At Ease with the Dead Page 14

  I shrugged. “It could’ve been a coincidence. Could’ve been a burglar.”

  “But you don’t think so, right?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  He smiled his small, barely perceptible smile. “You don’t know, maybe, but you think.”

  I shrugged again. “What I think doesn’t really count.”

  “Okay,” he said, and nodded once. “What I think, myself, is that maybe we should quit this now. It’s not good what’s happening. People getting killed.”

  “Fair enough, Daniel. No problem. We’ve got your address, we’ll mail you a statement at the end of the month.”

  He was watching me, faintly smiling again. “Your friend, Mrs. Mondragon, she says you’re a real stubborn person.”

  The pot calling the kettle black. “She’s a great little kidder,” I told him.

  He nodded. “You’re not going to quit on this, right?”

  I shrugged once more. “Why not?” I said. “No client, no case.”

  He nodded again. “So when are you going to the Reservation?”

  17

  I frowned. It was a pretty good frown, I thought. “Why would I go to the Reservation?”

  “The Ardmore Trading Post is there. And yesterday, Mrs. Mondragon asked me about Peter Yazzie.”

  I grinned. “Well, Daniel, you know, I thought I might take a drive out there today.”

  He looked down at his hands, looked back up at me. “It’s a good idea, you think? What if someone else gets hurt?”

  Good question. “I’m going to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  Another nod. “Okay,” he said. “You got a client.”

  “Uh-uh,” I said.

  “You’re gonna keep doing this, you got to get paid.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “So I’ll pay you anyway.”

  “Nope. You hired me to go down to El Paso and ask some questions about the remains of Ganado. I did that. Mrs. Wright’s death may have nothing to do with the remains. Right now, I’m more interested in Mrs. Wright’s death. I’m sorry, Daniel.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Can you give me a ride?”

  Talk about non sequiturs. “Where to?”

  “Gallup.”

  “Gallup?”

  “Truck’s not running right. I got something I need to do in Gallup later today.”

  I wondered if this were true; he’d given up, I thought, fairly suddenly on the idea of paying me.

  But Gallup lay directly along on the route I’d be taking. “Sure,” I said. “How soon can you be ready?”

  “An hour.”

  Fine. That left me time enough to pack what few clean clothes I had left. “Where should I meet you?”

  “My nephew’s house.” He gave me an address on the west side of Santa Fe.

  Before I left the office, I called up Lamont Brewster in Michigan.

  “Mr. Brewster,” I told him, “I’m sorry, but I just learned that Carl and Elena Ardmore died some time ago.” I was apologizing quite a bit lately.

  He said nothing for a moment. Then: “When did she die?”

  “Over twenty years ago.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “Mr Brewster?”

  “Yeah.” Distracted.

  “I tried to reach you for a few days. Were you out of town?”

  “I was over in Chicago, visiting with my nephew’s family. Why?”

  “No reason. Just tying up some loose ends.”

  “Loose ends,” he said sadly. “Sometimes it seems that’s all there is, doesn’t it?”

  “Sometimes it does, yeah.”

  I heard him take a deep breath. “Well, Mr. Croft, I appreciate it, your letting me know.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Did she—hell, guess it doesn’t matter. Appreciate your calling.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Brewster.”

  He hung up.

  I called Rita next and told her. She was kind enough not to point out that, once again, I’d been wrong.

  At one-thirty that afternoon I was on the porch of Daniel Begay’s nephew’s house, shaking hands with his nephew’s wife, a short, plump, attractive woman. Then I was shaking hands with nephew’s daughter, a slender, slyly smiling ten-year-old who looked like she might, given a chance, drop telephones onto concrete. (Nephew himself, a lawyer, was at work in the Capitol building.) Then I was helping Daniel load his duffel into the back of the Subaru, next to my suitcase. Then we were in the wagon and I was heading down Cerillos to pick up the interstate.

  I was beginning to feel like a country-western singer, living out of his car and hustling from one dreary gig to the next.

  Travel didn’t seem to bother Daniel Begay. His coat off, his hands in his lap, he sat silently and silently watched the scenery roll by. If Pascal was right, if man is unhappy because he’s unable to sit quietly in his room, Daniel Begay was probably a pretty happy guy. I got the feeling he could sit quietly, perfectly contented, inside an empty refrigerator crate.

  It was a fine day. The temperature had climbed up into the fifties and the sky was clear, only a few clouds draped like bits of wooly white blanket along the gray slopes of the Jemez range, off to the right.

  At Albuquerque I picked up I-40 West. Daniel Begay had nothing to say until we hit the boundaries of the Isleta Indian Reservation, about twenty-five miles outside the city. And even then he didn’t say much: He only asked if it would be okay to open a window and smoke. It was as though he’d been postponing lighting up until we reached Indian land. I told him sure.

  As the rich smell of burley drifted through the car, I turned to him. “Daniel, what kind of a guy is this John Ardmore?”

  He took the pipe from his mouth. “Oh, he’s okay.”

  “And his son?”

  He frowned. “A drinker. Not a happy man. He was in Vietnam.”

