Chee looked. He noticed, as he’d noticed the first time he’d examined it, that the safe door did seem to have been pried open. Whatever had been used had left marks, and the door had been slightly bent. Once again, that seemed odd. The door was heavy. Unless it was poor metal, it would take tremendous strength to bend it even with the leverage of a wrecking bar. Chee looked for a trademark and found none.
“I think you should get your money back on that door,” he said.
Vines laughed. “I’m afraid the warranty’s run out. As a matter of fact, I had the safe made and installed, and I guess they didn’t use the most expensive material.”
“Who did it for you?”
“I don’t remember,” Vines said. “Some outfit in Albuquerque. I had it done when I built this place, and that was thirty years ago.” He pushed the door shut. “The point I was making was that Rosemary doesn’t have a key to the wall safe, but she does have a key to the tool locker. The pry bar was gone. I found it in her closet.”
“Oh,” Chee said.
Vines shrugged. He produced a wry face. “So I want to apologize for all this. And I’d like to pay you for your trouble.” He produced a check. “You made two trips out here. Would two hundred dollars be fair?”
Chee glanced from Vines to the sly smile of the tiger. He thought of the bent metal of the door and the empty space behind the door, and of what Mrs. Vines had told him. Among other things, she had told him that B. J. Vines was away at a hospital. But two hundred dollars was too much to be offered. Vines was watching him. Vines had told him, in effect, that the crime was family business, and thus no crime at all, and no concern of Chee’s. To ask a question now would be impertinent.
“Did Mrs. Vines have the box?” Chee asked.
Vines considered this impertinence, his mild eyes on Chee’s face. He sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she had it. Maybe she disposed of it. The point is it doesn’t matter. I think she told you there wasn’t much in it. There wasn’t. Mementos. Things that reminded me of the past. Nothing of value. Not even to me any longer.”
Vines held the check toward Chee, dangling it between his fingers.
“I understand you reported it to the sheriff,” he said. “Of course you’d have to do that. Old Gordo came out yesterday to ask about it. I wondered how much you told him.”
“Just what Mrs. Vines told me.”
Vines took three careful steps toward Chee and put the check in Chee’s shirt pocket.
“This isn’t necessary,” Chee said. “I’m not even sure it’s allowed.”
“Take it,” Vines said. “Rosemary and I will both feel better. If it’s against policy, tear it up. I wonder if you noticed that our sheriff is very interested in my business?” Vines made his laborious way back to his chair.
“I noticed,” Chee said.
“Did he ask a lot of questions?”
“Yep,” Chee said. Vines waited for more. He realized gradually that it wouldn’t be forthcoming.
“Gordo asked me a lot of questions about the People of Darkness,” Vines said. “I got the impression that you’d told him Rosemary thought one of the Charley boys had taken the box.”
“That’s right,” Chee said.
Vines waited again. He sighed. “I’ve had a lot of trouble with Gordo Sena,” he said. “Years ago. I thought it was over with.” Vines put out his cigaret and walked to the window. Past him, Chee could see an expanse of Mount Taylor’s east slope. At this altitude it was the zone of transition from ponderosa pine into fir, spruce, and aspen. The ground under the aspens was yellow with fallen leaves. The slanting sunlight created a golden glow a little like fire.
“It was early in the 1950s,” Vines said. “I’d found that uranium deposit that the Red Deuce is mining now, and I was building this place, and I hired a Navajo named Dillon Charley as a sort of foreman to look after things. I didn’t know it, but Gordo had a thing about Charley, and about a bunch of other Indians in a church old Dillon was running.” Vines glanced back at Chee, the window light giving his gray beard a translucent frosting. “It was the peyote church. It was against tribal law in those days.”
“I know about it,” Chee said.
“Well, Sena was dogging them. He was picking them up, and beating them up. I got involved in it. Hired a lawyer over in Grants to take care of bonding them out and to bitch to the Justice Department about nights violations, and finally I put up some money behind a candidate and we got Sena beat for re-election for one term. For several years there, it was hairy between Sena and me. Things had settled down for the last few years. I’m wondering if he wants to stir it up again. That’s why I wanted to know what kind of questions he was asking you.”
“He asked why your wife wanted to hire me,” Chee said. He gave Vines a quick résumé of Sena’s questions.
“What do you think of that oil well business?” Vines asked. “Did Sena tell you about that? About why he hated old Dillon Charley?”
“He didn’t talk about it,” Chee said. “But I understand he thinks it’s funny Dillon Charley got that advance warning.”
“You don’t believe in visions?” Through the bristling whiskers Vines’ expression seemed to be amused. Chee couldn’t be sure.
“It depends,” Chee said. “But I don’t believe in crimes without motives. No one can find one for this explosion, I guess.”
“Well, there are some theories.”
“Like what?”
“You know Sena’s, I guess. He doesn’t seem to have any ideas about a motive, but he appears to think that Dillon Charley was tied up in some sort of conspiracy. And then there’s another theory that Gordo did it himself.”
“Why?”
“The way the story goes, the older brother was the apple of everybody’s eye – including his mother’s. Gordo is supposed to have known that the old lady was leaving the ranch to Robert. So he blows up the oil well.”
“How’d he handle it?”
Vines shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I heard it was a nitroglycerin explosion, some sort of charge they tower down into the shaft of oil wells to shake things up, but it went off too early. I guess you could set that stuff off by shooting into it with a rifle. It was all before my time.”
“How does the Sena-did-it theory explain Dillon Charley’s vision?”
“That’s easy,” Vines said. “Dillon finds out somehow that Sena was planning something funny. So he arranges to have his peyote vision at the church service, and he tells his crew to stay away from the well. Sena blows the place up, but he finds out that Dillon must have known something. So he tries to drive him away with the harassment.”
“Could be,” Chee said.
“I think Gordo would like to know if Dillon Charley told me anything,” Vines said. “Did his questions lead that way?”
“More or less,” Chee said. “Did Dillon Charley tell you anything?”
Vines smiled. “Did Gordo tell you to ask me that?”
“You brought it up,” Chee said. “I’ll change the question. What do you think happened out at that oil well?”
“I understand nitro is touchy stuff. In those days those accidents happened. I think they had another case like that in the state a few years earlier.”
“Do you think it was an accident? Do you think Dillon Charley was just nervous about having the nitro at the well?”
Vines swiveled his chair to give himself a view out the window. Chee could see only his profile.