Threepersons Hunt Page 6

  The occasional windmill … a grass valley, a stream with cottonwoods, then Fort Apache, the old Army buildings crumbling where they hadn’t been shored up for use as part of the Theodore Roosevelt Indian Boarding School (Bureau of Indian Affairs).

  On up the road toward Whiteriver he passed the sawmill of the Fort Apache Timber Company, then the dusty rodeo arena and a good stand of shade trees. The mountains crowded in closer and he rolled into town past the imposing single-story building that housed the headquarters of the White Mountain Tribal Council. Beyond it squatted the Whiteriver trading post and the town’s gas station, WE DON’T LOAN TOOLS.

  Along the dirt roads that spider-webbed out from the center he could see kids on donkeys lassoing dogs for practice. A fat woman in a pink squaw-dress waddled out of the trading post and climbed into the driver’s seat of a badly sprung pickup. Loose horses and colts browsed along the road shoulders.

  Watchman parked in front of the trading post. Four Apaches on the trading post verandah watched the Volvo from under their high-domed hats, and behind Watchman a car approached with a gravel-crunching rumble of slow-rolling tires.

  It was Pete Porvo’s white Agency car. Watchman stepped out of the Volvo.

  The agency prowl car pulled over and Porvo left the engine idling when he got out.

  “I wasn’t following you. Just had to come this way myself, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” Watchman said. “They told me I’d find Joe’s sister up here.”

  “Angelina. She ain’t seen him or heard from him.” Muted sensations of dislike floated off Porvo like heat waves. He added, “I believe she drove up to Showlow this morning. Be back tonight around eight, eight-thirty—she works over to the roadhouse nights.”

  “Thanks.”

  Porvo laid one arm along the roof of his car and pointed toward the council house. “You might want to talk to Mr. Kendrick, he’s the one handled Joe’s case at the trial.”

  “He’s here now?”

  “Got an office over there. That’s his Corvette parked around back.” Porvo slid down into the seat and spoke through the V-notch between the windshield and the open door: “I come up with anything, where’ll I find you?”

  “I’ll be poking around here a while.”

  “We ain’t got anything in town you could call tourist accommodations,” Porvo said overcasually, and pulled the door shut.

  Watchman stood there, the sun warm on his face, watching the prowl car shimmy away faster than it needed to.

  The men on the porch watched him with undisguised suspicion. They also knew. The moccasin telegraph had done its work.

  He went inside the trading post because it was always the center of communication and gossip.

  It was cool inside and a lot bigger than the branch trading post at Chinle where he’d grown up. Cowboy hats hung from the beam above the cash-register counter. On a pillar above a calendar which notified debtors that it was July 8 there was a carefully printed misspelled sign, BUILDING SUPPLES. Three females in bright patterned dresses stood browsing the notions shelves like the Three Bears: a fat woman about Watchman’s age and a girl about thirteen with an infant girl in her arms.

  It was one of the last old-style general stores, part supermarket, part feed-and-grain, part clothing emporium, part hardware, part Woolworth’s. Some wit had hung a little wood box on the wall with a three-inch slot in its lid: DO NOT PUT MONEY IN THIS BOX.

  There was a smell of leather harness. Watchman bought a pack of spearmint gum.

  “You know Joe? Joe Threepersons?”

  The girl behind the cash register was in her shy teens and she only shook her head, not meeting his glance. But there was a man at the bulletin board whose face swiveled when Watchman spoke. Watchman took his change and broke open a stick of gum. “You know Joe?”

  “Maybe I heard of him,” the man said, and went outside on bowlegged boots with the heels run down on the outsides.

  The four men on the porch were watching the door without blinking. Watchman let them have their look at him. “I guess you heard I’m looking for Joe Three-persons.”

  Nobody made any answer of any kind. Watchman said, “There might be a reward,” and stepped out into the sunlight and walked toward the council house.

