“Those bastards,” she said. “Don’t they have any sense?”
He patted her on the shoulder. “Ah, come on, Virginia. The chiefs just doing his job.”
Leaphorn called the Crownpoint office from home. Lieutenant Toddy had left for home but the dispatcher said he would get the message to him.
“It’s ‘Meet Lieutenant Leaphorn at Saint Bonaventure Mission at ten tomorrow morning’? Is that right? And bring the key to Dorsey’s office and his Dorsey file.”
“Right,” Leaphorn said. He tried Louisa’s Flagstaff number again, aroused the answering machine, and could think of nothing to add to what he’d already told it. He sat in the gathering darkness with no motivation to switch on the light, or the television, or to begin unpacking his bags. He thought about the tape and how it might have come to be. Roger Applebee, the lobbyist for Nature First, was the only one he could think of whose cause would be helped.
He called the Navajo Nation Inn. Yes, Roger Applebee was registered. He was in room 127. No, Roger Applebee didn’t answer his telephone. Leaphorn picked up his car keys and walked out to the driveway. He’d go to the Navajo Inn for a hamburger or something. Maybe Applebee would be having dinner.
Most of the parking spaces along the two-story wing that held room 127 were empty, but at Applebee’s door a dark blue Range Rover was parked. Leaphorn stopped his car behind it. A decal on the back displayed a picture of earth as NASA’s big blue marble. The legend read, IT’S THE ONLY HOME WE HAVE. Probably Applebee’s car.
Leaphorn moved his car forward, planning to park and knock at the door. Then he saw a man – a big man who looked vaguely familiar – turn the corner and come hurrying down the walk toward him. Leaphorn let his car roll, parked it a half-dozen spaces down.
The big man stopped at 127 and tried the knob. Then he knocked, knocked again, rattled the knob, turned to inspect the Range Rover briefly, and then pounded on the door.
Leaphorn joined him.
“I’m looking for Mr. Applebee,” Leaphorn said. “Seems like he’s not home.”
The big man looked at Leaphorn, glanced back at the Range Rover. “That’s his car,” he said. “He can’t be far away.”
“Maybe in the dining room,” Leaphorn said. He recognized the man now, but the name eluded him. He was a trader. One of those buyers and sellers of things ancient, odd, or beautiful. One of those who show up at tribal fairs, rug auctions, ceremonials, even postfuneral family gatherings looking for the sort of things for which collectors are willing to pay big money and for which they will offer very little money. With that thought came recognition.
This was Asher Davis, one of the exceptions. Mister Fair Price.
The first time he’d heard the name was at a coffee shop in Tuba City, at least twenty years ago. Captain Largo, young and thin then and a sergeant, telling an old woman not to sell her grandfather’s concha belt until she could ask Asher Davis what it was worth.
“I checked the dining room,” Davis said. He banged on the door again, half-heartedly this time. It was less a summons than an expression of frustrated anger – a gesture devoid of hope. “He’s out here lobbying the Tribal Council about something,” Davis said.
“Maybe he’s off somewhere with one of them. You a friend of his?”
Davis really looked at Leaphorn for the first time, taking in polished boots, pressed jeans, silver belt buckle, blue shirt, denim jacket, gray felt hat.
“Friend?” he said, and shook his head. “Unfortunately, yes. Old friends.” The tone was sarcastic. Davis made a wry face. “Ever since grade school.” Suddenly, his face lit with recognition. “Hey. Didn’t you used to be with the Navajo police? Years ago? Is your name Leaphorn?”
“Joe Leaphorn,” Leaphorn said. “And you’re Asher Davis.”
“Right,” Davis said. “You remember the first time our trails crossed?”
Leaphorn didn’t. Probably at the Navajo Nation Fair at Window Rock, or the Crownpoint Rug Auction. In fact, he now remembered chatting with Davis at the auction years ago. “Crownpoint Rug Auction,” he said.
