“How did you know it was an Arizona license?” Chee asked. “The telescope?”
“Take a look,” Ms. Sam said, and waved at the scope.
Chee did, twiddling the adjustment dial. The mountain jumped at him. Huge. He focused on a slab of basalt fringed with mountain oak. “Wow,” Chee said. “Quite a scope.”
He turned it, brought in the point where Navajo Route 33 cuts through the Chinese Wall of stone that wanders southward from the volcano. A school bus was rolling down the asphalt, heading for Red Rock after taking kids on their fifty-mile ride into high school at Shiprock.
“We bought it for him, long time ago when he started getting sick,” Ms. Sam said—using the Navajo words that avoided alluding directly to the name of the dead. “I saw it in that big pawnshop on Railroad Avenue in Gallup. Then he could sit there and watch the world and keep track of his mountain.”
She produced a deprecatory chuckle, as if Chee might think this odd. “Every day he’d write down what he saw. You know. Like which pairs of kestrels were coming back to the same nests. And where the red-tailed hawks were hunting. Which kids were spray-painting stuff on that old water tank down there, or climbing the windmill. That sort of thing.” She sighed, gestured at the talk show. “Better than this stuff. He loved his mountain. Watching it kept him happy.”
“I heard he used to come down to Shiprock, to the police station, and report people trespassing and climbing Tse´ Bitáí´,” Chee said. “Is that right?”
“He wanted them arrested,” she said. “He said it was wrong, those white people climbing a mountain that was sacred. He said if he was younger and had some money he would go back East and climb up the front of that big cathedral in New York.” Ms. Sam laughed. “See how they liked that.”
“What sort of things did he write in the book?” Chee asked, thinking of Lieutenant Leaphorn and feeling a twinge of excitement.
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“Could I see it?”
“All sorts of things,” she said, and handed it to him. “He was in the marines. One of the code talkers, and he liked to do things the way they did in the marines.”
The entries were dated with the numbers of day, month, and year, and the first one was 25/7/89. After the date Hosteen Sam had written in a tiny, neat missionary-school hand that he had gone into Farmington that day and bought this book to replace the old one, which was full. The next entry was dated 26/7/89. After that Sam had written: “Redtail hawks nesting. Sold two rams to D. Nez.” Chee closed the book. What was the date Breedlove had vanished? Oh, yes.
He handed Ms. Sam the ledger.
“Do you have an earlier book?”
“Two of them,” she said. “He started writing more after he got really sick. Had more time then.” She took two ledgers down from the top of the cabinet where she stored canned goods and handed them to Chee. “It was something that kills the nerves. Sometimes he would feel pretty good but he was getting paralyzed.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Manuelito said. “They say there’s no cure.”
“We had a sing for him,” Ms. Sam said. “A Yeibichai. He got better for a little while.” Chee found the page with the day of Hal Breedlove’s disappearance and scanned the dates that followed. He found crows migrating, news of a coyote family, mention of an oil field service truck, but absolutely nothing to indicate that Breedlove or anyone else had come to climb Hosteen Sam’s sacred mountain.
Disappointing. Well, anyway, he would think about this. And he’d tell Lieutenant Leaphorn about the book. That thought surprised him. Why tell Leaphorn? The man was a civilian now. It was none of his business. He didn’t exactly like Leaphorn. Or he hadn’t thought he did. Was it respect? The man was smarter than anybody Chee had ever met. Damn sure smarter than Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. And maybe that was why he didn’t exactly like him.
12
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE
that metaphor whites use about money burning a hole in your pocket had taken on meaning for Joe Leaphorn. The heat had been caused by a check for twenty thousand dollars made out to him against an account of the Breedlove Corporation. Leaphorn had endorsed it and exchanged it for a deposit slip to an account in his name in the Mancos Security Bank. Now the deposit slip resided uneasily in his wallet as he waited for Mrs. Cecilia Rivera to finish dealing with a customer and talk to him. Which she did, right now.
Leaphorn rose, pulled back a chair for her at the lobby table where she had deposited him earlier. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to keep a new customer waiting.” She sat, examined him briefly, and got right to the point. “What did you want to ask me about?”
“First,” Leaphorn said, “I want to tell you what I’m doing here. Opening this account and all.”
“I wondered about that,” Mrs. Rivera said. “I noticed your address was Window Rock, Arizona. I thought maybe you were going into some line of business up here.” That came out as a question.
“Did you notice who the check was drawn against?” Leaphorn asked. Of course she would have. It was a very small bank in a very small town. The Breedlove name would be famous here, and Leaphorn had seen the teller discussing the deposit with Mrs. Rivera.
But he wanted to make sure.
“The Breedloves,” Mrs. Rivera said, studying his face. “It’s been a few years since we’ve seen a Breedlove check but I never heard of one bouncing. Hal’s widow banked here for a little while after he—after he disappeared. But then she quit us.” Mrs. Rivera was in her mid-seventies, Leaphorn guessed, thin and sun-wrinkled. Her bright black eyes examined him through the top half of her bifocals with frank curiosity.
“I’m working for them now,” Leaphorn said. “For the Breedloves.” He waited.
Mrs. Rivera drew in a long breath. “Doing what?” she asked. “Would it be something to do with that moly mine project?”
“It may be that,” Leaphorn said. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. I’m a retired policeman.” He extracted his identification case and showed it to her. “Years ago when Hal Breedlove disappeared, I was the detective working that case.” He produced a deprecatory expression. “Obviously I didn’t have much success with it, because it took about eleven years to find him, and then it was by accident. But anyway, the family seems to have remembered.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Young Hal did like to climb up onto the mountains.” A dim smile appeared. “From what I read in the Farmington Times, I guess he needed more studying on how to climb down off of them.” 35 of 102
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Leaphorn rewarded this with a chuckle.
“In my experience,” he said, “bankers are like doctors and lawyers and ministers. Their business depends a lot on keeping confidences.” He looked at her, awaiting confirmation of this bit of misinformation. Leaphorn had always found bankers wonderful sources of information.
“Well, yes,” she said. “Lot of business secrets come floating around when you’re negotiating loans.”
“Are you willing to handle another one?”
“Another secret?” Mrs. Rivera’s expression became avid. She nodded.
And so Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, laid his cards on the table. More or less. It was a tactic he’d used for years—based on his theory that most humans prefer exchanging information to giving it away. He’d tried to teach Jim Chee that rule, which was: Tell somebody something interesting and they’ll try to top it. So now he was going to tell Mrs. Rivera everything he knew about the affair of Hal Breedlove, who had been by Four Corners standards her former neighbor and was her onetime customer. In return he expected Mrs. Rivera to tell him something she knew about Hal Breedlove, and his ranch, and his business. Which was why he had opened this account here. Which was what he had decided to do yesterday when, after long seconds of hesitation, he had accepted the check he had never expected to receive.