Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 14] Read Online Free PDF Page A

was
going to fly it up to Blanding and get the inspection done at
CanyonAire up there. That’s the last I saw of him.”
    “Would you have a phone number for Mr Timms?” Chee asked. “Or his
address?”
    “Sure.”
    Edgar walked across the hangar to his desk and sorted through a
Rolodex file. Chee stood watching, trying to understand his motive for
what he was doing. What did this have to do with Bernie’s boyfriend’s
problem? Had he spent so many hours fishing and fighting mosquitoes in
Alaska that he yearned for some way to get himself into trouble? Was he
hungering for some explanation of the wildly illogical way the casino
bandits had managed their escape? Whatever his motive, Captain Largo
would be very unhappy indeed if Largo learned that Chee had stuck his
nose into FBI business and the FBI caught him at it.
    Edgar interrupted these thoughts by handing him a copy of a Mountain
Mutual Insurance claim form.
    “He had me sign off on his insurance claim. He’d left the plane out
in the weather and gotten some hail damage,” Edgar said. “That was
several years ago, but as far as I heard, he hasn’t moved.”
    Chee jotted the information he wanted into his notebook, thanked
Edgar and headed back to his truck. Then a sudden thought caused him to
grin. With the plane now stolen, Timms would be filing another
insurance claim.
    “Mr Edgar,” he shouted. “Do you remember what you’d have had to
charge Timms for those repairs? When he said he’d sell it for half your
estimate?”
    “I think the estimate was close to four thousand dollars,” Edgar
said. “But if I was stupid enough to want that thing, and made him an
offer, he’d have said it was a valuable antique and asked for about
thirty thousand.”
    Chee laughed. That, he thought, would probably be about what Timms
would claim from his insurance company.
    “How about using your telephone?” Chee asked. “And the directory.”
    He punched in the Mountain Mutual Insurance Farmington agent’s
number, identified himself, asked the woman who ran the place if she
still handled Eldon Timms's insurance.
    “Unfortunately,” she said.
    “His airplane, too?”
    “Same answer,” she said. “Or I guess you’d say the former airplane,
the one those robbers stole?”
    “Does he have another one?”
    “Lordy, I hope not,” she said.
    “He file a claim on it?”
    “Yes, indeedy, he did. Right away. I just heard about the robbers
stealing a plane out there and flying off in it, and he’s on the phone
asking about getting his money. And I said, “What’s the hurry. They
have to land someplace and the cops recover it and you get it back.”
And he said, “If that happens, we tear up the claim.”
    “How much was the insurance?”
    “Forty thousand,” she said. “He just jacked it up to that a couple
of months ago.”
    “Sounds like quite a bit for a fifty-year-old aircraft,” Chee said.
    “I thought so,” she said. “But no skin off my nose. Timms was the
one paying the premium. He said it was an antique, a real rare
airplane, and he was going to sell it to that military-aircraft museum
in Tucson. I have a feeling he was using that higher-insured value to
sort of—you know—establish a sales price.”
    Edgar had been standing nearby, listening.
    “That do it for you?”
    “Yeah,” Chee said, "and thanks. But by the way, what’s that Energy
Department helicopter doing here? And what’s the DOE doing with those
big white pods?”
    “Actually, the pods aren’t DOE, they’re EPA,” Edgar said. “You are
looking at a rare case of inter-agency cooperation. The Environmental
Protection bunch borrows the copter and the pilots from the DOE’s
Nevada Test site. They got radiation detectors in those pods, and they
use them to find old uranium mines. Get the hot stuff covered up.”
    After he left Four Corners Flight, Chee dropped in at the New Mexico
State Police office below the airport and made two more calls—the first
one to the Air War