“Long before that,” Davis said, grinning at the memory. “You were with the Navajo police. At Chinle. And I got in this crazy mess-” He gestured toward the door of 127. “Applebee again. He and I were in Farmington on some business or other, and he’d let his credit card expire so I let him use mine to rent a car there. He’d flown in on Mesa Airlines and he had to go to Canyon de Chelly to meet some people. Make a long story short, next thing I knew he’s sent me the keys from San Francisco with a little sketch showing where the car’s parked there at the canyon.”
Leaphorn’s memory produced the incident – a hard one to forget.
“Yeah,” he said. “You called the station to see if we could find you someone who could drive it back to Avis at Farmington.”
“Before I went broke paying the overdue rental fees,” Davis said. “I owe you a favor for that.”
As it had happened, the jailer’s wife had been planning to take the bus to Farmington, so it hadn’t been a problem. He had met Davis in person the next year at the rug weavers’ cooperative auction at Crownpoint, and Davis’s thanks had been embarrassingly effusive. But now Leaphorn did need a favor.
“I really need to talk to this Applebee guy,” Leaphorn said. “You have any idea where I could find him?”
Davis frowned. “I know he’s here to lobby against that waste dump thing, but I don’t know who he’d be working on this evening. No idea.”
“I always wondered how you got stuck in that rental car situation. What happened?”
“Well,” Davis said, and looked past Leaphorn out across the parking lot. He shook his head. “That was a long time ago. Roger was getting his Nature First thing off the ground and he found out these big environmentalists from Frisco were coming out to see some Indian Country. Things were going well and he didn’t want to break off the talks, so he rode down to Flagstaff with ’em and went on back to California so they could introduce him to some other rich folks.”
“I meant, What happened next? Did you break his arm or what?”
Leaphorn thought then that perhaps Davis’s reputation as an honest Indian trader was due to his face. It was an honest face, not practiced at stealth or secrecy. Now it showed a flash of anger, which faded into bitterness, which faded into something like sorrow.
“Old friends,” he said. He thought about that a moment, shook his head, and produced a sardonic chuckle. “He’s done worse to me.”
Leaphorn extracted his card from his billfold and handed it to Davis. “If you find him before I do, would you ask him to contact me? At the home number.”
Davis glanced at the card, and back at Leaphorn, and back at the card. When he looked up again his honest face was no longer revealing anything at all. He nodded, banged on the door of 127 again, and walked away.
Leaphorn arrived at Saint Bonaventure School a little early and found Lieutenant Toddy waiting. He was sitting on the little foldout doorstep of the dilapidated little trailer that had been Dorsey’s home and office – drinking a Pepsi and looking bored. He broke the seal that secured the door, unlocked it, and held it open for Leaphorn.
“You know Streib already searched this place,” Toddy said. “I don’t think he found anything interesting.”
“He didn’t know what to look for,” Leaphorn said.
Toddy suppressed a grin and restored his expression to almost neutral. “That’s supposed to be better, isn’t it? Didn’t I hear somebody saying that just a little while back? ‘If you know what you’re looking for, then you look for something specific and you don’t see something that might be more important.’ Somebody was saying that.”
“Well,” Leaphorn said, grinning himself. “Whatever you say. But this time we’re a little wiser. We know that Dorsey made an ebony cane with a silver knob – a copy of the antique cane the governor keeps at Tano Pueblo. Let’s forget that stuff somebody told you and look for anything that would tell us who he made that cane for.”
“Or the cane itself?”
“That’d be nice. But apparently the Kanitewa boy got his hands on it and took it to Tano and gave it to his uncle,” Leaphorn said. He was looking around the tiny room, barely high enough to stand in and not much longer than the foldout cot against the opposite wall. Everything was tidy, everything neat, nothing relaxed, nothing comfortable. A tiny table, a single chair, the cot with a filing cabinet at its foot, a small desk. On the wall, a framed family photograph – mother, father, three boys, and a girl. Beside it, another framed photo of a bearded young man with a sweatband holding back longhair. Down the wall a bit, a picture of St. Francis of Assisi. Leaphorn
