“Any sign somebody broke in?”
“Not that I know of,” Dockery said. “And I think I would have heard. I’m sure I would have. That’s the sort of thing that would get around.” He fished a pack of Winstons from his desk drawer, offered one to Leaphorn.
“I finally managed to quit,” Leaphorn said.
Dockery lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. “What are you fellows looking for, anyway?”
“What did the FBI tell you?”
Dockery laughed. “Not a damned thing. It was some young fella. He didn’t tell me squat.”
“We found the body of a man beside the tracks east of Gallup. Stabbed. All identification gone. False teeth missing.” Leaphorn tapped the Fixodent with a finger. “Turns out the Amtrak had an emergency there at the right time. Turns out the baggage unclaimed from this roomette has also been stripped of all identification. The clothing we have here in this bag is the same size and type the corpse was wearing. So we think it’s likely that the man who reserved this roomette under the phony name was the victim.”
“Hey, now,” Dockery said. “That’s interesting.”
“Also,” Leaphorn added slowly, looking at Dockery, “we think that someone—probably the person who knifed our victim—got into this roomette, searched through his stuff, and took out everything that would help identify the corpse.”
“Have you talked to the attendant?” Dockery asked.
“I’d like to,” Leaphorn said. “And whoever it was who cleaned up the room, and packed up the victim’s stuff.”
“He saw somebody in that roomette,” Dockery said.
Leaphorn stopped leafing through the notebook and stared at Dockery. “He told you that?”
“Conductor on that run’s a guy named Perez, an old-timer. He used to be our chapter chairman in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. He told me he and the guy traveling in that roomette would chat in Spanish now and then. You know, just polite stuff. He said the guy was a nice man, and kind of sickly. Had some sort of heart condition and the altitude out there had been bothering him. So when they had that non-scheduled stop there in New Mexico, after they got the train rolling again, Perez checked at the roomette to see if this guy needed any help getting off at Gallup.” Dockery paused, ashed his cigarette into something invisible in his desk drawer, inhaled more smoke. Through the window behind him Leaphorn noticed it was raining hard now.
“There was a man in there. Perez said that he tapped on the door and when nobody answered it, he was uneasy about this sick passenger so he unlocked it. And he said there was a man in there. He asked Perez what he wanted, and Perez told him he was checking to see if the passenger needed any help. The man said ‘No help needed’ and shut the door.” Dockery blew a smoke ring. “Seemed funny to Perez because he said he couldn’t see his passenger back in the roomette and he’d never seen the passenger and this guy together. So he was watching for the passenger when they made the Gallup stop. Didn’t see him get off so he tapped at the door again and nobody answered. So he unlocked the door and went in and all this stuff was in there but no passenger.” Dockery stopped, waiting for reaction.
“Odd,” Leaphorn said.
“Damn right,” Dockery agreed. “It’s the sort of thing you remember.”
“You tell the FBI agent about this?”
“Didn’t really get a chance. He just wanted to look at the bags and be on his way.”
“Could I talk to Perez?”
“He’s on the same run,” Dockery said. He fished a timetable out of his drawer and handed it to Leaphorn. “Call some station a stop ahead where they stop long enough to get him to the telephone. He’ll call you back. He’d be damned interested in what happened to his passenger.”
Leaphorn was thumbing his way through the notebook a second time, making notes in his own notebook. Most of the pages were blank. Some contained only initials and what seemed to be telephone numbers. Leaphorn copied them off. One page contained only two letter-number combinations. Most of the notations seemed to concern meetings. The one Leaphorn was looking at read, “Harrington.
“Harrington,” Leaphorn said. “Would that be a hotel?”
“It’s downtown,” Dockery said. “Over on E Street and not far from the Mall. Sort of lower middle class. They let it run down. Usually when that happens somebody buys it and turns it into offices.”
Leaphorn wrote the address and room number in his notebook. At the top of the next page “AURANOFIN” was written in capital letters, followed by “W1128023.” He jotted that down, too. Below, on the same page, a notation touched a faint chord in Joe Leaphorn’s excellent memory. It was a name, slightly unusual, that he’d seen somewhere before.
The man with the pointed shoes had written: “Natl. Hist. Museum. Henry Highhawk.”
Chapter Eleven
« ^ »
Janet Pete decided they would take the Metro from the Smithsonian Station up to Eastern Market. It cost only eighty cents a ticket, and was just as fast as a taxi. Then, too, it would give Jim Chee a chance to see the Washington subway. As Chee was wise enough to guess, Janet wanted to play city mouse to his country mouse. That was okay with Chee. He could see that Janet Pete’s self-esteem could use a little burnishing.
“Not like New York,” Janet said. “It’s clean and bright and fast and you feel perfectly safe. Not at all like New York.” Chee, who had only heard rumors of the New York subway, nodded. He’d always wanted to ride the New York subway. But maybe this trip would be interesting, too.
It was. The soaring waffled ceiling, the machines which dispensed paper slips as tickets along with the proper change, the gates which accepted those paper slips, opened, and then returned the slips, the swarm of people conditioned to avoid human contact—eye, knee, or elbow. Chee clung to the bracket by the sliding door and inspected them. It surprised him, at first, that he wasn’t being inspected in return. He must look distinctly different:
