“That’s not quite the way it was. After old Edgar got the place away from Demott’s daddy, Hal and Shaw would come out in the summers. Shaw had been climbing already. So he didn’t need much teaching. And Demott and Castro were already into climbing some when they had time. Eldon was about six or eight years older than Hal and more of an athlete. From what I heard he was the best of the bunch.”
A customer came in and the cool smell of autumn and the sound of laughter followed him through the doorway from the street.
Leaphorn could think of just one more pertinent question.
“You mentioned Hal Breedlove had overdue note payments when he disappeared. How’d that get paid off?” It was the sort of bank business question he wasn’t sure she would answer. Neither was she. But finally she shook her head and laughed.
“Well, you sort of guessed right about not having it secured the way we should have. Old family, and all. So we weren’t pressing.
But we’d sold off another loan to a Denver bank. Made it to a feedlot operator who liked to go off to Vegas and try to beat the 39 of 102
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blackjack tables. With people like that you make sure you have it secured. Wrote it on sixty-two head of bred heifers he had grazing up in a Forest Service lease. The Denver people foreclosed on it and they called us for help on claiming the property.” She laughed. “Those Denver people had sixty-two head of cows out in the mountains grazing on a Forest Service lease and not an idea in the world about what to do with them. So I told ’em Eldon Demott might round them up for ’em and truck them over to Durango to the auction barn. And he did.”
“He got paid enough for that to pay off Breedlove’s note?”
She laughed again. “Not directly. But I mentioned we made the loan on bred heifers. So we sold the Denver bank a mortgage on sixty-two head, but when Demott went to get ’em, they weren’t pregnant anymore. They were mama cows.” She paused, wanting to see if Leaphorn understood the implications of this. Leaphorn said: “Ah, yes. He didn’t get back from Las Vegas to brand ’em.”
“Ah, yes, is right,” Mrs. Rivera said. “In fact he didn’t get back at all. The sheriff has a warrant out for him. So there was Eldon with sixty-two cows loaded up and all those calves left over. They were all still slicks. Not any of ’em branded yet. Nobody in the world had title to ’em. Nobody owned ’em but the Lord in heaven.”
“Enough to pay off the note?”
“He might’ve had a little bit left over,” she said, and looked at Leaphorn over her glasses. “Wait a minute now,” she said. “Don’t you get any wrong ideas. I don’t actually know what in the world happened to those calves. And I’ve been talking way too much and it’s time to get some work done.”
Back at his car, Leaphorn fished his cellular telephone from the glove compartment, dialed his Window Rock number, and punched in the proper code to retrieve any messages accumulated by his answering machine. The first call was from George Shaw, asking if he had anything to report and saying he could be reached at room 23, Navajo Inn. The second call was from Sergeant Addison Deke at the Chinle police station.
“Better give me a call, Joe,” Deke said. “It probably doesn’t amount to anything but you asked me to sort of keep an eye on Amos Nez and you might like to hear about this.”
Leaphorn didn’t check on whether there was a third call. He dialed the Arizona area code and Chinle police department number.
Yes, Sergeant Deke was in.
He sounded apologetic. “Probably nothing, Joe,” he said. “Probably wasting your time. But after we talked, I told the boys to keep it in their minds that whoever shot Nez might try it again. You know, keep an eye out. Be looking.” Deke hesitated.
Leaphorn, who almost never allowed impatience to show, said, “What did they see?”
“Nothing, actually. But Tazbah Lovejoy came in this morning—I don’t think you know him. He’s a young fellow out of recruit training two years ago. Anyway Tazbah told me he’d run into one of those Resource Enforcement Agency rangers having coffee, and this guy was telling him about seeing a poacher up on the rim of Canyon del Muerto yesterday.” Sergeant Deke hesitated again. This time Leaphorn gave him a moment to organize his thoughts.
“The ranger told Tazbah he was checking on some illegal firewood cutting, and he stopped at that turnout overlook down into del Muerto. Wanted to take a leak. He was getting that done, standing there, looking out across the canyon, and he kept seeing reflections off something or other across the canyon. No road over there, you know, and he wondered about it. So he went to his truck and got his binoculars to see what he could see. There was a fellow over there with binoculars. The reflections turned out to be coming off the lenses, I guess. Anyway, he had a rifle, too.”
“Deer hunter, maybe,” Leaphorn said.
Deke laughed. “Joe,” he said. “How long’s it been since you’ve been deer hunting? That’d be out on that tongue of the plateau between del Muerto and Black Rock Canyon. Nobody’s seen a deer over there since God knows when.”
“Maybe it was an Anglo deer hunter then. Did he get a good look at him?”
“I don’t think so. The ranger thought it was funny. Hunter over there and nothing to hunt. But I guess he was going to call it attempted poaching, or conspiracy to poach. So he drove back up to Wheatfields campground and tried to get back in there as far as he could on that old washed-out track. But he gave up on it.”
“Did he get a good enough look to say man or woman?”
“I asked Tazbah and he said the ranger didn’t know for sure. He said they were thinking man, on grounds a woman wouldn’t be stupid enough to go hunting where there wasn’t anything to shoot at. I thought you’d like to know about it because it was just up the canyon a half mile or so from where that sniper shot old Amos.”
“Which would put it just about right over the Nez place,” Leaphorn said.
