Stealing Fire Page 13

  I wondered how Wright had met up with Jake Fine. Chicago? Maybe Payton had grown up in the ritzy area around the lake. Maybe, without dough, he’d acquired a few contacts to fuel a lifestyle he once had and expected to have again. The city was full of people who were mobbed up, starting with the government and heading down to your local contractor.

  One thing I was certain of: Mr. Wright wouldn’t think twice about guaranteeing a loan for a Fellow, and he’d never think about checking out the lender. If the interest seemed a bit high, well, Payton would just have to bring in commissions to pay for it. Bottom line: Payton could have slipped a paper in front of Wright, he would have signed without thinking twice, wished the young man well, told him to stay away from women, and get back to work.

  About ten miles short of the Cameron Trading Post, I saw lights flashing. There it was, the Cadillac roadster. A highway patrol car wailed, its red and blue lights violating the night. I had never been so relieved to see the police in my life.

  I pulled my truck onto the left shoulder, nose to nose with the roadster. Iris was standing by the driver’s side door, and something was wrong with the three-way body language.

  I got out and one of the cops came toward me. “Sir, get back in your vehicle.”

  “It’s okay. That’s my wife you’re talking to, and I’ve come to take her back to Monument Valley.”

  “Sir, I said get back in your vehicle.” The cop was young, probably new and green, sensitive about his authority. I decided to play it easy. But that did not include getting back in the truck. Too many guns around here for that.

  “Officer, I respect the police. I emphasize that.”

  The other cop walked up beside the first one. This one was older and probably more experienced. He’d get it.

  “Get back in your vehicle, sir,” the greenie repeated.

  “With respect—I emphasize that respect—I believe that would be inappropriate.” How did I know she didn’t have a tail they hadn’t spotted, and some mob driver and his companion were right now in the greasewood with their weapons pointed at us?

  “I am a licensed private detective,” I said. I held both palms out facing them. “Iris, would you please get my wallet out?”

  My darling wife ignored their protests and moved fast. They were both talking at once anyway, and I couldn’t understand a word they said.

  As she held the wallet up, both cops drew their weapons—.45s, I noticed.

  I said, “Put those away, or I will feel forced to defend myself and my wife.”

  “You don’t give the orders, asshole, we do.” That was Officer Experience.

  “Iris, show them my permit to carry.”

  She did.

  They studied it.

  Stepping back, she tapped my boot with her toe. I knew she was reminding me that she was armed, too, a .22 in her boot. I’d gotten there before they patted her down.

  Goddamn dangerous situation in the dark on a lonely highway.

  “Iris, get in the driver’s seat and start the car.”

  “No, sir, you get in there.”

  But she was already in place, and I heard the engine rev.

  “Madam,” barked Greenie, “turn off that engine.”

  “Iris,” I said sharply, “keep it running.”

  The permit was giving Officer Experience pause.

  I kept my palms showing. I said, “I am no threat to you. In fact, I’m on your side. Will you hear what I have to say?”

  “Not until you’re in that truck,” said Greenie.

  “I’m going to tell you what’s going on here. If you listen, you can decide. If you don’t, there’s going to be shooting.”

  Iris screwed herself around in the driver’s seat, and I knew the .22 was below the windowsill in her hand.

  I figured the odds. On a duck between the vehicles, and no place for them to go, I could take one out. And since they’d be aiming at me and not her, Iris might get the other. But the risks were way-way-way too high.

  “Okay,” Officer Experience said. “Just keep your hands away from your weapon, and make it short and sweet.”

  “I will. This Cadillac belongs to the Santa Fe Railroad. I am a detective for that railroad. My wife is bringing the car to me.”

  “No, sir,” said Experience. “The car belongs to the railroad, but it’s reported stolen, and we were looking for it.”

  Mistake. That’s why they call bureaucracies bureaucracies.

  “Iris,” I said loudly and clearly, “you have the wallet. Would you throw it at the feet of these officers?”

  She did.

  Experience picked it up. The greenie maintained his shooter’s stance at me.

  “You’ll find my PI license and my Santa Fe Railroad ID.”

  I waited. Nothing changed.

  “You find them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now you know I’m an employee of the company that owns this car. Here’s how we can settle this. Get on your radio and ask to be patched through to this number.”

  I gave it to him. “Mr. Dennis, the man who set this up, will confirm my story. The car needed to be brought to me at the film shoot now going on in Monument Valley. My wife brought it this far. But we’ve been followed by gangsters recently—that’s the job I’m working right now—and I was afraid she might be followed and end up in trouble, or they might just follow her to find out where we are.

  “So I asked my boss to put a stolen report on it. That way you cops could follow her and spot any tail. But someone didn’t get the plan right when they told you.”

  Experience radioed in, got patched, and confirmed the story. He got orders to bring the roadster back to Flagstaff, where a railroad guy would pick it up.

  Greenie never moved the sights of the .45 off my face. I ached to get even.

  “So we’re helping you out,” said Experience.

  “As soon as your partner puts that gun away,” I said.

