now. He was looking forward to another conversation with the man who wanted to be a Navajo.
Chapter Ten
« ^ »
Leaphorn had left his umbrella. He’d thought of it as he boarded the plane at Albuquerque —the umbrella lying dusty in the trunk of his car and the plane flying eastward toward Washington and what seemed to Leaphorn to be inevitable rain. The umbrella had never experienced rain. He’d bought it last year in New York, the second of two umbrellas he’d purchased on the same trip—the first one having been forgotten God knows where. He’d tossed the second one into the trunk of his car with his luggage on his return to the Albuquerque airport. There it had rested for a year.
Now, with the rain drumming down on his neck, he paid the cabby. He pulled his hat lower over his ears, and hurried across the sidewalk to the Amtrak office. He had an appointment with Roland Dockery, who was the person in the Amtrak bureaucracy stuck with handling such nondescript problems as Leaphorn represented.
Dockery was waiting for him, a plump, slightly bald, and slightly disheveled man of perhaps forty. He examined Leaphorn’s Navajo Tribal Police identification through bifocal glasses with obvious curiosity and invited Joe to sit with a wave of his hand. He pointed to the luggage on his desk—a shabby leather suitcase and a smaller, newer briefcase.
“The FBI’s already been through them,” Dockery said. “Like I told you on the phone. I guess they would have told you if they found anything.”
“Nothing useful,” Leaphorn said. “What we’re looking for is anything that might connect the bags to a homicide we have out in New Mexico. I hope you won’t mind me going over some questions the FBI probably already covered.”
“No problem,” Dockery said. He laughed. “No trouble about keys. The FBI already opened them.” He flipped open both cases with a flourish. Dockery was obviously enjoying this. It represented something unusual in a job that must be usually routine.
Leaphorn sorted through the big case first. It held a spare suit, dark gray and of some expensive fabric, but looking much used. A sweater. Two dark blue neckties. White, long-sleeved shirts, some clean and neatly folded, some used and folded into a laundry sack. Eight altogether. Three used. Five clean. Leaphorn checked his notes. The neck and arm sizes matched the shirt on the corpse. Shorts and undershirts, also white. Same total, same breakdown. Same with socks, except the color now was black. He thought about the numbers and the timetable. He’d check but it seemed about right. If this was indeed the luggage of Pointed Shoes, then he had in fact been about three shirts west of Washington by the time he reached Gallup. Wearing shirt four when he was stabbed, with five clean ones to take him to where he was going. Or—if he was simply going to see Agnes Tsosie—home again to Washington.
The smaller bag contained a jumble of things. Leaphorn glanced up from it but Dockery didn’t give him a chance to ask the question.
“One of the cleanup crew packed it,” Dockery said. “Just dumped all the stuff that was around the roomette into the bag. I’ve got his name somewhere. The FBI had him in and talked to him when they checked on it.”
“So this would be everything left lying around?” Leaphorn asked. And Dockery nodded his agreement. But it wasn’t everything, of course, Leaphorn knew. Odds and ends that seemed to have no value would have been discarded. Old newspapers, notes, empty envelopes, just the sort of stuff that might be most helpful would have been thrown away.
But what hadn’t been thrown away was also helpful. First, Leaphorn noticed an almost empty tube of Fixodent and a small can of denture cleaner. He had expected to find them. If he hadn’t he would have doubted that this was the luggage of a man who wore false teeth. Three books, all printed in Spanish, added another bit of support. The clothing Pointed Shoes had been wearing had looked old-fashioned and foreign. So did the clothing in the suitcase. He found a thin little notebook, covered in black plastic, glanced at it, and set it aside. Under a sweater in the bag he found two pots, each wrapped in newspaper. He examined them. They were the sort Pueblo Indians made to sell to tourists—small, one with a black-on-white lizard design, the other geometric. Probably they had been purchased as gifts at the Amtrak station in Albuquerque, where such things were sold beside the track. But the pots interested Leaphorn less than the newspaper pages in which the purchaser had cushioned them.
Spanish again. Leaphorn unfolded a wad of pages, looking for the name and the date. The name was
Leaphorn folded them into his pocket and sorted through the odds and ends in the bottom of the bag. He extracted a sheet of white note-paper, folded vertically as if to fit into a pocket. On it, someone had written what seemed to be a checklist.
Pockets
Prescription bottles eyeglasses (check case, too)
dentures (if any)
labels in coats address books, etc.
letters, envelopes book plats (plates?) stuff written in books addresses on mags, etc.
Leaphorn stared at the list, thinking. He showed it to Dockery. “What do you think of this?”
Dockery looked at it. “Looks like some sort of shopping list,” Dockery said. “No, it’s not that. Reminders, maybe. Things to do.”
Leaphorn put the list on the desk. He picked up the notebook he’d set aside, opened it. Several pages had been torn out. The writing in it was in Spanish, done with blue ink in a small, careful hand. He got out his wallet, extracted the note he’d found in the dead man’s shirt pocket. The handwriting matched the small, neat penmanship in the notebook. And it looked nothing at all like the handwriting on the list.
“Do you happen to know if that fellow had a roommate?” he asked.
“Just the single occupant,” Dockery said.
