“Just hope for the best, you mean? Hope nothing gets stirred up.”
“Yes,” Chester said. “Let’s talk about my money.”
The speakers emitted the tinny sound of Zeck’s laughter. “The check’s in the mail,” he said. “Just like I keep telling you.”
“I’m not laughing,” Chester said. “The bank’s not laughing. I’ve got to pay off that note. Remember, it was me that signed the paper.”
For a moment the only sound was the tape running.
“All right then,” Zeck said. “Twenty-two thousand something. I’ll have to do some transferring around. Tell ’em you’ll have it for ’em Monday.”
“And none of this ‘check in the mail’ crap,” Chester said.
“I’ll make it a cashier’s check,” Zeck said.
“And what do you hear from Tano?”
“Nothing much. I think we’re all right there. Bert Penitewa’s for it. He’s a popular man there and Tano pretty well does what the governor wants. It’s not split like your Navajo council. There, the governor’s also the big man in one of the religious kivas.”
“I know,” Chester said.
“We should just leave that alone then, you think? Anything else going on I ought to know about?”
“Nothing,” Chester said. “You go on down and get that money transferred. And it’s not twenty-two thousand something. It’s twenty-two thousand five hundred and thirty. Maybe those banks don’t charge anything to loan money to you
“And some-odd cents, which we’ll round off. So
There was a click, and then only the sound of the tape running.
Chee let it run until it shut itself off. Then he rewound it, replayed the conversation, and rewound it again. He had decided where it must have come from. Who else but Roger Applebee? The environmentalist had said he knew a way to get some evidence proving Jimmy Chester was corrupt. And he had gotten it. Probably with an illegal wiretap. Actually, not a wiretap these days. More likely one of those gadgets that pick up mobile telephone conversations. He’d seen one in an electronics supply store in Farmington. But still, the tape wouldn’t be usable in court or even before a grand jury. If it was illegal, and it probably was, how could it be used?
He was thinking about that when the telephone rang.
“Joe Leaphorn’s office.”
“Joe? Is Jim Chee still working on that hit-and-run vehicular homicide case?” It was the voice of the Window Rock dispatcher. “The one where-”
“This is Chee,” Chee said. “The lieutenant’s away from his office.”
“Hey, man. You lucked out. Your suspect just confessed. Right over the radio.”
“Confessed? What d’ya mean?”
“He drove up to KNDN in Farmington, and walked in where they have that open mike for the public to make announcements on, and he said he did it, and he was sorry, and he was going to make restitution. He said he was drunk. Said he didn’t know he’d hit the man.”
“Who was it?”
“We haven’t got him yet. He walked out and drove away.”
“Wonderful,” Chee said. “Didn’t they call the cops? The people at the station?”
“I guess so. Everybody’s looking for him. Farmington police, New Mexico state cops, San Juan Sheriff’s Department. Our people at Shiprock. Everybody.”
“Well,” Chee said. “I guess I’ll go join ’em.” It was three hours over the mountain to Farmington, but the hit- and-run was his baby. Jimmy Chester would have to wait.
Chapter 14
“WHERE ALL did you look?” Dilly Streib asked. He was standing in the door of the Saint Bonaventure School shop, looking across the clutter.
“Where?” said Lieutenant Toddy. He waved his arms in a gesture that encompassed the cosmos. “I guess you’d have to say everywhere.”
“So I guess that’s where we have to look again,” Streib said. “How about you, Joe? You got any ideas about where to start?”
Leaphorn shrugged.
“It would help me if I knew what the hell we’re supposed to be looking for,” Toddy said. He started examining the array of chisels, awls, punches, hammers, nail sets, files, and planes racked on the wall.
Streib maintained his position, leaning against the doorjamb. “If you ask Lieutenant Leaphorn that question, he’ll tell you to look for clues. Then you ask him how you know it’s a clue, and he’ll give you a wise look.”
“I’m in favor of just looking,” Leaphorn said. “You never know what you’ll find.”
“That’s Joe’s theory,” Streib said. “You don’t look for anything in particular. You just look and if you look long enough you reach retirement age.”
“At exactly the same speed as you do leaning in doorways,” Leaphorn said.
“How about this?” Lieutenant Toddy asked. He showed Leaphorn a mallet. “Could that be blood?”
Leaphorn looked at it, scraped with a thumbnail, showed the result to Toddy.
“Dried paint,” Toddy said.
“I’ll tell you what we’re looking for,” said Streib. “We hope to discover a Polaroid photo of Eugene Ahkeah with his bludgeon raised, about to hit Mr. Dorsey on the back of the head. See if he left it in the wastebasket.”
Toddy was not enjoying Streib’s humor. “We went through the wastebaskets. Went through everything.”
“I was just kidding,” Streib said. He pushed himself off from the doorjamb and began opening drawers. “I wonder what these things could be for.” He displayed a small, shallow wooden box.
“They’re forms for sand-casting metal,” Toddy said. “You put wet sand in and make the shape in it that you want and then you pour in the molten silver – or whatever you’re working with. That one looks like the size you’d use to cast a belt buckle.”
“How about this one?” Streib handed Toddy a much deeper box, almost a cube. “Maybe some sort of jewelry?”
“No idea,” Toddy said. He put it on the workbench.
Leaphorn picked it up. It was newer than the more standard casting forms and looked carefully made. The sand inside it was packed hard and crusted by the intense heat of the metal it had formed. He stared at the indentation. An odd shape. What could it have been? One of those fancy desk cigarette lighters maybe. But it looked too round for the Aladdin’s lamp shape favored for those. In fact, the shape pressed into the sand must have been close to a perfect hemisphere. Maybe just a little ovoid. But Leaphorn now saw it had had lettering on it. He could make out the shape of what might have been a one, and a clear eight next to it. Eighteen. But what next? Beyond the eight was a mostly erased shape that might have been a six, but the sand was too disturbed to keep a legible imprint. He placed the form carefully in the drawer of the workbench. He’d waste a little time later trying to find out which student was working with it and what sort of object the box was forming.
They spent almost an hour in the shop before Toddy declared the press of duty at Crownpoint and left. Streib decided he should question Mission volunteers again. He disappeared toward the living quarters. Leaphorn remained. Except for the sand-cast form, he had found nothing that provoked interest except some shavings from a wood much heavier and darker than the oak, fir, and pine that almost everyone seemed to be using. Nor did it match the various half-finished tables, benches, table-lamp bases, rolling pins, and kitchen shelves racked in the workshop storeroom. Leaphorn put a sample of it in an envelope and into his pocket. Later he would find someone to explain it. Or perhaps he would simply forget it. It had more relevance to his personal curiosity than to this homicide investigation.
It had always seemed to Leaphorn that the question without a satisfactory answer in this affair was why it had happened. If a man was drunk enough, not much motive was required. But Ahkeah had to have had some reason.
