Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (8 page)

LEAPHORN BLAMED IT ON BEING LONELY—this bad habit he'd developed of talking
too much. And now he was paying the price. Instead of waiting until he'd
arrived at Louisa Bourebonette's little house in Flagstaff to tell her of his
adventures, the empty silence in his Tuba City motel room had provoked him into
babbling away on the telephone. He'd told her about his visit with John
McGinnis after his talk with Krause. He had given her a thumbnail sketch of
Hammar and asked if she could think of an easy, make-no-waves way to check on
his alibi.

"Can't you just call the police in Tempe and have them do it? I thought
that's what was done."

"If I was still a cop I could, providing we had any evidence a crime had
been committed and some reason to believe Mr. Hammar was a suspect in this
crime."

"Lieutenant Chee would do it."

"If he would, that would take care of problem one. We'd still have
problems two and three," Leaphorn said. "How is Chee going to explain
to the Tempe police why he wants them to poke into the life of a citizen when
there's not even a crime to suspect him of committing?"

"Yeah," Louisa said. "I see it. Academics can be touchy about
things like that. I'll handle it myself."

Which left Leaphorn merely breathing into the phone for a moment or two.
Then he said: "What?"

"Hammar was supposed to be teaching a lab class July eighth, isn't that
what he said? So I have a friend over in our biology department who knows
people in biology down at ASU. He calls somebody in his good-old-boy network
down at Tempe and they ask around and if Mr. Hammar cut his lab class that
day—or got somebody to handle it—then we know it. That sound okay?"

"That sounds great," Leaphorn said. It would also have been a
great place to end the conversation, just to tell Louisa he'd be there for
dinner tonight and say goodbye. But, alas, he kept on talking.

He told her about Dr. Woody and his project. Even though Louisa's field was
ethnology and, even worse, mythology—on the extreme opposite end of the
academic spectrum from microbiology—Louisa had heard of Woody. She said the
fellow she'd ask to make the call to Tempe for her sometimes worked with the
man, doing blood and tissue studies in his microbiology lab at the NAU.

Thus the restful evening Leaphorn had yearned for with Louisa had turned
into a threesome with Professor Michael Perez invited to join them.

"He's one of the brighter ones," Louisa had said, thereby
separating him from a good many of the hard science faculty, whom she found too
narrow for her taste. "He'll be interested in what you're doing, and maybe
he can tell you something helpful."

Leaphorn doubted that. In fact, he was wondering if he would ever learn
anything helpful about Catherine Pollard. He'd classified what McGinnis had
told him as no higher than interesting, and yesterday had left him wondering
why he was wasting so much energy on what seemed more and more like a hopeless
cause. He'd spent weary hours locating the sheep camp where Anderson Nez
resided during the grazing months. As expected, he found the Navajo taboo
against talking about the dead adding to the usual taciturnity of rural folks
dealing with a citified stranger. Except for a teenager who remembered
Catherine Pollard coming by earlier collecting fleas off their sheepdogs,
checking rodent burrows and quizzing everyone about where Nez might have been,
he learned just about nothing at the camp beyond confirming what Hammar had
told him. Yes indeed, Nez had worked part-time for several summers helping Dr.
Woody catch rodents.

He arrived at Louisa's house just before sunset with the high dry-weather
ice crystals dusted across the stratosphere reflecting red. The spot where he
usually parked his pickup in her narrow driveway was occupied by a
weather-beaten Saab sedan. Its owner was standing beside Louisa in the doorway
as Leaphorn came up the steps—a lanky man with a narrow face and a narrow white
goatee whose bright blue eyes were inspecting Leaphorn with undisguised
curiosity.

"Joe," Louisa said. "This is Mike Perez, who'll tell us both
more about molecular biology than we want to know."

They shook hands.

"Or about bacteria, or virology," Perez said, grinning. "We
don't understand the virus end of it yet, but that doesn't keep us from
pretending we do."

Louisa had presumed that Leaphorn, being Navajo, enjoyed mutton so the
entree was lamb chops. Having been raised a sheep-camp Navajo, Leaphorn was
both thoroughly tired of mutton and far too polite to say so. He ate his lamb
chop with green mint jelly and listened to Professor Perez discuss Woody's work
with rodents. Two or three questions early in the meal had established that
Perez seemed to know absolutely nothing that would connect him to Catherine
Pollard. But he knew an awful lot about the career and personality of Dr.
Albert Woody.

