Chee, who had promised himself never to be surprised by Leaphorn again, was surprised. Had the
Legendary Lieutenant just walked off with the suicide note? Surely the FBI wouldn’t have given Leaphorn a copy. Chee tried to imagine that and failed. Legendary or not, Leaphorn was now a mere civilian. But the paper Leaphorn was handing him was indeed a suicide note, and the name on the bottom was Jorie’s.
“No signature,” Chee said.
“It was left on Jorie’s computer screen,” Leaphorn said. “This is a printout.”
Yes, Chee could imagine Leaphorn doing that. Did the FBI know he’d done it? Highly unlikely. He read through it.
“Wow,” Chee said. “This requires some new thinking.' He glanced at Professor Bourebonette, who was watching him. Checking his reaction, Chee guessed. She’d read the note, too. Well, why shouldn’t she?
“Some things are puzzling,” Leaphorn said. “From what Dashee found - just two sets of footprints - Jorie seems to have gotten away from the two somewhere else. Near enough to his home to walk there? But if you look at the map, you see their escape route wouldn’t take them there. It would be out of the way. He says in his note they were planning to kill him. That he slipped away. That suggests they stopped somewhere else. But where? And why?”
“Good questions,” Chee said.
“I tried to re-create the situation from what little I knew,” Leaphorn said. “Jorie, a sort of intellectual. Political idealogue. Fanatic. Doing a robbery to finance his cause. Then it goes sour on him. Unplanned killings. At least unplanned by him. Awareness that his recruits are going to take the loot. There must have been an argument. Or at least an angry quarrel. It must have occurred to Jorie that letting him split off represented a threat to them. How did he manage it?”
“No idea,” Chee said.
“Let’s say he was still with them when they left the truck. Do you think Dashee might have missed his tracks?”
“They’d stopped in a big flatfish place. Mostly covered with old blow dirt. Dashee’s good at his job, and it would be hard to miss fresh track in that.”
“How about cover? A place to hide?”
“No,” Chee said. “A cluster of junipers sort of screened the truck itself from the road. But I didn’t see a good place to hide anywhere near. There wasn’t one. Certainly not if they were looking for him.”
“I presume he was armed,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe he warned them away. You know: 'I’m out of here. Let me go or I’m shooting you.'”
“Could have been that,” Chee said.
The waitress returned. Leaphorn moved the map to make space for the plates. He looked at Chee. “You had something you wanted to tell me.”
“Uh, oh, yeah, I did. About Ironhand. How much do you know about him?”
“Very little.”
Chee waited, hoping he’d add to that. From what Dashee had told him Leaphorn knew enough about George Ironhand to have him on the list of names he asked Potts about. But Leaphorn obviously wasn’t going to explain that.
“They say a Ute by that same name, about ninety or so years ago, used to lead a little band of raiders down across the San Juan into our territory. Steal horses, sheep, whatever they could find, kill people, so forth. The Navajos would chase them, but they’d disappear in that rough country along the Nokaito Bench. Maybe into Chinle Wash or Gothic Creek. It started a legend that Ironhand was some sort of Ute witch. He could fly. Our people would see him down in the canyon bottom, and then they’d see him up on the rimrock, with no way to get there. Or sometimes the other way around. Top to bottom. Anyway, Ironhand was never caught.”
Leaphorn took a small bite of the hamburger steak he’d ordered, and looked thoughtful.
“Louisa,” he said, 'have you ever picked up anything like that in your legend collecting?”
“I’ve read something sort of similar,” Professor Bourebonette said. “A man they called Dobby used to raid across the San Juan about the same time. But that was farther west. Down into the Monument Valley area. I think that’s more or less on the record. A Navajo named Littleman finally ambushed them in the San Juan Canyon. The way the story goes, he killed Dobby and two of the others. But they were Paiutes, and that happened earlier—in the eighteen nineties, I think it was.”
