a thousand miles outside his jurisdiction. It's got to be better than a runaway teenager."

"They didn't send me," Chee said. "I'm taking vacation time. Sort of on my own. Makes it simpler."

Wells snorted. "Lordy," he said. "Spare me from this. Two of them in the same booth. The vigilantes ride again."

"My friend here," said Shaw, tilting his round, red face toward Wells, "thinks police should just stick to their assignments."

"Like arson," said Wells. "Right now we're supposed to be over on Culver looking into a warehouse fire, which is every bit as much fun as a New Mexico homicide and which the taxpayers are paying us for."

"You're on your own then?" Shaw said. "Nothing official. A personal interest?"

"Not exactly," Chee said. "The department wants to find the girl, and Old Man Begay. They're more or less missing. And me doing it on time off makes it less complicated." Chee could see Shaw understood the implications of that.

"Yeah," Shaw said. "It's an fbi case." Some of the caution had left his face, and there was a touch of friendliness there now. And something else. Excitement?

"You were going to tell me what Gorman talked about in the parking lot," Shaw said.

Chee told him.

"Albert was looking for Leroy?" Shaw frowned. "Had a picture of a house trailer?" He extracted a leather-covered notebook from a pocket of his coat, put on his bifocals, and read.

"Joseph Joe," he muttered. "I wonder why he didn't tell the Feds about that."

"He did," Chee said.

Shaw stared at him.

"He told the fbi everything I've told you."

Shaw digested that. "Ah," he said. "So."

"If that interests you," Chee said, "you might like to know that when the fbi emptied out Albert Gorman's pockets, the photograph Gorman had shown Joe wasn't there."

"Stranger and stranger," Shaw said. "What happened to it?"

"Two obvious possibilities. Gorman threw it away after he got shot. Or Old Man Begay took it."

Shaw was reading his notebook. "I suspect you thought of a third possibility," he said, without looking up.

"That the fbi agent palmed it?"

Shaw glanced up from his notebook, a look that mixed appraisal and approval.

"I'm almost certain that didn't happen. I found the body. I was watching. He didn't have a chance."

"Could you find that trailer? Albert thought it was in Shiprock. Isn't that a small place?"

"We found it. The man living in it said his name was Grayson. Said he didn't know any Leroy Gorman."

"Do you know who Leroy Gorman is?" Shaw asked.

"That's one of the things you were going to tell me."

"Let me see that identification again."

Chee dug out his ID folder and handed it to Shaw. Shaw studied it, memorizing the information, Chee guessed. "I'll make a telephone call," he said. "Back in a minute."

Chee sipped his coffee. Through the window came the sound of traffic, the clamor of an ambulance hurrying somewhere. Wells slid his cup back and forth across his saucer, pushing it with a finger.

"He's a good man, Shaw," he said. "Great record. But he's going to screw himself up with this. Mess around until he gets into trouble."

"Why? Why's he so interested?"

"His friend got killed," Shaw said. "Died, actually." He drained the cup and signaled a waitress for a refill. "However it was, Shaw thinks they killed him, and they're getting away with it. It drives him crazy."

"He's not happy with the investigation?"

"There isn't any," Wells said. He waited for the waitress to finish pouring. "The man had a coronary. Natural causes. No sign of foul play."

"Oh."

Wells's face was moody. "I've been his partner for four years, and I can tell you he's a dandy. Three commendations. Smart as they get. But he can't seem to turn loose of this Upchurch business."

"Upchurch. Was he the fbi agent?"

Wells stared at him.

"I heard the fbi lost a man on this case," Chee explained. "And they seem to be acting funny."

"They're going to be acting even funnier when they find out Shaw—" He stopped. Shaw slid back into the booth.

"Albert Gorman was a car thief," Shaw began without preamble. "He and Leroy. They're brothers, and they both stole cars for a living. Worked for an outfit called McNair Factoring. Old outfit down on the San Pedro docks. Imports coffee beans, cocoa, raw rubber, stuff like that—mostly from South America, I think, but some from Asia and Africa too. Exports whatever is going out—including stolen cars. It's sort of a specialty. Mostly expensive stuff. Ferraris, Mercedes, Caddies. So forth. Mostly to Argentina and Colombia, but now and then to Manila and wherever they had orders. That's the way they worked. Gorman and the others were on commission. They'd get orders for specific models. Say a Mercedes Four-fifty SL. And a delivery date when the right ship was at the wharf. They'd spot the car, wait until the date, then nail it and drive it right onto the dock. Have it on the ship before the owner missed it. Pretty slick."

Shaw paused to see if Chee agreed. Chee nodded.

"Then an fbi agent got into this. His name was… Kenneth…" Shaw's voice choked. The muscle along his upper jaw tensed. Wells, who had been watching him, looked quickly away to study the traffic passing on this seedy end of Sunset Boulevard. Chee thought of the Navajo custom of not speaking the name of the dead. For Shaw, the name had certainly called back the ghost.

Shaw swallowed. "His name was Kenneth Upchurch." He stopped again. "Sorry," he said to Chee. "He was a good friend. Anyway, Upchurch worked up a case on the McNair operation. A good one."

Shaw had control again now. A man who had made a thousand reports was making another one, and he made it clearly and concisely. When Upchurch had gone to the grand jury he found his witnesses slipping away. A first mate fell overboard. A ship's captain remained behind in Argentina. A thief lost his memory. Another changed his mind. Upchurch got some indictments, but the top people got away clean."

"Went scot-free," Wells said sourly. "A pun. The clan McNair went scot-free. Ha ha." He didn't smile and neither did Shaw. A bad old joke.

"That was nine years ago," Shaw continued. "After a while McNair Factoring went back into the car business, and Upchurch got wind of it, and the word was they were tying it in now with Colombia cocaine trade. He told me that what went wrong the first time was that everybody knew about it. This time he was going to make a case by himself. Keep it totally quiet. Just work on it by himself; you know, take his time. Nail a witness here and there and keep 'em in the bag until he was ready. Tell nobody except whoever he had to work with in the U.S. District Attorney's office, and maybe somebody in Customs if he had to. So that's the way he did it. Worked for years. Anyway, this time he had everything cold. He was really tickled, Ken was." Shaw's red face was happy, remembering it. "He had witnesses nailed down to tie in the top people, old George McNair himself, and a guy named Robert Beno, who sort of ran the stealing end, and one of McNair's sons—everybody big."

Shaw gestured with both hands, a smoothing motion. "Like silk. Seven indictments. The whole shebang." Shaw grinned at the recollection. "That was on a Tuesday. Complete surprise. Got 'em all except Beno, mugged and fingerprinted and booked in and bonded out on Wednesday. Kenneth, he made some of the arrests himself—McNair, it was, and his boy—and then he made sure he got his witnesses tucked in safe. He had 'em in the Witness Protection Program, and as soon as they got through talking to the grand jury, he'd take 'em himself and tuck 'em back in. Not taking any chances this time. By that weekend he was all finished with it."

Shaw stopped, staring straight ahead. He took a deep breath and let it out.

"That weekend, Saturday night, we was going to celebrate. My wife and Kenneth and Molly. Had reservations. Saturday he was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway. Don't know where he was going, but he was just about at Culver City, and he lost control of the car and hit a van and another car and went over an off ramp."

There was another dragging moment of silence.

"Killed him," Shaw said.

Wells stirred, started to say something, shrugged instead.

"How?" Chee asked. "In the crash?"

"Autopsy showed he had a coronary," Shaw said, glancing at Wells. "Death by natural causes."

"Nice timing," Chee said.

"Sure, it makes you suspicious," Wells interjected. "It made the fbi suspicious too. One of their own had just closed a big case. They got right on it, heavy. I know for sure they had the autopsy rechecked. Had their own doctor in on it. They didn't find anything but a guy driving down the freeway having a heart attack."

"The fbi," Shaw said. "Lawyers and certified public accountants."

"lapd Homicide helped them," Wells said. "You know that. You know those guys as well as I do. Better. They don't miss much when they're interested, and they didn't find a damn thing either."

