The Ghostway

Shaw returned the card. Chee was looking at the calendar pad beside the telephone. It was divided into the thirty-one days of October, and Mrs. Day had written the telephone number of whoever had just called her in the October 23 space—which was today. October 22 was blank, as were many of the days. Others bore terse notations, accompanied by numbers. In the October 3 square, the word Gorman was written, with a number under it. A line ran from Gorman to another number in the margin. Chee recognized the second number. It was on a card in his billfold—the number of Shaw's telephone. Whose phone would the first number ring?

Now, as he sat in his pickup amid the tumbleweeds beside this rundown service station, the significance of all this began to take shape in Jim Chee's mind. The date was wrong. Too early. Days too early.

There was a pay phone booth at the sidewalk adjoining the station. Chee opened the truck door, swung his legs out, and stopped to think it through again. Mrs. Day had written Gorman's name in the October 3 box, at least a week before Shaw had recruited her as a watcher. Then she had written the number of Shaw's arson office number in the margin and linked it to Gorman's name with a line. But someone had contacted her a week before that and arranged for her to call a number relative to Gorman. Had she been watching him for someone else before she had watched his apartment for Shaw? What was the number? Chee recalled the number, as he was expected to recall it, without feeling particularly proud of the feat. Chee had been taught to remember when he emerged from infancy, and it was a skill his training as a yataalii had honed. He climbed out of the truck.

Chee called the arson number, hoping only to extract Shaw's home number. But the detective answered.

'It don't mean a thing to me,' Shaw said. 'It's a downtown telephone, judging from the prefix. Have you tried it?'

'No. I thought I'd ask you. It's after five so nobody is going to be there.'

'Who knows?' Shaw said. 'We'll just give a try. I'm going to put you on hold a minute and call it.' The telephone clicked.

Chee waited. Through the dirty window of the telephone booth, he could see a row of rundown residences scattered down a street that was mostly weedy vacant lots. From across the hills, smoke rose white and gray. A brush fire, Chee guessed. Shaw had called this 'poor boy territory,' the habitat of losers, of transients and bums and other marginal people. He'd warned Chee not to expect the streets to match the street maps.

'I wish I could get off and go along,' Shaw had said. 'It's a good place to get lost, if you want to get lost. Or to lose something if you got something you don't want nobody to find. Including bodies. Every once in a while we get one reported from out there. They just turn up. Dumped behind the brush. Or somebody notices a foot sticking out after a mudslide, or old bones in a rotten sleeping bag.'

The telephone clicked again. 'Turned out to be an answering service,' Shaw said. 'And of course nobody knew anything about anything except the boss and he wasn't in. Sort of establishment you have to go down and show a badge to find out something. I'm going to put you on hold again and call the landlady.'

The telephone booth smelled dusty. Chee pushed open the door to admit the outside air and got with that the aroma of warm asphalt. There was also the smell of smoke, the perfumed smoke of the desert burning that drifted down from the fire over the ridge. Through that, faintly and only now and then, he could detect an acrid chemical taint—the bad breath of the city. Last night's Santa Ana wind had blown the Los Angeles smog far out over the Pacific. But that was many hours ago. The city had exhaled again. Through the window of the cashier's cage, the service station attendant was watching Chee, openly curious. Chee thought about Mary Landon. About now she'd be in her little Crownpoint teacherage preparing her supper. He saw her, as he had often seen her from his favorite chair in that tiny living-dining room, working at the drainboard, hair pulled to the top of her head, slender, intent, talking as she did whatever she was doing to the vegetable she was working on.

Chee closed his eyes, rested his head against the cool metal of the telephone box, and recreated the scene and his feeling for it. Anticipation. A good meal. But not that, really. Anticipation of a good meal in good company. Mary across from him, checking his response to whatever she had given him, caring whether he liked it, her knee against his knee. Her—

Click. 'You still there?' Shaw asked and went on without waiting. 'Day said that some fellow had called her on the phone and told her that if she was willing to keep an eye on Gorman's apartment and let him know anything interesting, he was going to mail her a hundred bucks, and there would be another hundred anytime she called with anything interesting.'

'Like what?'

'Like any visitors. Like Gorman packing up, moving out. Anything unusual.'

'Did she make any calls?'

'She said just one. The day Gorman left for Shiprock.'

'You believe her?'

'No,' Shaw said. 'But it might be true. Far as we know, nothing else happened.'

'That's true,' Chee agreed.

'Call me if you locate the girl,' Shaw said. He gave Chee his home telephone number.

The service station attendant, with considerable gesturing, showed Chee that if he drove directly north on Jaripa he would inevitably drive right past its junction with Jacaranda.

'Map's screwed up,' he said. 'Jacaranda runs up into the hills about a mile from here. Access to some jackleg housing development, but the city never put in the utilities so the whole thing went down the tube. You bought in there, you got burned.'

'I'm trying to find some people at thirteen thousand two hundred and seventy-one Jacaranda,' Chee said. 'That sound like it would be back in there?'

'God knows,' the attendant said. 'They got all sorts of street names and numbers back in there. Just no house to put 'em on.'

'But some people do live back there,' Chee said. 'That right?'

'There's some,' the man said. 'Beats sleeping under a bridge. But if you're sleeping under a bridge, at least somebody didn't sell it to you.' He laughed and glanced at Chee to see if he enjoyed the humor.

But Chee was thinking something else. He was thinking that whoever had paid Mrs. Day to keep track of Albert