  When the .45 went down and they said nothing about the .22, I breathed easier. They hadn’t spotted it. I loved my wife.

  “So, now,” I said, “have you noticed any lights behind you, anything that might be a tail?”

  “Not since the other side of Cameron,” said Experience. “You’re going to follow each other, right?”

  “Yeah.” I breathed easier. “I think we’re safe,” I told Iris. I looked at the cops. “I guess I should say thanks to you, too.”

  “We accept,” said Experience.

  “Better not let me see you in my sights again,” said Greenie.

  Actually, I thought, it’s the other way.

  * * *

  Iris fell into my arms. I wrapped her up in a way that I can only describe as being one with the same person.

  Then she started to cry.

  She looked up at me, and tears kept streaming down her face.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Yazzie, he’s dead.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “I can’t speak the name of the dead. Not yet.”

  “Do you know, know for certain, the person is dead?”

  “Trust me. I know.”

  And I noticed, there on the cuff of her yellow blouse, a splotch of blood, new enough that it hadn’t gone all the way down to brown yet.

  “What do we do?” she said.

  “We get onto the rez and then you’re going to tell me exactly what happened. Everything will be all right.”

  “I’m the one who thought you should take this job. I’m never going to push you again.”

  “Iris. Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right. I promise.”

  I hoped that my voice sounded more certain to her than it did to myself.

  Twenty-six

  We turned onto a dirt two-track road three miles up the highway. It was on Navajo land. A few old tires—stacked and painted red, white, and blue—marked the road. We were safe.

  Iris’s voice was soft and low. Changed. “The room next door was quiet, then
there was an argument. It kept getting louder.”

  “The manager didn’t check it out?”

  “We’re not talking La Posada here. This is a no-tell motel. The manager was probably in his cups, behind the desk with a radio blaring.”

  “When I called you, a woman answered.”

  “She went off duty at noon. Then some dimwad drunk showed up.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “They were fighting about those damned plans.”

  “The Guggenheim?”

  “Yes.”

  “About selling them?”

  “Damn right,” she said.

  “You said ‘they.’ It was more than the man and woman?”

  “Them first. Then I think two men—I couldn’t tell.”

  “Go on.”

  “The voices got louder, but no one was like, you know, yelling like me and Frieda or Grandpa yell. The way they argued with their loud voices was scarier than people who just yell. Then I heard a crash into furniture, something broke, maybe a mirror.

  “There was silence.” Iris looked in her lap for a minute or two. “Then a woman screamed.” Pause. “It turned into inconsolable weeping.”

  “Don’t tell me you let them see you. That they know you heard.”

  “No. They didn’t see me.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Not all of them, anyway,” she said. “I waited awhile. The front door was open a crack, and I walked into the motel room.”

  “Iris.”

  “I know. I know.”

  And then Iris started to cry again. Not deep, heaving sobs, just tears, tears, a river of them running down her cheeks.

  “There she was, over this body,” Iris said, “Payton’s body. And she was keening. Not crying, but more like Indians do when they grieve. Or Jews. Keening. It made me cold from the inside out. I bent down to hold her.”

  “Did you recognize her?”

  “It was Helen Fine, the gorgeous woman with curves at the pool. I noticed the green eyes the guy who came to our house mentioned. Uh, Rick Fine, his card said.”

  “Okay. It’s okay.”

  “Seemed like she didn’t know I was there, though. I guess that’s when I got this.” She motioned to the blood on her sleeve and cuff. “It was a mess like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  “And then you took off in the roadster.”

  “I did one thing first.”

  Oh, God, this would be something I did not want to hear.

  “Iris?”

  “I walked into the lobby of the motel and turned the register around. The clerk was out cold with the radio blaring—the Yankees were ahead by three points—and I erased my name from the register. Did a really good job of it.”

  I held her tightly again. “You are the bravest woman who ever lived.”

  “Maybe one of the stupidest, too.”

  “We’re a matched pair on that count.”

  She nestled her head inside my chest. “I love you until the end of time.”

  We climbed into my truck and drove ten miles on back roads to a cousin of Eno’s. My cousins, too, but I only saw them once a year at the Shiprock Powwow. I talked to Ermalina. She didn’t ask for explanations or reasons. She didn’t wonder if helping us would get her into trouble. She pulled out a white blouse made from a Blue Bird flour sack, and a bucket. She led Iris around to the side of the hogan and gave her a rag. Iris washed herself down. I promised Ermalina coffee and sugar. She said not to worry about it, generosity always finds its way back home. Then the grandmother, cooking fry bread in a large iron pot, took Iris’s yellow blouse and tossed it into the fire under the pot.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Grandmother said. “This fire needed a little more fuel.” She smiled, almost toothless. “And remember that bluebirds are lucky. They are happy.”

  We thanked them and walked back to the truck.

