Largo listened.
'I don't know why,' he said, and listened again. 'Well, it was worth a call anyway,' he said. 'She cut out from school after she got the letter and went up to the Begay place. We were puzzled about why old Ashie Begay would think Gorman was dangerous when he had a bullet in him—dying right there in the hogan, you know. Could there be another Gorman the old man was talking about?'
Largo listened very briefly.
'We can't ask her because'—he glanced at Chee—'she got away and disappeared again. What? Granddaughter. Margaret Sosi is Ashie Begay's granddaughter. You guys got anything that would point us to looking for another Gorman around here? A dangerous one?'
Largo listened again. He covered the mouthpiece with his palm, looked at Chee, said, 'Lying son of a bitch,' and listened some more.
'Well,' he said, 'we went out and talked to Joseph Joe to see if Albert Gorman had said anything to him, and he told us that Albert was looking for a guy named Leroy Gorman.' Largo winked at Chee. 'I guess Joe forgot to tell you about that. And Joe said Gorman showed him a photograph of an aluminum house trailer, which was where this Leroy Gorman was supposed to be living. You know anything—'
Largo looked slightly surprised. 'All right,' he said. 'We'll keep in touch.'
He hung up, looking suspiciously at the telephone and then at Chee.
'Sharkey tells me that Joe didn't say anything to them about Albert Gorman looking for anybody, or about a picture, and that there was no picture on Gorman's body.'
'Interesting,' Chee said,
'Wonder what's going on,' Largo said. 'I don't think Sharkey's lying just to keep in practice.'
'No,' Chee said. He was thinking that he would start hunting the aluminum house trailer.
'I think we better see if we can find that house trailer,' Largo said.
Chapter 10
Finding an aluminum trailer in Shiprock, New Mexico, required only persistence. The town is the most populous of the hundreds of dots that mark populated places on the vastness of the Navajo Big Reservation. Even so, it counts less than 3,000 permanent residents. Knowing the trailer was parked under a cottonwood tree simplified the search. On the arid Colorado Plateau, cottonwoods grow only along streams, or beside springs, or in places where the runoff from snowmelt augments their water supply. In and around Shiprock, natural cottonwood habitat was limited to the San Juan river bottom and a few places along Salt Creek Wash and Little Parajito Arroyo. Chee checked the San Juan first, working upstream from the old U.S. 666 highway bridge and then downstream. He found hundreds of cottonwoods, and scores of places where a trailer might be parked, and dozens of trailers of all descriptions, including aluminum. Just before noon, he found an aluminum trailer parked under a cottonwood. It had taken a little less than two hours.
It was parked perhaps a mile below the bridge, near the end of a dirt track which led behind the Navajo Northern District Health Clinic, went past a pump station of the Shiprock town water system, and finally petered out on a low bluff overlooking the San Juan River. Chee parked just off the track and inspected his discovery.
The glossy metal reflected a pattern of sun and shadow in streaks caused by the bare branches above. Nothing on the ground indicated occupancy—neither litter nor the boxes, barrels, broken furniture, cots, or other effluvia of life that those who occupy trailers or hogans or other crowded spaces tend to leave outside to make room inside. There was nothing on the ground except a yellow mat of fallen cottonwood leaves.
Chee was instantly aware of this departure from the normal, as he always was of any deviation from the harmony of the expected. He noticed other peculiarities too. The trailer looked new, or almost new. Its glossy skin was clean and polished. Trailers that housed Shiprock Navajos and those who lived among them would more typically have the look of second-, third-, and fourth-hand models, wearing the dents, scrapes, and rust marks of hard wear and poor maintenance. Second, Chee noticed the trailer was tied to two black wires, telephone and electric power. The powerline was no surprise, but telephones were relatively rare on the reservation. The Navajo telephone book, which covered more territory than all the New England States and included Hopi country as well as Navajo, was small enough to fold neatly into one's hip pocket, and nearly all the numbers in it were for some sort of government or tribal office or a business. Residential telephones were unusual enough to draw Chee's attention. He took off his uniform jacket and hat and put on his nylon windbreaker. As he walked toward the trailer he became aware that the telephone was ringing. The sound was faint at first, muffled by distance and whatever insulation the walls of such trailers held, then louder as he came nearer. It rang as if it had always been ringing, as if it would ring on through the noon hour, and into the evening, and forever. Chee stopped at the retractable metal step below the trailer door, hesitated, then tapped on the metal. The telephone's ring coincided with the knock. He waited, knocked again into the silence, listened. No response. He tried the knob. Locked.
Chee walked away from the trailer and stood beside the cottonwood's trunk, thinking. Below, on a path leading down to the riverbank and along it, a man was walking. He was whistling, coming up the path toward Chee. He wore neatly fitted denims, a long-sleeved shirt of blue flannel, a denim vest, and a black felt hat with a feather jutting from its band. When the path tilted upward so that Chee could see his face, he recorded a man on the young side of middle age, clean-shaven, slender, distinctly Navajo in bone, with a narrow, intelligent face. He walked with an easy grace, swinging the heavy stalk of a horseweed like a cane. He walked now through a tunnel of sunlit yellow where the willows and alders arching over the path had not yet lost all their foliage, still not seeing Chee. But suddenly, he heard the persistent summons of the telephone bell.
He dropped the stick and sprinted for the trailer, hesitating when he noticed Chee, then regaining stride.
'Got to catch the phone,' he said as he ran past. He had his key out when he reached the door, unlocked it deftly, scrambled inside. Chee stood at the steps by the open door, waiting.
'Hello,' the man said, and waited. 'Hello.
'Hello.' He waited again, then whistled into the speaker. 'Anybody home?' He waited, then whistled again, waited again, watching Chee. Whoever had dialed his number had apparently put down the phone and left it to ring. 'Hello,' the man repeated. 'Anybody there?' This time he seemed to receive an answer.
'Yes, this is Grayson… Well, I wasn't far. Just went for a walk down the river.' Then he listened. Nodded. Glanced at Chee, his expression curious. 'Yes,' he said. 'I will.' He leaned his hip against the trailer's cooking stove and reached into a drawer to extract a note pad and pen. 'Give it to me again.' He wrote something. 'All right. I will.'
