“The tribal police think you got the wrong man?”
“Maybe. More likely Leaphorn is freelancing. He does that some. He’s sort of our supercop. Old as the hills. Knows everybody. Remembers everything. Forgets nothing. I worked with him a time or two before. Everybody does sooner or later because he handles the tough investigations wherever they are.”
“You didn’t get along?”
“I don’t think he held me in extremely high regard,” Chee said. “But we got along all right. To be fair about it. He even hired me to do a Blessing Way for him.”
He saw the question in Jacobs’s face.
“It’s a curing ceremonial,” he explained. “I’m a would-be shaman. A singer. A medicine man. Hataalii is the Navajo word for it. I was going to be one of the people who conducts the curing ceremonies to restore people to harmony. Or I was trying to be. Nobody seemed to want my services.” He produced a humorless chuckle. “And Lieutenant Leaphorn was my only legitimate patient. Only one outside the family.”
“You do sand paintings,” Jacobs said. “Is that right? That’s about all I know about it.”
Even while he was speaking, Chee had the sensation of standing outside himself, watching and listening. He saw self-pity, and heard it. Some anger, yes. But mostly he saw a man who felt sorry for himself. He hated that in others, hated it even more in himself. Now he felt ashamed. And beyond his anger, he was suddenly aware of the implications of Leaphorn’s involvement. It couldn’t be merely casual. How had the lieutenant found out about Tagert? That must have taken some digging. Chee felt his anger seeping away, replaced by a sense of urgency.
“Sorry about unloading my troubles,” he said. “I didn’t come in here for that. I came in to see if I could look at some of the paperwork. See if maybe it would tell us what Tagert and Pinto were working on. Tell us if Tagert was with him that day.”
“We can look,” Jean Jacobs said. “But I don’t think it’s going to help much.”
Look they did. But first Jean Jacobs closed the door. And locked it. “I feel sort of sneaky,” she said. “Looking through the old bastard’s stuff. Even though I work with a lot of it every day.”
“Just remember, I’m the arresting officer,” Chee said, and felt his mood improving.
The out-basket was empty. They checked the in-basket.
The mail, the memos, were a month old and, as far as Chee could tell, without relevance.
“How does he file things?” Chee asked.
“By subject, usually. Sometimes mail gets filed by name of the correspondent. Mostly by subject.”
“Let’s see if he has a Pinto file.”
No Pinto file.
“How about a Cassidy file?”
Cassidy folders occupied half a drawer in Tagert’s filing cabinet. Chee and Jacobs stacked them on his desktop and started sorting.
“What am I looking for?” Jacobs asked.
“Good question,” Chee said. “Anything related to Pinto, I’d say, for starters. Anything that relates to this robbery up in Utah and the chase. Stuff like?”
“Here’s stuff about the Utah robbery,” Jacobs said. “Copies of newspaper stories.”
The headline in the Blanding Defender was multiple lines, in turn-of-the-century newspaper fashion:
OLD HOLE IN WALL GANG BELIEVED
INVOLVED IN TRAIN ROBBERY
WITNESS SAYS HE SAW
BUTCH CASSIDY AMONG GANG
WHICH BOARDED
COLORADO SOUTHERN TRAIN AT FRY CREEK
WOUNDED BANDIT SAYS IT IS TRUE
DEAD BANDIT IS IDENTIFIED
AS RUDOLPH “RED” WAGONSTAFF
HIS FRIENDS SAY HE USED TO
RUSTLE CATTLE WITH CASSIDY
AND THE WYOMING WILD BUNCH
The story below repeated all that with more details and with a rehashing of what happened in the robbery. Three men had boarded the train when it stopped to pick up mail at Fry Creek. They had entered the mail car, and engaged in a gunfight with the two mail clerks. One clerk was killed, the other wounded in the upper chest. The bandit now identified as Wagonstaff was shot in the neck and died the next day in the Blanding hospital.
The bandits had stopped the train north of Blanding where an accomplice was waiting with horses. An off-duty Garfield County deputy sheriff had fired from the train window at the departing robbers. His bullet struck one in the back, causing him to fall from his horse. The newspaper account continued:
As their bad luck had it, this fellow was carrying the bags which contained most of the loot which had attracted
