“Ah,” Chee said. He was remembering Janet Pete. How she had handled him when she thought he was mishandling one of her clients the first time they had met; how she had dealt with the situation when he’d damaged a car she was buying. Janet Pete was not a person who would be easy to spook.
“If not exactly following me, then keeping an eye on my place. And on me. I see this guy outside my apartment. I see him in the newsstand below where we work. I see him too often. And I never saw him until I got tied up with this Highhawk business.”
Chee had been holding Mary Landon’s letter in his left hand, folding and unfolding it between his fingers. Now he dropped it into his out-basket on top of the little folder which held his round-trip Continental Airlines ticket to Milwaukee. He thought he might go to Washington, drop in at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. See what it looked like. Talk to a couple of people he knew back there. See what it would feel like to work for the Bureau.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m coming to Washington anyway. Next day or two. I have some business at the FBI office. I’ll let you know exactly when and you set it up for me to talk to Highhawk. And Gomez, too, if you can. That is, if you want to see what I think of it.”
“I do.” A long pause. “Thanks, Jim.”
“It’ll be good to see you,” he said. “And I want to meet your boyfriend, the rich and famous attorney.”
At least it would be better than two weeks lying around the trailer. And he had detected something in Janet Pete’s voice that he’d never heard before. She sounded frightened.
Chapter Eight
« ^ »
Sunday Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had felt a lot better about the man with pointed shoes. His sense of the natural order of things had been restored. While in many ways Joe Leaphorn had moved into the world of the whites, his Navajo requirement for order and harmony remained. Every effect must have its cause, every action its necessary result. Unity existed, universal and eternal. And now it seemed that nothing violating this natural order had happened in the sagebrush plain east of Gallup. Apparently Pointed Shoes had flashed his bankroll in the wrong place, perhaps at a poker game in the observation car. The man with the knife had killed him, stopped the train, put the body under a convenient cover of chamisa brush, and gotten back on with the victim’s wallet.
There were some holes in that theory, some unanswered questions. For example, what the devil had happened to the false teeth? What was the connection with the Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai? But basically much of the disharmony had seeped out of this homicide. Leaphorn could think of other things. He thought about cleaning his house, and getting ready for his vacation. As with most Navajo Tribal Policemen, vacation time for Leaphorn came after the summer tourist season ended and before winter brought its blizzards with their heavy work load of rescue operations. If Leaphorn wanted to take his vacation, now was the time. He had already postponed it once, simply because in the absence of Emma he could think of nothing he would enjoy doing. But he should take it. If he didn’t, his friends would notice. He would see more of those subtle little indications of their kindness and their pity that he had come to dread. So he would think of someplace to go. Something to do. And he would think of it today. Just as soon as he got the dishes done, and the dirty clothes down to the laundromat. But when the phone rang just as he was getting ready to go to lunch Monday he still hadn’t thought of anything. Lunch was going to be with Kennedy. Kennedy was in Window Rock on some sort of Bureau records-checking business and was waiting for him at the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation Motor Inn. He had decided he would ask Kennedy for suggestions about what to do with eighteen days off. Leaphorn picked up the receiver and said “Leaphorn,” in a tone which he hoped expressed hurry.
The voice was Bernard St. Germain’s. Leaphorn had time for this call.
“Pretty good guess you made,” St. Germain said. “Not perfect, but close.”
“Good,” Leaphorn said. Now, he thought, Pointed Shoes becomes a homicide committed in interstate commerce. A federal case. Now the Bureau would be involved. More than eleven thousand FBI agents, well dressed, well trained, and highly paid, would be unleashed to attach an identity to the man with pointed shoes. The world’s most expensive crime lab would be involved. And if Pointed Shoes was important and a solution seemed imminent, law enforcement’s best-funded and most successful public relations machinery would spring into action. Kennedy, his old friend, with whom he was about to have lunch, would have to get to work.
“What do you mean, close but not perfect?” Leaphorn asked.
“Close because the Amtrak did stop that evening, and right about where your body was found. But nobody pulled the big hole lever,” St. Germain said. “The ATS system malfunctioned and stopped it.”
“ATS?”
“They used to call it the dead man’s switch,” St. Germain said. “If the engineer doesn’t push the button periodically, it automatically applies the air brakes. It’s just in case the engineer has a heart attack or a stroke or something. Or maybe goes to sleep. Then he doesn’t push the button and the ATS stops the train automatically.”
“That means it was just an accident? A passenger couldn’t cause that? No question about it?”
“No question at all. Such things have to be reported in writing. It’s all there on the delay report. The Amtrak was seven minutes behind schedule. Then, a few miles east of the Fort Wingate spur, the ATS shorted out or something and put on the brakes.”
Leaphorn stared at the map on the wall behind his desk, rethinking his theory.
“How long was it stopped?”
“I knew you’d ask that,” St. Germain said. “It was stopped thirty-eight minutes. From 8:34 until 9:12 P.M. That would be about average, I think. The engineer has to get the air pressure up and the brakes have to be reset. So forth.”
“Could passengers get off?”
“Not supposed to.”
“But could they?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“And get back on again?”
