“I’m not going to drive all the way to Shiprock this afternoon to spend the night with you, Mr. Chee, in that old trailer,” said Bernadette Manuelito. “I have to get my stuff together. Get my boots, and hiking stuff, sleeping bag, all that. You have to meet Dashee anyway. Can’t you pick me up on the way? I’ll meet you over at Yah-ta-hey. At the trading post.”
Chee sighed. “We’re meeting Dashee at Tuba City at five A.M.,” he said. “So I guess we could meet at Yah-ta- hey. But we’d have to leave Yah-ta-hey about three A.M., I’d say. Can you handle getting up that early?”
“Hey, man,” Bernie said. “You’re forgetting I’ve been a Border Patrolman.”
Indeed, Bernie seemed wide awake as well as loaded with water bottles, foodstuff, and luggage when he pulled up at Yah-ta-hey. However, after a hundred miles and a lot of talking of wedding plans, snuggling, and so forth, they saw no sign of Dashee or Billy Tuve at their Tuba City meeting place. Chee looked at his watch and grumbled. “When I’m late, Cowboy always gives me that ‘Navajo time’ complaint,” he said. “As if the Hopis were perfect.”
“If I were you I’d just call him. Find out what happened.”
Chee extracted his cell phone, dialed Dashee’s cell number, let it ring, heard Dashee’s voice.
“Is this Chee?” Dashee said. “I was just going to call you. Tuve’s gone.”
It wasn’t a good connection.
“Tuve’s what? Gone where?”
“When I got to his place, his mother was there. She said a car drove up yesterday about suppertime. She was out seeing about the sheep, but she saw Billy out in front talking to somebody. When she got back to the house, the car was driving away. She went on in, looking for Billy, but he was gone.”
Chee considered that. Said, “What do you think?”
“Now I don’t know what to think,” Dashee said. “But then I told Billy’s mother maybe the sheriff had come to get him. Needed some more information from him. Or maybe the bail bond business had been canceled.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Chee said.
“Sure does, but it wasn’t. On the way down off Second Mesa I met a McKinley County Sheriff’s car going up the slope. Flagged him down. He said he was going out to Tuve’s place to pick him up. Said more evidence had come in and Tuve’s bail had been revoked.”
“This is interesting,” Chee said. “So what do you think happened to him?”
“I don’t have a clue. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. But I’ve got an idea.”
Bernie tapped Chee on the arm, said, “What’s interesting, and who is the ‘him’ that something happened to? Was it Billy Tuve?”
Cowboy was talking into Chee’s other ear.
“Hold it a second, Cowboy. I’ll bring Bernie up to date on this.”
“My idea,” said Cowboy, “is that Craig woman who bailed him out came and got him. Remember, she wanted him to take her down into the canyon. Show her where he got the diamond.”
“I remember,” Chee said. “But I also remember he told her he wouldn’t do it. And then she said, well, she’d go anyway. Or something like that.”
“What’s he telling you?” Bernie asked.
“Shut up a minute, will you, Cowboy?” Chee said. He put the phone on his lap, told Bernie what Cowboy had told him, and reclaimed the telephone.
“Well, anyway, I don’t have any better ideas. Where are you? And what do we do now?”
Cowboy, it developed, was just rolling over the hump on 264 and dropping down into the Moenkopi draw. “I’ll be with you there in Tuba in about twenty minutes.”
And he was. As Chee had suggested, he parked his pickup in the Tuba City police station lot. Then he climbed out, took off his hat, nodded to Bernie and Chee.
“Well,” he said. “As Jim was just asking us, what do we do now?”
12
Joe Leaphorn was listening to the coffee perking and deciding whether he would double his fried egg ration this morning and cut back on other food later in the day. His rationale for that indulgence was having slept later than usual this morning, having been up past eleven the night before on the phone with Louisa. It had been a long conversation, starting with her report on her interview with the old lady at the Havasupai settlement. He had responded with his own report on his Shorty McGinnis encounter, and McGinnis’s tale of trading the cowboy for a diamond. That had triggered a bunch of questions, most of which he couldn’t answer, and that had led backward into the whole business of Cowboy Dashee’s cousin Billy Tuve, the problem he’d brought crashing down on himself by trying to pawn such a diamond, and Jim Chee’s involvement in the whole Billy Tuve mess.
“When did Tuve get it?” Louisa had asked.
“Several years ago is about the best I can tell you. Tuve’s very vague on chronology. He did some rodeo riding, and his horse fell on him, and he suffered some brain damage.”
“I’ve always thought rodeo riders are brain damaged before they get on the horse,” Louisa said. “But how about the other man? I mean McGinnis’s cowboy. The one who swapped his folding shovel for the diamond. Do you have any specific date when that happened?”
