Talking God Part 15

"That would have been Delmar's car," Fleck said. "It was a nice one." Mama had talked of it before but Fleck had never seen it. Delmar must have bought it while Fleck was doing his time in Joliet.

"Delmar is his name, all right," Mama said. "The A-rabs got him hostage in Jerusalem or someplace. Otherwise he'd come to see me, Delmar would. He'd take care of me right. He was all man, that one was."

"I know he would," Fleck said. "Delmar is a good man."

"Delmar was all man," Mama said, still staring at the TV set. "He wouldn't let n.o.body treat him like a n.i.g.g.e.r. Do Delmar and he'd get you right back. He'd make you respect him. You can count on that. That's one thing you always got to do, is get even. If you don't do that they treat you like a G.o.dd.a.m.n animal. Step right on your neck. Delmar wouldn't let anybody not treat him right."

"No, Mama, he wouldn't," Fleck said. Actually, as he remembered it, Delmar wasn't much for fighting. He was for keeping out of the way of trouble.

Mama looked at him, eyes hostile. "You talk like you know Delmar."

"Yes, Mama. I do. I'm Leroy. I'm Delmar's brother."

Mama snorted. "No you ain't. Delmar only had one brother. He ended up a d.a.m.n jailbird."

The room smelled stale to Leroy. He smelled something that might have been spoiled food, and dust and the acidic odor of dried urine. Poor old lady, he thought. He blinked, rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes.

"I think it would be nice for you to get out in the halls at least. Get out of this room a little bit. See something different just for a change."

"I wouldn't be in here at all if the A-rabs hadn't got to Delmar. He'd have me someplace nice."

"I know he would," Fleck said. "I know he'd come to visit you if he could."

"I had two boys, actually," Mama said. "But the other one he turned out jailbird. Never amounted to s.h.i.+t."

It was just then that Leroy Fleck heard the cop. He couldn't make out the words but he recognized the tone. He strained to listen.

But Mama was still talking. "They said that one turned fairy up there in the prison. He let them use him like a girl."

Leroy Fleck leaned out into the hallway, partly to see if the voice which sounded like a cop really was a cop. It was. He was standing beside the receptionist and she was pointing down the hall. She was pointing right at Leroy Fleck.

Elkins had always told him he was naturally fast. He could think fast and he could move like lightning. "It's partly in your mind, and it's partly in your reflexes," Elkins had told him. "We can get your muscles built up, build up your strength, by pumping iron. But anybody can do that. That quickness, that's something you gotta be born with. That's where you got the edge if you know how to use it."

He used it now. He knew instantly that he could not let himself be arrested. Absolutely not. Maybe he'd come clear on the Santillanes affair. Probably not. Why else were those two Indian-looking cops d.o.g.g.i.ng him? But even if they didn't make him on that one, as soon as they matched his prints, they'd make him on something else. He'd worked for Elkins on too many jobs, and been on the prowl in too many airports and nightclubs, to ever let himself be arrested. He'd survived only by being careful not to be. But now the Fat Man, that fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d, had put an end to that. He'd have to get even with the Fat Man. But there was no time to think of that now. Within what was left of the same second, Fleck had decided how he would talk his way out of this. It would help that the Fat Man wasn't here to press his case. The receptionist apparently had orders to call the law anytime he showed up, but she was minimum-wage help. She wouldn't care what happened next.

Fleck moved back into the room and sat on the bed. "Mama," he said softly, "you're going to have some more company in just a minute. It's a policeman. I want to ask you to just keep calm and be polite."

"Policeman," Mama said. She spit on the floor by the television set.

"It's important to me, Mama," Fleck said. "It's awful important."

And then the policeman was at the door, looking in.

"You d.i.c.k Pfaff?"

It took Fleck the blink of an eye to remember that was the name he'd used when he'd checked Mama in here.

Fleck stood. "Yes sir," he said. "And this here is my Mama."

The policeman was young. He had smooth, pale skin and a close-cropped blond mustache. He nodded to Mama. She stared at him. Where was his partner? Fleck wondered. He would be the old hand on this team. If Fleck was lucky, the partner would be resting out in the patrol car, letting the rookie handle this p.i.s.sant, nothing little complaint. If they thought there was any risk at all of it being serious they would both be in here. In fact, Fleck suspected the police rules probably required it. Somebody was goofing off.

"We have a complaint that you caused a disturbance here," the policeman said. "We have a statement that you threatened to kill the manager."

Fleck produced a self-deprecatory laugh. "I'm ashamed of that. That's the main reason I came today-to apologize for the way I behaved." As he said it, Fleck became aware that Mama was no longer watching the television set. Mama was watching him.

