“How does this come out?” Demott said. “I don’t know much about the law.”
“It will depend mostly on how you handle it,” Leaphorn said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Here’s where we are now. We have three felonies. The Maryboy homicide and the related shooting of a Navajo policeman. The FBI is handling that one. Then there is the assault upon Amos Nez, in which the FBI has no interest.”
“Hal?”
“Officially, formally, an accident. FBI’s not interested. Nobody else is, except the Breedlove Corporation.”
“Now what happens?”
“Depends on you,” Leaphorn said. “If I were still a Navajo Tribal Policeman and working this case, I’d take you in on suspicion of shooting Amos Nez. The police do a ballistics check on that rifle of yours and if the bullets match the one they got from Nez’s horse, then they charge you with attempted murder. That gets Nez on the witness stand, which makes Elisa an accessory after the fact but probably indicted as coconspirator. That leads the Breedloves to file legal papers to void the inheritance. And what Nez says wakes up the FBI and they make the Maryboy connection. The ballistics test on whatever you shot him with, which I suspect we’ll find either in your glove compartment or under the front seat, nails you on that one. I’d say you do life. Elisa? I don’t know. Much shorter.”
Demott had been following this intently, nodding sometimes. Sometimes frowning.
“But why Elisa?”
“If they can’t make the jury believe she helped plan it, you can see how easy it is to prove she helped cover it up. Just get Nez and some of the people at the Thunderbird Lodge under oath. They saw you there with her.”
“You mentioned an option. Said it depends on me. How could it?”
“We go into Gallup. You turn yourself in. Say you want to confess to the shooting of Hosteen Maryboy and Jim Chee. No mention of Nez. No mention of Hal. No mention of climbing Ship Rock.”
“And what do you say? I mean about where you found me. And why and all that.”
“I’m not there,” Leaphorn said. “I park where I can see you walk into the police station and wait awhile and when you don’t come out, I go somewhere and get something to eat.”
“Just Maryboy, then, and Chee?” Demott said. “And Elisa wouldn’t get dragged into it?”
“Without Nez involved, how would she?”
“Well, that other cop. The one I shot. Doesn’t he have a lot of this figured out?”
“Chee?” Leaphorn chuckled. “Chee’s a genuine Navajo. He isn’t interested in revenge. He wants harmony.” Demott’s expression was skeptical.
“What would he do?” Leaphorn asked. “It’s obvious why you shot Chee. You were trying to escape. But you have to give them some plausible reason for shooting Maryboy. Chee isn’t going to rush in and say the real motive was some complicated something or other to cover up not reporting that Hal Breedlove fell off the mountain eleven years ago. What’s to be gained by it? Except a lot of work and frustration. Either way, you are going to do life in prison.”
“Yes,” Demott said, and the way he said it caused Leaphorn to lose his cool.
“And you damn sure deserve it. And worse. Killing Maryboy was cold-blooded murder. I’ve seen it before but it was always done by psychopaths. Emotional cripples. I want you to tell me how a normal human can decide to go shoot an old man to death.”
“I didn’t,” Demott said. “They found the skeleton. Then they identified Hal. The nightmare was coming true. I got panicky. Nobody 84 of 102
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knew I’d climbed up there with Hal and Elisa that day but the old man. We went to ask him about trespassing, but that was eleven years ago. I didn’t think he’d remember. But I had to find out. So I drove down there that evening, and knocked on the door. If he didn’t recognize me, I’d go away and forget it. He opened the door and I told him I was Eldon Demott and heard he had some heifers to sell. And right away I could see he knew me. He said I was the man who’d climbed up there with Mr. Breedlove. He got all excited. He asked how I could have gone off and left a friend up there on the mountain. And now that he knew who I was, he was going to tell the police about it. I went out and got into the car and there he was coming out after me, carrying a thirty-thirty, and wanted me to go back into the house. So I got my pistol out of the glove box and put it in my coat pocket. He went into his house and put on his coat and hat, and he was going to take me right into the police station at Shiprock. And, you know . . . “
“That’s how it was, then?”
“Yeah,” Demott said. “But if I can just keep Nez out of it, maybe we save Elisa?” Leaphorn nodded.
Demott reached his hand slowly toward the rifle.
“What I’d like to do is slip the bolt out of this thing so it’s harmless.”
“Then what?”
“Then I walk five steps over there to the cliff, and I toss it down into that deepest crack where nobody could ever find it.”
“Do it,” Leaphorn said. “I won’t look.”
Demott did it. “Now,” he said. “I want just a few minutes to write Elisa a little letter. I want her to know I didn’t kill Hal. I want her to know that when I climbed on up there and signed that register for him, it was just so she wouldn’t lose her ranch.”
“Go ahead.”
“Got to get my notebook out of the glove box then.”
“I’ll watch,” Leaphorn said. He moved around to where he could do that.
Demott dug out a little spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen, closed the box, backed out of the vehicle, and used the hood as a writing desk. He wrote rapidly, using two pages. He tore them out, folded them, and dropped them on the car seat.
“Now,” he said, “let’s get this over with.”
“Demott,” Leaphorn shouted. “Wait!”
But Eldon Demott had already taken the half dozen running steps to the rim of Canyon del Muerto and jumped, arms and legs flailing, out into empty space.
Leaphorn stood there a while listening. And heard nothing but the wind. He walked to the rim and looked. Demott had apparently hit the stone where the cliff bulged outward, down some two hundred feet. The body bounced out and landed on the stony talus slope just beside the canyon road. The first traveler to come along would see it.
Demott had left the door open on the Land-Rover. Leaphorn reached in and picked up the letter, holding it by its edges.
Dear Sister:
The first thing you do when you read this is call Harold Simmons at his law office don’t tell anyone anything until you talk it over with him. I’ve made an awful mess of things, but I’m out of it now and you can still have a good life taking care of the ranch. But I want you to know that I didn’t kill Hal. I’m ashamed to tell you a lot of this but I want you to know what happened.
About a week after Hal disappeared from the canyon I got a call from him. He was in a motel in Farmington. He wouldn’t tell me where he had been, or why he was doing this, but he said he wanted to climb Ship Rock right away, before it got too cold. I said hell no. He said if I didn’t I was fired. I wouldn’t anyway. Then he said if I would and I didn’t say anything to you, he would decide against signing that strip mining contract and put it off for another full year. He said he wanted to explain everything to you after we got down. So I said okay and I picked him up at the motel about five the next morning. He wouldn’t tell me a word about where he’d been and he was acting strange. But we climbed it, up to Rappel Gulch, and there he insisted on edging out on the cliff face to see if there was a way good hands with rope could get down. A gust of wind caught him and he fell.
That’s it, Elisa. I’ve been too ashamed to tell you all these years and I’m ashamed now. I think it’s made me crazy. Because when I went to see Mr. Maryboy about his stock getting onto our grazing over on the Checkerboard Reservation, we got to yelling at one another and he got his rifle down and I shot him and then I shot the policeman to get away. I checked on the penalty I can expect 85 of 102