Leaphorn thought, said, “Tell me about the radio.”
“The radio? Dashee said it wouldn’t play. It looked new. Looked expensive. But it didn’t work. He figured the battery must be dead.”
Leaphorn thought again. “Seems funny they’d go off and leave something like that. They must have brought it along for a reason. Probably wanted to use it to keep track of what the cops were doing. Did it have a scanner, so they could monitor police radio traffic?”
“Damn,” Chee said. “Dashee didn’t say, and I didn’t think to ask him.”
Leaphorn glanced at Professor Bourebonette, looking apologetic.
“Go ahead,” she said. “I always wondered how you guys do your work.”
“Not in a restaurant usually,” Leaphorn said. “But I wish I had a map.”
“Lieutenant,” Chee said, reaching for his jacket pocket, ”can you imagine me coming in here to talk to you and not bringing a map?”
The waitress arrived while Leaphorn was spreading the map over the tablecloth. She made a patient face, took their orders and went away.
“OK,” Leaphorn said. He drew a small, precise X. “Here we have Jorie’s place. Now, where did the men get out of the pickup?”
“I’d say right here,” Chee said, and indicated the spot with a tine of his fork.
“Right beside that unimproved road?”
“No. Several hundred yards down a slope. Toward that Gothic Creek drainage.”
The map they were using was THE MAP, produced years ago by the Automobile Club of Southern California, adopted by the American Automobile Association as its ‘Guide to Indian Country’ and meticulously revised and modified year by year as bankruptcy forced yet another trading post to close, dirt roads became paved, flash floods converted ‘unimproved’ routes to ‘impassable,' and so forth. Leaphorn refolded it now to the mileage scale, transferred that to the margin of his paper napkin and applied that to measure the spaces between X’s.
“About twenty miles as the crow flies,” Leaphorn said. “Make it thirty on foot because you have to detour around canyons.”
“It seemed to me an awful long way to walk if you don’t have to,” Chee said. “And then there’s more questions.”
“I think I have the answer to one of them,” Leaphorn said. “If you want to believe it.”
“It’s really a sort of bundle of questions,” Chee said. “Jorie went home. So I guess we can presume he was sure the cops wouldn’t be coming after him. Didn’t have him identified. So forth. So how was he identified? And how did he know he’d been identified? And why didn’t the other two members of the crew behave in the same way? Why didn’t they go home? And—and so forth.”
Leaphorn had extracted a folded paper from his jacket pocket. He opened it, glanced at it.
“That suicide note Jorie left,” he said. “It seems to sort of explain some of that.”
Chee, who had promised himself never to be surprised by Leaphorn again, was surprised. Had the
Legendary Lieutenant just walked off with the suicide note? Surely the FBI wouldn’t have given Leaphorn a copy. Chee tried to imagine that and failed. Legendary or not, Leaphorn was now a mere civilian. But the paper Leaphorn was handing him was indeed a suicide note, and the name on the bottom was Jorie’s.
“No signature,” Chee said.
“It was left on Jorie’s computer screen,” Leaphorn said. “This is a printout.”
Yes, Chee could imagine Leaphorn doing that. Did the FBI know he’d done it? Highly unlikely. He read through it.
“Wow,” Chee said. “This requires some new thinking." He glanced at Professor Bourebonette, who was watching him. Checking his reaction, Chee guessed. She’d read the note, too. Well, why shouldn’t she?
“Some things are puzzling,” Leaphorn said. “From what Dashee found - just two sets of footprints - Jorie seems to have gotten away from the two somewhere else. Near enough to his home to walk there? But if you look at the map, you see their escape route wouldn’t take them there. It would be out of the way. He says in his note they were planning to kill him. That he slipped away. That suggests they stopped somewhere else. But where? And why?”
“Good questions,” Chee said.
“I tried to re-create the situation from what little I knew,” Leaphorn said. “Jorie, a sort of intellectual. Political idealogue. Fanatic. Doing a robbery to finance his cause. Then it goes sour on him. Unplanned killings. At least unplanned by him. Awareness that his recruits are going to take the loot. There must have been an argument. Or at least an angry quarrel. It must have occurred to Jorie that letting him split off represented a threat to them. How did he manage it?”
“No idea,” Chee said.
“Let’s say he was still with them when they left the truck. Do you think Dashee might have missed his tracks?”
“They’d stopped in a big flatfish place. Mostly covered with old blow dirt. Dashee’s good at his job, and it would be hard to miss fresh track in that.”
“How about cover? A place to hide?”
“No,” Chee said. “A cluster of junipers sort of screened the truck itself from the road. But I didn’t see a good place to hide anywhere near. There wasn’t one. Certainly not if they were looking for him.”
“I presume he was armed,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe he warned them away. You know: 'I’m out of here. Let me go or I’m shooting you.'”
“Could have been that,” Chee said.
The waitress returned. Leaphorn moved the map to make space for the plates. He looked at Chee. “You had something you wanted to tell me.”
“Uh, oh, yeah, I did. About Ironhand. How much do you know about him?”
“Very little.”
Chee waited, hoping he’d add to that. From what Dashee had told him Leaphorn knew enough about George Ironhand to have him on the list of names he asked Potts about. But Leaphorn obviously wasn’t going to explain that.
“They say a Ute by that same name, about ninety or so years ago, used to lead a little band of raiders down across the San Juan into our territory. Steal horses, sheep, whatever they could find, kill people, so forth. The Navajos would chase them, but they’d disappear in that rough country along the Nokaito Bench. Maybe into Chinle Wash or Gothic Creek. It started a legend that Ironhand was some sort of Ute witch. He could fly. Our people would see him down in the canyon bottom, and then they’d see him up on the rimrock, with no way to get there. Or sometimes the other way around. Top to bottom. Anyway, Ironhand was never caught.”
Leaphorn took a small bite of the hamburger steak he’d ordered, and looked thoughtful.
“Louisa,” he said, "have you ever picked up anything like that in your legend collecting?”
“I’ve read something sort of similar,” Professor Bourebonette said. “A man they called Dobby used to raid across the San Juan about the same time. But that was farther west. Down into the Monument Valley area. I think that’s more or less on the record. A Navajo named Littleman finally ambushed them in the San Juan Canyon. The way the story goes, he killed Dobby and two of the others. But they were Paiutes, and that happened earlier—in the eighteen nineties, I think it was.”
Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve heard the old folks in my family talk about that. Littleman was Red Forehead Dine‘, in my mother’s clan.”
“It produced a sort of witch story, too,” Louisa said. “Dobby could make his men invisible.”
Leaphorn put down his fork. “That old Ute you’re interviewing at Towaoc tomorrow. Why not see what she remembers about the legendary Ironhand?”
“Why not,” Professor Bourebonette said. “It’s right down my scholarly alley. And the man you’re after is probably Ironhand Junior. Or Ironhand the Second or Third.”
She smiled at Chee. “Nothing changes. A century later and you have the same problem in the same canyons.”