The Threepersons Hunt

In June 1962 subject had been arrested in Showlow and was subsequently convicted of assault on a police officer. Sentence suspended. At the time he was employed by the tribe’s lumber and sawmill operation; capacity unspecified, but probably ordinary laborer. There was another arrest for D-and-D in Globe—September 1962—and then the file showed no further arrests until the Calisher homicide in 1968.

Rap-sheets were not character studies but things were visible between the lines. There was recorded the marriage of subject and Maria Poinsenay, a San Carlos Apache girl, on December 3, 1962, and it was significant that after the wedding there were no further arrests on the subject’s record.

There was an oddity about the wedding. A Christian ceremony had been performed at the Baptist mission at Cedar Creek, where briefly subject had gone to school in 1954/55, and that was unusual because it was the groom’s bailiwick, not the bride’s. Also the newly weds had not gone down to San Carlos to set up housekeeping among the bride’s relatives and this was another break with tradition.

The record showed the birth of a son, Joe Junior, “on or about” October 18, 1963, with baptism performed at the mission early in November. At this time subject was described as a resident tribal member of the White Mountain Apaches but a paid (and taxed) employee of Rand Enterprises, so evidently he had got the job on Rand’s cattle ranch within a few months of his marriage. He had held the job, it appeared, without trouble until September 4, 1968, the date of his arrest on the murder charge.

Buck Stevens arrived at eight-thirty and Watchman looked up from his ruminations. “Busted both legs getting here, didn’t you.”

Stevens had a rowdy grin. “You on the warpath again?”

“What coop they find you in this time?”

“Sam, your whole trouble in life is you never learned the importance of the coffee break.”

Watchman shoved the Threepersons file at him. “Here, read this in the car. Let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“Uptown.”

Watchman filled him in on the broad outlines on the way to the parking lot. Stevens had not turned in his cruiser and they used that, Watchman driving while Stevens opened the folder.

He let Stevens read without interruption; he concentrated his attention on the traffic. Phoenix was turning into a second-rate imitation of Los Angeles, smog and all.

Finally Stevens laid the dossier on the seat between them. “I hear the son of a bitch is a mean hand with a rifle.”

“Where’d you pick that up?”

“I don’t know. Somebody around the squad room. Everybody was talking about the jailbreak that day. I guess you weren’t around.”

Watchman had been on traffic duty west of Gila Bend that day; he’d only heard about the break on the radio.

“You know that guy Porter, used to partner with old Gutierrez? He comes from up there in Apache County someplace—Showlow, I think. He used to go to all those turkey shoots at the rod and gun clubs up there. He says if Joe Threepersons was entered in the shoot, nobody else had a chance.”

“Now that’s news to comfort a man.”

Watchman fitted the cruiser through a narrow space between trucks and squirted ahead a block and searched for the next gap in the traffic.

Suddenly Buck Stevens said, “It’s that God damned sister of hers,” reviving a conversation Watchman had thought dead four days previously. “We should have strung her out over an anthill.”

“Shut up,” Watchman said.

Lisa …

“I wish it had worked out with you two.”

Watchman gave him a bleak glance and ran the amber light. “In just a minute you’ll be picking up your teeth with two busted arms, white man.”

Stevens had a brash grin, a lot of teeth. “Sam, right now you’re so easy to goad it almost ain’t even fun any more.”

“Then quit it.”

“You ought to get it out of your system before you keep it bottled up so long it starts to rot.” Stevens crossed his legs with one knee against the dashboard. “You know you’ve changed some since I used to know you up north.”

It went both ways. Stevens had filled out in the past six months. He was getting just a bit of a belly on him from the roadside hamburger lunches, the French fries and root beers. In another five years he’d be a cop with a big gut on him but right now he still had youth, the amiable rookie look.

Stevens had partnered in Watchman’s car on the final lap of his training program until a rifle bullet had taken him off patrol last October. When he’d come back on duty in January the department had rewarded him with a one-man car at the Willcox division and Watchman hadn’t seen him again until a week ago when Stevens had finished his tour of duty at Willcox and got his transfer to Phoenix.

It was nothing against Buck but he had won the headquarters assignment with less than a year’s service while Watchman had spent ten years on back-road boondock beats; promotions and good assignments came a little faster for blond Anglos than they did for a dark-faced Navajo whose features were as bone-craggy as those of a Frederic Remington warrior.

Stevens said, “You look like you’ve been sucking lemons.”

“Button it up, will you?”

“Hey this is Buck, remember? Old paid-his-dues Buck, your faithful white companion?”

“I thought I taught you to step away from a snake that looks mad. You don’t keep prodding it with your finger.”

“It wasn’t me that made you mad, it was Lisa. Quit taking it out on me. Hey we traveled some miles together, or maybe you forgot. Sam you used to be a friend of mine.” Stevens took a breath and met his eye. “I’m still a friend of yours.”

Watchman made no reply. Shortly thereafter Stevens uncrossed his legs and looked at the street signs at a passing intersection. “Where we headed, anyway?”

“We’ll check out the area where he ditched the Ford. Maybe somebody saw him around the hospital.”

“Sounds like a dead end to me. What if somebody did see him? So what?”

“I’d welcome suggestions.”

Two red lights later Stevens said, “Yeah, well let’s check out the hospital.”

4.

In a dour frame of mind Watchman emerged from the hospital and squinted against the midmorning blaze. Stevens said, “Zero. Now what?”

“For once in my life I’m going to take Captain Custer’s advice.” He started the cruiser and put its nose out into Sixteenth Street.

“The Reservation?”

“Aeah.”

“Then why are we heading back for the HP building?”

“Pick up another cruiser. You can keep this one.”

“To do what?”

“Poke around Phoenix. Take the mug shots with you, ask around. For all we know he’s still in the city—he left the car here. Check out his wife’s house, that curio shop where she worked, any friends she had around there. Maybe she said something to somebody. Maybe Three-persons was snooping around her house before he ditched the Ford—maybe somebody saw him. Hell, be a detective.”

“Sure.” Stevens patted a yawn. “I guess it’s a way to pass the time.”

They drove without conversation toward the center of the city but finally Stevens picked up the Threepersons file and thumbed through it the way a bank teller would count money. “Don’t they know all this paper’s a fire hazard?”

“Way back there was an old chief who noticed how the white people thought paper had some mysterious power. If a white man loses his papers he’s helpless—you hear white preachers say nobody gets admitted to Heaven unless there are writings about him in a great book. That old chief was a wise man.”

“You guys never had any writing at all, did you.”

“Didn’t need it. That old chief said words that are true sink deep in a man’s heart and stay there.”

“How’s anybody know what this old chief said if nobody wrote it down?”

“There was some anthropologist. He had a tape recorder. You ever see an anthropologist without a tape recorder?”