Hillerman, Tony (26 page)

“Neither,” Korolenko said. “I have an errand to run. I want you to keep Mr. Cotton here for . . .” he glanced at the clock, “exactly thirty minutes. That phone call told us that Cotton can’t hurt us any more than he already has. And there’s no reason to harm him. If he’s harmed, I’ll give the police your description.” Korolenko handed Adams the shotgun. “Don’t let him make any calls,” he said. “And ten minutes after twelve, you can leave and let him leave if he wants to go.”

And with that Korolenko was gone. Cotton heard the clatter of a coat hanger in the entryway closet, the front door closing. A minute later Korolenko’s old Lincoln was purring out of the driveway.

Adams was looking at the shotgun, examining its safety catch and the pump action. “Any objection to waiting thirty minutes?”

“None,” Cotton said. “You don’t even need the gun.”

“Might as well keep it, if you don’t mind. If you got away and screwed something up, maybe I wouldn’t get my money.”

“That’s reasonable,” Cotton said. He wondered what sort of mission Korolenko was on, but it didn’t matter. He felt only euphoria, elation. Janey Janoski. Janey Janoski, whose dark eyes lit like candles when she laughed, had done it for him. She had read through the story, and she had hated it for what it would do to people, and then—still hating it—she had folded it neatly and walked down to the pressroom, and handed it to Tom Rickner.

The man was behind Korolenko’s desk now, dialing the telephone, watching Cotton with noncommittal, incurious eyes while he listened to it ring, then talking in a low voice. “This is me. Yeah.” He grinned. “Me. I’m at the old man’s house. Cotton’s here with me. The old man said I was just to keep him here thirty minutes and then leave.” He paused, listening, looking at Cotton. “That’s what he said. Got a call from somewhere that Cotton’s story has already been printed. Yeah. Today. Just a few minutes ago, I guess. O.K. I’ll hold on.” He put his hand over the receiver, smiled at Cotton. “Just checking. I don’t work for the old man here. Wouldn’t want to turn you loose if I’m not supposed to.”

“Or you wouldn’t get paid,” Cotton said. A thought struck him. “By the way, how much do you get paid for this?”

“I don’t get rich.” The man glanced away from Cotton, inspecting the photographs of hunting dogs on the walls, utterly unembarrassed. A gust of wind eddied around the eaves, rattling sleet against the window. Two or three minutes ticked away. He’s like me, Cotton thought. Just doing an impersonal job.

“Hell of a day,” Adams said. And then the telephone receiver squawked. “Yeah, I’m still here. O.K. I’m all done then? Is that right? O.K.” He hung up. Looked at Cotton, grinning. “All done.”

“All done,” Cotton said. He intended to say more but his voice was shaky. He felt watery, weak. There was still almost fifteen minutes left of Korolenko’s thirty-minute wait, but the man seemed to be ignoring Korolenko’s instructions.

He put the shotgun back in the gun case and picked up his coat from the chair where Korolenko had draped it. He weighed it on his hand, surprised. “The old son-of-a-bitch stole my gun.” He plunged his hand into the pocket, looking at Cotton. “How about that? That old bastard took it.”

“Buy another one,” Cotton said. In a moment he was going to get up and walk out of here and never come back. But now he felt dizzy and his legs were weak. He was thinking about why Korolenko had taken the pistol.

“Well,” Adams said. “Goodbye now.” He walked out.

“Goodbye,” Cotton said. He knew why Korolenko had taken the pistol. There was the sound of the front door closing. He knew why Korolenko wanted thirty minutes. He glanced at the clock. Ten minutes now. Cotton pushed himself stiffly out of the chair, picked up his coat, walked through the cold, silent living room. In the entry hall, he paused. He hadn’t heard a car start and he would rather not see the man again, not ever. He would rather wait until the man drove away. He hesitated a moment in the entry hall. And then he opened the front door.

Captain Whan was walking up the front steps. Behind him Adams was leaning with his good hand against a police car, being searched by a man in a tweed overcoat while another officer watched. Whan stopped, looking at Cotton, his face surprised. How long had he been waiting out here? Waiting for what?

“Too bad,” Cotton said. “I’m still alive. You don’t have a corpus delicti.”

Whan ignored the words. “What’s been going on in there?”

“Do you mean how come the man there didn’t shoot me so you’d have a case? I don’t know. It was damn sure no thanks to you.”

Whan flushed. What he was saying, Cotton realized, might not be entirely fair.

“We figured he’d bring you out with him,” Whan said. “That would have been the safest time to take him.”

And, Cotton thought, the time when there would be evidence that a felony was being committed. Something concrete to take before a grand jury. But Whan was just doing his job. Nothing personal.

“No gun,” the man in the tweed coat said. “Nothing.”

Whan turned and walked back to the car. Cotton followed, interested in this.

“Mr. Harge,” Captain Whan said, “what brings you to our town? And where’s your gun?”

“Just visiting,” the man said.

“Mr. Cotton, anything happen in there?”

“Nothing that would interest you,” Cotton said.

“Take him downtown and book him on something,” Whan told the tweed overcoat. “I’ll be down to talk to him later.” He turned to Cotton. “You’ll ride downtown with me.”

“I guess not,” Cotton said. “Thanks, but I’ve got things to do. I’ll call a cab.”

Whan’s mouth tightened. “This man you’re consorting with here is a known felon. There’s no reason I can’t take you in for an hour or two just on general circumstance.”