"Well," Shaw said, "you know and I know that McNair killed him. Just killed him to get even. Had money enough to do it so it wouldn't show. Induced the heart attack."

Wells looked angry. Obviously it was something they had covered before. Often. "Nothing wrong with the brakes. No sign of drugs in the body. No skin punctures. No poison darts fired from airplanes. No canisters of poison gas. Nothing in the blood."

"The car was all torn up," Shaw said. "So was the body."

"They're used to that," Wells said. "The pathologists—"

"We won't argue about it," Shaw said. "Kenneth is dead. He was as good a friend as a man ever had. I don't want somebody getting away with killing him, casual as swatting a fly."

"What's the motive?" Chee asked.

Shaw and Wells both looked at him, surprised.

"Like I said, getting even," Shaw said. "For starters. And it got him out of the way before the trial."

"But the D.A.'s office would handle that, wouldn't it? Was he an important witness?"

"I guess not," Shaw conceded. "But the case was his baby. He'd be in the background, making sure nothing went wrong, making sure the witnesses were okay, that the prosecutor knew what the hell he was doing. That sort of thing."

"Witnesses all safe?"

"Sure. Far as I know, and I think I would have heard. But it's the Witness Protection Program. All secret, secret, secret."

"Albert Gorman wasn't safe," Chee said.

"Albert wasn't a witness," Shaw said. "Kenneth couldn't turn him. Couldn't get anything on him. Leroy, now, he's a witness. Ken got him cold, in a stolen Mercedes with his hotwire kit and keys. And he even had written himself a note about the model and when to deliver it to what dock. Two previous convictions."

"So now Leroy's a protected witness?" Chee said.

"I'd guess yes," Shaw said. "Wouldn't you? I know he hadn't been in town since before the grand jury. If I was guessing, I'd guess maybe they assigned him the name of Grayson and hid him in a trailer on the Navajo Reservation."

"So why shoot Albert?" Chee asked. But he was already guessing the answer.

"I don't think they planned to do it. I think they were watching him to see if he'd lead 'em to Leroy, and they followed him to Shiprock. Sent Lerner. Lerner was supposed to follow Al or get him to tell where Leroy was hiding. Something went wrong. Boom."

"Makes sense," said Chee. "The fbi report didn't say much about Lerner. Who was he?"

"We have a folder on him," Shaw said. "Longtime hood. Used to work in one of the longshoremen's rackets, extortion, collecting for the sharks. Then he was bodyguard for somebody in Vegas, and for a long time he worked for McNair."

"Sort of a hit man?" Chee asked. He was uneasy with the expression. It wasn't a term in the working vocabulary of the Tribal Police.

"Not really," Shaw said. "Their regular muscle, from what Upchurch told me, was a freelancer. A guy named Vaggan."

"Wonder why he didn't go," Chee said. "Looks like it would have been important to them."

Shaw shrugged. "No telling. Maybe it cost too much. Vaggan is supposed to be expensive."

"But good," Wells said. "But good."

Chapter 13

Vaggan rarely wasted time. Now, while he waited for 3 a.m. and time to begin Operation Leonard, he listened to Wagner on his tape deck and reread The Navajo. He sat in the swivel chair in the rear of his van, light-tight curtains drawn over its windows, and absorbed the chapter about Navajo curing ceremonials. The page he read was illuminated by a clip-on battery-powered light that Vaggan had ordered from Survive magazine at a cost of $16.95 plus cod charges. He kept the light in the glove box of the van for just such occasions, the long waits in dark places where he had business to do and where he didn't want to be noticed. The light was advertised for reading in poorly lit motels, on aircraft, and so forth, and it made turning pages awkward. But its light focused narrowly on the page and nowhere else. If anyone was snooping around Vaggan's van they'd see nothing reflecting on his windshield.

It wasn't likely that anyone would be outside. The Santa Ana had started blowing early in the afternoon. It was blowing harder now, and Vaggan had picked this place carefully—the screened off-street parking apron outside the four-car garage of a massive, colonial-style mansion on Vanderhoff Drive. The owners of the mansion were elderly, their only live-in servant a middle-aged woman. The light went off early, and the parking area offered Vaggan an unobtrusive place to wait, out of sight of the Beverly Hills police patrol. The patrol prowled the streets at night looking for those, like Vaggan, who had no legitimate after-hours business here among the richest of the rich.

In addition, it was near enough to Jay Leonard's home to make it convenient for Vaggan to scout his grounds. He had done that at 11 p.m., and again a little after midnight, and twice since midnight. And it was far enough from Leonard's to reduce the risk of being noticed in the event someone else was watching, Vaggan had considered that possibility—as he considered all possibilities when he took on a job—but it didn't seem to be happening. Leonard seemed to be content to base his safety on a triple line of defense. He had a rent-a-cop staying in his home with him, he'd installed a fancy new burglar alarm, and he'd rented two guard dogs.

Vaggan found the thought of the dogs intruding into his concentration. The paragraph he'd just read concerned the taboo violations which could be counteracted by the Enemy Way ceremonial, a subject that interested him mildly. But the thought of the dogs excited him. He had inspected them (and they had inspected him) on each of his scouting trips. Dobermans. A male and a female. The dog man at Security Systems, Inc., had assured him that the dogs were trained not to bark, but Vaggan had wanted to check that out. Even with the Santa Ana blowing, even with the whine and howl of the wind covering just about every sound, Vaggan didn't want the animals raising a clamor. Leonard was a drinker, and a coke snorter, and Leonard might be out of it. But he would be nervous. So might the rent-a-cop.

"You can ask Jay Leonard," the dog man said. "He's had 'em better'n a week now and they ain't barked for him. If they'd been bothering his neighbors, I don't think he'd have recommended us to you."

"Maybe they haven't had any reason to be barking," Vaggan said. "But what if somebody walks along the fence there with a dog on a leash, or a cat, or if somebody wants to come through the gate. What if a cat gets in the yard?"

"No barking," the man said. "One kind of watchdog, you teach him to bark when somebody shows up. Encourage it when they're pups. Another kind of guard dog, attack dog, you don't want barking. You teach 'em right away they bark they get punished for it. Before long, nothing makes 'em bark. We can rent you a pair like that."

Vaggan had reserved two dogs for December, long after he'd be finished with Leonard. He used a name and address he'd picked out of the Beverly Hills telephone book and paid a $50 deposit to make sure the man would know the deal was made and wouldn't be calling Leonard about the barking business. Leonard was into the Man for $120,000, not counting interest and Vaggan's collection fee. And Vaggan's collection fee—usually 15 percent—was going to be a lot fatter this time.

"Publicity," the Man had said. "That's what we need. You know what that silly little bastard said to me? What Leonard said? He said don't give him any of that crap about breaking kneecaps. Them days is past, he said. He said take him to court. Did I know you couldn't collect a gambling debt in court?"

Vaggan had just listened. The Man was very, very angry.

"I said I'd turn it over to my collection, and he said screw my collection. He said try to get tough with him and I'd end up in the pen."

"So you want a kneecap broken?"

"Something or other," the Man said. "Whatever is appropriate. But I want people to know about it. Too many deadbeats saying sue me. Let's get some publicity out of Leonard. Cut down on the bad debts."

"Whether or not we get the money?"

"I don't mean kill him," the Man said. "Kill him, I'm out a hunnert and twenty grand and interest. He ain't gonna name me in his will."

Vaggan didn't respond to that. He sat easily in the telephone booth, receiver to his ear, and watched a woman trying to back a Cadillac into a space at the shopping center across the street. He let the silence tick away. Better to let the Man start the next phase of the negotiations.

"Vaggan," he said at last. "There'd be a bonus for the publicity."

"I can see that," Vaggan said. "What you're asking me to do is sort of challenge the cops to do something about it. Roughing up Leonard is one thing. Roughing him up so it's public is like daring 'em to catch me. And if I do it right, I'm putting myself out of the collection business. All you have to do is mention Jay Leonard and they hand you a cashier's check."

"What's fair?" the Man asked.

"I'd say all of it," Vaggan said. "You lose the Leonard money but you make the point with everybody else. All of it, if I really do it right. I mean, make the TV news shows, and the Times. Get a big splash."

