“Another secret?” Mrs. Rivera’s expression became avid. She nodded.
And so Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, laid his cards on the table. More or less. It was a tactic he’d used for years—based on his theory that most humans prefer exchanging information to giving it away. He’d tried to teach Jim Chee that rule, which was: Tell somebody something interesting and they’ll try to top it. So now he was going to tell Mrs. Rivera everything he knew about the affair of Hal Breedlove, who had been by Four Corners standards her former neighbor and was her onetime customer. In return he expected Mrs. Rivera to tell him something she knew about Hal Breedlove, and his ranch, and his business. Which was why he had opened this account here. Which was what he had decided to do yesterday when, after long seconds of hesitation, he had accepted the check he had never expected to receive.
They had met again yesterday at the Navajo Inn—Leaphorn, McDermott, and George Shaw.
“If I take this job,” Leaphorn had said, “I will require a substantial retainer.” He kept his eyes on Shaw’s face.
“Substantial?” said McDermott. “How sub—”
“How much?” asked Shaw.
How much, indeed, Leaphorn thought. He had decided he would mention a price too large for them to pay, but not ludicrously overdone. Twenty thousand dollars, he had decided. They would make a counteroffer. Perhaps two thousand. Two weeks pay in advance. He would drop finally to, say, ten thousand. They would counter. And finally he would establish how important this affair was to Shaw.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” Leaphorn said.
McDermott had snorted, said, “Be serious. We can’t—”
But George Shaw had reached into his inside coat pocket and extracted a checkbook and a pen.
“From what I’ve heard about you we won’t need to lawyer this,” he said. “The twenty thousand will be payment in full, including any expenses you incur, for twenty weeks of your time or until you develop the information we need to settle this business. Is that acceptable?”
Leaphorn hadn’t intended to accept anything—certainly not to associate himself with these two men. He didn’t need money. Or want it. But Shaw was writing the check now, face grim and intent. Which told Leaphorn there was much more involved here than he’d expected.
Shaw had torn out the check, handed it to him. A little piece of the puzzle that had stuck in Leaphorn’s mind for eleven years—that had been revived by the shooting of Hosteen Nez—had clicked into place. Unreadable yet, but it shed a dim light on the effort to kill Nez. If twenty thousand dollars could be tossed away like this, millions more than that must be somehow involved. That told him hardly anything. Just a hint that Nez might still be, to use that white expression, “worth killing.” Or for Shaw, perhaps worth keeping alive.
He had held the check a moment, a little embarrassed, trying to think of what to say as he returned it. He knew now that he would try again to find a way to solve this old puzzle, but for himself and not for these men. He extended the check to Shaw, said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think—”
Then he had seen how useful that check could be. It would give him a Breedlove connection. He wasn’t a policeman any longer.
This would give him the key he’d need to unlock doors.
And this morning, in this small, old-fashioned bank lobby, Leaphorn was using it.
“This is sort of hard to explain,” he told Mrs. Rivera. “What I’m trying to do for the Breedlove family is vague. They want me to find out everything about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and about his death on Ship Rock.” Mrs. Rivera leaned forward. “They don’t think it was an accident?”
“They don’t exactly say that. But it was a pretty peculiar business. You remember it?”
“I remember it very well,” Mrs. Rivera said, with a wry laugh. “The Breedlove boy did his banking here—like the ranch always had.
He was my customer and he was four payments behind on a note. We’d sent him notices. Twice, I believe it was. And the next thing 36 of 102
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you know, he’s vanished.”
Mrs. Rivera laughed. “That’s the sort of thing a banker remembers a long, long time.”
“How was it secured? I understand he didn’t get title to the ranch until his birthday—just before he disappeared.” Mrs. Rivera leaned back now and folded her arms. “Well, now,” she said. “I don’t think we want to get into that. That’s private business.”
“No harm me asking, though,” Leaphorn said. “It’s a habit policemen get into. Let me tell you what I know, and then you decide if you know anything you would be free to add that might be helpful.”
“That sounds fair enough,” she said. “You talk. I’ll listen.”
And she did. Nodding now and then, sometimes indicating surprise, enjoying being an insider on an investigation. Sometimes indicating agreement as Leaphorn explained a theory, shaking her head in disapproval when he told her how little information Shaw and McDermott had given him to work on. As Leaphorn had hoped, Mrs. Rivera had become a partner.
“But you know how lawyers are,” he said. “And Shaw’s a lawyer, too. I checked on it. He specializes in corporate tax cases.
Anyway, they sure didn’t give me much to work with.”
“I don’t know what I can add,” she said. “Hal was a spendthrift, I know that. Always buying expensive toys. Snowmobiles, fancy cars. He’d bought himself a—can’t think of the name—one of those handmade Italian cars, for example. A Ferrari, however you pronounce that. Cost a fortune and then he drove it over these old back roads and tore it up. He’d worked out some sort of deal with the trust and got a mortgage on the ranch. But then when they
