Free Threepersons Hunt by Brian Garfield

fat but her face was stern. “ Enju? ”
    â€œI don’t talk Apache, sorry.” He produced his wallet. “Highway Patrol.”
    â€œOh yes, about Joe Threepersons. I’m afraid the Chairman isn’t in just now.…”
    â€œMaybe in the morning?”
    â€œOf course. Shall I make an appointment?”
    â€œDon’t bother, I don’t know where I’ll be. I’ll take my chances. Mr. Kendrick in his office?”
    â€œI think he is.” She pointed down the hall.
    â€œYou know Joe pretty well?”
    â€œNo,” 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.”
    â€œYour brother around?”
    â€œYou’ll have to wait till next year. He’s in Spain. He’s in the Air Force.”
    â€œAnybody else around here that knew Joe very well? Any relatives besides his sister?”
    â€œWell 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.
    â€œHe lives in Whiteriver?”
    â€œYou know the Shell station up by the roadhouse?”
    â€œNo, but I can find it.”
    â€œHe owns the station. He lives in the house right behind it.”
    â€œI didn’t know Joe had such prosperous relatives.”
    She didn’t have anything to say to that. Watchman said, “What’s your name?”
    â€œLisa 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?”
    â€œWe don’t all behave the way he behaves,” Watchman murmured. “But right now I’m more interested in where I might find him.”
    â€œI’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