They argued for a while, haggling, each man objecting. But they settled on a price. Several prices, actually, depending on the nature of the publicity and on Leonard paying up promptly. Even the lowest one was enough to pay for putting in the reinforced concrete storage house that Vaggan was going to build into the hillside next to his place. It made the lost $50 dog deposit seem reasonable.

Vaggan glanced at his watch. Twelve minutes now. He put down the book. The wind gusted against the van, shaking it on its springs and battering it with a barrage of twigs and whatever the dry Santa Ana gale picked up from the lush lawns of Beverly Hills. The sound of Götterdammerung muttered from the speakers—turned low in the interest of safety but, at this thunderous point in the opera, loud enough to be heard over the storm. The passage always moved Vaggan. The Twilight of the Gods, the end of the decayed old order, the cleansing. Blood, death, fire, chaos, honor, and new beginnings. "Nietzsche for thought, Wagner for music," his father would say. "Most of the rest of it is for niggers." His father…

He turned his thoughts instantly from that, glanced at the watch again. He would leave a little early. He slipped off his shoes, pulled the chest-high waders from their box, and slipped his legs into them, the splint on his left forefinger making the action clumsy. Vaggan hated the splint for reminding him of his moment of carelessness. But the finger had healed quickly, and he'd soon be done with the bandage. Meanwhile, he'd not think about it. "Think about your strength," the Commander had said. "Forget weaknesses." The waders were heavy with the equipment he had stuffed in their pouch. He pulled the rubber over his hips and adjusted the suspenders. Even in the waders he was graceful. Vaggan exercised. He ran. He lifted weights. He weighed 228 pounds, and every ounce of it was conditioned to do its job.

Vaggan picked up the canvas airline bag he used to carry his bulkier equipment, locked the van behind him, and walked slowly up the sidewalk, getting accustomed to the clumsy waders. At the corner, the view opened before him. The lights of Los Angeles, bright even at 3 a.m., spread below. Vaggan thought of a luminescent southern sea, and then of the phosphorescence of decay. An apt thought. He shuffled along on the waders' felt soles, keeping silent, keeping in the shadows, looking at the glow of sleeping Los Angeles. The glow of a rotting civilization. One day soon it would be sterilized, burned clean. Very soon. The article he'd clipped from Survival estimated fourteen Soviet warheads targeted on the Greater Los Angeles area, including lax, the port at Long Beach, and the city center, and the attendant military installations and industrial areas. Hydrogen bombs. They would clean the valley. When it was over, and safe again, he could climb these hills at night and look down into clean, quiet darkness.

The dogs heard him coming or perhaps—despite the wind—smelled his scent. They were waiting for him at the fence. He examined them while he extracted his wire cutter and his pipe wrench from the wader pouch. The dogs stared back, ears forward, tense and expectant. The smaller one, the female, whined, and whined again, and made a quick move toward the wire, drawing her lips back in a snarl. The Santa Ana had blown clouds and smog out to sea, as it always did, and there was enough late moon to reflect from white, waiting teeth. Vaggan pulled on his heavy leather gauntlets and snipped the first wire. The dogs wouldn't bark. He was sure of that now.

He had made sure on his second visit to the fence, taking along the cardboard box with the cat in it. The cat was a big Siamese tom which Vaggan had adopted at the Animal Shelter in Culver City—paying $28 to cover the cost of license, shots, and neutering. The dogs had charged the fence, standing tense, and the cat had smelled them. He had scratched and struggled inside the box so frantically that Vaggan had to put it on the ground and hold the lid down with one hand while he cut the cord holding it. Then he had thrown the box over the fence.

The cat had emerged in midair. It landed running and lasted a minute or so. Vaggan had wanted to learn if the dogs' training to silence would hold even during the excitement of an attack. It had. They had killed the cat with no more sound than their breathing. He had also learned something useful about how they worked. The female was the leader. She struck, and then the big male went in for the kill. Instinct, probably. It hardly seemed to Vaggan that it was something animals could be taught.

Vaggan's sentiments, oddly for him, had been with the cat. For the cat was the foredoomed loser in this affair, and Vaggan had no regard for losing, or for those who did it. Vaggan, however, admired cats, respected their self-sufficient independence. He identified with that.

Often, in fact, he thought of himself as a cat. In the world that would come after the missiles and the radiation he would live as a predator, as would everyone who survived more than a week or so. Cats were first-rate predators, requiring no pack to hunt, and Vaggan found them worthy of his study.

Vaggan had started clippping wires at the bottom of the fence, wanting to be standing erect when he had cut enough to make it possible for the dogs to attack. But the dogs made no move. They waited, skittish and eager, aware that Vaggan was the enemy, wanting the wire out of the way for what was inevitable.

He clipped the last wire, holding the severed fence between him and the Dobermans. He dropped the clippers, fished his buck knife from the waders' pocket, and opened it. He held the blade upward, like a saber in his left hand, dropped the fence, and snatched up the pipe wrench in his right. The dogs stood, waiting. He studied them a moment, then stepped through the fence onto the lawn.

The male wheeled to Vaggan's left, whining eagerly, and the female took two or three steps directly backward. Then she lunged, fangs bared—a black shape catapulting at his chest. Had there been a single dog, Vaggan would have met the charge directly, to give the blow of the pipe wrench its full, killing force. But the male dog would also be coming. Vaggan wheeled to the right as he struck, taking some of the force out of the swing but putting the female's body between him and the charging male. The wrench slammed into the Doberman's skull in front of the ear, breaking jawbone, skull, and vertebrae. But the force of her lunge knocked Vaggan against the fence just as the male struck. It fastened, snarling, on the rubber leg of his waders, its weight pulling and tearing at him, jerking him off balance. Vaggan hit it across the lower back with the wrench, heard something break, and hit it again across the chest. The dog fell away from him and lay on its side on the lawn, struggled to get to its front feet, tried to crawl away from him. Vaggan walked after it and killed it with the wrench. The female, he saw, was already dead. Vaggan knelt beside the male dog's body, eyes on Leonard's house, listening. No lights came on. The Santa Ana had faded a little for the moment, as if it were listening with him. Then it howled again, bending the eucalyptus trees that shaded the swimming pool and battering the shrubbery behind him. Vaggan walked back to the hole in the fence and looked through it, up and down the moonlit street. The wind moved everything, but he could see no sign of human life.

He dragged the male dog back to the shrubbery and hung it, head dangling, in the thick limbs. He extracted a rubber ice pack from his airline bag, unscrewed its oversized cap, and cut the Doberman's throat with the buck knife. He'd bought the ice bag at a medical supply store, choosing it because of its mouth, wide enough for ice cubes or to catch a flow of blood in the dark. He collected a pint or so from the dog's severed artery and then replaced the cap. Next he took out two plastic garbage bags and unfolded them on the grass. He decapitated both dogs and amputated the left foreleg of the male. He stuffed the bodies in one bag and the heads and foreleg in the other. That done, he stripped off his heavy gauntlets, blood-soaked now, replacing them with a pair of thin rubber surgical gloves.

He stepped out of the waders. The male dog's teeth had torn through the heavy rubber at the knee, leaving multiple rips. He checked the leg of his coveralls. It, too, was torn but his skin hadn't been punctured. He put the gauntlets, wrench, and buck knife back in the airline bag. He took out his shoes, and slipped them on, and extracted a roll of adhesive tape, a small .32 caliber pistol, four pairs of nylon restraint handcuffs, a pressure spray can of foam insulation, and, finally, a pair of plier clamps and two cattle ear tags he'd purchased at a veterinarian supply store in Encino. He arranged this assortment in his pockets and stacked the waders and the bag containing the bodies under the shrubbery. If the situation allowed he would retrieve them. If not, it wouldn't matter because he'd left no fingerprints or any way of tracing anything. But having the dogs' bodies missing would add another touch of the macabre, and Vaggan was going to make it macabre to the maximum—macabre enough to make page one of the LA Times and the lead item on tomorrow's newscasts.