"Mike thinks Woody's going to be one of the great ones," Louisa
said. "Nobel Prize winner, books written about him. The Man Who Saved
Humanity. A giant of medical science. That sort of thing."

Perez looked embarrassed by that. "Louisa tends to exaggerate. It's an
occupational hazard of mythologists, you know," he said. "Hercules
wasn't really any stronger than Gorgeous George, and Medusa just had her hair
done in cornrows, and Paul Bunyan's blue ox was really brown. But I do think
that Woody has a shot at it. Maybe one chance in a hundred. But that's better
odds than Speed Ball lottery."

Louisa offered Leaphorn another chop. "Everyone in the hard sciences is
making the headlines these days," she said. "It's 'breakthrough of
the month' season. If it isn't a new way to clone toe-jam fungus, it's
rediscovering life on Mars."

"I saw something about that life on Mars business," Leaphorn said.
"It sounded like that molecules-in-the-asteroid discovery back in the
sixties. Didn't the geologists discredit that?"

Perez nodded. "This one is a NASA publicity ploy. They'd been having
their usual run of fiascoes and blunders, so they dug out an asteroid with the
proper minerals in it and conned the reporters again. New generation of science
writers, nobody remembered the old story, and it looked better on TV than the
footage of astronauts demonstrating their bigger bubblegum bubbles, and that
other sophomoric stuff they're always bragging about."

Louisa laughed. "Mike resents NASA because it siphons federal research
money away from his microbiology research. It must have some purpose."

Perez looked slightly offended. "I don't resent our Clowns in Space
program. It provides entertainment, what Woody's working on is dead serious."

"Like recording the blood pressure of prairie dogs," Louisa said.

Leaphorn watched her pass
Perez
the bowl of boiled new potatoes. He
had decided to drop out of this conversation and be a spectator.

Perez took a small potato. Looked at Louisa thoughtfully. Took another one.

"I just read a paper this morning from one of the microbiologists at
NIH," Perez said, pausing to sample the potato. "NIH." He
grinned at Louisa. "For you mythologists, that's the National Institutes
of Health."

Louisa tried to let that pass but didn't manage it. "Not affiliated
with the UN then," she said. "For you biologists, that's United
Period Nations."

Perez laughed. "Okay," he said. "Peace be with us all. My
point is, this guy was reporting dreadful stuff. For example, remember cholera?
Virtually wiped out back in the sixties. Well, there were almost a hundred
thousand new cases in South America alone in the past two years. And TB, the
old 'white plague,' which we finally eliminated about 1970. Well, now the world
death rate from that is up to three million per annum again—and the pathogen is
a DR mycobacterium."

Louisa gave Leaphorn a wry look. "I listen to this guy a lot and learn
his jargon. He's trying to say the TB germ has become drug-resistant."

"What we'd call the perpetrator," Leaphorn said. "Great
subject for dinner conversation," Louisa said. "Cholera and TB."

"More cheerful, though, than telling you about the summer-session
papers I've been grading," Perez said. "But I'd like to hear from Mr.
Leaphorn about this vanished biologist he's looking for."

"There's not much to tell," Leaphorn said. "She's a vector
control person for the Indian Health Service, or maybe it's the Arizona Health
Department. They sort of operate together. She's been working out of Tuba City.
About two weeks ago she drove out in the morning to check on rodent burrows and
didn't come back."

He stopped, waiting for Perez to ask the standard questions about boyfriend,
stalker, nervous breakdown, job stress, et cetera.

"I'd guess that's why Louisa wanted me to find out whether the Hammar
boy was teaching his lab on July eighth," Perez said. "Was that the
day?"

Leaphorn nodded.

"Mike Devente handles those lab programs," Perez said. "He
said Hammar was sick. Had food poisoning or something."

"Sick," Leaphorn said.

Perez laughed. "Or called in sick, anyway. With teaching assistants,
sometimes there's a difference."

Perez sampled his second potato, said: "Is he a suspect?"

"He might be if we had a crime," Leaphorn said. "All we have
is a woman who drove off in an Indian Health Service vehicle and didn't come
back."

