Read Online Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] by Listening Woman [txt] - Free Book Online Page B

Leaphorn said. “So we’re interested in anybody who has business out there.”
    “My business doesn’t have anything to do with crime,” Theodora Adams said. She looked amused.
    “It doesn’t have anything to do with the law, or with the police.
    It’s just personal business. And if you’re not willing to help me, I’ll find somebody who will.” And with that, she walked across the yard and disappeared into the trading post. One of the disadvantages of the Short Mountain Trading Post location was that it was impossible for shortwave radio communication. To contact Tuba City, Leaphorn had to drive out of the declivity made by the wash, going high enough up the mesa so that his reception wasn’t blanked out by the terrain. He found Captain Largo suitably surprised at the Adams woman’s aim of visiting the Tso hogan. “You want me to take her?”
    Leaphorn asked. “I’m going out to see the Cigaret woman and it’s sort of on the way. Same direction anyway.”
    “No,” Largo said. “Just find out what the hell she’s doing.”
    “I’m pretty sure she’s not going to tell me,” Leaphorn said. “She already told me it was none of our business.”
    “You could bring her in here for questioning.”
    “Could I? You recommending that?” The pause was brief—Largo remembering the reason for his original interest in Theodora Adams.
    “I guess not,” he said. “Not unless we have to. Handle it your own way. But don’t let anything happen to her.” The way Leaphorn had already decided to handle it would be to offer to drive Theodora Adams to the Tso hogan. If he did that there would be no conceivable way she could prevent him from learning why she had gone there. He would find the Adams woman and get on the road. But when he got back to the trading post, it was after 10 P.M. and Theodora Adams was gone. So was a GMC pickup truck owned by a woman named Naomi Many Goats. “I saw her talking to Naomi Many Goats,” Mcginnis said. “She came in here and got me to draw her a little map of how to get to the Tso place. And then she asked if you were headed back to Tuba City, and I told her you’d probably just gone off to do some radio talking because you was fixing to go out and talk to the Cigaret woman. So she got me to show her where the Cigaret hogan was on the map. Then she asked who she could hire to take her to the Tso place, and I said you never could tell with you Navajos, and the last thing I saw her doing was talking to Naomi.”
    “She get the Many Goats woman to drive her?”
    “Hell, I don’t know,” Mcginnis said. “I didn’t see ‘em leave.”
    “I’ll guess she did,” Leaphorn said. “It occurs to me that I’ve been telling you a hell of a lot and you ain’t been telling me nothing,” Mcginnis said. “Why does that girl want to go to the Tso hogan?”
    “Tell you what,” Leaphorn said. “When I find out, I’ll tell you.”
    By the relaxed standards of the Navajo Reservation, the first three miles of the road to the hogan of Hosteen Tso were officially listed as “unimproved—passable in dry weather.” They led up Short Mountain Wash to the site where the anthropological team was excavating cliff ruins. The road followed the mostly hard-packed sand of the wash bottom, and if one was careful to avoid soft places, offered no particular hazard or discomfort. Leaphorn drove past the ruins a little after midnight. Except for a pickup and a small camping trailer parked in the shade of a cottonwood, there was no sign of life. From there, the road quickly deteriorated from fair, to poor, to bad, to terrible, until it was, in fact, no road at all, merely a track. It left the narrowing wash via a subsidiary arroyo, snaked its way through a half mile of broken shale and emerged on the top of Rainbow Plateau. The landscape became a roadbuilder’s nightmare and a geologist’s dream. Here, eons ago, the earth’s crust had writhed and twisted. Nothing was level. Limestone sediments,