The Threepersons Hunt

2.

Two-and-a-half days later it began for Sam Watchman. He drove into the lot against the morning sun with his hat brim pulled down to his nose in lieu of a sun visor. He left his dusty Volvo in a slot that said OFFICIAL CARS ONLY, VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AWAY AT THEIR EXPENSE. It was seven o’clock and hotting up for a scorcher in Phoenix.

Rush-hour traffic crawled past the front of the AHP building, enough sunlight hitting the chrome to blind a pedestrian. Watchman kept his hat brim down until he was inside the glass doors.

There was a hush of ducted air. At the desk the bald sergeant was interviewing a complainant, looking him over closely as if inspecting him for bodily signs of Communism or felonious character. The sergeant waved Watchman through without giving any evidence he had ever looked up to see who he was.

A bilious green hallway lit by wire-netted bulbs; he passed the canteen room where two patrolmen were drinking coffee and a third was on the phone: “What’s the squeal?… All right, who catches?… Shit, all right.” When Watchman continued on his way the patrolman was reaching for his hat and kit.

Captain Fred Custis had a corner office with a view of the parking lot. From the desk he gave Watchman a bleak glance across his steepled fingers.

The size of Custis was a tribute to the breweries and his white mustache was stained to amber by cigar smoke. He decided to be hearty. “How’re they hangin,’ Sam?” Then he tugged out a crumpled handkerchief and blew his nose. “God damn summer cold.”

It looked as if it had been two days since the captain had been near a razor. His uniform looked lived-in. You had to credit his industry. He would work an eager twenty-four-hour day and that was mostly the reason for his success in the department; certainly it wasn’t his brains.

He uttered a grinding snort to clear his nasal passages and scraped a sleeve across his mustache.

Watchman said, “You told me to report in for assignment.”

“That slot where you parked just now. I was watching. It’s for official cars only—can’t you read?”

“I’m an official, Captain.”

“Your car isn’t. I ought to send Dancey out there to put a summons on your windshield. Ought to have the damned foreign crate towed away.”

“I’ll move it, Captain.” In a minute he was sure Custis would ask him sarcastically if he couldn’t afford a native American car.

The desk was covered with green linoleum and the walls were illustrated with framed citations and news-photo clippings, crowded together like medical diplomas in a doctor’s office. Most of the pictures featured Custis with his pale-eyed, clenched-teeth public smile, holding a prisoner by the elbow or looming above a podium or shaking hands with celebrities.

Captain Custis blew his nose. “How would you like a lateral promotion?”

It pricked Watchman’s interest and he brought his eyes back to Custis.

“Sit down a minute.” It wasn’t a courtesy; Custis didn’t want to have to look up at him. Watchman sat.

“Lateral to where?”

“Investigations Division.”

There had to be a catch and Watchman waited for it.

“Of course it’s temporary until we see how you work out over there.”

Ten years ago Custis had been on the line working a cruiser out of Phoenix and Watchman had been a rookie and circumstances had assigned him to Custis’ car. They hadn’t liked each other the first day and nothing had changed since then. Custis was a good cop from the old school but people like Watchman didn’t fit into his concept of Good Guys. Now Custis was offering Watchman not only an olive branch but a plum and it had an odd smell.

Custis had the writing board pulled out from one side of his desk and there were papers and photographs on it. He stood up, singled out one of the photographs and tossed it spi

Watchman reached for the glossy. It was a print-out that showed a pair of mug shots, one profile and one full face.

This one had a round face and looked a little soft around the cheeks—his body probably carried fifteen pounds more than it needed to. But a mug shot betrayed no more character than a death mask and there was no way to ascertain what the man’s face would look like when it was animated or how he moved or what his voice sounded like or how he used his hands.

The face was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. It was the face of an Indian and the only real distinguishing mark was the cauliflowering of the left ear. A disfigurement like that would be a dead giveaway in a lineup, but first you had to find him.

Within the photos the movable lettering of the chin rest identified the man: “J. Threepersons.”

“Him,” Watchman said.

Captain Custis screwed up his face and there was a moment of suspense and then he sneezed, not getting the handkerchief to his nose quite in time.

Afterward he wiped his mustache. “As of eight o’clock this morning it’s your case.”

Custis pushed two more papers across the desk—the fingerprint chart and the description sheet—and stood up. “You’re to get a make on him. Find, fix and apprehend.”

“All by myself?”

“You have all the mighty resources of the nation’s crime-busting institutions at your fingertips,” Custis said in his dry way of attempting humor. “There’s an APB out of course. The mug shots have been circulated. In theory every police officer in the southwest is looking for him. But you’re the one who’ll be on the case exclusively. He’s important enough to warrant a one-officer cover but he’s not important enough to justify taking a whole squad of line detectives off work on more active cases. The bulletins have the Warning-This-Man-May-Be-Armed-And-Dangerous tag on them but I don’t really think he’s the type to go on a murder spree.”

“What type is he?”

“Just a no-account Apache.” Custis looked up from under his white eyebrows. “Don’t get stiff on me like that. The chairman of the Tribal Council up at Whiteriver used exactly those words to me. One Apache calling another Apache a no-account Apache. So take it up with him, not me.”

“You wouldn’t have called the chairman of the Tribal Council if you didn’t think the subject would head home. What did they tell you up there?”

“Said they hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him. I told them to put their Agency Police on it but I don’t trust those clowns to find their way to the bathroom.”

“Then you figure he’s hiding out on the Reservation.”

“It’s the only home he knows. Only place he’d feel comfortable.”

“So you single out the only Indian in the department to go look for him.”

“I figured maybe you’d be able to think the same way Threepersons thinks.”

“Do you know how much cooperation I’m likely to get up there? I’m a Navajo. Maybe we all look alike to you, but before the Anglos came down here and unified the Indians by giving them a common enemy, Apaches and Navajos used to shoot each other for sport. If the Apaches are hiding him out they might not talk to a white man about it but they’d sure as hell not talk to a Navajo.”

“That’s ancient history. It’s all one big happy family now.”

“You’ve been talking to anthropologists.” Watchman used a tone on the word that he might have used in pronouncing the word “Custer.” “Maybe you go up to Flagstaff or Gallup for the big intertribal ceremonies and watch all that oozing brotherhood. That’s fine on white man’s turf, Captain, but right now we’ve got Hopis and Navajos murdering each other over the rights to a few useless acres of land and the Apaches are laughing themselves silly every time somebody gets killed there. A Navajo going onto the Apache land, that’s more of a foreigner than a white man.”

“I guess you don’t want the job then.”

“I didn’t say I was turning it down.”