“O.K.,” Cotton said. “It’ll give me a chance to thank you for all this close guarding you’ve been doing for me.” He waited in the police car while Whan and a policeman checked the house.

Whan drove carefully on the icy street, flicking on his warning blinker as he pulled onto the freeway.

“You said Korolenko fired the shotgun into the wall. But you didn’t say why.”

“I said you should ask him why,” Cotton said. “I had my back turned. Maybe he was seeing if it would work, or maybe it was an accident.”

The sleet was snow now, small dry flakes which the wiper blades dusted off the windshield. Whan was looking straight ahead, driving very slowly. “You’re not very talkative today,” he said. “I can remember when you talked a lot. What happened?”

“That was way back when I thought I might get some police protection. Before I knew you’d just use me as a decoy.”

“I’m not going to argue about it,” Whan said. “What did he do with his gun?”

“To tell the truth, I never saw his gun.”

The radio speaker emitted clipped, precise female radio-dispatcher words. A three-vehicle collision at the intersection of Seventh and Marberry.

“Look, Cotton,” Whan said. “I can see why you’re sore. But I told you we couldn’t have somebody sleeping with you. We haven’t got the people. And you know yourself the only way to end this business is to catch them at it. Now, what can we charge Harge with? If he threatened you, we might make an assault stick with the kind of record he has.”

“Nothing,” Cotton said. The radio interrupted him. Unit 17 was instructed to pick up Officer Matthiessen at the east entrance of the federal building. “If he had a gun, he didn’t take it out of his pocket.” Where was the gun now? Cotton glanced at his watch. Korolenko’s thirty minutes were up. Expired six minutes ago.

Whan slowed, flicked the turn indicator, and angled gradually into the exit lane for Central Avenue. “Goddamn it,” he said. “You can’t expect . . .”

“Things have changed, captain. The story that wasn’t supposed to get printed got printed in today’s
Tribune.
Nobody’s gunning for John Cotton right now. I wish you luck on . . .”

The radio interrupted again. “All units in vicinity of the Senate Downtowner at Capitol and Second . . .” This would be it. Korolenko had estimated the time he needed almost exactly right. Cotton closed his eyes as he listened. The female voice unflustered, unhurried, detached, reporting a homicide in the lobby of the Senate Downtowner. Homicide. Then Korolenko’s bullets had hit where he wanted them to hit. That was exactly what you would expect of Joe Korolenko. The voice droned on, flat, no trace of emotion, reporting a statistic. Against his eyelids, Cotton tried to project the scene. The lobby aswarm with dentists. Korolenko among them. Greeting an old friend here and there, waiting. Eugene Clark arriving, as the Senator always arrived, exactly on time for the ceremonial entry into the dining room. And then the shots. Two or three. As many as were necessary. Nothing said because there would be nothing to say. And then Korolenko would shoot himself.

“Subject surrendered and is disarmed and in custody of officers,” the voice said. “No additional units are needed.” It paused. “Unit 17. Matthiessen is waiting at the east entrance of the Federal Building. Please confirm you’re en route to pick him up.”

“Hell of a place for a shooting,” Whan said. “Some nut knocking off his wife, probably.” He paused. “But who knows?”

Cotton kept his eyes closed. Why would Korolenko turn himself in? The answer was obvious. The death of Senator Clark would crowd the corruption story out of the banner headline spot today and tomorrow. But, by staying alive himself, Korolenko could keep the assassination story alive. Keep it alive through his arraignment, the preliminary hearing, all the way through the trial. And control it, timing his statements and even timing the trial, using it all as a forum to discredit whatever would be left of Eugene Clark’s organization.

“I’ve got to use the telephone when we get to your office,” Cotton said. Korolenko would need help.

I
thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters — Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green “crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers — my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in
The Blessing Way
(1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper & Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I — having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn — gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of
People of Darkness
(1980) make sense — and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.

I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.

—Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn novels:
The Blessing Way
;
Dance Hall of the Dead
;
Listening Woman

Chee novels:
People of Darkness
;
The Dark Wind
;
The Ghostway

Leaphorn/Chee novels:
Skinwalkers
;
A Thief of Time
;
Talking God
;
Coyote Waits
;
Sacred Clowns
;
The Fallen Man
;
First Eagle
;
Hunting Badger
;
The Wailing Wind

Standalone novels:
The Fly on the Wall
;
Finding Moon

All titles were published in New York by Harper & Row, until 1993’s
Sacred Clowns
, by which time the house, still based in New York, had become HarperCollins.

~

Lt. Joe Leaphorn must stalk a supernatural killer known as the “Wolf-Witch” along a chilling trail of mysticism and murder.

TH: It was easy enough to make the Enemy Way ceremony germane to the plot. It is used to cure illness caused by exposure to witchcraft and my villain was trying to keep the Navajo away from his territory by spreading witchcraft fears. The problem was devising a way for Joe Leaphorn to connect the ceremony and the killer. The solution came to me when I noticed the peculiar pattern of sweat stains on a felt hat caused by a silver concho hatband. With that in mind, I skip back to an early chapter, write in Leaphorn at a trading post seeing the villain buying a hat to replace one stolen and wondering why someone would steal an old hat and not the expensive silver. That done, I then skip forward to the “scalp shooting” phase of the ceremony, have Leaphorn notice the “scalp” is a sweat-stained hat, find the “scalp shooter” who has delivered the hat to the ceremony, learn from him where (and why) he stole the hat, and thereby solve the mystery.

~