He walked quietly across the lawn, carrying his burden. Dogs out of the way, the next step was the burglar alarm.

Vaggan knew a lot about the alarm. The second time he'd scouted the house, he'd noticed a burglars beware sticker the alarm company had pasted on the side-entrance window. He'd examined the sticker through his binoculars, looked up the company's name in the phone book, and spent an afternoon as a potential customer, learning how the system worked. Jay Leonard was big in Los Angeles, a television talk show host people were proud to have as a customer. As he had with the dog trainer, Vaggan implied that Leonard was a friend. He mentioned that Leonard was well pleased with his alarm system and had suggested he get one like it. The salesman had shown him the model and explained how it worked, and Vaggan had bought one, saying he'd install it himself.

He found the control box about where the salesman had said it should be put, mounted on an inside wall of the open carport near both a power source and a telephone line. It was equipped with an anti-tamper device that set off the alarm inside the house and flashed a signal to the Beverly Hills police if the power was cut off. Vaggan fished the aerosol can from his jacket pocket, shook it vigorously, and inserted the nozzle into the heat/moisture vent on the side of the metal box. He depressed the button and listened to the hiss of the foam insulation gushing in. The label specified a drying time of thirty minutes but, when Vaggan had checked it, it had been solid in eighteen minutes—solid and expanded to congeal all the alarm's relay switches and circuits into useless immobility. But he waited the full thirty minutes to be safe, leaning against the carport wall, coming down from the high he'd experienced in dealing with the dogs.

There was no reason to think about what he'd do next. That was carefully planned. Instead he thought about the Navajo Project. The message from his answering service had said simply, Call Mac. That meant call McNair, which in turn meant that something must have come unglued again. Not surprising. In Vaggan's experience, jobs that started sloppily tended to continue to screw up. But it was no skin off his ass. He didn't even know what the operation involved. Something, he guessed, to do with getting rid of witnesses. McNair was under indictment, with some of his people. McNair was fairly big, and certainly very senior, in the West Coast car-stealing business, and fairly big in cocaine too, from what Vaggan had heard. And he had Koreans, and Indians, and Filipinos, and Mexicans, and such people doing his stealing. In Vaggan's estimation, that was asking for trouble, since such people were poor stock. Some of them would surely screw up and get caught and talk. Had talked, already, to the grand jury, from what he'd heard, and would be ready to nail McNair in court. Which is what you should expect when you deal with such people. Losers. All of them, except maybe the Navajos.

Something about the Navajos appealed to Vaggan. Since he'd gotten into this business, he'd been reading about them. They, too, were survivors. It was because, he was sure, of their philosophy of staying in harmony with conditions, being in tune with whatever was coming down. That made sense. He did it himself. The people who refused to believe the missiles were coming and tried to turn it off by denying it, they would die. He'd gotten in harmony with that inevitable truth, accepted it, prepared for it. He would survive. And he'd gotten in harmony with this Santa Ana wind. It didn't bother him. In fact, he'd made it a part of his cover, like the quills on a porcupine. He listened to the wind, battering and shaking things, and smiled slightly. He glanced at his watch and pushed the tip of his little finger against the foam insulation in the vent. It was stiff. Time for the final phase. Time for the rent-a-cop.

Vaggan used his glass cutter on the window, removing a pane and reaching inside to unfasten the lock and then closing it behind him quickly, as soon as he had himself and his supplies inside, to shut out the wind sound. He stood listening, giving his eyes time to adjust to this deeper darkness. He'd made no sound himself. Vaggan could be quiet as the cats he admired. But opening the window would have changed the sound level of the storm for anyone awake inside. If that had alerted anyone it was better to know it now. So he waited, stock still, using up a full five minutes.

To his right a click, a low hum. The thermostat turning on the refrigerator motor. Vaggan smelled something astringent—a cleanser, perhaps—and coffee, and dust. Behind the purr of the refrigerator, the sound of distant music. Perhaps a radio playing, or a tape. In a bedroom somewhere. Then the sound of the Santa Ana rose again, pounding against the windows, rattling limbs across the roof, screeching at the corners. It subsided. The music was replaced by a male voice, inaudibly low, and then became music again. Vaggan strained to hear. It was "Daniel," the Elton John tune. Vaggan folded his handkerchief over the lens of his penlight, pointed it at the floor, and turned it on. His eyes had adjusted now, and the glow was adequate—illuminating a modern kitchen and reflecting into an expansive living area beyond.

Vaggan crept through the open archway, his crepe soles moving from the sibilance of the kitchen tile to the total silence of a thick gold carpet. He stopped and listened again, light off. The music was a bit louder now, coming from the hallway that led from the living area into what must be a bedroom wing. He removed the handkerchief, dropped it back into his pocket, and turned on the flash. A second hallway to the left led into what seemed to be some sort of atrium-greenhouse and beyond that into darkness. Vaggan moved down the carpeted hall of the bedroom wing. He stopped at the first door, listening with an ear pressed to a wooden panel. Hearing nothing, he turned off the flash, tried the knob, turned it slowly, eased the door open. He smelled deodorant, an air freshener, soap, bathroom aromas. A flick of the flash confirmed it. Guest bathroom. Vaggan closed the door and moved to the next one. Silence again, knob turning easily, door easing open. Vaggan aimed the flash at the floor, flicked it on. The reflected light showed him an empty bed, a neat, unused bedroom. He backed out, pausing to examine the door's locking mechanism under the light. A typical bedroom lock. In the hallway again, he noticed the music was loud enough now to make out an occasional word. "Daniel," the voice sang, "my brother…" Vaggan pressed an ear against the next door. Heard nothing. The knob wouldn't turn. He tried it again to confirm it was locked, then extracted a credit card from his wallet and knelt. The lock was new, and the tongue slid back easily without a sound. Vaggan stood and pulled the door open a half inch. He replaced the credit card, fished a section of nylon stocking from his pocket, and spent a moment adjusting the holes he'd cut into it over his eyes. He inhaled, feeling the same exhilaration he'd felt facing the dogs at the fence. Adrenaline. Strength. Power. Vaggan took the .32 from his pocket, held it briefly in his palm, then returned it to the pocket. He eased the door open and looked into a room lit by moonlight reflecting through translucent drapes.

The rent-a-cop had hung his clothing across a chair beside the bed, with his belt and holster dangling from the chairback. Easy to reach, Vaggan thought, when the guard heard the dogs or heard the alarm. A careful man. He extracted a revolver from the holster, dropped it in the pocket of his jacket. The cop was sleeping in shorts and undershirt, on his side, face to the wall, breathing lightly.

Vaggan switched on the flash and shined it on the man. He was young, maybe thirty, with curly black hair and a mustache. He slept on, snoring lightly. Vaggan extracted his .32, leaned forward, touched him.

The man jerked, stiffened.

"No sound," Vaggan said. He moved the light back so it illuminated the pistol. "No reason in the world for you to get hurt. They don't pay you enough for that."

The guard rolled on his back, eyes wide, staring at the gun barrel. The light reflected from dilated pupils.

"What?" the guard said. He said it in a whisper, back pressed against the mattress. "Who…?"

"You and I have no problem," Vaggan said. "But I've got to talk to Leonard, so I got to tie you up."

"What?" the guard said again.

"You make any trouble, I kill you," Vaggan said. "Noise or trouble and you're dead. Otherwise, no harm done. You just stay tied up for a while. Okay? I'll look in now and then, and if you've tried to get loose, then I have to kill you. You understand that? Do you?"

"Yes," the guard said. He stared at the pistol, and into the light that illuminated it, and above the light, looking for the source of Vaggan's voice.

"On your stomach, now," Vaggan whispered. "Wrists behind you."

Vaggan fished two sets of nylon handcuffs from the jacket. He secured the guard's wrists behind him, then pulled him down the bed by his ankles. He cuffed the ankles together, one foot on each side of the metal bedpost.

The man was shaking, and his skin was wet with perspiration under Vaggan's hand. Vaggan grimaced and wiped his palm against the sheet. This one would never survive, and should never survive. When the missiles came, he would be one of the creeping, crawling multitude of weaklings purged from the living.

