Chee nodded. “He turned out to be a guy named Harold Breedlove. He owned a big ranch near Mancos.”
“Breedlove,” Janet said. “That sounds familiar.” The waiter came—a lanky, rawboned Navajo who listened attentively to Janet’s questions about the wine and seemed to understand them no better than did Chee. He would ask the cook. About the trout he was on familiar ground. “Very fresh,” he said, and hurried off.
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Janet was looking thoughtful. “Breedlove,” she said, and shook her head. “I remember the paper said there was no identification on him. So how’d you get him identified? Dental chart?”
“Joe Leaphorn had a hunch,” Chee said.
“The legend-in-his-own-time lieutenant? I thought he’d retired.”
“He did,” Chee said. “But he remembered a missing person case he’d worked on way back. This guy who disappeared was a mountain climber and an inheritance was involved, and—”
“Hey,” Janet said. “Breedlove. I remember now.”
Remember what? Chee thought. And why? This had happened long before Janet had joined the DNA, and become a resident reservation Navajo instead of one in name only, and entered his life, and made him happy. His expression had a question in it.
“From when I was with Granger-hyphen-Smith in Albuquerque. Just out of law school,” she said. “The firm represented the Breedlove family. They had public land grazing leases, some mineral rights deals with the Jicarilla Apaches, some water rights arrangements with the Utes.” She threw out her hands to signify an endless variety of concerns. “There were some dealings with the Navajo Nation, too. Anyway, I remember the widow was having the husband declared legally dead so she could inherit from him.
The family wanted that looked into.”
She stopped, looking slightly abashed. Picked up the menu again. “I’ll definitely have the trout,” she said.
“Were they suspicious?” Chee asked.
“I presume so,” she said, still looking at the menu. “I remember it did look funny. The guy inherits a trust and two or three days later he vanishes. Vanishes under what you’d have to consider unusual circumstances.” The waiter came. Chee watched Janet order trout, watched the waiter admire her. A classy lady, Janet. From what Chee had learned about law firms as a cop, lawyers didn’t chat about their clients’ business to rookie interns. It was unethical. Or at least unprofessional.
He knew the answer but he asked it anyway. “Did you work on it? The looking into it?”
“Not directly,” Janet said. She sipped her water.
Chee looked at her.
She flushed slightly. “The Breedlove Corporation was John McDermott’s client. His job,” she said. “I guess because he handled all things Indian for the firm. And the Breedlove family had all these tribal connections.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I guess not,” Janet said. “I don’t remember the family having us intervene in the case.”
“The family?” Chee said. “Do you remember who, specifically?”
“I don’t,” she said. “John was dealing with an attorney in New York. I guess he was representing the rest of the Breedloves. Or maybe the family corporation. Or whatever.” She shrugged. “What did you think of Finch, aside from him being so talkative?” John, Chee thought. John. Professor John McDermott. Her old mentor at Stanford. The man who had hired her at Albuquerque when he went into private practice there, and took her to Washington when he transferred, and made her his mistress, used her, and broke her heart.
“I wonder what made them suspicious?” Chee said. “Aside from the circumstances.”
“I don’t know,” Janet said.
Their trout arrived. Rainbows, neatly split, neatly placed on a bed of wild rice. Flanked by small carrots and boiled new potatoes.
Janet broke off a tiny piece of trout and ate it.
Beautiful, Chee thought. The perfect skin, the oval face, the dark eyes that expressed so much. He found himself wishing he was a poet, a singer of ballads. Chee knew a lot of songs but they were the chants the shaman sings at the curing ceremonials, recounting the deeds of the spirits. No one had taught him how to sing to someone as beautiful as this.
He ate a bite of trout.
“If I had been driving a patrol car yesterday instead of my old pickup,” he said, “I could have given a speeding ticket to a guy driving a white Porsche convertible. Really flying. But I was driving my truck.”
“Wow,” Janet said, looking delighted. “My favorite car. I have a fantasy about tooling around Paris in one of those. With the top down.”
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Maybe she looked happy because he was changing the subject. Moving away from unhappy ground. But to Chee the trout now seemed to have no taste at all.
