on the ground, waiting for dawn, when Margaret Sosi would emerge from the hogan with the soot washed from her face. She would drink the bitter emetic Hosteen Littleben would have prepared for her, vomit up the last traces of her ghost sickness, and be happily returned to the beauty of her way.
Chee's mind wouldn't leave it alone. Why the warning against trust? he thought. Who wasn't to be trusted? Should he take the advice himself? Just who was he trusting in this affair?
There was Shaw. The cop motivated by love for a friend and desire for justice. Was that credible? Chee thought about Shaw for a while and came up with nothing helpful. There was Sharkey. Chee could think of no reason not to trust what he'd learned from the fbi agent—which was nothing much. There was even Upchurch. Had he done something untrustworthy before he died? Who else was Chee depending on? Leroy Gorman. He'd learned nothing much from Leroy, except for Leroy's denial that he'd written the warning on the picture. Chee considered that a moment. Did he trust Gorman? Of course not, no more than he trusted Albert Gorman's landlady. He simply trusted them to behave in the way they were conditioned to behave. Just as you trusted the mailman to deliver mail. Chee remembered Albert Gorman's mailbox, shielding it with his body so Gorman's landlady couldn't see that he was checking its contents. Abruptly a whole new line of thought opened. The letter Leroy Gorman had mailed would have been delivered to that mailbox, visible to Mrs. Day—the landlady who was being paid to keep McNair informed. But the picture, mailed as a postcard with an address, but no stamp and no return address, would have been delivered just a little differently. The mailman would have tapped at the door and collected the postage due. Mrs. Day would have had no chance to intercept that. Was that important? Chee could see how it might be. He considered. 'Ah,' he said. If he was thinking correctly, the McNair people would have known Leroy Gorman was hidden at Shiprock very soon after he got there. Mrs. Day would have seen the letter Leroy Gorman had mailed in Albert's mailbox, and noted the return address, and made her $100 call. And in such a small community they could have found a stranger. Not quickly, perhaps, because Albert obviously had the photograph and they didn't. But they could have found him. Apparently they didn't try. Why not?
Chee sighed. What about the card? Leroy Gorman said he'd mailed the Polaroid photograph in an envelope and hadn't written the warning on it. But the photograph had 'Postage Due' stamped on it, and an address. What explained that? Two photographs? Hardly possible with a Polaroid print. Albert Gorman had told old man Berger he received the photograph from his brother, that he was worried. The 'Wish you were here' note Leroy said he'd written would hardly provoke worry. The 'Don't trust nobody' message would.
Chee closed his eyes, shutting out the moonlight and the sound of Mr. Littleben's chanting as best he could to better reproduce the scene on the Silver Threads lawn. There was Mr. Berger, using his hands to tell the story of the blond man coming, of Albert Gorman slamming the door on the blond man's hand. Gorman had told Berger that he wasn't supposed to go to Shiprock, but he was going anyway. Berger believed the blond man had come to prevent that. That hadn't made sense to Chee then, and it made no sense now. If they hadn't found Leroy, they would have wanted Al to go find him for them. What if they had found him. Would it matter then? Perhaps.
Abruptly Chee sat bolt upright, eyes open. It would matter a lot if the man Albert Gorman found when he found the trailer was not his brother. What if the McNair people had found Leroy in his trailer, and removed him, and replaced him? But that couldn't possibly work. Chee did a quick scan of his memory for reasons it couldn't work.
There were none. Upchurch, who would have recognized the switch instantly, was dead. Farmer, the only man in the u.s.d.a's office Upchurch had trusted with his witnesses, was far away working for a private law firm in San Francisco. Who did that leave who would know Leroy Gorman? Sharkey? Not likely. Sharkey would know he had one under his wing, would be in telephone contact, would be alert. But he would also stay away to avoid drawing any attention to the man.
Looking back on it, Chee could never say exactly when enlightenment came. First he finally really understood how the postcard had originated. Leroy Gorman must have realized he had been found. They must have sent Vaggan to dispose of him. Perhaps he'd seen Vaggan first. He would have known instantly that the Witness Protection Program had failed. He had been trying to talk his brother into cooperating with the Feds. Now he knew that was a fatal mistake. He'd be desperate to warn his brother. He'd managed to jot the address and the warning on the only thing he had with him that would drop through a mailbox slot—the Polaroid print. 'Don't trust nobody' included the fbi, the McNair bunch, and everyone else.
After that breakthrough, the rest of it became clear and simple. The death of Upchurch must have triggered it, and it didn't matter whether Shaw was right, or the coroner. Probably the death had been natural. What mattered was that McNair knew of it quickly, and recognized the chance it offered. Upchurch's secrecy had been the downfall of Clan McNair, but now it presented McNair a way out, a witness switch. It made what had happened at the Begay hogan totally logical. Everything had to be done to avoid raising any question, drawing any attention to the man in the aluminum trailer at Shiprock. Once again Frank Sam Nakai's immutable law of cause and motivation was confirmed.
About then, Jim Chee began thinking of who the man he'd been calling Leroy Gorman might really be, and the implication of what this man was doing. And he realized that if things went as planned he might not leave Mesa Gigante alive.
And neither would Margaret Billy Sosi.
Chapter 26
Chee unlocked the glove box, fumbled among the maps, tools, and papers in it, and pulled out his pistol. It was a short-barreled .38 caliber revolver, and Chee looked at it without pleasure. Nothing against this particular pistol; it was just that Chee had no fondness for any of them and wasn't particularly good at using them. Keeping up his marksmanship certification, a condition of employment, was an annual chore. While he always managed to pass, there was never any margin to spare. Now, however, the heft of the pistol was reassuring in his hand. He examined it, made sure it was loaded, and cocked and uncocked it. Then he dropped it into the side pocket of his coat. That out of the way, it was time to make a plan. That involved trying to figure out what was likely to happen here.
The key to it all was simple: Leroy Gorman was not Leroy Gorman. He might be Beno, or whatever his name was—the Navajo Shaw said the grand jury had indicted and who had never been picked up. That made sense. Shaw had said finding him was tough because he had no arrest record, which meant no pictures or fingerprints, and no useful information. Thus nobody was going to recognize him. And when the time came for McNair to go to trial, a Navajo identified as Leroy Gorman would be placed on the witness stand, and how would they work it then? Chee guessed he knew. When the D.A. examined him, he'd recite his testimony in a halting, uncertain way, raising doubt in the jury. Then, under cross examination, he'd say that he'd been coached in what to say by Upchurch; that Upchurch had given him all this information, and assured him it was true, and warned him that if he didn't recite in court he'd be sent to prison as a thief. He would say that he actually knew none of it; he was simply passing along what the fbi agent had told him. And that, of course, would taint everything any other prosecution witness said, and raise at least a reasonable doubt, and McNair would go home free.
The genuine Leroy Gorman was undoubtedly dead. Carefully dead. They would never want his body found.
Chee reconsidered. Sharkey? No problem.
Leroy's warning had been mailed almost immediately after he was put in place. There was almost no chance
