He’d make his own deal and cut them out.”
“I think that’s probably about the way it was,” Demott said. “I know his lawyer told him all he had to do was slow things down in court long enough to get to his birthday. Then he’d have clear title and he could do what he wanted. That’s what Elisa wanted him to do. But Hal was a fella who just could not wait. There were things he wanted to buy. Things he wanted to do. Places he hadn’t seen yet. And he’d borrowed a lot of money he had to pay back.”
Demott produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “Elisa didn’t know about that. She didn’t know he could use the ranch as collateral when he didn’t own it yet. Came as quite a shock. But he had his lawyer work out some sort of deal which put up some sort of overriding interest in the place as a guarantee.”
“Lot of money?”
“Quite a bit. He’d gotten rid of that little plane he had and made a down payment on a bigger one. After he disappeared we let them take the plane back but we had to pay back the loan.”
With that, Demott rose and collected his tools. “Back to work,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t know anything that would help you.”
“One more question. Or maybe two,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still climbing?”
“Too old for it,” he said. “What’s that in the Bible about it? About when you get to be a man you put aside the ways of the boy.
Something like that.”
“How good was Hal?”
“He was pretty good but he was reckless. He took more chances than I like. But he had all the skills. If he’d put his mind to it he could have been a dandy.”
“Could he have climbed Ship Rock alone?”
Demott looked thoughtful. “I thought about that a lot ever since Elisa identified his skeleton. I didn’t think so at first, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t even try it myself. But Hal . . . “ He shook his head. “If he wanted something, he just had to have it.”
“George Shaw went out to the Maryboy place the other day and got permission for a climb,” Leaphorn said. “Next day or two. Any idea what he thinks might be found up there?”
“George is going to climb it?” Demott’s tone was incredulous and his expression shocked. “Where’d you hear that?”
“All I know is that he told me he paid Maryboy a hundred dollars for trespass rights. Maybe he’ll get somebody to climb it but I think he meant he was going up himself.”
“What the hell for?”
Leaphorn didn’t answer that. He gave Demott some time to answer it himself.
“Oh,” Demott said. “The son of a bitch.”
“I would imagine he thinks maybe somebody gave Hal a little push.”
“Yeah,” Demott said. “Either he thinks I did it, and I left something behind that would prove it—and he could use that to void Elisa’s inheritance—or he did it himself and he remembers that he left something up there that would nail him and he wants to go get it.”
Leaphorn shrugged. “As good a guess as any.”
Demott put down his tools.
“When Elisa came back from having the bones cremated she told me none of them had been broken,” he said. “Some of them were disconnected, you know. That could have been done in a fall, or maybe the turkey vultures pulled ’em apart. They’re strong enough to do that, I guess. Anyway, I hope it was a fall, and he didn’t just get hung up there to starve to death for water. He could have been a damn good man.”
“I never knew him,” Leaphorn said. “To me he was just somebody to hunt for and never find.”
“Well, he was a good, kind boy,” Demott said. “Big-hearted.” He picked up his tools again. “You know, when the cop came up to show Elisa Hal’s stuff I saw that folder he had with him. He had it labeled ‘Fallen Man.’ I thought, Yes, that described Hal. The old man gave him paradise and it wasn’t enough for him.”
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15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
LUCY SAM HAD SEEMED GLAD TO SEE CHEE.
“I think they’re going to be climbing up Tse? Bitaiagain,” she told Chee. “I saw a big car drive down the road toward Hosteen Maryboy’s place two days ago, and it stayed a long time, and when I saw it coming back from there, I drove over there to see how he was doing and he told me about it.”
“I heard about it, too,” Chee said, thinking how hard it was to keep secrets in empty country.
“The man paid Hosteen Maryboy a hundred dollars,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we should let them climb up there, even for a thousand dollars.”
“I don’t think so either,” Chee said. “They have plenty of their own mountains to play around on.”
“The one who lived here before,” Lucy Sam said, using the Navajo circumlocution to avoid saying the name of the dead, “he’d say that it would be like us Navajos climbing all over that big church in Rome, or getting up on top of the Wailing Wall, or crawling all over that place where the Islamic prophet went up to heaven.”
