It didn’t seem to.
“So, I unlocked it. There’s this man in there, standing over a suitcase. I told him I’d come by to see if my passenger needed a hand and he said something negative. Something like he’d take care of it, or something like that. I remember he looked sort of hostile.”
Perez stopped, looking at them. “Now when I think about that I think I was talking to the guy who had already knifed my passenger to death. And what he was probably thinking about right at that moment was whether he should do it to me, too.”
“What’d you do then?” Dockery asked.
“Nothing. I said, Okay. Or let me know if he needs a hand, or something like that. And then I got out.” Perez looked slightly resentful. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know anything was wrong. Far as I know this guy really is just a friend.”
“What did he look like?” Leaphorn asked. He had remembered now why the name Henry Highhawk scribbled in the notebook struck a chord. It was the name of the man who had written Agnes Tsosie about coming to the Yeibichai. The man who had sent his photograph. He felt that odd sort of relief he had come to expect when unconnected things that troubled him suddenly clicked together. Perez would describe a blond man with braided hair and a thin, solemn face—the picture Agnes Tsosie had shown him. Then he’d have another lead away from this dead end.
“I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. “I’d say sort of small. I think he had on a suit coat, or maybe a sports coat. And he had short hair. Red hair. Curly and close to his head. And a freckled face, like a lot of redheads have. Sort of a round face, I think. But he wasn’t fat. I’d say sort of stocky. Burly. Like he had a lot of muscles. But small. Maybe hundred and thirty pounds, or less.“
The good feeling left Leaphorn.
“Any other details? Scars? Limp? Anything like that? Anything that would help identify him?”
“I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. He made a wry face. “Just one look.”
“When did you check the room again?”
“When I didn’t see the passenger get off at Gallup. I sort of was watching for him, you know, because Gallup was his destination. And I didn’t see him. So I thought, well, he got off at another door. But it seemed funny, so when we was ready to pull out west, I took a look.” He shrugged. “The roomette was empty. Nobody home. Just the luggage. So I looked for him. Checked the observation car, and the bar. I walked up and back through all the cars. And then I went back and looked in the room again. Seemed strange to me. But I thought maybe he had got sick and just got off and left everything behind.”
“Everything was unpacked.”
“Unpacked,” Perez agreed. “Stuff scattered around.“ He pointed to the bags. ”I took it and put it in the bags and closed them.“
“Everything?”
Perez looked surprised, then offended.
“Sure, everything. What’d ya think?”
“Newspapers, magazines, empty candy wrappers, paper cups, everything?” Leaphorn asked.
“Well, no,” Perez said. “Not the trash.”
“How about some magazine that might have been worth saving?” Leaphorn phrased the question carefully. Perez was obviously touchy about the question of him taking anything out of the passenger’s room. “Some magazine, maybe, that might have something interesting in it and shouldn’t be thrown away. If it was something he had subscribed to, then it would have an address label on it.”
“Oh,” Perez said, understanding. “No. There wasn’t anything like that. I remember dumping some newspapers in the waste container. I left the trash for the cleaners.”
“Did you leave an empty prescription bottle, or box, or vial, or anything?”
Perez shook his head. “I would have remembered that,” he said. He shook his head again. “Like I’m going to remember that red-headed guy. Standing there looking at me and he had just killed my passenger a few minutes before that.”
In the taxi heading back for his hotel, Leaphorn sorted it out. He listed it, put it in categories, tried to make what little he knew as neat as he could make it. The final summation. Because this was where it finished. No more leads. None. Pointed Shoes would lie in his anonymous grave, forever lost to those who cared about him. If such humans existed, they would go to their own graves wondering how he had vanished. And why he had vanished. As for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, who had no legitimate interest in any of this anyway, he would make a return flight reservation from the hotel. He would return the call of Rodney, who had missed him returning Leaphorn’s call, and take Rodney out to dinner tonight if that was possible. Then he would pack. He would get to the airport tomorrow, fly to Albuquerque, and make the long drive back home to Window Rock. There would be no Emma there waiting for him. No Emma to whom he would report this failure. And be forgiven for it.
The cab stopped at a red light. The rain had stopped now. Leaphorn dug out his notebook, flipped through it, stared again at “AURANOFIN” and the number which followed it. He glanced at the license of the cab driver posted on the back of the front seat. Susy Mackinnon.
“Miss Mackinnon,” he said. “Do you know where there’s a pharmacy?”
“Pharmacy? I think there’s one in that shopping center up in the next block. You feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling hopeful,” Leaphorn said. “All of a sudden.”
She glanced back at him, on her face the expression of a woman who is long past being surprised at eccentric passengers. “I’ve found that’s better than despair,” she said.
The pharmacy in the next block was a Merit Drug. The pharmacist was elderly, gray-haired, and good-natured. “That looks like a prescription number all right,” he said. “But it’s not one of ours.”
“Is there any way to tell from this whose prescription it is? Name, address, so forth?”
