The Threepersons Hunt

It was half-past four and the shadow of a cloud moved across the town. Over the hills north of the trees he could see the shadow-streaks of a rain squall. But heat misted up from the earth and before he entered the council house he stopped and armed sweat from his forehead. Back on the trading post verandah the four Apaches were still watching him. It wouldn’t have surprised him if one of them had turned to spit at the ground.

4.

The girl at the reception counter looked comfortable in her fat but her face was stern. “Enju?”

“I don’t talk Apache, sorry.” He produced his wallet. “Highway Patrol.”

“Oh yes, about Joe Threepersons. I’m afraid the Chairman isn’t in just now.…”

“Maybe in the morning?”

“Of course. Shall I make an appointment?”

“Don’t bother, I don’t know where I’ll be. I’ll take my chances. Mr. Kendrick in his office?”

“I think he is.” She pointed down the hall.

“You know Joe pretty well?”

“No,” she said, but it wasn’t a closed-off negative. “He’s older than I am, he didn’t live here any more by the time I was old enough to notice boys. My brother went to school with him, though. At the Baptist mission.”

“Your brother around?”

“You’ll have to wait till next year. He’s in Spain. He’s in the Air Force.”

“Anybody else around here that knew Joe very well? Any relatives besides his sister?”

“Well you might try his … uncle, Will Luxan.” The hesitation was caused, probably, by her uncertainty at translating in her head: there was no exact synonym for uncle in the Athapascan tongues, of which Apache and Navajo were dialects. The relationship was more specific in the Indian languages: mother’s-brother or father’s-brother.

“He lives in Whiteriver?”

“You know the Shell station up by the roadhouse?”

“No, but I can find it.”

“He owns the station. He lives in the house right behind it.”

“I didn’t know Joe had such prosperous relatives.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. Watchman said, “What’s your name?”

“Lisa Natagee,” she said and it shot his mind into another orbit so that he had to bring it back by force. Lisa …

He went without hurry down the hall and found a door near the end with a wooden plaque screwed onto it, LEGAL DEPARTMENT. He stopped with his hand on the knob and looked back along the corridor at the girl who was fitting a card into a plastic Wheeldex. Her head was bowed with concentration so that the black hair had swung forward to hide her face. He thought of his own Lisa in slender fair-haired images and took his eyes off the overweight black-haired girl at the desk, and went into the law office.

5.

Faded blond hair fell limply over Dwight Kendrick’s ears; he was an imposing bear of a man, huge and pale with great butcher’s shoulders and an improbably lean waist, as if he spent a good part of his life lifting weights in gymnasiums. It was hard to judge his age; he had to be at least forty. He had a penetrating but superficial voice and that was a little surprising in view of his spectacular courtroom reputation.

Kendrick’s fingers were very long and thin and moved like sea fans as he spoke, opening and closing with carnivorous sensuality. “I don’t know what the hell they expect. The unsavory record of the Indian Bureau—Christ they make the first American the last American at the trough. Nothing extraordinary about Joe, I can tell you that much. It’s only what you’ve got to expect when you raise a man by filling his head that his own people are dirty savages whose extermination is required for the purification of the democratic republic. Of course he’s got a temper. Of course he behaves irrationally. What the hell else can they expect of him?”

“We don’t all behave the way he behaves,” Watchman murmured. “But right now I’m more interested in where I might find him.”

“I’m sorry,” Kendrick snapped. “I don’t think it’s incumbent upon me to help you crucify Joe.” It wasn’t as if everybody else didn’t also call Threepersons by his first name but Kendrick pronounced it with a kind of offhand familiarity which implied ownership. It grated on Watchman.

Kendrick sat back, crossed his legs at right angles and laced his hands together behind his head. “Look, I imagine legally he’s still my client. Certainly if he were to come to me I’d continue to act in his behalf—I’m not the kind to betray a man just because he’s in some kind of trouble. Now you’re supposed to be an officer of the law, you ought to know as well as I do that there’s a privileged relationship here. Even if I knew exactly where you could lay your hands on him, I’d be under no obligation to tell you.” Kendrick generally looked away at neutral objects while he was talking but at intervals his pale eyes would flash up to make sure he had been understood.

“If you knew where he was,” Watchman replied, “I hope you’d have the good sense to advise him to turn himself in.”

“What for? Another dose of white justice?”

“The longer he stays loose the worse it’ll go for him.”

“Suppose he stays loose forever?”

“Do you think he’s smart enough?” Watchman said, and studied him for a response.

Kendrick smiled a little as he might smile to a small child who had asked him a question about the universe, but Watchman got no audible answer to his question and so he tried another. “You’re supposed to be an officer of the court. You’re supposed to have some kind of duty to advise him to give himself up.”

“All right, I’ll admit I’ve been playing a little game. I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him. It was all a harmless exercise to find out how tough you’d get about it. Frankly I find it rather rancid that they’d pick out their token red man to handle this assignment. It stinks of television politics to me. I don’t know why the hell you put up with it, if you’ve got any guts at all.”

“Mr. Kendrick, I’m a police officer, it’s my job to enforce the laws.”

“I Would have assumed that with an assignment as delicate as this one they must have given you the option of turning it down.”

“I didn’t see any reason to.” The interview was getting out of hand, the interrogator becoming the interrogated. He made an effort to get it back where it belonged. “It would help if you could tell me about him. Who his friends were, where he used to hang out.”

“I’m sorry. Actually I never knew him all that well, he was only a client and I’d never met him prior to his arrest. But even if I could help you I’m not sure I would. Joe’s got enough cards stacked against him. I understand Charlie Rand’s been on the horn to Phoenix several times already, trying to get them to mobilize the National Guard to track him down or some such idiocy.”

“You know Rand, do you?”

“We’re eyeballing each other across a legal fence. I’m handling the tribe’s case against him.”

“What’s it about?”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“I’d just as soon hear it from you. I keep remembering Joe Threepersons used to work for Rand. It was Rand’s foreman who got killed.’

“It’s cheap pettifoggery, that’s all. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Joe or that old murder.”

“The case was pending, even way back then. Wasn’t it?”

“It was. But Joe was only a cowhand.”

“He’s an Apache and he was working for a white man who seems to be regarded as the Apaches’ number-one enemy. I find that a little hard to understand for openers.”

“Quite a few of his red brothers work for Rand. It’s not unusual. In a labor market like this one you go where the jobs are. Rand’s hiring and he doesn’t ask questions about your politics.”

“Isn’t that a little risky—for him?”

“He’s a tough son of a bitch, or he thinks he is. I guess he likes to think he’s welcoming the challenge.”