  Twenty-seven

  For the first fifteen miles after we left Ermalina’s, I could only think about one thing—when this mess was over I was going to use the dough I got from Wright to pay for a full-on healing ceremony. Mom had a chant after the horror with my so-called father the year before. Iris did not, and she sure needed one now. She got a dead man’s blood on her. Mr. Wright? He needed a healing that covered incidents from decades before. That sort of healing was possible. I’d get a strong medicine man, probably the one who lived at Elephant Butte in Monument Valley. When the ceremony is done right, it takes time, and it is expensive. But you don’t want to cut corners.

  We rode in silence to Monument Valley. Before we got there, we started comparing stories. I told her what had happened while I was gone, and she told me what had happened at the house. We began to work the puzzle.

  “Iris, when we get to Goulding’s, someone has to go over to Oljato and check on Eno.”

  “He’s there alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “And pretty useless as far as self-defense,” she said.

  “In other words, a sitting duck.”

  We agreed that Eno needed to get away from the post. He could stay at a girlfriend’s house if his wife was at the end of her rope. He had several women, and kids, scattered over about twenty miles. There had to be someone who’d take him in.

  One problem solved.

  Iris pulled a notepad out of the glove box. “This is going to be complicated, and we can’t keep everything straight. Okay, I am putting down Get Eno out. That’s first on the list.”

  “Now write Call Santa Fe house—make sure everything is okay. And you need to talk to your mom so she doesn’t worry about you. My mom for the same reason.”

  Iris’s face went pale. “Yazzie. If anyone has harmed our mothers, in any way, I will personally, and with no remorse or regret, kill them.”

  “Just put it on the list, sweetheart.”

  “What else?”

  “There was a big Ute at old man Hambler’s. Then the next day Eno told me that a Ute was dogging me. Harry ran into him, too,” I said. “Although the man at Hambler’s didn’t know English well and looked very traditional. Not so with the Ute at Harry’s.”

  “Yazzie, we’re backed right up to the Ute Nation. Doesn’t sound like it’s the same man.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Do we want to avoid him or find him?”

  “We find him. Maybe he’s still at Harry’s.”

  Now I had inserted the “we” word into this mess. How terrible was this, me, a man who wanted his wife to help him protect and find other people? On the other hand, this was 1948. A woman could do anything a man could. On the other-other hand, this woman was my wife. I wanted to live long and happy with her.

  “Next?” she said.

  “We find out if Payton’s death has been reported.”

  “Yazzie, how could it not be reported?”

  “His girlfriend was a gangster’s daughter. Someone in that circle was the killer. You think a gangster can’t pay off a small-time cop and a drunk hotel clerk, and move a body?”

  “Should we call mortuaries? Never mind, that was stupid.”

  “It wasn’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it’s a good idea.”

  “Wait. Do we know Payton’s last name?”

  “Well, there’s a bump in the road,” I said.

  “I’ll ask Mrs. Wright,” said Iris.

  “Just out of the blue?”

  “I’ll finagle around, find out his name in the middle of a conversation. Then I’ll say I want to send her a thank-you note.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “I’ll wing it.”

  “What if Wright knows about Payton’s death?”

  “Then a consolation note,” said Iris. “We’d better know if she has news of his death.”

  “If not, don’t you be the one who tells her.”

  “You think I’m crazy or something?”

  I just let that one go.

  Twenty-eight

  When we got back to Goulding’s, the movie people we
re happy, so very happy, to see Iris again. Laughing, chatting, music, a little early evening drinking. Same crew, a few people I didn’t recognize—new to the group, a little uncomfortable—figuring out where to sit. Ford sitting alone on his red rock perch in a sling-back chair, glass of whiskey in one hand, looking out at the Great Mystery while Danny played his accordion.

  Wright and my grandfather were with John Wayne, and they were talking like old buddies. I supposed Wayne was about ten years or so older than me. He was handsome. A man’s man. Big guy with a boisterous laugh. I don’t know what Wright had said, but John Wayne thought it was a riot.

  We waved hello, asked them to save us a place, and went into Harry’s office to use the phone.

  Our mothers were safe and sound. They had also decided to get a Great Dane. A retired cop in town told them a Dane, particularly a black one, would scare off anyone. Frieda was afraid of guns. My mother was trigger-happy. A big dog seemed like a good compromise. The cop had friends with a nine-month-old Dane, he was too much for the elderly couple to handle, and they were ready to let it go to a good home. So we’d have a new family member when we got home. The dog’s name was Shorty, the moms had him all of three hours, and they were already arguing over who he liked best.

  I wasn’t sure how the dog would work with Iris’s cat, but Iris told me that it doesn’t take long for a cat to teach a dog who is the boss.

  Iris put her hand on the phone and whispered to her mother. All I caught was “Yes, Ma. I know, Ma. I promise, Ma.” Then Iris handed the phone to me—my turn. My mother said Wright was a bad customer, and I needed to dump him and get my tail back home with the money he already owed me. Monument Valley was no place for Iris after what she went through there last year, I was not even to look at one glamorous movie star, and she didn’t want Grandfather getting too attached to the trading post. That was past and done with as far as she was concerned.

  All I’d really wanted was to know if they were safe and to tell them I was hiring a PI to watch their house. Only a mother can make a grown man feel like a ten-year-old boy. It’s a real knack.