“Maybe it doesn’t to you. But that client of yours could end up dead within the next few days or maybe the next few hours if you don’t give me a name.”
“I’ll get in touch with the client. That’s all I can do. I can’t say a word without the client’s permission.”
“I hope you don’t end up explaining that to the client’s corpse.” Watchman turned on his heel and tramped to the Volvo.
Victorio trotted to catch up. When Watchman looked past him Kendrick was gone. Victorio said, “Man I want to talk to you.”
“You’ve been doing that all day.”
“I didn’t know anything about that trust fund. It changes things. Look, why don’t we run over to the Arrow, I’ll buy us a beer.”
8.
The one-armed barkeep sat on a stool at the end of the bar with a fingernail inserted in his nostril. He was very carefully not looking in Watchman’s direction.
Victorio appeared from the men’s room feeling for the top of his zipper. He called down the length of the bar: “You want another firewater?”
Watchman nodded and inhaled the fumes of his nearly empty beer. It was all surmise. He wanted to believe Angelina but her word was unsupported; she might have seen Joe that night in Cibecue but suppose her watch had been an hour slow? Kendrick was right: there could be any number of explanations for the trust fund, half of them unconnected with Calisher’s death. Joe had confessed and produced the murder weapon. Everything else was hearsay and the people who talked to Watchman had attitudes that were colored by their feelings for or against Joe; either way they would naturally tend to make pinks red and greys black.
But he kept coming back to the original proposition because it accounted for the facts, even if it was full of holes. It explained a lot of things that otherwise looked like coincidence. Coincidences offened Watchman’s sense of orderliness. If Joe weren’t innocent there were too many of them to explain: the coincidence that brought money to Maria when Joe went to prison; the coincidence that sprung Joe efficiently from Florence less than thirty-six hours after Maria’s death; the coincidence that connected Joe Threepersons to three murders, at least two of which he could not possibly have committed; the coincidence that placed a .375 magnum in Joe’s hands at a time when everything else suggested he had escaped and armed himself in order to avenge the deaths of his wife and son.
There could have been any number of explanations but if you had to put your money on just one of them it had to be Angelina’s theory. From that it followed that Joe was not hiding up. He wasn’t the quarry, he was the hunter; he wouldn’t disappear into a hidden lair, he’d come out. He’d come out shooting.
The incestuousness of the past was disturbing: all the people, ostensibly enemies, who kept crossing paths in the Threepersons case. Kendrick marrying Charlie Rand’s ex-wife. Calisher maybe sleeping with Joe’s wife. Harlan Natagee, the alleged sorcerer, sending his red-power thugs out to harass Rand while Rand allegedly sent his own thugs to rifle Kendrick’s files. Angelina seeing Joe and Maria at Cibecue when Joe insisted he had been shooting Ross Calisher in a place two hours’ drive from there. Boundaries and water rights; reds and whites. Maria: levelheaded and ambitious, or tart and fast as a doxy? Joe Threepersons: a red man with a white job, and the victim of both worlds. It was taking a long time to accrete an impression of Joe: a young man gone to seed, clinging to the hem of hope and watching the fabric crumble away upon the death of Maria and Joe Junior. A savage killer bent on brutal revenge? Or a confused man hiding in the mountains battling his own conscience?
Victorio sat down and pushed a fresh beer in front of him. “I hate a noisy silence.”
Pools of poor light fell into the room from the nicked wall-lamps and the red discs in the ceiling. The place was gloomy and empty with a stale late-afternoon silence.
“It comes down to money,” Victorio said. “You see that. The sixty-five thousand.”
“You’re talking about Charles Rand, aren’t you.”
“Anybody else around here got that kind of money? Don’t you see how it fits together, man?”
Watchman considered the beer. “If your people are anything like my people they don’t talk about how much money they’ve got salted away. Unless they haven’t got any, then you hear about it. People like Will Luxan, Harlan Natagee, that medicine man, what’s his name?”
“Rufus Limita?”
Watchman nodded. “They’ve probably got cash socked away somewhere. Not every red man on a Reservation is dirt poor. It’s bad form to show it, that’s all.”
“How come you don’t want to believe it’s Rand? It’s got to be Rand, damn it.” Victorio’s head moved quickly with his impatient talk; strands of black hair had come loose of his headband and fell over his eye.
Watchman said, “Think about it. If the money man was Charles Rand he’d hardly choose Dwight Kendrick to be his executor.”
Victorio’s eyes brightened and then shifted away; he scowled. “God knows I’d love to see something pinned on that son of a bitch Rand.” Victorio drained his beer and wiped his upper lip. “Maybe he found Calisher in the wrong bed. Gwen slept around.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“God knows. You know how rumors are.”
“She was having an affair with Kendrick before she divorced Rand, I gather.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. The first I knew of it was after she got the divorce. After that Kendrick started dating her, and they got married about a year or a year and a half later. Actually I don’t think Rand knew about it at the time. But what’s that got to do with this? Gwen could have been sleeping with Calisher too.”
“A little while ago you were just as eager to see Joe’s head in that basket.”
Victorio grinned. “Yeah, I guess I was.”
“How far would you go to help?”
“Help what? Find Joe or clear him?”
“One may lead to the other.”
Victorio shook his head. “I don’t know any more about it than you do but I guess I’d be willing to try. I keep remembering that yarn you heard about my car being down there that morning in front of Maria’s house. If Joe heard the same yarn you heard it still could be me he’s gunning for.” He felt the knot of his necktie and poked his jaw forward to stretch his throat against his collar.
Watchman pushed his chair back and stood. “Let’s go talk to Jimmy Oto.”
“Me?”
“He knows you.”
“I doubt that means much. You ever see a bulldozer shoving rocks over military graves in the movies? That’s Jimmy.”
“I’m not asking you to hold my hand. But he might say something to you that he wouldn’t say to me.”
“I doubt it. But if you say so.”
9.
Watchman filled the Volvo at Will Luxan’s pumps and Victorio told him where to drive: back into Whiteriver and then left up a dirt-road fork. “You may not believe it when you see where he lives. It’s where the local derelicts go when they go slumming.”
“Things weren’t all that rich where I grew up, either.”
Victorio went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Babies dying with sores on their mouths. You know eight Apaches have starved to death on this Reservation in the past ten years and five of them lived up here in Cuncon. They get in hock to the trading post, up to their asses, and once they get too far in the hole the store won’t let them buy anything except for cash. It used to be you could always count on your relatives but that was before welfare. And the old ones that haven’t got any family left and can’t read the welfare forms to fill them out—they’re the ones you find by the smell. Man it breaks your heart. The Indian Bureau gets that damned appropriation from Congress every year, a thousand dollars for every Indian in the country, and it all ends up in some white crook’s pocket and these people starve to death. You know the life expectancy down here? Forty-six years.”