“I need some information,” Leaphorn said. “I’m looking for Elogio Santillanes.”
The small man shook his head. “I don’t know him.”
“Do you know those people in that apartment over there?” Leaphorn nodded toward it. “I understand Santillanes lives in this building.”
The man shook his head. Behind him in the apartment Leaphorn could see a folding card table with a telephone on it, a folding lawn chair, a cardboard box which seemed to contain books. A cheap small-screen television set perched on another box. The sound was turned off but the tube carried a newscast, in black and white. Otherwise the room seemed empty. A newspaper was on the floor beside the lawn chair. Perhaps the man had been reading there when the doorbell rang. Leaphorn suddenly found himself as interested in this small man as he was in the slim chance of getting information that had brought him here.
“You don’t know the names of the people?” Leaphorn asked. He asked it partly to extend this conversation and see where it might lead. But there was a note of disbelief in his voice. Old as he was, Leaphorn still found it incredible that people could live side by side, see each other every day, and not be acquainted.
“Who are you?” the small man asked. “Are you an Indian?”
“I’m a Navajo,” Leaphorn said. He reached for his identification. But he thought better of that.
“From where?”
“Window Rock.”
“That’s in—” The man hesitated, thinking. “Is it in New Mexico?”
“It’s in Arizona,” Leaphorn said.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking for Elogio Santillanes.”
“Why? What do you want with him?”
Leaphorn’s eyes had been locked with the small man’s. They were a sort of greenish blue and Leaphorn sensed in them, in the man’s tone and his posture, a kind of hostile resentment.
“I just need information,” Leaphorn said.
“I can’t help you,” the man said. He closed the door. Leaphorn heard the security chain rattle into place.
Miss Mackinnon started the motor as soon as he climbed into the backseat of the taxi. “I hope you got a lot of money,” she said. “Back to the hotel now? And get your traveler’s checks out of the safe-deposit box.“
“Right,” Leaphorn said.
He was thinking of the small man’s strange, intent eyes, of his freckles, of his short, curly red hair. There must be thousands of short men in Washington who fit the Perez description of the man searching the roomette of Elogio Santillanes. But Leaphorn had never believed in coincidence. He had found the widow of Santillanes. He was sure of that. The widow or perhaps a sister. Certainly, he had found someone who had loved him.
And almost as certainly, he had found the man who had killed him. Going back to Window Rock could wait a little. He wanted to understand this better.
Chapter Fourteen
« ^ »
Over lunch, the day after their visit to Highhawk’s house, Chee and Janet Pete had discussed the man waiting in the sedan. “I think he was watching Highhawk, not you,” Chee had said. “I think that’s why he was parked out there.” And Janet had finally said maybe so, but he could tell she wasn’t persuaded by his logic. She was nervous. Uneasy about it. So he didn’t tell her something else he had concluded—that the little man was one of the sort policemen call “freaks.” At least the desert-country cops with whom Chee worked called them that—those men who have been somehow damaged beyond fear into a species that is unpredictable, and therefore dangerous. Finding a strange man tapping at his window in the darkness hadn’t shaken the small man in the slightest. That was obvious. It had only aroused curiosity, and then provoked a sort of aggressive macho anger. Chee had seen that in such men before.
He had given Janet his analysis of Highhawk. (“He’s nuts. Perfectly normal in some ways, but his sketches, they show you he’s tilted about nine degrees. Slightly crazy.”) And he told her of the carving of the fetish he’d seen in Highhawk’s office-studio.
“He was carving it out of cottonwood root—which is what the Pueblo people like to use, at least the ones I know. The Zunis and the Hopis,” Chee had said. “No reason to believe Tano would be any different. Maybe he was making a copy of the Twin War God.”
And Janet, of course, was way ahead of him. “I’ve thought about that,” she said. “That maybe John would hire him to make a copy of the thing. Maybe I guessed right about that.” She looked sad as she said it, not looking at Chee, studying her hands. “Then I guess we would give it to our man in the Tano Pueblo. And he’d use it to get himself elected.”
“Tell him it’s the real thing?”
“Depending on how honest our Eldon Tamana is,” Janet said glumly. “If he’s honest, then you lie to him. If he’s not, then you tell the truth and let him do the lying.”
“I wonder if anyone at the Pueblo could tell the copy from the real thing,” Chee said. “How long has the thing been missing?”
“Since nineteen three or four, I think John said. Anyway, a long time.”
“You’d probably be safe with a substitute then,” Chee said. He was thinking about Highhawk. It didn’t seem within the artist’s nature to use his talent in a conspiracy to cheat an Indian Pueblo. But perhaps Highhawk would be another one considered honest enough to require that he be lied to. Maybe he didn’t know why he was making the replica. In fact, maybe that carving wasn’t a replica at all. Maybe that cottonwood fetish in his office was something else. Or maybe it was the genuine fetish itself. Or maybe this whole theory was nonsense.