"Louisa said this Pollard lady was checking sources for this latest
Yersinia
pestis
outbreak. Is that why you are interested in Woody?" THE FIRST
EAGLE

Leaphorn shook his head. "I never heard of him before today. But
they're both interested in prairie dogs, pack rats and so forth and in the same
territory. Not many people are, so maybe their paths crossed. Maybe he saw her
somewhere. Maybe she told him where she was going."

Perez looked thoughtful. "Yeah," he said.

"They're working in the same field, so he'd probably know about
her," Leaphorn said. "But in such a big country it's not likely
they'd meet, and if they did, why is she going to tell a virtual stranger that
she's going to run off with a government vehicle?"

"Mutual interests, though," Perez said. "They cut pretty
deep. How often do you find someone who wants to talk to you about fleas on
prairie dogs? And Woody is a downright fanatic about his work. Run him into
another human with any knowledge of infectious diseases, immunology, any of
that, and he's going to tell 'em a lot more about it than they'll want to know.
He's obsessed by it. He thinks the bacteria are going to eliminate mammals
unless we do something about it. And if they don't get us, the viruses will. He
feels this need to warn everybody about it. Jeremiah complex."

"I can sympathize with that," Leaphorn said. "I'm always
talking about what's wrong with the War on Drugs. Until I notice everybody is
yawning."

"Same problem with me," Perez said. "I'll bet you're not very
interested in discussing molecular mineral transmission through cell
walls."

"Only if you explained it so I could understand it." Leaphorn
said. He wished he hadn't mentioned Woody to Louisa, wished she hadn't invited
Perez, wished they could just be having a relaxing evening together. "And
first I guess you'd have to explain why I should care about it."

It was the wrong thing to say, inspiring Dr. Perez to defend pure science
and orate on the need to collect knowledge merely for the sake of knowledge.
Leaphorn nibbled at the second chop. He down-rated his character for lacking
the courage to refuse it. He examined his semihostile reaction to Perez. It had
begun when he saw the Saab parked where he liked to park in Louisa's driveway
and worsened when he saw the man standing beside her in the doorway, grinning
at him. And it clicked up another notch when he noticed that Perez seemed to be
looking upon him as a rival. Perez was jealous, he concluded. But then what
about Joe Leaphorn? Was Joe Leaphorn jealous? It was an unsettling thought, and
he took another bite of the lamb chop to drive it away.

Perez had completed his account of how pure science had led to the discovery
of penicillin and the whole arsenal of antibiotics, which had pretty well wiped
out infectious diseases. Now he digressed into how stupid misuse of those drugs
had turned victory into defeat and how the killer bugs were mutating furiously
into all sorts of new forms.

"Mom brings her kid in with a runny nose. The doc knows a virus is
causing it, and antibiotics won't touch the virus, but the kid is crying, and
Mom wants a prescription, so he gives her his pet antibiotic and tells Mama to
give it to the kid for eight days. And then two days later, the immune system
deals with the virus, and she stops the medicine. But two days of the
antibiotic"—Perez paused, took a long sip from his wineglass, wiped his
mustache—"has slaughtered all the bacteria in the kid's bloodstream
except—" Perez paused again, waved his hand. "Except the few freaks
who happened to be resistant to the drug. So, with the competition wiped out,
these freaks multiply like crazy, and the kid is full of drug-resistant
bacteria. And then—"

"And then it's time for dessert," Louisa said. "How about
some ice cream? Or brownies?"

"Or maybe both," Perez said. "Anyway, just a few years ago
about ninety-nine-point-nine percent of
Staphylococcus aureus
was
killed by penicillin. Now it's down to about four percent. Only one of the
other antibiotics works on the stuff now, and sometimes it doesn't work."

Louisa's voice came from the kitchen. "Enough! Enough! No more doomsday
talk." She emerged, carrying dessert. "And now thirty percent of the
people who die in hospitals die of something they didn't have when they came
in." She laughed. "Or is it forty percent? I've heard this lecture
before, but mythologists aren't good with numbers."

"It's about thirty percent," Perez said, looking miffed. A bowl of
ice cream and two brownies later, Perez pleaded the need to finish grading
papers and rolled his Saab out of Leaphorn's place in the driveway.