while back. You sounded like a kid on the telephone.” He chuckled. “Come to think of it, you still did when you called me last week.”
“You sounded like some old fart in a nursing home,” Chandler said, “but you look healthy enough. What kind of information have you got for me?”
“First I got a question. What’s my split on this?”
“No split,” Chandler said. “If we bomb out, we pay you your expenses plus your regular hourly rate. If we get the deal done, you get that plus a twenty-thousand bonus.”
Sherman digested that. Looked at Chandler. “This don’t sound a bit like a bail bond case.”
“I already told you that,” Chandler said. “I told you I want you to find out everything you can about that robbery-homicide they were holding a Hopi Indian named Billy Tuve for doing. Everything about that big diamond he had that got him arrested. Everything about who has just bonded him out. And why they put up the money. This Tuve hasn’t jumped bond. But I want to know where he’s living now. Probably he’s at his home on the Hopi Reservation. But I want to know for sure. And what’s he doing? What’s going on? Has he just gone home and rested? Or what?”
It occurred to Chandler as he finished that string of bad-tempered questions that he had adopted exactly the same arrogant tone that Plymale had used with him. Sherman was staring at him now, eyes squinted, an expression that suggested he, Sherman, hadn’t liked it any better than Chandler had. But Sherman merely shrugged.
“Well, now,” he said. “First I have another question. Where are you taking me now?”
“I’m going to get someplace where those airport security rent-a-cops won’t be hassling us to move along. We’re going to circle like we’re waiting to pick up a passenger. Then when we get our talking done, I’ll drop you off at the cabstand.”
“It would be quicker to just go into Flagstaff, stop at my hotel, and do our talking in air-conditioned comfort,” Sherman said. “Maybe in the bar with a Scotch-and-water in hand.”
Chandler ignored that.
Sherman studied him. “I’d guess you have some reason that I can’t think of right now not to want somebody or other to see you and me together at the hotel. Does that sound like a sensible guess?”
“Possibly,” Chandler said.
“Well, then, let’s see if I can answer some of those questions you were asking.”
Sherman extracted a slim little notebook from a shirt pocket.
“The bond for Billy Tuve was fifty thou,” Sherman began, and recited what else he’d learned at the clerk’s office, down to Tuve leaving the place with Joanna Craig.
“Going where?” Chandler asked.
“Be cool,” Sherman said. “The hotel where she was staying in Gallup was the El Rancho,” he reported, and then rattled off what and who he’d seen there, down to the ordering of room service. “Then…”
Sherman paused, peered at Chandler. “I understand this right, don’t I? You’re paying the expenses.”
Chandler nodded.
“I mention it because this cost me twenty bucks. The clerk was getting tired of talking to me. Anyway, then a big, tall Navajo, looked like an athlete, showed up with a Hopi deputy sheriff, asking about Joanna Craig. They went up to her room. A while later another Indian came in. He said he was supposed to come to the hotel and pick up Billy Tuve. Said he was his uncle giving him a ride back out to Second Mesa, wherever that is. Sounded like he was taking him home. So the clerk called Ms. Craig’s room, and they all came out and left.”
“All? Tuve left with them? And were they all together? Or how?”
“Tuve left with the man who claimed to be his uncle. Then the other two men left. Don’t know about Ms. Craig because I left myself.”
“How about why she put up Tuve’s bond?”
Sherman responded to that with an incredulous stare.
“Well? What’s the answer?”
“If I had been dumb enough to ask her, her answer would have been it was none of my damn business. And who was I, and who was I working for, and so forth,” Sherman said. “But I’d guess it’s something to do with that lawsuit you were telling me about on the telephone. You didn’t tell me much, but you did say we’d be working for one side of some sort of big-money court case.”
“How about the diamond? Where it came from?”
“Tuve told the cops an old man swapped it with him for his shovel. Down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.” Sherman laughed. “My connections in the district attorney’s office weren’t taking that very seriously when I first asked ’em about the case, but I have something new on that. I got a call back from my man there, and he told me —”
“Hold it,” Chandler said, and pulled the Land Rover into a tree-shaded turn bay, and stopped. “Told you what?”
“Told me another diamond had turned up. Or at least another diamond story. Come to think of it, two new diamond stories. Both pretty doubtful.”
“Go on,” Chandler said.
“This first one sounds like what you call a groundless rumor. My man heard from a cop he knows in the New Mexico State Police, got it from somebody in the Navajo County Sheriff’s Department, who picked it up in Window Rock. Probably from Navajo Tribal Police, who—”
“Come on,” said Chandler. “Cut down on the BS. What’s the story?”
