“That’s not much,” Chee said.
“They probably have more than that,” Largo said. “You know how they are. The feds don’t tell us locals anything unless they have to. They think we might gossip about it and screw up the investigation.”
Chee laughed. “What! Us gossip?”
Largo was grinning, too.
“Have they connected Bai with any of the suspects?”
Largo laughed. “That cold air up in Alaska made an optimist out of you. Not a hint far as I hear. There was some guessing that one of the militia did it to get money for blowing something up, or maybe it was the Earth Liberation Front, but I haven’t heard Bai was in any of them. The Earth Liberation folks have been pretty quiet since they burned up all those buildings at the Vail ski resort. Anyway, if anything checked out, they haven’t gotten around to informing the Navajo Tribal Police.”
“What do you think, Captain? Has your own grapevine been sending any messages about Bai that you haven’t gotten around to telling the feds about?”
Largo studied Chee, his expression suggesting he didn’t like the tone of that, and he wasn’t sure he would answer it. But he did.
“If Deputy Sheriff Bai is on the wrong side of this one, I haven’t heard it,” he said.
Chapter Five
Officer Bernadette Manuelito was absolutely correct when she reminded Chee that he knew a lot of people around Shiprock. That had paid off. A chat with a senior San Juan County undersheriff, a drop-in talk with an old friend in the county clerk’s office at Aztec, a visit at the Farmington pool hall and another at the Oilmen’s Bar and Grill had provided him with a headful of information about the Ute Casino in general and Teddy Bai in particular.
The casino came off better than he’d expected. There was the usual and automatic assumption that organized crime must have a finger in it somehow, but no one could offer any support for that. Otherwise, the people most likely actually to know anything considered it well run. No one had any specific notion about who might have been the robbery’s inside man if Bai wasn’t. There was agreement that Bai had been a wild kid and mixed opinion on his character in later life, with the consensus in favor of salvation. He had married a girl in the Streams Come Together Clan, but that hadn’t lasted. One of the regulars at Oilmen’s said since the divorce, Bai came in now and then with a young woman. Who? Chee asked. He didn’t know her, but he described her as ‘cute as a bug’s ear.' It wasn’t the metaphor Chee would have chosen, but it could fit Officer Bernadette Manuelito.
It was also at Oilmen’s that he learned Bai had been taking flying lessons.
“Flying lessons?” Chee said. “Really? Where?”
Chee’s source for this was a New Mexico State Police dispatcher named Alice Deal. She delayed taking the intended bite from her cheeseburger to wave the free hand toward the Farmington Airport, which sat, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, on the mesa looking down on the city.
The sign over the office door of Four Corners Flight declared it the source of charter flights, aircraft rentals, repair, sales, parts, supplies and FAA-certified flight instruction. It didn’t appear to be busy in any of those categories when Chee walked into the front office. The only person on the premises was a woman in the manager’s office. She interrupted her telephone conversation long enough to wave Chee in.
“Well, now,” she was saying, 'that’s no way to behave. If Betty acts like that, I just wouldn’t invite her anymore.' She motioned Chee into a chair, listened a moment longer, said, 'Well, maybe you’re right. I’ve got a customer. Got to go,” and hung up.
Chee introduced himself and his subject.
“Bai,” she said. “He owes us for a couple of lessons. The FBI already talked to us about him.”
“Could you -'
“Matter of fact, they wanted the names of everybody we’d been teaching for way back. Then they came back again to talk specifically about Teddy.”
“Could you tell me if he had his license yet?”
“I doubt it. You’re-going to have to talk to Jim Edgar,” she said. “He’s out there talking to the people at the DOE copter, and if he’s not there, he’ll be working in the hangar.”
The copter was a big white Bell with Department of Energy identification markings. Round white bathtub-sized containers had been attached above the skids, and a woman in blue coveralls was doing something technical at one of them. The only others present were two men in the same sort of coveralls engaged in conversation. Probably pilot and copilot. Chee tried to guess what the big tubes would contain, with no luck. Obviously none of these people was Jim Edgar.
