Janet squeezed his hand. “Really,” she said. “I have to go to Washington. On a bunch of legal stuff with Justice and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I have to be there day after tomorrow ready to argue.” She shrugged, made a wry face. “So I have to pack tonight and drive to Albuquerque tomorrow to catch my plane.”
Chee picked up the menu, said, “Like I’ve been telling you, you work way too hard.” He tried to keep it out, but the disappointment again showed in his voice.
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“And as I told you, it’s the fault of you policemen,” she said, smiling her tired smile. “Arresting too many innocent people.”
“I haven’t had much luck at arresting people lately,” he said. “I can’t even catch any guilty ones.” The Carriage Inn had printed a handsome menu on which nothing changed but the prices. Variety was provided by the cooks, who came and went. Chee decided to presume that the current one was adept at preparing Mexican foods.
“Why not try the chile relleños?”
Janet grimaced. “That’s what you said last time. This time I’m trying the fish.”
“Too far from the ocean for fish,” Chee said. But now he remembered that his last time here the cook had converted the relleños to something like leather. Maybe he’d order the chicken-fried steak.
“It’s trout,” Janet said. “A local fish. The waiter told me they steal ’em out of the fish hatchery ponds.”
“Okay then,” Chee said. “Trout for me, too.”
“You look totally worn-out,” she said. “Is Captain Largo getting to be too much for you?”
“I spent the day with a redneck New Mexico brand inspector,” Chee said. “We drove all the way up to Mancos with him talking every inch of the way. Then back again, him still talking.”
“About what? Cows?”
“People. Mr. Finch works on the theory that you catch cattle rustlers by knowing everything about everybody who owns cattle. I guess it’s a pretty good system, but then he passed all that information along to me. You want to know anything about anybody who raises cows in the Four Corners area? Or hauls them? Or runs feedlots? Just ask me.”
“Finch?” she said. “I’ve run into him twice in court.” She shook her head, smiling.
“Who won?”
“He did. Both times.”
“Oh, well,” Chee said. “It’s too bad, but sometimes justice triumphs over you public defenders. Were your clients guilty?”
“Probably. They said they weren’t. But this Finch guy is smart.” Chee did not want to talk about Finch.
“You know, Janet,” he said. “Sometime we need to talk about . . . “ She put down the menu and looked at him over her glasses. “Sometime, but not tonight. What took you and Mr. Finch to Mancos?” No. Not tonight, Chee thought. They would just go over the same ground. She’d say that if the police were doing their jobs properly there really wasn’t a conflict of interest if a public defender was the wife of a cop. And he’d say, yeah, but what if the cop had arrested the very guy she was defending and was a witness? What if she were cross-examining her own husband as a hostile witness? And she’d fall back on her Stanford Law School lecture notes and tell him that all she wanted to extract from anyone was the exact truth. And he’d say, but sometimes the lawyer isn’t after quite 100 percent of the truth, and she’d say that some evidence can’t be admitted, and he’d say, as an attorney it would be easy for her to get a job with a private firm, and she’d remind him he’d turned down an offer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety and was a cinch for a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs law-and-order division if he would take it. And he’d say, that would mean leaving the reservation, and she’d say, why not? Did he want to spend his life here? And that would open a new can of worms. No. Tonight he’d let her change the subject.
The waiter came. Janet ordered a glass of white wine. Chee had coffee.
“I went to Mancos to tell a widow that we’d found her husband’s skeleton,” Chee said. “Mr. Finch went along because it gave him an excuse to contemplate the cows in the lady’s feedlot.”
“All you found were dry bones? Her husband must have been away a lot. I’ll bet he was a policeman,” she said, and laughed.
Chee let that pass.
“Was it the skeleton they spotted up on Ship Rock about Halloween?” she asked, sounding mildly repentant.
Chee nodded. “He turned out to be a guy named Harold Breedlove. He owned a big ranch near Mancos.”
“Breedlove,” Janet said. “That sounds familiar.” The waiter came—a lanky, rawboned Navajo who listened attentively to Janet’s questions about the wine and seemed to understand them no better than did Chee. He would ask the cook. About the trout he was on familiar ground. “Very fresh,” he said, and hurried off.
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Janet was looking thoughtful. “Breedlove,” she said, and shook her head. “I remember the paper said there was no identification on him. So how’d you get him identified? Dental chart?”
“Joe Leaphorn had a hunch,” Chee said.
“The legend-in-his-own-time lieutenant? I thought he’d retired.”
“He did,” Chee said. “But he remembered a missing person case he’d worked on way back. This guy who disappeared was a mountain climber and an inheritance was involved, and—”
“Hey,” Janet said. “Breedlove. I remember now.”
Remember what? Chee thought. And why? This had happened long before Janet had joined the DNA, and become a resident reservation Navajo instead of one in name only, and entered his life, and made him happy. His expression had a question in it.
“From when I was with Granger-hyphen-Smith in Albuquerque. Just out of law school,” she said. “The firm represented the Breedlove family. They had public land grazing leases, some mineral rights deals with the Jicarilla Apaches, some water rights arrangements with the Utes.” She threw out her hands to signify an endless variety of concerns. “There were some dealings with the Navajo Nation, too. Anyway, I remember the widow was having the husband declared legally dead so she could inherit from him.
The family wanted that looked into.”
She stopped, looking slightly abashed. Picked up the menu again. “I’ll definitely have the trout,” she said.
“Were they suspicious?” Chee asked.
“I presume so,” she said, still looking at the menu. “I remember it did look funny. The guy inherits a trust and two or three days later he vanishes. Vanishes under what you’d have to consider unusual circumstances.” The waiter came. Chee watched Janet order trout, watched the waiter admire her. A classy lady, Janet. From what Chee had learned about law firms as a cop, lawyers didn’t chat about their clients’ business to rookie interns. It was unethical. Or at least unprofessional.
He knew the answer but he asked it anyway. “Did you work on it? The looking into it?”
“Not directly,” Janet said. She sipped her water.
Chee looked at her.
She flushed slightly. “The Breedlove Corporation was John McDermott’s client. His job,” she said. “I guess because he handled all things Indian for the firm. And the Breedlove family had all these tribal connections.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I guess not,” Janet said. “I don’t remember the family having us intervene in the case.”
“The family?” Chee said. “Do you remember who, specifically?”
“I don’t,” she said. “John was dealing with an attorney in New York. I guess he was representing the rest of the Breedloves. Or maybe the family corporation. Or whatever.” She shrugged. “What did you think of Finch, aside from him being so talkative?” John, Chee thought. John. Professor John McDermott. Her old mentor at Stanford. The man who had hired her at Albuquerque when he went into private practice there, and took her to Washington when he transferred, and made her his mistress, used her, and broke her heart.