Threepersons Hunt (12 page)

Watchman didn't wait in the doorway. It was too much like putting himself in a picture frame for inspection. He went to the near end of the bar and waited for a beer and when it came he carried it toward the back of the room. Men at the bar turned to glance at him and there was enough challenge in their eyes to show they knew about him. But it wasn't a gamut; their resentment only simmered.

The decibel level of talk had dropped when he had entered. The room had had time to size him up and the talk resumed its former level until Angelina Threepersons left the corner table and carried her guitar to the stool on the bandstand. Then some of them stopped talking and looked at her, anticipating her song. Some others kept on talking as if they'd heard her before and didn't think much of her act.

Watchman took a small table and tipped his chair back against the wall. There were a few Anglos in the place— three in a bunch at the bar and two others, singly, talking with Apaches at tables. They were probably local sawmill technicians and livestock managers but ten years ago you wouldn't have found them in a place like this. The old barriers had come down. Allowing an Indian girl to sing non-Indian songs would have been unthinkable in an earlier generation.

The girl tuned up, not hurrying; she bent her ear over the f-holes of the guitar and ignored her audience.

There was a mournful quality to her, as if her gauntness were the product of sadness. The lamps bleached her face of color; it was a tired face, striking, the bones as fragile as a sick child's but the mouth and eyes creased by life. Once he'd had to tell a nine-year-old girl her puppy had been run over. Before she'd absorbed it completely and started to bawl there had been an expression on her face, quizzical and disbelieving and yet saddened and enraged all at once. Angelina Threepersons reminded him of that.

When she started to sing he was surprised by the repertoire. They were Kristofferson songs—
Sunday Morning Coming Down
and
Bobby McGee
and
Help Me Make It Through The Night
—and she did them well with a country twang and a husky deep delivery. But she sang without looking at her audience; she was singing for herself. Her music went into Watchman's bones with melancholy lassitude.

A fat Indian got up from his seat to Watchman's right and carried his empty glass toward the bar for refilling; it left a gap through which Watchman saw two familiar faces—Dwight Kendrick's and Thomas Jeffords Victorio's. Kendrick swiveled his gaze around and it passed across Watchman casually and kept turning until it reached the girl on the bandstand; for a moment Kendrick pretended he hadn't seen Watchman but then he thought better of it, looked back and nodded. He said something and Victorio looked over his shoulder and lifted a glass of whiskey in Watchman's direction. It might have been an invitation but Watchman ignored it. He acknowledged the attention with one hand and returned his glance to the girl. A few minutes later he picked up movement in the edge of his vision and turned to see Kendrick and Victorio making their way to the door, and out.

After the third song Angelina carried the guitar back to the corner table and left it standing up on the seat of a chair. She walked to the bar. Her legs weren't particularly long but she had a languid way of moving, or perhaps again it was weariness. She was wearing a black cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and a sheathed red skirt that almost reached the floor. The points of her shoulders were pronounced, exaggerated by the masculine tailoring of the shirt. The bartender spoke to her and handed her a tray and she carried it toward the front of the room. Watchman followed her with his eyes. Her black hair, tied in a bun, bobbed among the tables.

He drained his beer and when she was on her way back with a tray of empty glasses he waved her over.

“Another beer?”

“A little talk. When you get a minute.”

“You must be the Navajo.”

“Highway Patrol,” he said.

He reached toward his wallet but she spoke quickly. “I'd sooner not talk here.” She looked back across the room but the bartender was talking to someone. She turned her face toward Watchman and her quick smile was pretty but it was mocking and left an uncertain aftertaste.

“Name a time and place,” he said.

“Have you got your car here?”

“Beat-up Volvo right outside. What time do you finish here?”

She looked down at the tray, thinking, and then she gave him an up-from-under glance. She seemed amused. “We're not too crowded. Let's get it done with—I'll be out directly.”

He left and sat in the car with his elbow out the window. The spot where the dark Volkswagen had been was empty. He hadn't noticed anybody leaving the place except the two lawyers and Kendrick drove a Corvette. So it was Tom Victorio's and that was no real surprise; Victorio had been sweet on Maria and he'd have needed no big excuse to go down to Sunnyslope to visit her while Joe was tucked away in prison.

A surmise; a check on the license number would confirm it.
So it puts Victorio at Maria's house the morning before the breakout. How does that help locate Joe?
It didn't and he put it aside.

She came out of the roadhouse and looked for his car. He flashed the headlights at her and watched her come toward him. Her stride was still lazy but he sensed the tension in her.

She slid in beside him. “We can just sit here if you don't want to waste gas.”

“I like the way you sing.”

“And I'm far too talented for this dump.”

“You could be. If you worked at it.”

“I guess I don't want it that much.” She gave him a head-on look for the first time since she'd got into the car. “Are you a cop or a talent scout?”

“Come on,” he said, “don't get hard-boiled. I'm trying to find your brother, I'm not making a pass.”

“Now that's odd,” she said, “because I like to think I've learned to tell the difference between the serious customers and the ones that are just looking. Browsing, you know.” She was mocking him again. She leaned toward him, her left arm sliding across the back of his bucket seat. “I'm trying to buy my crippled nephew an operation so he can play the trumpet again. Would you care to contribute?”

“It's not your nephew I'm interested in, it's Joe. Let's talk about him.”

“I can't tell you anything you don't already know, but I'll go through the motions to save trouble.”

“Can't or won't tell?”

“Does it matter? Would you believe me?”

“It's my job never to believe anything too fast.”

When she put her back against the passenger door and folded her arms he added, “You're the one who can reach him if anybody can. I'd like you to take him a message. Tell him he's in a lot more trouble if he keeps hiding than he is if he gives himself up.”

“Why?”

He hadn't thought that question would have been first on her list. She was not without surprises—or candor.

He said, “Because I have a feeling someone's going to get hurt if he stays loose long enough.”

“Maybe that was why he broke loose in the first place. Didn't you think of that?”

“I did, but I don't have any facts.”

“You must have some. Otherwise you wouldn't have got that far.”

She was giving him the first real break he'd had; there were admissions between the lines of what she was saying—her failure to deny the implications of what he had said. He wasn't sure how to proceed from there; he didn't want to scare her off.

She waited and when he didn't speak she said, “You're kind of new at the job.”

“How do you know?”

“I've been questioned a few times.” She smiled; it was the same smile as before, it wasn't completed and it left him uneasy. “I break the law a lot, you see. I'm an arch criminal, a menace to society. I smoke grass.”

“Gee whiz.”

“I wouldn't have told you if I hadn't thought you'd answer like that.”

He said, “It's my youthful honesty.”

“No. It's just that you're relaxed. The ones that bust you for grass are the ones that twang like guitar strings. They're upright and pious and I think their parents must all have been drunks.”

“It's likely,” he said. “Tell me something, what does this mean—
Enju, yutuhu nda
?” He repeated it as accurately as he could remember it. The sounds weren't unlike the Navajo but the words were strange.

She laughed off-key. “Who called you that?”

“A mountain in a satin shirt, driving a '58 Ford pickup.”

“Jimmy Oto,” she said. “It stands to reason.”

So that was Jimmy Oto.

She said, “It means … well.
Enju
means anything you want it to mean. Like ‘well' or
‘alors'
or
‘como'
or what do they say in Navajo,
‘yatahay'
?”

“That's pretty close.”

“
‘Yutuhu'
means Navajo and I'm surprised you didn't know that.
‘Nda'
means white man.

“That's all?”

“Well the way Jimmy Oto would say it I imagine it would come out meaning something more than just Navajo white man. More like Navajo son-of-a-bitch Uncle Tomahawk selling out to the white man.”

“I could go home for that,” he said. “Here I thought he was putting the bad eye on me.”

“For him it would amount to that. His crowd doesn't believe in the old stuff.”

“What about you?”

“I believe in all kinds of things. You'd be surprised.”

“I might at that. Some of the folks believe in it. Will Luxan said he'd heard Maria was witched to death.”

“Maybe she was,” Angelina said.

“Who by? And what for?”

“A lot of people don't like my brother. And some of them maybe wanted him to break out of jail.”

He sat and waited for her to continue but she only fished in the pocket of her skirt and found a pack of cigarettes. She hunted around the dashboard and found the lighter and punched it. “This thing work?”

“I don't know, I never use it.”

“Oh God. He doesn't smoke. He drinks one beer. I'll bet he eats spinach twice a week.”

The lighter popped. She pushed the glowing red end against the cigarette in her mouth and dragged suicidally to get it going. Watchman said, “A second ago you opened a can of worms.”

“I did?”

“Joe's enemies. The ones who wanted him to escape. Who and why?”

“Because he didn't kill Ross Calisher,” she said.

7.

“Okay. You wrote that letter to the Highway Patrol.”

“What letter?” She inhaled smoke, choked, recovered and said, “Quit looking at me like I'm a hundred pounds of poon.”

“The worms are starting to crawl out of the can, Angelina, and you're the one who opened it when you sent us that letter. You may as well finish what you started.”

“You want a joint?”

“I'll take a rain check.”

“I haven't got them on me anyway. Not with a cop in the same car.”

He said, “Relax, I'm not going to search you. Now let's talk about that letter. Why anonymous?”

“I'm his sister. If you knew I wrote it you'd ignore it— naturally his sister would think he was innocent.”

“That part didn't work. We assumed you sent it.”

She made a face. “Well that's not the point. The night Joe was supposedly slaughtering Ross Calisher up at Rand's place I saw him up at Cibecue. He couldn't have been both places at once.”

“You didn't tell this to anybody at the time?”

“I told Joe. He told me to keep my mouth shut.”

“And you did what he told you, just like that.”

“It wasn't like that. What do you take me for?”

“I'm still trying to sort that out,” he said.

“Joe said a lot of people would be in a lot of trouble if I said anything. He told me we could both get killed. I believed that.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody did get killed. Ross Calisher.”

“All right, so you kept your mouth shut then. Why open it now?”

“Because I think all bets are off now.”

“Where'd you get your secretarial training?”

“Phoenix,” she said. She gave him a surprised look.

“Okay. What do you mean, all bets are off?”

“Joe didn't kill the man. They established the time of death and it was less than an hour after that when I saw Joe and Maria up in Cibecue. They had the baby in the car, they'd gone up to visit our cousin Jesse. But Jesse wasn't home that night. He was sick, that's why we were all worried about him, and Will Luxan was convinced somebody had witched Jesse. So they had Rufus Limita up there for a while throwing spells and they had a big sing. But Jesse wasn't getting any better. Rufus is a pretty hip medicine man, he decided they ought to try the white hospital. That night when I got there they'd taken Jesse away to the hospital. I was leaving when I saw Joe and Maria drive in. They didn't see me. I doubt they stayed any longer than I did, but I know what time it was and Joe couldn't have been killing Ross Calisher because it's a couple of hours' drive from Cibecue to where Calisher lived.”

“You're still not telling me what bets are off.”

“There must have been some kind of bargain. Don't you get it?”

“Tell me about it.”

She was impatient. “Look, Joe confessed. He was, like,
happy
to go to jail for a murder he hadn't committed— it had to be some part of a deal he made, don't you see? Joe goes to jail and then all of a sudden Maria gets rich and moves down to Phoenix and the kid goes into private schools.”

“And you think somebody paid Joe to take the rap.”

“You know any other way to explain it?”

It fitted together well enough but it was all predicated on the assumption that Joe hadn't killed Calisher and there was only Angelina's word for that.