The Threepersons Hunt

“I don’t know. But I never saw a cop without two and a half tons of paper.”

“Look Buck, I’m sorry I jumped down your throat before.”

“No charge.”

“I just don’t want to talk about Lisa right now. Whole thing’s still too raw, you know?”

Stevens had kind eyes when he wasn’t hiding himself behind wisecracks. “It’s only I was worried a little that maybe you got sore because I got the headquarters beat so fast.”

“You can’t help it you had the misfortune to be born blond. You’ll just have to learn to live with your handicap.”

It wasn’t bitterness; he wasn’t sure how to define it. If there was blame it wasn’t Buck’s. Watchman had been looking at his boondock beats and was begi

He’d had an offer from Diego Orozco’s private agency in Phoenix. The pay was half again his present salary and it meant he’d have a permanent base of operations instead of being transferred from ghost town to ghost town every year. But the work wasn’t movie-private-eye stuff, it was industrial espionage and tracers: repo cars, missing persons, errant spouses.

There’d been a feeler of interest from the Federal narcs but that would mean dealing with human garbage all the time and he wasn’t zealous enough for that line of work. Ambition had never burned many holes in his pockets. He had a tendency to drift; he knew he’d let it all ride a while until one day something deep in his viscera made the decision for him. When the time came he’d know.

5.

Wilder had two bits of information for him, one from the city police. The rear license plate of the stolen Ford had been smeared with mud. “I’d call it a mark of hasty professionalism. An amateur wouldn’t think about the license plates at all. A pro with the right co

Watchman said, “What’s the other item?”

“He’s got a sister.”

“I know. What about her?”

“She lives in Whiteriver,” Wilder said. “Alone.”

Watchman looked at him. “She’s twenty-eight.”

“I can’t help that, Sam.”

Watchman went into the canteen and bought a cardboard cheese sandwich from the machine and a container of coffee. It was pushing ten o’clock and if he didn’t hit the road the whole day would be destroyed; it was a good three hours’ drive up to the Reservation.

He swallowed the last of the cheese and dropped the Styrofoam coffee cup in the trash liner and went out to the lot.

Someone came out of the building and stopped to peer around and when Watchman put the car in motion the uniformed figure loped toward him waving a sheet of paper.

It was Wilder. Watchman pulled up beside him. “What form did I forget to fill out?”

“Glad I caught you. They thought you’d already gone.” Wilder handed him the paper. “Just came in the mail. Here’s a copy of the envelope.”

Two Xeroxes. Watchman took them. “A Xerox of an envelope?”

“I sent the originals down to the lab. But read it.”

The envelope was addressed to the Highway Patrol with a little typed notation at the lower left: “Attn. Officer In Charge Of Threepersons Case.” That made Watchman look at the postmark. “Globe, Ariz., July 6, P.M.”

Dear Sir,

With reference to the escaped convict Joe Threepersons, this is to inform you that he was not guilty of the murder that he was in prison for.

Watchman turned it over but it was only a Xerox and there was nothing on the back of it. He looked at Wilder. “What the hell.”

“Yeah.”

“Joe didn’t write this himself.”

“Okay, detective, why didn’t he?”

“One, he was still bottled up in Florence when this was mailed in Globe. Two, I doubt Joe knows how to use a typewriter. Three, I doubt he’d be able to spell, let alone compose a letter in business style.”

“Go to the head of the class. What do you make of it?”

“No signature. I thought anonymous tips like that usually came on the phone.”

“Usually they do. But we get letters. Maybe it’s somebody with a recognizable voice. A speech defect or something.”

Watchman thrust his hand out the car window to give the Xeroxes back but the lieutenant said, “You keep them, it’s your case. We’ve got the originals down in the lab. I’ll let you know if anything turns up by way of finger-prints. We’ll find out what kind of machine it was typed on, but I doubt we can spend the time to find out who wrote it. Could be some crackpot. Most likely is.”

“Or somebody with enough interest in Joe to try and persuade us to go easy on him.”

“Yeah, it could be the sister. Maybe she’s a trained business secretary or something.”

“Living on the Reservation?” Watchman folded the Xeroxes. “I’ll find out when I talk to her.”

“It makes sense,” Wilder said. “I mean she might figure we’d be less inclined to shoot him on sight if we thought there was a chance he was i

“Is there?”

“A chance? Come on, Sam. He had the gun in his pocket and he made a voluntary confession. Far as I know he never tried to rescind it.”

“Then it’s kind of strange, this letter.”

“But it’s got you wondering, hasn’t it.”

“Aeah.”

“I suspect that’s what it was supposed to do, Sam.”

6.

Driving up toward the mountains, east out of Phoenix along U.S. 60, you pass a dirt road below Superior that curls south from the highway into scrubby hills. It is marked “APACHE TEARS ROAD.” Watchman passed the sign at sixty-five.

In the 1880s the Apaches had a stronghold on top of a sheer cliff below Superior. They staged attacks from there on Pima towns and white settlers until the blueleg Cavalry surrounded the stronghold and besieged it. When the Apaches ran out of ammunition the braves elected to leap from the cliff rather than suffer the indignity of capture. In the morning their women buried the dead at the foot of the cliff and their tears drenched the earth and instantly froze into dark pebbles of pure volcanic Obsidian glass. That is the legend. Today the lapidaries sell the Apache Tears as costume jewelry. Most of them come from pockets at the foot of Apache Leap Mountain.

Watchman took the bypass ramp around the town of Superior. He drove on up through the discolored slag piles of Miami and into the chrome, plastic and neon town of Globe, with its miners’ saloons and used-car arenas and drive-in root-beer stands.

Out of Globe the highway makes a wide turn into more hills studded with scrubs: greasewood and paloverde and manzanita, here and there the spines of yucca, century plant and cactus.

The road climbs and climbs until without warning the earth falls away: beyond hangs an empty space. But beyond the space the earth resumes and continues to climb. The color of the Salt River Canyon is a sun-bleached greyish tan accented with richer darknesses of eroded rock strata and clumps of growing things. There are glimpses, four thousand feet below the highway lip, of river froth at the bottom.

The highway runs down to the bottom in switchbacks along the cliff shelf. At the top the crow-flight line from rim to rim is not more than ten or twelve miles but a driver has to spend more than an hour negotiating the heroic passage down, across and up.

The river marks the boundary between the San Carlos Reservation and the Fort Apache Reservation. On the north side, after a bridge, there is a lonely gas station that sells ice cream, soda pop and water cans for cars that have boiled over trying to make the steep twisting climb.

Watchman filled up at the station and put the receipt in with his expense vouchers, and began the climb. He hit the residue of the early afternoon’s rain about halfway up: slippery patches where the water had brought the oil in the pavement to the surface. He took it easy getting to the top and that was when the radio squawked into chatter and informed him that the Agency Police had found Joe Threepersons’ spoor at a clan-cluster of wickiups not far ahead of him.