Read Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] for Free Online

laryngitis. He can hardly talk. I guess
I’ll head back to Flagstaff and try it later.”
    “Too bad,” Leaphorn said.
    “Another thing. He’d told them we were coming today. And no
telephone, of course, to tell them we’re not.”
    “Where do these guys live?”
    Louisa’s expression brightened. “Are you about to volunteer to
interpret? The Navajo’s a fellow named Dalton Cayodito and the address
I have is Red Mesa Chapter House. The other one’s a Ute. Lives at
Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation. How’s your Ute?”
    “Maybe fifty words or so,” Leaphorn said. “But I could help you with
Cayodito.”
    “Let’s do it,” Louisa said.
    “I’m thinking that a couple of the men on that list are supposed to
live up there in that border country. One of ’em’s Casa Del Eco Mesa.
That couldn’t be too far from the chapter house.”
    Louisa laughed. “Mixing business with pleasure. Or I should say your
business with my business. Or maybe my business with something that
really isn’t your business.”
    “The one who has a place up there—according to the notes on that
paper anyway—is Everett Jorie. I can’t place him, but the name’s
familiar. Probably something out of the distant past. I thought we
could ask around.”
    Louisa was smiling at him. “You’ve forgotten you’re retired,” she
said. “For a minute there, I thought you were going along for the
pleasure of my company.”
    Leaphorn drove the first lap—the 110 miles from his house to the
Mexican Water Trading Post. They stopped there for a sandwich and to
learn if anyone there knew how to find Dalton Cayodito. The teenage
Navajo handling the cash register did.
    “An old, old man,” she said. “Did he used to be a singer? If that’s
him, he did the Yeibichai sing for my grandmother. Is that the one
you’re looking for?”
    Louisa said it was. “We heard he lived up by the Red Mesa Chapter
House.”
    “He lives with his daughter,” the girl said. “That’s Madeleine
Horsekeeper, I think they call her. Her place is -" She paused,
thought, made a gesture of frustration with her hands, penciled a map
on a grocery sack and handed it to Louisa.
    “How about a man named Everett Jorie?” Leap-horn said. “You know
where to find him? Or Buddy Baker? Or George Ironhand.”
    She didn’t, but the man who had been stacking Spam cans on shelves
along the back wall thought he could help.
    “Hey,” he said. “Joe Leaphorn. I thought you’d retired. What you
want Jorie for? If you got a law against being a damned nuisance, you
oughta had him locked up long ago.”
    They left the trading post a quarter hour later armed with explicit
instructions on how to find the two places Jorie might be located, an
addendum to the grocery-sack map outlining which turns to take from
which roads to find Ironhand, and a vague notion that Baker might have
moved into Blanding. Along with that they took a wealth of speculative
gossip about Utah-Arizona borderland political ambitions, social
activities, speculation about who might have robbed the Ute Casino, an
account of the most recent outrages committed by the Forest Service,
Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Park Service, and
other federal, state and county agencies against the well-being of
various folks who lived their hardscrabble lives along the Utah border
canyon country.
    “No wonder the militia nuts can sign people up,” Louisa said, as
they drove away. “Is it as bad as that?”
    “They’re mostly just trying to enforce unpopular laws,” Leaphorn
said. “Mostly fine people. Now and then somebody gets arrogant.”
    “OK, now,” Louisa said. “These guys you mentioned in there—Jorie and
Ironhand and so forth. I guess they’re the three who robbed the casino?”
    “Or maybe robbed it,” Leaphorn said. “If we believe Gershwin.”
    Louisa was driving and spent a few moments looking thoughtful.
    “You know,” she said, "as long as I’ve been out here I still