Deputy sheriff ozzie price was almost as old as Joe Leaphorn, had known him for a long, long time, and was more interested in how he was faring in retirement than in why Leaphorn wanted to inspect the McKay homicide evidence.
'As I remember, you never were much for fishing, or hunting, either,' Price said, as he slid the blue plastic basket out of its shelf in the sheriff's department evidence locker. 'And you don't play golf as far as I know. How do you pass your time?'
'Stuff like this, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'I get interested in all sorts of things.'
'Not much interesting in this McKay homicide that I can see,' Price said. He put the basket on the sorting table, sat in the chair under the window, and leaned back against the wall. 'As I remember, Denton got mad at a swindler and shot him and admitted it and got off on justified manslaughter, self-defense. Wasn't that it?'
'That was it,' Leaphorn said. He lifted a folded pair of trousers out of the basket and put it on the table. Next came a shirt, stained and stiffened with dried blood, a belt with a heavy buckle inlaid with turquoise, a pair of expensive-looking boots, and a leather jacket. Leaphorn held it up for a closer inspection.
'Cost a lot of money, a jacket like that,' Price said.
'No blood on it. No bullet hole that I can see. Front or back.'
'It was hanging over the back of a chair when I got there,' Price said. 'He wasn't wearing it.'
'He wasn't?' Leaphorn found himself remembering Denton's account of the shooting. In that, McKay had this jacket on. He'd taken his pistol out of its pocket. Leaphorn checked the pockets.
'You worked this one?'
'We were short-handed that night. Had to send a car out to Fort Wingate. Some sort of Halloween prank, it turned out to be. Anyway, I went along out to Denton's place.' Price shook his head. 'Wow. What a mansion.'
'You still have McKay's gun?'
'Firearms go in another locker,' Price said. He picked up his key ring, unlocked a small safe at the end of the room, and came back with a .38-caliber revolver, an identification tag dangling from its trigger guard. Leaphorn worked it into the jacket pocket. It went, but not easily, and produced a prominent bulge.
'That where he was carrying it?' Price asked.
'That's the way Denton tells it.'
Price looked skeptical. 'That's no way to treat that pretty jacket,' he said. 'My wife would kill me for that.'
Leaphorn left underwear and socks in the basket. He added a felt hat to the stack on the tabletop and then took out a slim black briefcase, checked the side pockets and found them empty, and unzipped the center section. From that he extracted two Ziploc bags, a folded map, a stack of papers, and a tiny padlock with a tiny key in it. He held that up.
'Briefcase locked when you got there?'
'Yeah, and we couldn't find the key at first. When the crime scene crew got there, they found it in that little pocket some pants have inside the regular pants pocket. You know what I mean?'
Leaphorn nodded. One of his jeans had such a bothersome little pocket. Dimes and other small things tended to lose themselves in it. He pointed at the bags, raised his eyebrows in a question.
'The little one is stuff found in the furniture, and vacuumed up off the carpet. That kind of stuff.' Price laughed. 'Not that you need it when the shooter is there, and hands you the gun and says he did it. But the crime scene boys always follow their routine. Think maybe they'll get lucky, and it will be a mystery, and they can use the forensic stuff. And that bigger bag holds what was in the briefcase besides the papers.'
Leaphorn set aside the map and checked the other papers—mostly what appeared to be copies of old letters, some written in an untidy scrawl and signed by Mott, some on the stationery of a San Francisco law firm. There was also an official-looking assay report, which seemed to Leaphorn's unpracticed eye to confirm a high gold content in a sand sample. He left a single-page contract form for the last. It also matched Denton's description of what McKay had brought—giving McKay a fifty-percent interest in all revenues derived from gold-mining development of 'said Golden Calf property.' It was signed 'Marvin F. McKay' at the bottom, but the space for Denton's signature was blank.
'How's that for a deal,' Price said. 'He was giving Denton a map to the end of the rainbow, and Denton was supposed to promise him fifty percent of nothing.'
'And fifty thousand in cash,' Leaphorn said.
'Yeah,' said Price, 'along with a thirty-eight-caliber bullet in the chest. You think this Doherty kid was trying to play the same game?'
Leaphorn shrugged. 'Why do you think that?'
'I don't know,' Price said. 'But he came in here chatting with some of his old friends from when his uncle was sheriff, and then he wanted to know if he could look at all this stuff. And after he was gone, I noticed an old Prince Albert tobacco tin was missing. Thought he might be collecting souvenirs or something. But mostly he was interested in that map.'
Leaphorn unfolded the map, stared at it, turned to Price.
'This map was in the briefcase when you got it? When you unlocked and opened it?'
The question puzzled Price. 'Sure,' he said.
'No other maps there? On the desk? Anywhere where they might have been looking at them?'
'There were maps on the walls,' Price said. 'Lots of them. What's the trouble?'
'I don't know,' Leaphorn said. 'Every once in a while I find out I'm not as smart as I thought I was.'
