back and forth as he rocked to keep the whiskey from splashing.
“You know,” Leaphorn said, and produced a wry chuckle, “I’d forgotten about that burglary.”
“I wish the FBI had forgotten it,” Pinto said. “Apparently the old man listed the diamond on his insurance claim at ten thousand dollars—which I guess would make it worth twice that these days. And the insurance company complained, objected, and the feds looked into it as maybe a fraud case way back then. And now somebody did a sort of diamond-diamond match in their computer files. It looked strange and they wanted us to check it out.”
“Now, doesn’t that sound easy? Did they say how to do it?”
“They want to know where that McGinnis diamond came from. Was it recovered? So forth. They seem to have a fairly good witness identification on the Hopi, prints in the store, all that stuff, but the only material evidence is that diamond he was trying to pawn. The theory of the crime seems to be the Hopi took it when he did the Zuni robbery. And it’s the only material evidence available so far. So they’d like to know if McGinnis got his diamond back, and did he have one of those jewelry certification forms describing its cut and weight and size and so forth.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“So we sent a man out from Tuba City to the store. He said the place had a ‘Closed’ sign on the door and looked deserted. Said he stopped at a place down the road and they’d heard the old man had a heart attack. Thought he’d been hauled off to Page. Never came back. Checked the hospital. He wasn’t there. No record of him. Maybe died in the ambulance or something. Probably his family came and took care of the funeral somewhere.”
Leaphorn let that pass without comment. Did Shorty have a family? He couldn’t quite imagine that. After a while, Pinto would get to the reason he’d asked Joe to drop in. No hurry. Pinto shuffled some papers, put them back into a folder, looked across the desk at Leaphorn.
“Joe,” he said, “did McGinnis tell you where he got that damned diamond? Anything about that?”
“Not a thing. If I had known he’d put it on his insurance claim, I would have asked him. I’d have said, ‘Mr. McGinnis, how did you come to have such a fancy diamond?’ and McGinnis would have said, ‘Officer Leaphorn, that’s none of your damned business.’”
Pinto waited for an expansion of that. Leaphorn let him wait. “No ideas, then?”
“Not a one. But now I have a question for you. None of my damned business either, but it seems to me our federal friends are unusually interested in this diamond. I’ll bet you noticed that, too, and you asked whichever special agent is dealing with this about it. What did he say?”
Captain Pinto smiled, and it turned into a laugh. “Ah, hell, Joe,” he said. “It was George Rice. He said it was just routine, and I said, ‘Come on now, Special Agent Rice, you can be honest with me,’ and he said, ‘Well, you know how it’s been since the politicians invented that Homeland Security Agency. They laid a fat new level of political patronage bureaucrats on top of everything we already had to deal with.’ Rice said he had a feeling maybe one of the campaign fund-raisers in Washington was doing somebody a favor. You know how it works. Called the regional jefe in Phoenix on the old buddy-buddy basis and told him somebody in the White House would be happy to hear anything we could find out about where this diamond came from. And I told Rice that sounds mysterious, and he said he had the impression it has something to do with a huge estate settlement lawsuit going on back there, and I said that’s mysterious, too, and he said it was also a mystery to him, and since it sounded like more Washington politics to him, he’d be happy to keep it that way.”
Leaphorn considered this a moment.
“Well,” he said, “that makes me sort of glad I’m retired. But why don’t you get somebody at work finding McGinnis’s family, or whoever claimed his body. They’d have his stuff, if anything was worth keeping. Maybe that would…” He stopped. Shook his head. “You know, I’m having trouble believing that old man has left us.”
“They say the good die young. But even men like Shorty have to go sometime.”
“How did it happen?”
“Just natural death. He was old as the mountains, wasn’t he?”
Leaphorn sat awhile, staring out the window. Shook his head. “Hard to believe old Shorty just died naturally,” he said. “Wasn’t shot or something.”
“Well, we never heard anything to the contrary,” Pinto said.
Leaphorn got up, recovered his hat.
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” he said. “And if I happen to learn anything about the McGinnis diamond, I’ll let you know. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
Which, of course, proved to be wrong.
3
The text of the message on Joanna Craig’s answering machine didn’t seem very important. But the tone of her lawyer’s voice told her it was.
“Miss Craig,” he had said. “This is Hal Simmons. Our investigators have notified me of something that I should discuss with you. I’ll be in my office all afternoon. Please call me when you have time.”
She had hardly spoken to Simmons since they’d completed the legal work after her mother’s funeral. Now she found his law firm’s number in the telephone book, got a busy signal, then called the apartment house doorman and asked him to get her a taxi.
The receptionist at the Simmons law office remembered her from the days when she was there a lot, trying to tie up all those loose ends that death leaves behind even well-organized people. And Joanna Craig’s mother was not organized at all. She was erratic, forgetful of things that had happened yesterday, remembering things that had never happened. “Senile dementia,” her psychiatrist had called it. Joanna had protested that her mother was too young for senility, and he had said, “Your mother’s been through a lot of stress. And her mind has always been—