  He put his pipe back in his mouth and that, I gathered, was that.

  We sailed along through the Acoma Reservation, past the towering white mesa and the village of Acoma. People have been living up there in the sky, pretty much uninterrupted, since the eleventh century.

  There was a Stuckey’s at Acomita, the next town, and I decided to try calling the trading post again.

  I wasn’t worried, not yet. But it was almost three o’clock now, and we wouldn’t reach Ardmore’s until at least six or seven at night. And it was a good thirty miles off the interstate. If I could reach this John Ardmore by phone, learn what I wanted to learn, I could skip a visit to the place and continue on to Hollister. Save myself some time.

  Daniel Begay went inside for a Coke while I used the phone. The line was still busy, and the verification operator told me it was still troubled.

  Driving back onto the interstate with Daniel sipping his Coke beside me, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a gray Chevy Malibu leaving the Stuckey’s lot and sliding into the same entrance I was taking.

  Something else I didn’t think twice about.

  We were driving through the Malpais, miles and miles of ragged black lava flow, when I turned to Daniel Begay and asked him, “This Ganado. He was an important person? A chief?”

  He turned to me, smiling that small faint smile. “We didn’t really have chiefs, like the kind you mean. He was a leader.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A leader, he only made suggestions. To do a thing. If everyone agreed, then they did it.”

  “What if everyone didn’t agree?”

  “They argued.”

  “They argued?”

  He gave a small nod. “Until they agreed. Sometimes the leader won, sometimes he didn’t.”

  “So what made Ganado a leader?”

  He shrugged. “He was a healer. And he was very smart, and very brave. Once some soldiers, they took some Navajo women. They took Ganado’s wife too, Tazbah. He tracked them down by himself. It took him two weeks. He killed them all, six of them,
and took their horses. He brought all the women back.”

  More southwest romance. Love Among the Tumbleweed.

  “The woman on the Reservation,” I said. “With the dreams. She’s the descendant of Ganado and Tazbah?”

  He shook his head. “Ganado died without children. His brother, Mariano, he married Tazbah later, and they had children. The woman comes from these.”

  “How did Ganado die?”

  “From drink.”

  “Drink?”

  “One night they had some bad whiskey. Everyone got drunk and then very sick. Ganado, he fell from the opening of the cave.”

  Not the most illustrious of deaths. A slapstick departure. But I’d seen some of the caves in Canyon de Chelly, and you wouldn’t need to be drunk or sick to fall from one.

  “Where’d they get the whiskey?”

  “From a trader.”

  “A white guy.”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  Another small way station along the Road of Progress.

  I left the interstate at the tiny hamlet of Milan. From the Thriftway on Main Street, I dialed the Ardmore Trading Post.

  Trouble on the line.

  At this stage I was still more irritated than concerned.

  Shooting back onto the interstate again, I glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed, behind me, a gray Chevy Malibu doing the same thing.

  It could’ve been a different gray Chevy Malibu. But I didn’t think so.

  Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe the guy just had a touchy bladder.

  Why would anyone be following us?

  If he were following us, he must’ve picked us up in Santa Fe. I didn’t remember seeing any gray Malibu back in Santa Fe.

  Then again, I hadn’t been looking for one.

  The Malibu fell back to a position about a quarter of a mile behind me, letting other cars pass by.

  Okay. Let’s see what we have here.

  Gradually, over a couple of miles, I put a bit more pressure on the gas pedal. Watched the speedometer needle slowly climb from sixty-five to seventy-five. Watched the Malibu in the rearview mirror.

  Hard to tell at a quarter mile, but it seemed to me that the Malibu was matching my speed, maintaining the same distance between us.

  I let the car gradually slow back to sixty-five. In the rearview mirror, the Malibu seemed to remain exactly the same size.

  If I’d done it right, and if he were actually a tail, he might not’ve noticed the speed change. If he had noticed, he might not’ve thought it was anything special.

  Depended, really, on whether he was a professional or an amateur. A professional, most likely, would’ve noticed, and known what it meant.

  “What’s wrong?” Daniel Begay asked me.

  “Not sure,” I told him. “Do you know anyone who owns a gray Chevrolet Malibu?”

  He thought for a moment, finally shook his head. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Because there’s one on the road back there, and I think it’s following us.”

  “Why would anyone follow us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could stop the car and see what he does.”

  If the Malibu were a tail, I didn’t really want to see what the driver might do when we stopped in the middle of nowhere. Paranoia, probably; but I’ve always suspected that paranoids, despite their muttering, lived a long and happy life.

  “What’s the next town?” I asked him.

  “Prewitt. About ten miles.”

  “Anything there?”

  “A gas station. A grocery store.”

  “I think we’ll stop in Prewitt.”

  At Prewitt, when we pulled off the highway, the Malibu came with us.

  I drove into the gas station lot, parked the Subaru. The Malibu drove past, down the main street. Only the driver inside, a figure too dim to make out. Texas tags on the back of the car.

  Daniel stayed in the car. I went into the station and used the telephone. The Ardmore’s line was still troubled.

  So was I.

  The line should’ve been fixed by now. A store out in the boondocks—they needed that phone.

