3.
Lieutenant Lloyd Wilder was a few years younger than Watchman, a hotshot with several university degrees in police science. Watchman had known him at a distance for several years and casually for six months, as one gets to know an official of a different branch who works out of the same small building. Wilder was amiable and up-to-date and had a very fast way of talking, like a salesman half afraid someone would try to interrupt his pitch.
“He was doing ten years for second-degree murder. The original charge was first-degree but his lawyer copped a plea. He’d served five and a half, he’d have been eligible for parole seventeen months from now.”
“Then why bust out if all he had left was easy time?”
“That’s one of the questions I’d like an answer to. Okay, here’s as much background as I’ve been able to get on him—I may get more coming in, this is kind of short notice. I gather you never met him?”
“No.”
“I did, once. When the county cops arrested him I happened to be on my way back here from Albuquerque. I chauffeured him up to the County Jail at St. Johns. I remember it because he was a curious character. Usually you arrest a man for murder he’s either morose as hell or violent as hell. This guy seemed as cheerful as if it was the first time in his life something had gone right for him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know what it means. All I can tell you is, I never saw a man quite so happy to go to jail.”
“Who’d he kill?”
“Man named Ross Calisher.”
“White man?”
“Yes. Calisher was vice-president and operating manager of a big ranch up in Apache County where Threepersons worked as a line rider.”
“He was working there when he killed Calisher?”
“That’s right.”
“What was it? Family dispute?”
“Something like that. It came out that Calisher was making time with Threepersons’ wife and Threepersons called him down for it. It wasn’t one of those unwritten law killings, it didn’t take place in the bedroom in the heat of anger. Calisher was killed in his own living room with his own gun, but Threepersons still had the gun in his pocket when they arrested him the next morning.”
“Now that’s pretty stupid.”
“Nobody said he was a genius.”
“What about Threepersons’ wife? You put surveillance on her?”
“I would have if she were still alive. She died, just a few days ago. Ugly car accident on the Black Canyon Freeway at the Camelback intersection.”
“She died before or after the breakout?”
“A day or two before.”
“Maybe that’s why he busted out.”
“It’s possible—God knows how anybody’s mind works. She had their kid in the car, a little boy. Eight or nine years old.”
“He still alive?”
“No. Both killed instantaneously. She lost control of the car, went across the divider and hit a loaded semi head-on. The truck driver’s in the hospital with about forty broken bones and a fifty percent chance.”
“I remember Buck Stevens talking about that one.”
“I was talking to Stevens this morning at the briefing. You stand pretty high in his books. You want him for a partner on this job? I can check it out with the captain.…”
“If it’s all right with you. He’s a good cop.” The words were ordinary but it was the highest compliment Watchman knew how to pay a colleague.
He studied the mug shot again. It didn’t tell him anything new. “What was his wife doing in Phoenix?”
“She lived here. Had a little house in one of those developments up in Sunnyslope. She had a job running an Indian curio shop out on.…” Wilder had to look it up in his notes “…. Bethany Home Road. Place called the Katchina Boutique.”
Watchman made a face. “Apache woman?”
“San Carlos Apache.” Wilder put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it; it wobbled up and down as he spoke. “She got the job here after he went to prison. Here—have a look.”
The photo showed a surprisingly good-looking young woman with an infant in her arms. She hadn’t gone to fat; she had the good looks of youthful radiance but she also had fine bones and a face which contained more self-assuredness than you expected to find in the features of a line rider’s wife.
“This was taken before the murder?”
“Two or three years before it. I guess he borrowed somebody’s camera to take that picture. Indians don’t go in much for cameras, do they?”
“Not much.”
“I haven’t got a picture of Calisher here, but he was a stud. Threepersons wasn’t the first man he put horns on. In fact there’s some woman’s husband down in Texas still serving time for attempted murder, for trying to beat Ross Calisher to death.”
Wilder took the cigarette out of his mouth. “This is a phony. I gave up smoking.” He put it down in a clean ashtray. “Calisher used to be World’s Champion rodeo cowboy and then some uncle of his hit a big oil strike and Calisher started hanging around with rarefied people. That’s how he got the job managing Rand’s operation.”
“Charlie Rand?”
“You know him?”
“No. I’ve heard of him.”
“Well Calisher was Rand’s foreman. Naturally when he got killed, Rand leaned real hard on the County Attorney to get a first-degree conviction. But Threepersons had a pretty good lawyer.”
“An Apache line rider? Where’d he find a good lawyer?”
“Politics. Rand owns one of those big cattle and timber operations right along the edge of the White Mountain Reservation. You know about the water-rights squabble up there?”
“A little.”
“Well there’s maybe a dozen big operations up there, white-owned, but Rand’s the biggest and the rest don’t count. It’s pretty much Rand against the Apaches. The fight’s been going on for I don’t know how many years. Rand has a high-powered battery of lawyers so the Apaches have a high-powered battery of lawyers. One of them defended Threepersons. Dude called Dwight Kendrick.”
“It rings a bell. He’s handled a lot of Indian rights cases.”
“Seems to know his way around a criminal court well enough, too. He managed to get the charge reduced to second degree.”
Watchman sat with an ankle across a knee, his hat perched on his upraised knee. He fingered the four dents in its crown. “Anything else I need to know?”
“What do you want to know? You can take these files with you.”
“I do have one question. The captain seems to think Threepersons is hiding on the Reservation. Is there any evidence or is that just his theory?”
“Actually it was my theory and he picked up on it. No, there’s no evidence. It’s just that Threepersons spent his whole life on the Reservation or just outside of it. Where else would he go at a time like this?”
“Any sign of how he got out of Florence in the first place? I don’t mean the prison break, I mean afterward.”
“No. Nothing at all. We’re still working on it.”
“Then for all we know he could still be in Florence.”
“Not unless he’s a mole. We’ve done a house-to-house.”
“He’d know how to lie up in the brush.”
“The dogs would have found him.”
“Not if he got his hands on a bottle of vinegar.”
“You think he’s that bright?”
Watchman said, “I don’t know the man. What do you think?”
“He didn’t impress me as being very bright. But you could have a point—that’s the kind of tidbit they pass around the mess table in slam. He could have picked up that information and remembered it when he passed somebody’s kitchen window. But I don’t set that much store in it myself. A well-trained hound won’t be discouraged by a little vinegar.”