"Lift your face," Vaggan whispered. He taped the guard's mouth, winding the adhesive around and around, in quick movements. "My business will take an hour," Vaggan said. "I can tolerate no sound from this room for one hour. If I hear you moving in here, I will simply step inside and kill you. Like this." He pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the skin above the guard's ear. "One shot."

The guard breathed noisily through his nostrils, shuddering. He closed his eyes and turned his face away from the pistol. Vaggan felt an overwhelming sense of repugnance. He wiped his palm against his trouser leg.

Back in the hallway he used up another full minute listening. He could hear the guard breathing, almost gasping, through the door behind him and, from the door at the end of the hall, music. Elton John had been replaced by a feminine voice singing of betrayal and loneliness. He moved to the door and pressed his ear against it. He could hear only the song. He tried the knob. Locked. He extracted the credit card, slid it through the slit, pressed back the tongue, and eased the door a half inch open. His heart was beating hard now, his breathing quick, the sound of blood in his ears. He made sure the pistol was cocked. Then he opened the door.

This room was also lit by moonlight. It shone directly on thin, translucent drapes pulled across a wall of glass—making the drapes luminescent and illuminating a pale carpet and a huge bed. On it two people slept. Jay Leonard lay on his back, right hand dangling, left arm across his face, legs spread. He wore a pajama top, unbuttoned. The other person was a woman, much younger—a brunette curled on her side away from Leonard, the filtered moonlight giving the smooth, bare skin of her buttocks the look of ivory. Vaggan smelled perfume, human sweat, the inevitable dust of the Santa Ana, and the sweet smell of marijuana. The music ended and became the muted voice of the disc jockey, talking about dog food. The radio tuner was built into the headboard of the bed, its dial a bright yellow slit in the dimness. Vaggan wondered how anyone could sleep with a radio on.

In his pocket, he touched the sharp interlocking serrations forming the teeth of the ear tags and found the plier-clamp that would crimp them together. Outside, the Santa Ana rose again, screaming in the moonlight. Vaggan glanced at his watch. Three eighteen. He'd planned for three twenty, and he waited for three twenty.

"Leonard," Vaggan said. "Wake up. I've come to get the money."

When Vaggan got back to his van it was a little after 4 a.m. He stored the plastic garbage bag with the bodies of the dogs in the back, put away his other gear, and then let the van roll quietly back down the street before starting the engine. He ticked off all he'd done, making sure that nothing had been overlooked. After finishing with Leonard, he'd taken the dog's leg and used it and the ice bag of blood to make a crazy pattern of paw prints across the living room carpet and down the hall to Leonard's bedroom. He'd put the dogs' heads, side by side, on the mantel and poured the remainder of the blood over them. He'd called the hospital emergency room to tell them Jay Leonard, the TV talk show host, was on his way and would need attention. Finally he called the city desk of the Times and the night shift of the newsrooms of the three network TV stations. At each place someone was waiting for a call "about three forty-five," just as Vaggan had told them to be.

"I'm the man who called earlier," Vaggan said. "The celebrity I told you about who was going to get hurt tonight is Jay Leonard. He's on his way right now to the emergency room, just like I told you he would be. His girlfriend is driving him. He's got cattle ear tags clamped through both ears, and he'll need a little surgery to get them removed. If you sent a crew there, like I suggested, you should get some good stuff."

And then he told them the motive of this affair—a matter of not paying one's gambling debts. Leonard had been a fellow who didn't believe kneecaps still got broken, but Leonard knew better now, and Leonard was paying up in full, with interest.

Finally, Vaggan added, Leonard had left his house open and the lights on, and if they hurried and got there before the Beverly Hills police got the word, they would find something interesting.

Chapter 14

Chee emerged from sleep abruptly, as was his way, aware first of the alien sheet against his chin, the alien smells, the alien darkness. Then he clicked into place. Los Angeles. A room in Motel 6, West Hollywood. He looked at his watch. Not quite five thirty. The sound of the wind, which had troubled his sleep throughout the night, had diminished now. Chee yawned and stretched. No reason to get up. He had come with a single lead to finding Begay and Margaret Billy Sosi, the Gorman address. That had led nowhere. Beyond that he had nothing but the chance of picking up some trace of the Gorman family or the Turkey Clan. He and Shaw had tried the Los Angeles County Native America Center with no luck at all. The woman who seemed to be in charge was an Eastern Indian, a Seminole, Chee guessed, or Cherokee, or Choctaw, or something like that. Certainly not a Navajo, or any of the southwestern tribes whose facial characteristics were familiar to Chee.

Nor was she particularly helpful. The notion of clans seemed strange to her, and the address of the three Navajos she finally managed to come up with had been dead ends. One was a middle-aged woman of the Standing Rock People, born for the Salt Cedars, another was a younger woman, a Many Goats and Streams Come Together Navajo, and the third, incredible as it seemed to Chee, was a young man who seemed to have no knowledge of his clan relationships. The project had taken hour after hour of fighting traffic on the freeways through the endless sprawl of Los Angeles, hunting through the evening darkness and into the night and getting nothing from it but a list of names of other Navajos who might know somebody in the diminished circle of Ashie Begay's diminished clan. Probably, Chee knew, they wouldn't.

Chee got up and took a shower with the water on low to avoid disturbing his motel neighbors. The shorts and socks he'd rinsed the night before were still damp, reminding him that even with the dry Santa Ana blowing all night there was a lot more humidity on the coast than in the high country. He sat in the clammy shorts, pulling on clinging wet socks, noticing that the light wind he had awakened to had faded into a calm. That meant the Pacific low-pressure area into which the wind had been blowing had moved inland. It would be a day of good weather, he thought, and the thought reminded him of how impressed Mary Landon had been (or pretended to be—it didn't really matter) with his grasp of weather patterns.

"Just like the stereotype," she'd said, smiling at him. "Noble Savage Understands the Elements."

"Just like common sense," Chee had told her. "Farmers and ranchers and people who work outside, like surveying crews and tribal cops, pay attention to the weather news. We watch Bill Eisenhood on Channel Four, and he tells us what the jet stream is doing and shows us the hundred-and-fifty-millibar map."

But he didn't want to think about Mary Landon. He opened the blinds and looked out into the gray dawn light. Still air. Street empty except for a black man in blue coveralls standing at a bus stop. The world of Mary Landon. A row of signs proclaiming what could be had for money stretching up the decrepit infinity of the West Hollywood street. Chee remembered what he'd seen on Sunset Boulevard last night on his Navajo hunt with Shaw. The whores waiting on the corners, huddling against the wind. Chee had seen whores before. Gallup had them, and Albuquerque's Central Avenue swarmed with them in State Fair season. But many of these were simply children. He commented on that to Shaw, surprised. Shaw had merely grunted. "Started a few years ago," he said. "Maybe as early as the late sixties. We don't try to buck it any more." This, too, was part of Mary Landon's world. Not that the Dinee had no prostitution. It went all the way back to the story of their origins in the underworld. The woman's sexuality was recognized as having monetary value in their marriage traditions. A man who had intercourse with a woman outside of wedlock was expected to pay the woman's family, and to fail to do so was akin to theft. But not children. Never children. And never anything as dismal as he'd seen last night on Sunset.

The black man at the bus stop put his hand in his rear pocket and scratched his rump. Watching, Chee became aware that his own rump was itching. He scratched, and made himself aware of his hypocrisy.

All alike under the skin, he thought, in every important way, despite my Navajo superiority. We want to eat, to sleep, to copulate and reproduce our genes, to be warm and dry and safe against tomorrow. Those are the important things, so what's my hang-up?

"What's your hang-up, Jim Chee?" Mary Landon had asked him. She had been sitting against the passenger door of his pickup, as far from him as the horizon. "What gives you the right to be so superior?" All of her was in darkness except for the little moonlight falling on her knees through the windshield.

And he had said something about not being superior, but merely making a comparison. Having a telephone is good. So is having space to move around in, and relatives around you. "But schools," she'd said. "We want our children to get good educations." And he'd said, "What's so wrong with the one where you're teaching?" and she'd said, "You know what's wrong," and he'd said…

Chee went for breakfast to a Denny's down the street, putting Mary Landon out of his mind by escaping into the problem presented by Margaret Sosi. This puzzle, while it defied solution, improved his appetite. He ordered beef stew.