  And by now I was fairly certain that the Malibu was a tail.

  I got back into the car, put the key in the ignition.

  “The car’s down there,” Daniel Begay told me, nodding down the street.

  “Where?” I saw nothing but the mountains unfolding off into the distance.

  “Behind those trees.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “It’s there,” he said simply.

  I was convinced.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve got two choices, Daniel. We can confront him, find out what he’s up to. Or we can lose him.”

  He turned to me. “How are we going to lose him on the interstate?”

  I smiled. “Well, if it’s all right with you, we’re not.”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay with me.”

  “I’ll need your help.”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  I leaned over, popped open the glove compartment, took out the .38.

  Daniel Begay smiled faintly. “Magnum P.I.,” he said.

  “Let’s hope not, Daniel. Magnum got canceled.”

  18

  The cocked Smith and Wesson in my hand, I stood with my back flat against the big rock.

  Fifty feet farther along, the Subaru was parked at an angle across the track, blocking it. The road had been bulldozed from the flank of the hill, leaving a rocky slope climbing up from one side and a steep cliff falling off to the other; anyone driving from either direction would have to stop. Hidden behind the rock, I was positioned at the spot where the driver of the Malibu would first see the wagon, just as he rounded the curve.

  When he stopped, even for only a moment, I could reach him. If he figured it out, threw the car into reverse before I could get there, I could hit one of his tires with a shot from the .38. With five shots, at six or seven feet, I figured I could handle a tire.

  This ought to work.

  Daniel Begay was off in the rocks up ahead, beyond the Subaru. I’d asked him to stay there. In case this didn’t work.

  He had calmly assured me that if things went sour, if something happened to me, he’d be able to walk crosscountry to the house of a Navajo he knew.

  “Not far away,” he had said.

  “How far away?”

  “Oh, fifteen miles, maybe. That way.” Indicating the barren landscape toward the south with a quick upward tilt of his chin.

  “Fifteen miles across that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s only ground.”

  “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  And he had smiled faintly and said, “Sure.”

  And now, my back pressed against the rock, I could hear the Malibu coming, the rumble of its engine growing louder as the car rattled over the road.

  Any moment now it would wind around the curve.

  Out here in the sunlight, the air was warm and it still carried the chalky taste of dust kicked up by the passage of the Subaru. In the blue sky overhead a hawk soared slowly up a thermal.

  And then the Malibu was there.

  The driver made it easy for me. He stopped.

  He wasn’t very bright. He was halfway out of the car, left foot on the ground, left hand along the open window, head poking over the door, when I swung around the rock and brought up the .38 in a Weaver stance, both hands around the butt. He turned to me.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” I told him.

  He thought about it. He considered it carefully. The barrel of a .38 can look like the Holland Tunnel when it’s pointed at your lungs. He decided not to move a muscle.

  “Very slowly,” I told him. “Put your right hand on the door. Make sure it’s empty.”

  Frowning, he put his right hand on the door. It was empty.

  I took a step forward. “Out of the car,” I told him. “Slowly. Keep your hands on the door.”

  He hesitat
ed. “I got to shut it off.” A Spanish accent.

  “I’ll pay for the gas. Out. Slowly.”

  He pulled himself, slowly, out of the car.

  He frowned again. “So what’s going on, mister?” As though he couldn’t imagine why on earth I’d stopped him.

  He wore jeans and workboots, a black T-shirt under an opened gray windbreaker. He was a few inches shorter than I was, but he looked at least a foot wider. Thick sloping shoulders, meaty chest, body-builder bulk beginning to blur with fat. Black hair swept back in an artful pompadour from a broad forehead. Deeply set brown eyes, wide Indio cheekbones, broad mouth, strong square jaw. A handsome face, but slack and brutal, the face of a man who wouldn’t think very far beyond the pleasures, or the resentments, of the moment. They would be simple pleasures, complicated resentments.

  On the right side of his face, just below the arc of cheekbone, was a two-inch square of flesh-colored bandage.

  “What happened to your face?” I asked him.

  “An accident. Listen, mister, if you want money, you can have everything I got. All of it. I don’t want no trouble.” Still playing the baffled tourist.

  Holding the gun pointed at his chest, I took another step forward.

  “The bandage. Take it off.”

  He frowned at me.

  “Take it off.”

  He raised his right hand and in a single motion ripped away the bandage. He tossed it to the ground and held up his head, as though daring me to say something about the wound on his face.

  A jagged tear in the flesh, neatly sutured together. The sort of wound that might be made by a motel-room key used like a dagger.

  “Good to see you again,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” he said. But he blinked and his glance skittered away for a moment.

  He’d been one of the three men in stocking masks, back in El Paso; and he knew that I knew it.

  “Hands in the air,” I told him. “Step away from the car.”

  His hands up, he stepped away from the car.

  I gestured to my right with the gun barrel.

  He moved in that direction.

  “Turn around,” I said. “Hands against the top of the car. Feet back. Spread your legs.”

  He did all this as though by rote. Presumably he’d done it before.

  Walking toward him, I said, “Get your feet back farther.”