  A breeze moved dust across his path and a boy on a horse choused a seventy-dollar cow down the street. Watchman felt the prod of the flat S&W .38 automatic against his spine where it rested under his shirt in the thin Myers holster; it was inconvenient there but it was out of sight and he didn’t want to alarm people. He had to remember not to sit back too fast in wooden chairs or the thing would thud like a bomb.

  It was half-past four and the shadow of a cloud moved across the town. Over the hills north of the trees he could see the shadow-streaks of a rain squall. But heat misted up from the earth and before he entered the council house he stopped and armed sweat from his forehead. Back on the trading post verandah the four Apaches were still watching him. It wouldn’t have surprised him if one of them had turned to spit at the ground.

  4.

  The girl at the reception counter looked comfortable in her fat but her face was stern. “Enju?”

  “I don’t talk Apache, sorry.” He produced his wallet. “Highway Patrol.”

  “Oh yes, about Joe Threepersons. I’m afraid the Chairman isn’t in just now.…”

  “Maybe in the morning?”

  “Of course. Shall I make an appointment?”

  “Don’t bother, I don’t know where I’ll be. I’ll take my chances. Mr. Kendrick in his office?”

  “I think he is.” She pointed down the hall.

  “You know Joe pretty well?”

  “No,” she said, but it wasn’t a closed-off negative. “He’s older than I am, he didn’t live here any more by the time I was old enough to notice boys. My brother went to school with him, though. At the Baptist mission.”

  “Your brother around?”

  “You’ll have to wait till next year. He’s in Spain. He’s in the Air Force.”

  “Anybody else around here that knew Joe very well? Any relatives besides his sister?”

  “Well you might try his … uncle, Will Luxan.” The hesitation was caused, probably, by her uncertainty at translating in her head: there was no exact synonym for uncle in the Athapascan tongues, of which Apache and Navajo were dialects. The relationship was more specific in the Indian languages: mother’s-brother or father’s-brother.

  “He lives in Whiteriver?”

  “You know the Shell station up by the roadhouse?”

  “No, but I can find it.”

  “He owns the station. He lives in the house right behind it.”

  “I didn’t know Joe had such prosperous relatives.”

  She didn’t have anything to say to that. Watchman said, “What’s your name?”

  “Lisa Natagee,” she said and it shot his mind into another orbit so that he had to bring it back by force. Lisa …

  He went without hurry down the hall and found a door near the end with a wooden plaque screwed onto it, LEGAL DEPARTMENT. He stopped with his hand on the knob and looked back along the corridor at the girl who was fitting a card into a plastic Wheeldex. Her head was bowed with concentration so that the black hair had swung forward to hide her face. He thought of his own Lisa in slender fair-haired images and took his eyes off the overweight black-haired girl at the desk, and went into the law office.

  5.

  Faded blond hair fell limply over Dwight Kendrick’s ears; he was an imposing bear of a man, huge and pale with great butcher’s shoulders and an improbably lean waist, as if he spent a good part of his life lifting weights in gymnasiums. It was hard to judge his age; he had to be at least forty. He had a penetrating but superficial voice and that was a little surprising in view of his spectacular courtroom reputation.

  Kendrick’s fingers were very long and thin and moved like sea fans as he spoke, opening and closing with carnivorous sensuality. “I don’t know wha
t the hell they expect. The unsavory record of the Indian Bureau—Christ they make the first American the last American at the trough. Nothing extraordinary about Joe, I can tell you that much. It’s only what you’ve got to expect when you raise a man by filling his head that his own people are dirty savages whose extermination is required for the purification of the democratic republic. Of course he’s got a temper. Of course he behaves irrationally. What the hell else can they expect of him?”

  “We don’t all behave the way he behaves,” Watchman murmured. “But right now I’m more interested in where I might find him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kendrick snapped. “I don’t think it’s incumbent upon me to help you crucify Joe.” It wasn’t as if everybody else didn’t also call Threepersons by his first name but Kendrick pronounced it with a kind of offhand familiarity which implied ownership. It grated on Watchman.