The waitress looked tired. "You just getting off work?" she asked, jotting the order on her pad.

"Just going to work," Chee said.

She looked at him. "Beef stew for breakfast?"

Mexican, Chee thought, but from what Shaw had said she probably wasn't. Not in this part of Los Angeles. She must be a Filipino. "It's what you get used to," Chee said. "I didn't grow up on bacon and eggs. Or pancakes."

The woman's indifference vanished. "Burritos," she said. "Refritos folded in a blue corn tortilla." Smiling.

"Fried bread and mutton," Chee said, returning the grin. "Down with the Anglos and their Egg McMuffin." And so much for Shaw's generalizations about his home territory. The only people Chee had ever known who would willingly eat refried beans wrapped in a tortilla were Mexicans. Chee doubted if Filipinos would share any such culinary aberration.

He ate his stew, which had very little meat in it. Maybe this woman was the only Spanish speaker in West Hollywood who wasn't from the Philippines, but Chee doubted it. Even if she was, she represented the flaw in generalizing about people. On the Big Reservation, where people were scarce and scattered, one tended to know people as individuals and there was no reason to lump them into categories. Shaw had a different problem with the swarming masses in his jurisdiction. People in West Hollywood were Koreans or Filipinos, or some other category that could be labeled.

Just like people in old folks' homes were senile. Policemen wouldn't bother questioning senile people. Chee hurried through his stew.

The legend on the door of the Silver Threads Rest Home declared that visiting hours were from 2 to 4 p.m. Chee glanced at his watch. It was not yet 8 a.m. He didn't bother to ring the bell. He walked back to the sidewalk and began strolling along the chain-link fence. On his third circuit, four old people had appeared on the east-facing porch, sitting in their mute and motionless row in their immobile wheelchairs. While Chee strolled, a red-faced boy wearing a white smock backed through the doorway with a fifth wheelchair in tow. It held a frail woman wearing thick-lensed glasses. Mr. Berger and his aluminum walking frame had not appeared. Chee continued his circumnavigation, turning up the alley and confirming that residents of the nursing home had a fine view of the apartments where the late Albert Gorman had lived—from the porch or from the lawn. On the next circuit, Berger appeared.

As Chee rounded the corner that brought him past the east porch, the old man was shuffling his way toward the fence, moving the walker, leaning on it, then bringing his legs along. Chee stopped at the fence at the point for which Berger was aiming. He waited, turning his back to the fence and to the old man's struggle. Be hind him he could hear Berger's panting breath.

"Sons a bitches," the man was saying. Describing, Chee guessed, either the nursing home staff or his own recalcitrant legs. Chee heard Berger place the walker beside the fence and sigh and grunt as he dragged his legs under him. Only then did he turn.

"Good to see you, Mr. Berger," Chee said. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to wait for visiting hours."

"Coming to see…" The surprise was in the tone before Berger's tongue balked at the rest of it. His face twisted with the struggle, turning slightly red.

"I wanted to talk to you some more about Gorman," Chee said. "I remember you asked me if he was in trouble, and as a matter of fact he was in very deep trouble, so I thought maybe you had some idea of what was going on." Chee was careful not to phrase it as more than an implied question.

Mr. Berger opened his mouth slightly. Made a wry expression.

"He might have been in worse trouble than he knew. Somebody followed him from here to Shiprock. In New Mexico. On the Navajo Reservation. They shot each other, Gorman and this guy. Gorman killed the man. And then Gorman died himself."

Berger looked down at his hands, gripping the metal frame of the walker. He shook his head.

"We don't know why anyone would have wanted to kill Gorman," Chee said. "Doesn't seem to be any reason for it. Did Gorman tell you anything that would help?"

Berger's white head rose. He looked at Chee, drew a deep and careful breath, closed his eyes, concentrated.

"Man came," he said.

Chee waited.

Berger struggled, gave up. "Shit," Berger said.

"Would it help if I fill in the gaps? I'm going to guess at some of it. And if I'm wrong you shake your head and I'll stop. Or I'll try another guess."

Berger nodded.

"A man came to see Gorman, here at the apartment."

Berger nodded.

"The day before Gorman left for New Mexico?"

Berger took his hands from the walker, held them about a foot apart, moved them together.

"Less than that," Chee said. "The night before Gorman left."

Berger nodded.

"You saw him?"

Berger nodded. He pointed to Gorman's apartment. Then indicated height and breadth.

"A big man," Chee said. "Very big?"

Berger agreed.

"How old?"

Berger struggled with that. Chee held up his hands, flashed ten fingers, another ten, stopped. Berger signaled thirty, hesitated, added ten.

"Maybe forty," Chee said. "Another Navajo?"

Berger canceled that, pointing to his own hair.

"White," Chee said. "Blond?"

Berger nodded.

"A big blond man came here just before Gorman left for New Mexico," Chee said. Lerner, he was thinking, was neither big nor blond. "Had you seen him before?"

Berger had.

"Often?"

Berger held up two fingers.

"They talked?" Chee had begun wondering where this was taking him. What could Berger know that would be useful?

Berger had taken his hands from the walker. His fingers, twisted and trembling, became two men standing slightly apart. Wagging fingers indicated one man talking, then the other man talking. Then the two hands moved together, parallel, to Berger's left. He stopped them. His lips struggled with an impossible word. "Car," he said.

"They walked together to a car after talking. The blond man's car?"

Berger nodded, pleased. His hands resumed their walk, stopped. Suddenly the right hand attacked the left, snatched it, bent it. Berger looked at Chee, awaiting the question.

Chee frowned. "The blond man attacked Gorman?"

Berger denied it.

"Gorman attacked the blond man?"

Berger agreed. He struggled for words, excited.

Chee bit back a question. "Interesting," he said, smiling at Berger, giving him time. He had an idea. He tapped Berger's right hand. "This is Blond," he said, "and the left hand is Gorman. Okay?"

Berger grasped his right hand with his left, began to enact a struggle. Then he stopped, thinking. He grasped an imaginary doorknob, opened the imaginary door, watching to see if Chee was with him.

"One of them opened the car door? The blond?"

Berger agreed. He held his left hand with his right, released it, then pantomimed, fiercely, the slamming of the door. He clutched the injured finger, squirming and grimacing in mock pain.

"Gorman slammed the door on the blond man's finger," Chee said. Berger nodded. He was a dignified man, and all this play-acting was embarrassing for him. "That would suggest that Gorman wasn't going to the car willingly. Right? You were standing about here, watching?" Chee laughed. "And wondering what the hell was going on, I'll bet."

"Exactly," Berger said, clearly and distinctly. "Then Gorman ran." He motioned past the fence, up the alley, a gesture that caused Gorman to vanish.

"And the blond man?"

"Sat," Berger said. "Just a min…" He couldn't finish the word.

"And then I guess he drove away."

Berger nodded.

"You have any idea about all this?"

Berger nodded affirmatively. They looked at each other, stymied.

"Any luck writing?" Chee asked.

Berger held up his hands. They trembled. Berger controlled them. They trembled again.

"Well," Chee said, "we'll figure out a way."

"He came," Berger said, pointing to the gravel where Chee was standing. "Talked."

"Gorman. About the trouble he was in."

Berger tried to speak. Tried again. Hit the walker fiercely with a palsied fist. "Shit," he said.

"What did Gorman do for a living?"

"Stole cars," Berger said.

That surprised Chee. Why would Gorman tell Berger that? But why not? A new dimension of Albert Gorman opened. One lonely man meeting another beside a fence. Berger's potential importance in this affair clicked upward. Frail, bony, pale, he leaned on the walker frame, trying to form another word, his blue eyes intense with the concentration.

Chee waited. The woman whose son was coming to see her had posted her wheelchair down the fence. Now she rolled it across the parched, hard-packed lawn toward them. She noticed Chee watching her and turned the wheelchair abruptly into the fence. "He's coming," she said to no one in particular.

