Berger nodded.
"A man came to see Gorman, here at the apartment."
Berger nodded.
"The day before Gorman left for New Mexico?"
Berger took his hands from the walker, held them about a foot apart, moved them together.
"Less than that," Chee said. "The night before Gorman left."
Berger nodded.
"You saw him?"
Berger nodded. He pointed to Gorman's apartment. Then indicated height and breadth.
"A big man," Chee said. "Very big?"
Berger agreed.
"How old?"
Berger struggled with that. Chee held up his hands, flashed ten fingers, another ten, stopped. Berger signaled thirty, hesitated, added ten.
"Maybe forty," Chee said. "Another Navajo?"
Berger canceled that, pointing to his own hair.
"White," Chee said. "Blond?"
Berger nodded.
"A big blond man came here just before Gorman left for New Mexico," Chee said. Lerner, he was thinking, was neither big nor blond. "Had you seen him before?"
Berger had.
"Often?"
Berger held up two fingers.
"They talked?" Chee had begun wondering where this was taking him. What could Berger know that would be useful?
Berger had taken his hands from the walker. His fingers, twisted and trembling, became two men standing slightly apart. Wagging fingers indicated one man talking, then the other man talking. Then the two hands moved together, parallel, to Berger's left. He stopped them. His lips struggled with an impossible word. "Car," he said.
"They walked together to a car after talking. The blond man's car?"
Berger nodded, pleased. His hands resumed their walk, stopped. Suddenly the right hand attacked the left, snatched it, bent it. Berger looked at Chee, awaiting the question.
Chee frowned. "The blond man attacked Gorman?"
Berger denied it.
"Gorman attacked the blond man?"
Berger agreed. He struggled for words, excited.
Chee bit back a question. "Interesting," he said, smiling at Berger, giving him time. He had an idea. He tapped Berger's right hand. "This is Blond," he said, "and the left hand is Gorman. Okay?"
Berger grasped his right hand with his left, began to enact a struggle. Then he stopped, thinking. He grasped an imaginary doorknob, opened the imaginary door, watching to see if Chee was with him.
"One of them opened the car door? The blond?"
Berger agreed. He held his left hand with his right, released it, then pantomimed, fiercely, the slamming of the door. He clutched the injured finger, squirming and grimacing in mock pain.
"Gorman slammed the door on the blond man's finger," Chee said. Berger nodded. He was a dignified man, and all this play-acting was embarrassing for him. "That would suggest that Gorman wasn't going to the car willingly. Right? You were standing about here, watching?" Chee laughed. "And wondering what the hell was going on, I'll bet."
"Exactly," Berger said, clearly and distinctly. "Then Gorman ran." He motioned past the fence, up the alley, a gesture that caused Gorman to vanish.
"And the blond man?"
"Sat," Berger said. "Just a min…" He couldn't finish the word.
"And then I guess he drove away."
Berger nodded.
"You have any idea about all this?"
Berger nodded affirmatively. They looked at each other, stymied.
"Any luck writing?" Chee asked.
Berger held up his hands. They trembled. Berger controlled them. They trembled again.
"Well," Chee said, "we'll figure out a way."
"He came," Berger said, pointing to the gravel where Chee was standing. "Talked."
"Gorman. About the trouble he was in."
Berger tried to speak. Tried again. Hit the walker fiercely with a palsied fist. "Shit," he said.
"What did Gorman do for a living?"
"Stole cars," Berger said.
That surprised Chee. Why would Gorman tell Berger that? But why not? A new dimension of Albert Gorman opened. One lonely man meeting another beside a fence. Berger's potential importance in this affair clicked upward. Frail, bony, pale, he leaned on the walker frame, trying to form another word, his blue eyes intense with the concentration.
Chee waited. The woman whose son was coming to see her had posted her wheelchair down the fence. Now she rolled it across the parched, hard-packed lawn toward them. She noticed Chee watching her and turned the wheelchair abruptly into the fence. "He's coming," she said to no one in particular.
"Gorman stole cars," Chee said. "And the man he stole them for—the man who paid him—got indicted by the federal grand jury. Maybe the reason he went to New Mexico, and the reason somebody followed to shoot him, was because he was going to be a witness against his boss. Maybe the boss…"
But Berger was denying that, shaking his head.
"You don't think so?"
Berger didn't. Emphatically.
"He talked to you about that, then?"
Berger agreed. Waved that subject off. Tried to form a word. "Not go," he managed finally. His mouth worked to say more, but couldn't. "Shit," he said.
"Not go?" Chee repeated. He didn't understand that.
Berger was still trying to find words. He couldn't. He shrugged, slumped, looked ashamed.
"He showed him a picture." The words came from the woman in the wheelchair. She was looking out through the fence, and Chee didn't realize that the statement had anything to do with Berger until he saw the old man was nodding eagerly.
"Gorman showed Mr. Berger a picture?" he asked.
"That Indian showed that fella you're talking to there a picture," the woman said. She pointed at Berger. "Like a postcard."
"Ah," Chee said. The photograph again. Why was it so important? It didn't surprise him to see the woman's senility fall away. It would come again just as quickly. Chee had grown up surrounded by the old of his family, learning from them, watching them grow wise, and ill, and die. This end of the human existence had no more mystery for him than its beginning.
"Picture," Berger said. "His brother."
"Was it a picture of an aluminum trailer with a man standing by it?"
It was.
"And Gorman said it was from his brother?"
Berger nodded again.
"I don't know what you meant when you said 'Not go.' I'm confused because we know Gorman went. Was it that Gorman had decided not to go and then changed his mind?"
Berger denied it, emphatically. He recast his palsied hands in the roles of Gorman and the blond man. The hand representing Gorman dipped its fingertip affirmatively. The hand representing the blond man shook its fingertip negatively.
"I see," Chee said. "Gorman wanted to go. The blond man said not to." He glanced at Berger, who was agreeing. "So Gorman was going, the blond man tried to stop him, they fought, and Gorman went. Good a guess as any?"
Berger shrugged, unhappy with that interpretation. He pointed to the dial of his watch.
"Time?" Chee was puzzled.
Berger tapped the dial, pointing to where the hour hand was. Then he moved his finger around the dial, counterclockwise.
"Earlier?" Chee asked.
Berger nodded.
"You mean this happened earlier? This business about Gorman wanting to go and the blond man telling him not to?"
Berger was nodding vigorously.
"Before the fight? Before the evening Gorman hurt Blond Man's hand? A day before? Two days?"
Berger was nodding through all this. Two days before was correct. "And Gorman told you about that?"
"Right," Berger said.
"Do you know why Gorman wanted to go?"
"Worried," Berger said. He tried to say more, failed, shrugged it off.
The red-faced young man Chee had noticed earlier was slouching across the lawn toward them, whistling between his teeth. The woman spun her wheelchair and hurried it down the fence away from him. "Mean old bitch," the young man said, and hurried after her.
"Do you know what was written on the postcard? The one with the picture on it?"
Berger didn't.
"The woman said it was like a postcard," Chee said. "Was it?"
Berger looked puzzled.