  Kendrick sat back, crossed his legs at right angles and laced his hands together behind his head. “Look, I imagine legally he’s still my client. Certainly if he were to come to me I’d continue to act in his behalf—I’m not the kind to betray a man just because he’s in some kind of trouble. Now you’re supposed to be an officer of the law, you ought to know as well as I do that there’s a privileged relationship here. Even if I knew exactly where you could lay your hands on him, I’d be under no obligation to tell you.” Kendrick generally looked away at neutral objects while he was talking but at intervals his pale eyes would flash up to make sure he had been understood.

  “If you knew where he was,” Watchman replied, “I hope you’d have the good sense to advise him to turn himself in.”

  “What for? Another dose of white justice?”

  “The longer he stays loose the worse it’ll go for him.”

  “Suppose he stays loose forever?”

  “Do you think he’s smart enough?” Watchman said, and studied him for a response.

  Kendrick smiled a little as he might smile to a small child who had asked him a question about the universe, but Watchman got no audible answer to his question and so he tried another. “You’re supposed to be an officer of the court. You’re supposed to have some kind of duty to advise him to give himself up.”

  “All right, I’ll admit I’ve been playing a little game. I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him. It was all a harmless exercise to find out how tough you’d get about it. Frankly I find it rather rancid that they’d pick out their token red man to handle this assignment. It stinks of television politics to me. I don’t know why the hell you put up with it, if you’ve got any guts at all.”

  “Mr. Kendrick, I’m a police officer, it’s my job to enforce the laws.”

  “I Would have assumed that with an assignment as delicate as this one they must have given you the option of turning it down.”

  “I didn’t see any reason to.” The interview was getting out of hand, the interrogator becoming the interrogated. He made an effort to get it back where it belonged. “It would help if you could tell me about him. Who his friends were, where he used to hang out.”

  “I’m sorry. Actually I never knew him all that well, he was only a client and I’d never met him prior to his arrest. But even if I could help you I’m not sure I would. Joe’s got enough cards stacked against him. I understand Charlie Rand’s been on the horn to Phoenix several times already, trying to get them to mobilize the National Guard to track him down or some such idiocy.”

  “You know Rand, do you?”

  “We’re eyeballing each other across a legal fence. I’m handling the tribe’s case against him.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

  “I’d just as soon hear it from you. I keep remembering Joe Threepersons used to work for Rand. It was Rand’s foreman who got killed.’

  “It’s cheap pettifoggery, that’s all. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Joe or that old murder.”

  “The case was pending, even way back then. Wasn’t it?”

  “It was. But Joe was only a cowhand.”

  “He’s an Apache and he was working for a white man who seems to be regarded as the Apaches’ number-one enemy. I find that a little hard to understand for openers.”

  “Quite a few of his red brothers work for Rand. It’s not unusual. In a labor market like this one you go where the jobs are. Rand’s hiring and he doesn’t ask questions about your politics.”

  “Isn’t that a little risky—for him?”

  “He’s a tough son of a bitch, or he thinks he is. I guess he likes to think he’s welcoming the challenge.”

  “This squabble’s over water rights on the boundary of the Reservation, isn’t it?”

  Kendrick’s eyes raked him. “In a nutshell, the Bonito River supplies the water along that side of the Reservation. There’s a string of recreation reservoirs along the river and the tribe draws irrigation water out of them. Some years back Rand and his neighbors started drilling deep wells on their side of the line and they dug on a slant so that the wells bottomed out straight under the riverbed. It’s diverting a lot of acre-feet from the Apache water supply and the tribe’s having trouble finding enough water to irrigate the farms, and half those recreational facilities are closed down because the lakes are nothing but mud puddles. We’ve been trying to obtain an injunction to restrain Rand and his cronies from pumping out those wells. So far the Court of Appeals seems to be in Rand’s pocket—Rand’s lawyers claim there’s no mention of water rights in the Fort Apache treaty. And they say even if there were, it wouldn’t affect this issue because Rand’s wells are on his own private property. Naturally we’re claiming an analogy with mining law where you’re not allowed to drill slant-shafts under your neighbor’s claim. We’re also arguing that water rights are implicit in the treaty even if they’re not specified. We’ve got plenty of precedents and we’ll win it, and Rand knows that. He’s just being obstructionist.”

  Kendrick lit a cigarillo and blew smoke at his match. “We’re getting a little off the subject of Joe Threepersons, aren’t we?”

  “Maybe. But the better a picture I’ve got, the better a chance to find him. Did Joe have anything to do with any of these wells?”

  “He wasn’t a driller if that’s what you mean. I suppose he must have ridden past them a thousand times on his rounds. He was a line rider, his job was to keep the fence in repair and look out for livestock in trouble.”

  “Where’d he live?”

  “Line shack at the northwest corner of the ranch.”

  “With his wife and kid?”

  “Of course. They were only two or three miles off the highway to Showlow. It wasn’t a bad little house, I visited it once to interview his wife. Rand treats his employees pretty decently, he’s no cotton farmer.”

  “You talk as if you admire the man.”

  “I respect his good points. It doesn’t pay to underestimate your opponent.”

  “You happen to know if anybody’s living in that line shack now?”

  “Somebody must be. It’s twenty miles from the ranch headquarters—too far to commute on horseback. There’s always somebody posted out there. Rand has four or five line shacks. Christ he runs better than a half million acres.”

  “All of it cattle?”

  “About half. He grows feed corn and alfalfa, and there’s a lot of timber.”

  “And that’s what he needs the extra water for?”

  “I gather it is. I’m no expert on farming.”

  “Joe worked up there for better than three years. Did he have any especially close friends who might still be there?”

  “You’d have to ask around. I don’t know many of his friends. He’s got a sister here in town, and an uncle by the name of Luxan.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Not from me,” Kendrick said. Watchman heard the knock at the door and turned in his chair to look that way, and Kendrick lifted his head: “Yes?”

  It was a young Indian
with long hair held back by a multicolored headband. His suit was tailored and hadn’t come from stock and the patterned Justin boots were polished to a vicious shine. Late twenties, Watchman judged, and full of vinegar.

  “I think we’re about to nail down the figures on Hawkes Lake,” the intruder said as if Watchman weren’t there.

  It seemed to excite Kendrick. “About God damn time. How soon, do you think?”

  “Tonight, if my boy comes through.” The young Indian looked at Watchman.

  “Come on in, Tom. This man’s name is Watchman, he’s from the state police. My assistant, Tom Victorio.”

  Victorio’s grip was quick and firm and quickly withdrawn. Kendrick said, “Tom’s a bit of a firebrand but he does the work of five lawyers and I expect to see him practicing before the Supreme Court before he’s finished.”

  It didn’t appear to embarrass Victorio. Kendrick waved the cigarillo at Watchman. “He’s on Joe Threepersons’ trail.”

  Watchman said, “Somebody’s trying to convince us he was innocent of the Calisher murder. What would you say to that?”

  Kendrick’s eyes widened a little. “Who told you that?”

  “Anonymous. We don’t know.”

  “But it wasn’t Joe himself.”

  It was a statement, not a question. Watchman said. “What makes you say that?”

  “Joe confessed at the time of the murder. That was what made it so hard to get the charge reduced.”

  “Then you don’t think there’s anything to this.”

  “Look,” Kendrick said, “I’m in no position to come right out and state flatly that Joe was guilty. I was his attorney—still am, for that matter.”

  Watchman said, “But you can’t state flatly that he was not guilty.”

  “On the strength of an anonymous tip to the police? I’d need a lot more evidence than that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I was just wondering if you might have any other evidence to back up the tip we got.”

  “The tip didn’t come from this office,” Kendrick said. “That’s about all I can tell you about it.” He jabbed the cigarillo toward Tom Victorio. “I’ve about shot my wad on the subject of Joe Threepersons. Why don’t you take Mr. Watchman down to your office?” A quick shift to Watchman: “Tom knew Joe better than I did. Which is not to say they were friends.”