"Gorman stole cars," Chee said. "And the man he stole them for—the man who paid him—got indicted by the federal grand jury. Maybe the reason he went to New Mexico, and the reason somebody followed to shoot him, was because he was going to be a witness against his boss. Maybe the boss…"

But Berger was denying that, shaking his head.

"You don't think so?"

Berger didn't. Emphatically.

"He talked to you about that, then?"

Berger agreed. Waved that subject off. Tried to form a word. "Not go," he managed finally. His mouth worked to say more, but couldn't. "Shit," he said.

"Not go?" Chee repeated. He didn't understand that.

Berger was still trying to find words. He couldn't. He shrugged, slumped, looked ashamed.

"He showed him a picture." The words came from the woman in the wheelchair. She was looking out through the fence, and Chee didn't realize that the statement had anything to do with Berger until he saw the old man was nodding eagerly.

"Gorman showed Mr. Berger a picture?" he asked.

"That Indian showed that fella you're talking to there a picture," the woman said. She pointed at Berger. "Like a postcard."

"Ah," Chee said. The photograph again. Why was it so important? It didn't surprise him to see the woman's senility fall away. It would come again just as quickly. Chee had grown up surrounded by the old of his family, learning from them, watching them grow wise, and ill, and die. This end of the human existence had no more mystery for him than its beginning.

"Picture," Berger said. "His brother."

"Was it a picture of an aluminum trailer with a man standing by it?"

It was.

"And Gorman said it was from his brother?"

Berger nodded again.

"I don't know what you meant when you said 'Not go.' I'm confused because we know Gorman went. Was it that Gorman had decided not to go and then changed his mind?"

Berger denied it, emphatically. He recast his palsied hands in the roles of Gorman and the blond man. The hand representing Gorman dipped its fingertip affirmatively. The hand representing the blond man shook its fingertip negatively.

"I see," Chee said. "Gorman wanted to go. The blond man said not to." He glanced at Berger, who was agreeing. "So Gorman was going, the blond man tried to stop him, they fought, and Gorman went. Good a guess as any?"

Berger shrugged, unhappy with that interpretation. He pointed to the dial of his watch.

"Time?" Chee was puzzled.

Berger tapped the dial, pointing to where the hour hand was. Then he moved his finger around the dial, counterclockwise.

"Earlier?" Chee asked.

Berger nodded.

"You mean this happened earlier? This business about Gorman wanting to go and the blond man telling him not to?"

Berger was nodding vigorously.

"Before the fight? Before the evening Gorman hurt Blond Man's hand? A day before? Two days?"

Berger was nodding through all this. Two days before was correct. "And Gorman told you about that?"

"Right," Berger said.

"Do you know why Gorman wanted to go?"

"Worried," Berger said. He tried to say more, failed, shrugged it off.

The red-faced young man Chee had noticed earlier was slouching across the lawn toward them, whistling between his teeth. The woman spun her wheelchair and hurried it down the fence away from him. "Mean old bitch," the young man said, and hurried after her.

"Do you know what was written on the postcard? The one with the picture on it?"

Berger didn't.

"The woman said it was like a postcard," Chee said. "Was it?"

Berger looked puzzled.

"Did it have a stamp on it?"

Berger thought, closed his eyes, frowning. Then he shrugged.

"She was a very observant woman," Chee said. "I wonder if either one of you happened to see a Navajo girl show up at Gorman's apartment yesterday. Little. Skinny teenager, wearing a navy pea coat. You see her?"

Berger hadn't. He looked after the woman, wheeling furiously across the grass with the red-faced man hurrying after her. "Smart," he said. "Sometimes."

"I had an aunt like that," Chee said. "Actually my mother's aunt. When she could remember she was very, very smart. Yesterday our friend couldn't remember anything."

"Excited," Berger said. He tried to explain. Failed. Stopped. Stared down at his feet. When he looked up again, he was excited. And he had a plan.

"War," he said. He held up two fingers.

Chee thought about that. "World War Two," he guessed.

"Son," Berger said. He tried to go on and failed.

"In the war," Chee said.

Berger nodded. "Navy."

"He was killed," Chee guessed.

Berger shook that off. "Big shot," he said. "Rich." That exhausted Berger's supply of words. His mouth twisted. His face turned pink. He pounded at the walker.

The red-faced young man had caught the woman's wheelchair and was pushing her toward the porch. She sat, eyes closed, face blank. So her son was rich and important, Chee thought. What was Berger trying to tell him with that. Her son had been in the navy forty years ago, now he was rich and important, and that was related to something causing her to be excited yesterday.

"Hey!" Chee shouted, suddenly understanding. "Yesterday. Yesterday morning she saw a sailor, is that it?"

Berger nodded, delighted at the breakthrough.

"Maybe she saw a sailor," Chee told Berger. "Maybe she saw Margaret Sosi in her pea jacket. What's that woman's name?"

Berger got it out the first try. "Ellis."

"Mrs. Ellis," Chee shouted. "Did you see a sailor yesterday? At the apartments?"

"I saw him," Mrs. Ellis said.

"He looked like your son. In a blue pea coat?"

"I don't have a son," Mrs. Ellis said.

Chapter 15

The man mcnair called henry brought Vaggan his water in a crystal glass. Vaggan had said, "No ice, please," but the man named Henry hadn't listened, or hadn't cared. Henry's expression had suggested that he found bringing Vaggan a glass of water distasteful. He was a plump, soft man, with a soft voice and shrewd eyes that he allowed to give him an expression of haughty contempt. Vaggan placed the glass on the coffee table, aware of the two ice cubes floating in it but not looking at it.

"You're a day late," McNair said. "I called you yesterday morning, and I said there was a hurry for this." McNair opened a black onyx box on his desk, extracted a cigaret, and tapped it against his thumbnail. "I don't like people who work for me to be late."

Vaggan was feeling fine. He'd gotten home from the Leonard business before dawn, showered, done his relaxing exercises, and slept for six hours. Then he'd exercised again, weighed, and had a breakfast of wheat germ, alfalfa sprouts, and cheese while he watched the noon TV news. The NBC channel had led with Leonard being rushed through the emergency room doors and propelled away with one bloody ear visible. He switched quickly to ABC-TV and caught the tag end of his own voice, recorded from his final telephone call, explaining about the welshed debt. The Man could hardly ask more. Perfect. He'd switched off the set then and called the McNair number. He'd told the man who answered—probably Henry—to tell McNair he'd be there at 2 p.m.

It was an easy hour's drive. He killed the remaining time reading through his new copies of Survival and Soldier of Fortune. He clipped out an article on common medicinal herbs of the Pacific Coast and circled an advertisement of Freedom Arsenal offering an FN-LAR assault rifle for $1,795. He'd looked at an FN in a Pasadena sporting goods store—the same model built by Fabrique National in Belgium for NATO paratroops. He'd been impressed, but the price there had been $2,300, plus California sales tax. With the Leonard money, he could afford either price, but most of that money would have to go to the contractor to finish the concrete work on his storage bunker, and he also wanted to install a solar generator and add to his stock of ammunition. However, there'd be more money coming in from McNair. Vaggan felt fine.

He left at 1 p.m., giving himself a bit more time than he needed to drive into the Flinthills district, where the McNair family had bought itself a hill and built itself an estate and raised its offspring. And now he sat in the McNair office, or study, or library, or whatever such rooms were called in such houses, and here across the desk was McNair himself. McNair interested him. Very few men did.

"I am never late," Vaggan said. "Maybe Henry didn't tell you." He glanced over his shoulder at Henry, who was standing stiffly beside the doorway. "Henry," he said. "Come here."

Henry hesitated, looking past Vaggan at McNair. But he came.

"Here," Vaggan said. He extracted the two ice cubes from the glass and held them out to Henry. "You can have these," he said. "I said no ice."

Henry's face flushed. He took the cubes and stalked out of the room.

Vaggan took out his handkerchief and dried his fingers.

"Hard to get reliable help," he said to McNair.