"That's a pretty serious offense," the officer said. "Telling a man you're going to kill him."

"I doubt if I really quite said that," Fleck said. "But you notice how it smells in here? My Mama here, she hadn't been properly cleaned up. She had bedsores and all that and I just lost my temper. I had told him about it before."

Clearly the policeman was aware of the smell. Fleck could tell from his face that he'd switched from cautiously hostile to slightly sympathetic.

"If he's got back yet, I'll go out there and apologize to him. I'm sorry for whatever I said. Just got sore about the way they was treating Mama here."

The policeman nodded. "I don't think he's here anyway," he said. "That woman said he was off somewhere. I'll just check you for weapons." He grinned at Fleck. "If you didn't come in here armed, I'd say it's a pretty good argument on your side since he's about four times your size."

"Yes sir," Fleck said. He resisted the prison-learned instinct to spread his legs and raise his arms. The cop would never find his shank, which was in the slot he'd made for it inside his boot, but getting into the shakedown stance would tip off even this rookie that he was dealing with an ex-con.

"What do you want me to do?" Fleck asked.

"Just turn around. And then lock your hands over the back of your neck," the policeman said.

"Get down-" Mama began. Then it broke off into a sort of incoherent stammer. But she kept trying to talk and Fleck looked away from the policeman and looked at her instead. Her face was filled with an expression of such fierce contempt that it took Leroy Fleck back to his childhood.

"-and lick his G.o.dd.a.m.n shoes," Mama said.

He had made his decision even before she forced it out. "Now, Mama," he said, and bending down, he slid the blade out of his boot into his palm. He gripped it flat-side horizontal and as he stepped toward the policeman he was saying: "Mama had a stroke-" and with the word "stroke" the blade was driving through the uniform s.h.i.+rt.

It sank between the policeman's ribs with the full force of Fleck's weightlifter muscles behind it. And there, in that terribly vulnerable territory Elkins had called "behind the bone," Fleck's weightlifter's wrist flicked it, and flicked it and flicked it. Cutting artery. Cutting heart. The officer's mouth opened, showing white, even teeth below the yellow mustache. He made a kind of a sound, but not very loud because the shock was already killing him. It was hardly audible above the shouting that was going on in "The Young and the Restless."

Fleck released the knife handle, grabbed the policeman's shoulders, and lowered him to his knees. He removed the knife and wiped it on the uniform s.h.i.+rt. (If you do it all properly, Elkins would say, the bleeding is mostly inside. No blood all over you.) Then Fleck let the body slide to the floor. Face down. He put the knife back in his boot and turned toward Mama. He intended to say something but he didn't know what. His mind wasn't working right.

Mama was looking at the policeman, then she looked up at him. Her mouth was partly open, working as if she was trying to say something. Nothing came out but a sort of an odd sound. A squeaking sound. It occurred to him that Mama was afraid. Afraid of him.

"Mama," Leroy Fleck said. "I got even. Did you see that? I didn't let him step on me. I didn't kiss any boot."

He waited. Not long but more time than he could afford under the circ.u.mstances, waiting for Mama to win her struggle to form words. But no words came and Fleck could read absolutely nothing in her eyes except fear. He walked out the door without a glance toward the reception desk, and down the narrow hallway toward the rear exit, and out into the cold, gray rain.

19.

Museum Security had located Dr. Hartman, and Dr. Hartman had located possible sources of the fish trap. It was a matter of deciding in what part of the world the trap had originated (obviously in a place which produced both bamboo and good-sized fish) and then knowing how to retrieve data from the museum's computerized inventory system. The computer gave them thirty-seven possible bamboo fish traps of appropriate antiquity. Dr. Hartman knew almost nothing about fish and almost everything about primitive construction methods and quite a bit about botany. Thus she was able to organize the hunt.

She pushed her chair back from the computer terminal, and her hair back from her forehead.

"I'm going to say this Palawan Island tribe is the best bet, and then we should check, I'd say, this coastal Borneo collection, and then probably Java. If none of those collections is missing a fish trap, then it's back to the drawing board. That must be a Smithsonian fish trap and if it is then we can find out where it was stored."

She led them down the hallway, a party of five now with the addition of a tired-looking museum security man. With Hartman and Rodney leading the way, they hurried past what seemed to Leaphorn a wilderness of branch corridors all lined with an infinity of locked containers stacked high above head level. They turned right and left and left again and stopped, while Hartman unlocked a door. Above his head, Leaphorn noticed what looked like, but surely wasn't, one of those carved stone caskets in which ancient Egyptians interred their very important corpses. It was covered with a sheet of heavy plastic, once transparent but now rendered translucent with years of dust.

"I have a thing with locks," Dr. Hartman was saying. "They never want to open for me."

Leaphorn considered whether it would be bad manners to lift the plastic for a peek. He noticed Chee was looking too.

"Looks like one of those Egyptian mummy cases," Leaphorn said. "What do you call 'em? But they wouldn't have a mummy here."

"I think it is," Chee said, and lifted the sheet. "Yeah, a mummy coffin." His expression registered distaste. "I can't think of the name either."

Dr. Hartman had solved the lock. "In here," she said, and ushered them into a huge, gloomy room occupied by row after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving racks. As far as Leaphorn could see in every direction every foot of shelf s.p.a.ce seemed occupied by something-mostly by what appeared to be locked canisters.

Dr. Hartman examined her list of possible fish trap locations, then walked briskly down the central corridor, checking row numbers.

"Row eleven," she said, and did an abrupt left turn. She stopped a third of the way down and checked bin numbers.

"Okay, here we are," she said, and inserted her key in the lock.

"I think I had better handle that," Rodney said, holding his hand out for the key. "And this is the time to remind everyone that we may be interested in fingerprints in here. So don't be touching things."

Rodney unlocked the container. He pulled open the door. It was jammed with odds and ends, the biggest of which was a bamboo device even larger than the fish trap found by the janitor. It occupied most of the bin, with the remaining s.p.a.ce filled with what seemed to be a seining nets and other such paraphernalia.

"No luck here," Rodney said. He closed and locked the door. "On to, where was it? Borneo?"

"I'm having trouble with making this seem real," Dr. Hartman said. "Do you really think someone killed Henry and left his body in here?"

"No," Rodney said. "Not really. But he's missing. And a guard's been killed. And a fish trap was located out of place. So it's prudent to look. Especially since we don't know where else to look."

The Borneo fisherman's bin, Dr. Hartman's second choice, happened to be only two aisles away.

Rodney unlocked it, pulled open the door.

They looked at the top of a human head.

Leaphorn heard Dr. Hartman gasp and Jim Chee suck in his breath. Rodney leaned forward, felt the man's neck, stepped aside to give Chee a better view. "Is this Highhawk?"

Chee leaned forward. "That's him."

Some of the homicide forensic crew was still out at the Twelfth Street entrance and got there fast. So did the homicide sergeant who'd been working the Alice Yoak.u.m affair. Rodney gave him the victim's identification. He explained about the fish trap and how they had found the body. Dr. Hartman left, looking pale and shaken. Chee and Leaphorn remained. They stood back, away from the activity, trying to keep out of the way. Photographs were taken. Measurements were made. The rigid body of Henry Highhawk was lifted out of the bin and onto a stretcher.

Leaphorn noticed the long hair tied into a Navajo-style bun, he noticed the narrow face, sensitive even in the distortion of death. He noticed the dark mark above the eye which must be a bullet hole and the smear of blood which had emerged from it. He noticed the metal brace supporting the leg, and the shoe lift lengthening it. Here was the man whose name was scrawled on a note in a terrorist's pocket. The man who had drawn a second terrorist all the way to Arizona, if Leaphorn was guessing correctly, to a curing ceremonial at the Agnes Tsosie place. Here was a white man who wanted to be an Indian-specifically to be a Navajo. A man who dug up the bones of whites to protest whites digging up Indian bones. A man important enough to be killed at what certainly must have been a terrible risk to the man who killed him. Leaphorn looked into Highhawk's upturned face as it went past him on the police stretcher. What made you so important? Leaphorn wondered. What made Mr. Santillanes polish his pointed shoes and pack his bags and come west to New Mexico looking for you? What were you planning that drew someone with a pistol into this dusty place to execute you? And if you could hear my questions, if you could speak, would you even know the answer yourself? The body was past now, disappearing down the corridor. Leaphorn glanced at Chee. Chee looked stricken.

Chee had found himself simultaneously watching what had been Henry Highhawk emerge from the container and watching his own reaction to what he was seeing. He had been a policeman long enough to have conditioned himself to death. He had handled an old woman frozen in her hogan, a teenaged boy who had hanged himself in the restroom at his boarding school, a child backed over by a pickup truck driven by her mother. He had been investigating officer of so many victims of alcohol that he no longer tried to keep them sorted out in his memory. But he had never been involved with the death of someone he'd known personally, someone who interested him, someone he'd been talking to only a matter of minutes before he died. He had rationalized his Navajo conditioning to avoid the dead, but he hadn't eliminated the ingrained knowledge that while the body died, the chindi chindi lingered to cause ghost sickness and evil dreams. Highhawk's lingered to cause ghost sickness and evil dreams. Highhawk's chindi chindi would now haunt this museum's corridors. It would haunt Jim Chee as well. would now haunt this museum's corridors. It would haunt Jim Chee as well.

Rodney had been inspecting the items removed from the container where Highhawk's body had rested. He held up a flat, black box with something round connected to it by wires. "This looks a little modern for a Borneo fis.h.i.+ng village," he said, showing the box to all of them. The box was a miniature Panasonic ca.s.sette tape recorder.

"I think it's Highhawk's tape recorder," Chee said. "He had one just like that when he was at Agnes Tsosie's place. And I saw it again in the office at his place." Chee could see now that tape recorder was wired to one of those small, battery-operated watches. It was much like the nine-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent model he was wearing except it used hands instead of digital numbers.

"I think it's wired to turn on the recorder," Leaphorn said. "Possibly that's what Highhawk was talking about on that telephone call. Getting that thing fixed."

Rodney inspected it carefully. He laughed. "If it was, it wasn't fixed very well," he said. "If Highhawk did this he doesn't know any more about electricity than my wife. And she thinks it leaks out of the telephone." He unwound the wires and removed the watch. Holding it carefully by the edges, he opened the recorder and popped out the miniature tape. He weighed it in his hand, examined it, and put it back in the machine. "Let's see what we have on this," he said. "But first, let's see what else we have in this container."

Rodney sorted gingerly among the fish nets, bamboo fish spears, canoe paddles, clothing, and a.s.sorted items that Chee couldn't identify. Pressed against the side of the bin, partly obscured by folded twine of fish netting, was something white. It looked like leather. In fact, to Chee it looked like it might be a yei yei mask. mask.

"I guess that's it," Rodney said. "Except your team will come along and do a proper search and find the murder weapon in there, and the killer's photograph, fingerprints, and maybe his business card."

"We'll catch that later," the sergeant said. "We'll get somebody from the museum who knows what's supposed to be in there and what isn't."

Chee leaned past Rodney and turned the white leather between his fingers. The mask of Talking G.o.d stared up at him.

"This is the mask Highhawk had been working on," Chee said. "Or one of them."

The sergeant retrieved it, turned it over in his hands, examined it. "What'd you say it was?" he asked Chee, and handed it to him.

"It's the Yeib.i.+.c.hai mask. A Navajo religious mask. Highhawk was working on this one, or one just like it, for that mask display downstairs."

"Oh," the sergeant said, his curiosity satisfied and his interest exhausted. "Let's get this over with."

They followed Highhawk's body into the bright fluorescent lighting of the conservancy laboratory. When the sergeant finished whatever he wanted to do with him, Henry Highhawk would go from there to the morgue. Now the cause of death seemed apparent. The blackened round mark of what must be a bullet hole was apparent above the left eye. From it a streak of dried blood discolored the side of Highhawk's face.

The sergeant went through Highhawk's pockets, spreading the contents on a laboratory table. Wallet, pocketknife, a half-used roll of Turns, three quarters, two dimes, a penny, a key ring bearing six keys, a crumpled handkerchief, a business card from a plumbing company, a small frog fetish carved out of a basaltic rock.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" the sergeant said, pus.h.i.+ng the frog with his finger.

"It's a frog fetish," Leaphorn said.

The sergeant had not been happy to have two strangers and Rodney standing around while he worked. The sergeant had the responsibility, but obviously Rodney had the rank.

"What the h.e.l.l is a frog fetish?" the sergeant asked.

"It's connected with the Navajo religion," Leaphorn said. "Highhawk was part Navajo. He had a Navajo grandmother. He was interested in the culture."

The sergeant nodded. He looked slightly less hostile.

"No bin key?" Chee asked.

The sergeant looked at him. "Bin key?"

"When he left his office last night, he took the key that unlocks all these bins off a hook beside his door and put it in his pocket," Chee said. "It was on a little plain steel ring." The killer probably had taken Highhawk's key to open the bin and to relock it. Unless of course the killer was another museum employee with his (or her) own key.

"You saw him put the key in his pocket?"

Chee nodded. "He took it off the hook. He put it in his right front pants pocket."

"No such key in his pocket," the sergeant said. "What you see here is everything he had on him. From the car keys he was carrying, it looks like he was driving a Ford. You know about that? You know the license number?"

"There was a Ford Mustang parked in the driveway by his house. I'd say about five or six years old. I didn't notice the license. And I don't know if it was his," Chee said.