McNair had understood the subtlety of the point Vaggan was making, appreciating how the threat had been made without ever being spoken. He made a wry face and nodded.

"Henry," he called.

Henry reappeared at the door.

"Bring Mr. Vaggan a glass of water, please."

"Yes, sir," Henry said.

"So what needs doing?" Vaggan said.

"More Navajo business," McNair said. He had a heavy, rawboned face, pale and marked with the liver marks common with lightly pigmented people when they age. His eyes were an odd color, something near green, sunken under heavy, bristling gray brows. His expression was sour. "More trouble from the Gorman screw-up," he added. "A young woman named"—McNair looked down at a note pad on his desk—"named Margaret Sosi came to Los Angeles from Shiprock. She had a photograph of Leroy Gorman, and she came to Albert's place in West Hollywood looking for him. I want you to find her."

"Just find her," Vaggan said.

McNair grinned, more or less, showing white, even teeth. Henry had not had even teeth. It seemed to Vaggan that it was one of the few remaining signs left in America of social position versus family poverty. Rich people could afford orthodontists.

"I don't get involved with what happens after you find her. Just make sure she doesn't make any trouble." He lit the cigaret with a silver lighter extracted from the end of the onyx box. "Absolutely sure. I do not want her talking to anybody."

He exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"And I want that picture. I want it brought to me, personally. I want an end to it."

Vaggan said nothing. A map of Scotland printed on something that looked like parchment dominated the wall behind McNair. Its borders were decorated by patches of plaid which Vaggan presumed were the tartans of the Scottish clans. A bagpipe and a heavy belt holding a scabbarded sword hung beside it. A claymore, Vaggan thought. Wasn't that the Scottish name for it? Down the wall were photographs. People in kilts. People in fox-hunting coats. A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, an autograph scrawled across the bottom.

"Here's her description," McNair said. He held out a sheet of typing paper.

"I hope you have a little more than that," Vaggan said. "If you want her found this year."

"I have an address."

"Addresses help," Vaggan said.

"If she's still there," McNair said. "It was yesterday morning when I called you."

"Maybe we'll be lucky," Vaggan said. "Anyway, it's a place to pick up the trail."

McNair was holding the typing paper, folded, between his fingers, tapping the edge of the fold against the desk, looking at Vaggan.

"How'll you do it?"

"What? Find her?"

"Kill her."

Henry had replaced the water with another crystal glass and disappeared. No ice cubes. Vaggan sipped, looking over the rim of the glass at McNair. He was thinking of tape recordings, but he could think of nothing McNair could gain by taping this conversation. Still, it was an odd question. Vaggan answered with a shrug and put down the glass. McNair interested him more and more. But the job was suddenly less appealing. Such things should be strictly business. No pleasure mixed in.

"I would have thought you'd have a favorite method," McNair said. His expression was bland, but the greenish eyes in their deep sockets were avid.

It should be purely business, Vaggan thought. Otherwise things get too complicated. Hard to calculate, which made them needlessly risky.

Did he need this job? Did he still want to work for McNair?

"If I did your work, I'd have a favorite method," McNair repeated.

Vaggan shrugged again, took another sip of the tepid tap water. Outside, the McNair lawn sloped away toward the Pacific. The glass was like green velvet.

"I can't see how you're going to get off," Vaggan said. "From what the story in the L.A. Times had to say, you're indicted on eleven counts, witnesses tying you into the business personally, everything neat and tidy the way it sounded. Why don't you jump bail, cash in a little of this"—he gestured around him at the room—"and make a run for it?" He sipped again. "Actually, there wouldn't have to be any actual running. Just transfer some cash to wherever and get some papers and fly away. Easy. No worry. No risk."

Vaggan had been studying McNair's face. It registered irritation, then distaste. About what Vaggan had expected.

"I'm not guilty," McNair said.

"Not until the jury convicts you," Vaggan said. "Then you are, and the judge raises the bail way up there, and it's all going to be a lot tougher and more expensive."

"I have never been convicted of anything." McNair said. "No McNair has ever been in prison. Never will be." He got up and stood by the window, his hand resting on a form Vaggan presumed was a sculpture cast in steel. "Besides, if you walk away from it, you can't take this along."

He seemed to mean the sculpture and what he saw from the window. Or perhaps it meant the bagpipe and being a McNair. Vaggan could appreciate this. One of the rulers. The hard men. An interesting man, Vaggan thought. He'd be dealing with the McNairs after the missiles, the tough ones. He understood the old man better again. The avidity he'd seen was as much like greed as it was cruelty. Cruelty bothered him because it seemed beside the point, a waste of emotions that seemed strange to him. But Vaggan could understand greed perfectly.

"I have a feeling you're balking," McNair said, still looking out the window. "Why else all this impertinence? All these questions? Will you take care of it for me?"

"All right," Vaggan said. He got up and took the paper from the old man's fingers, unfolded it, and read. The address was on a street he'd never heard of. He'd get it located on his map, and wait for dark, and get it over with.

Chapter 16

Jim chee, who had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people. For a while he managed to keep track of just where he was in relation to where he had been, noticing direction shifts and remembering when he switched from one freeway to another. But soon it overwhelmed him. He concentrated solely on the freeway map, which Shaw had marked for him, and on not missing his turns. The land had risen a little now out of the flatness of the city basin, and there were traces of desert visible in vacant lots, which became vacant blocks, which became entire vacant hillsides, eroded and dotted with cactus and the dry, prickly brush common to land where it rarely rains. The poor side of the city. Chee examined it curiously. He no longer had a sense of where he was in relation to his motel. But there, low on the southwestern horizon, hung the sun. And eastward over those dry ridges lay the desert. And behind him, somewhere beyond the thickening smog of the city, was the cold, blue Pacific. It was enough to know.

And now just ahead of him was the exit sign Shaw had told him to watch for. He angled the truck cautiously across the freeway lanes and down the exit ramp and rolled to a stop on the parking ramp of a Savemor service station. Here tumbleweeds grew through the broken asphalt. A paunchy, middle-aged man in bib overalls leaned against the cashier's booth, eyeing him placidly. Chee spread his Los Angeles street map across the steering wheel, making sure he was in the right place. The sign said Jaripa Street, which seemed correct. Now the job was to locate Jacaranda, which intersected somewhere and led to the address that Shaw had pried, finally, from Gorman's landlady. Watching Shaw work had been impressive.

Chee recalled the interview. Two interviews, to be correct, although the first one had been brief. He had rung her doorbell, and rung, and rung until finally she had appeared, staring at him wordlessly past the barely opened door. She had re-inspected his Navajo Tribal Police credentials, still with no sign they impressed her. No, she'd said, she hadn't seen anyone like Margaret Billy Sosi. And then Chee had told her that a witness had seen the girl here.

"They lied," the woman had said, and closed the door firmly in Chee's face.

It had taken almost an hour for the dispatcher at lapd to locate Shaw, and maybe twenty minutes later Shaw had arrived—driving up alone in an unmarked white sedan. The second interview had gone much better.

They'd done this one inside, in the woman's cluttered office-sitting room, and Chee had learned something from the way Shaw had handled it.

"This man hasn't got any business here," Shaw had said, pointing a thumb at Chee. "He's an Indian policeman. Couldn't arrest anybody in LA. I don't care what you told him. You could tell him to go to hell. But now I'm here."

Shaw fished out his identification and held it in front of the woman's face. "You and I've done business before, Mrs. Day," he said. "You called me when this guy showed up asking about Gorman, just like I told you to. I appreciate that. Now I need to find this girl, Margaret Sosi. She was here yesterday. What'd she say to you?"

Chee was trying to read Mrs. Day's expression. It was closed. Hostile. Was it fearful? Call it tense, he thought.

"Trashy people are always showing up here, ringing my doorbell." She glanced at Chee. "You can't expect me to remember them."

"I can," Shaw said. "I do expect it." He stared at her, face hard. "We're going to find the girl, and I'm going to ask her if she talked to you."

Mrs. Day said nothing.

"If she did, then I'm going to get the fire marshal's boys interested in this place of yours. Wiring. Exits. Trash removal. You familiar with the fire code for rental property?"