Coyote Waits

COYOTE WAITS

Tony Hillerman

1990

Chapter 1

OFFICER JIM CHEE was thinking that either his right front tire was a little low or there was something wrong with the shock on that side. On the other hand, maybe the road grader operator hadn’t been watching the adjustment on his blade and he’d tilted the road. Whatever the cause, Chee’s patrol car was pulling just a little to the right. He made the required correction, frowning. He was dog-tired.

The radio speaker made an uncertain noise, then produced the voice of Officer Delbert Nez. ”

running on fumes. I’m going to have to buy some of that high-cost Red Rock gasoline or walk home.”

“If you do, I advise paying for it out of your pocket,” Chee said. “Better than explaining to the captain why you forgot to fill it up.”

“I think

“ Nez said and then the voice faded out.

“Your signal’s breaking up,” Chee said. “I don’t read you.” Nez was using Unit 44, a notorious gas hog. Something wrong with the fuel pump, maybe. It was always in the shop and nobody ever quite fixed it.

Silence. Static. Silence. The steering seemed to be better now. Probably not a low tire. Probably

And then the radio intruded again.

“

catch the son-of-a-bitch with the smoking paint gun in his hand,” Nez was saying. “I’ll bet then

“ The Nez voice vanished, replaced by silence.

“I’m not reading you,” Chee said into his mike. “You’re breaking up.”

Which wasn’t unusual. There were a dozen places on the twenty-five thousand square miles the Navajos called the Big Rez where radio transmission was blocked for a variety of reasons. Here between the monolithic volcanic towers of Ship Rock, the Carrizo Range, and the Chuska Mountains was just one of them. Chee presumed these radio blind spots were caused by the mountains but there were other theories. Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee insisted that it had something to do with magnetism in the old volcanic necks that stuck up here and there, like great black cathedrals. Old Thomasina Bigthumb had told him once that she thought witches caused the problem. True, this part of the Reservation was notorious for witches, but it was also true that Old Lady Bigthumb blamed witches for just about everything.

Then Chee heard Delbert Nez again. The voice was very faint at first.”

his car,” Delbert was saying. (Or was it ”

his truck”? Or ”

his pickup”? Exactly, precisely, what had Delbert Nez said?) Suddenly the transmission became clearer, the sound of Delbert’s delighted laughter. “I’m gonna get him this time,” Delbert Nez said.

Chee picked up the mike. “Who are you getting?” he said. “Do you need assistance?”

“My phantom painter,” Nez seemed to say. At least it sounded like that. The reception was going sour again, fading, breaking up into static.

“Can’t read you,” Chee said. “You need assistance?”

Through the fade-out, through the static, Nez seemed to say “No.” Again, laughter.

“I’ll see you at Red Rock then,” Chee said. “It’s your turn to buy.”

There was no response to that at all, except static, and none was needed. Nez worked up U.S. 666 out of the Navajo Tribal Police headquarters at Window Rock, covering from Yah-Ta-Hey northward. Chee patrolled down 666 from the Ship Rock subagency police station, and when they met they had coffee and talked. Having it this evening at the service station-post office-grocery store at Red Rock had been decided earlier, and it was upon Red Rock that they were converging. Chee was driving down the dirt road that wandered back and forth across the Arizona-New Mexico border southward from Biklabito. Nez was driving westward from 666 on the asphalt of Navajo Route 33. Nez, having pavement, would have been maybe fifteen minutes early. But now he seemed to have an arrest to make. That would even things up.

There was lightning in the cloud over the Chuskas now, and Chee’s patrol car had stopped pulling to the right and was pulling to the left. Probably not a tire, he thought. Probably the road grader operator had noticed his maladjusted blade and overcorrected. At least it wasn’t the usual washboard effect that pounded your kidneys.

It was twilight—twilight induced early by the impending thunderstorm—when Chee pulled his patrol car off the dirt and onto the pavement of Route 33. No sign of Nez. In fact, no sign of any headlights, just the remains of what had been a blazing red sunset. Chee pulled past the gasoline pumps at the Red Rock station and parked behind the trading post. No Unit 44 police car where Nez usually parked it. He inspected his front tires, which seemed fine. Then he looked around. Three pickups and a blue Chevy sedan. The sedan belonged to the new evening clerk at the trading post. Good-looking girl, but he couldn’t come up with her name. Where was Nez? Maybe he actually had caught his paint-spraying vandal. Maybe the fuel pump on old 44 had died.

No Nez inside either. Chee nodded to the girl reading behind the cash register. She rewarded him with a shy smile. What was her name? Sheila? Suzy? Something like that. She was a Towering House Dineh, and therefore in no way linked to Chee’s own Slow Talking Clan. Chee remembered that. It was the automatic checkoff any single young Navajo conducts—male or female—making sure the one who attracted you wasn’t a sister, or cousin, or niece in the tribe’s complex clan system, and thereby rendered taboo by incest rules.

The glass coffee-maker pot was two-thirds full, usually a good sign, and it smelled fresh. He picked up a fifty-cent-size Styrofoam cup, poured it full, and sipped. Good, he thought. He picked out a package containing two chocolate-frosted Twinkies. They’d go well with the coffee.

Back at the cash register, he handed the Towering House girl a five-dollar bill.

“Has Delbert Nez been in? You remember him? Sort of stocky, little mustache. Really ugly policeman.”

“I thought he was cute,” the Towering House girl said, smiling at Chee.

“Maybe you just like policemen?” Chee said. What the devil was her name?

“Not all of them,” she said. “It depends.”

“On whether they’ve arrested your boyfriend,” Chee said. She wasn’t married. He remembered Delbert had told him that. (“Why don’t you find out these things for yourself,” Delbert had said. “Before I got married, I would have known essential information like that. Wouldn’t have had to ask. My wife finds out I’m making clan checks on the chicks, I’m in deep trouble.”)

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” the Towering House girl said. “Not right now. And, no. Delbert hasn’t been in this evening.” She handed Chee his change, and giggled. “Has Delbert ever caught his rock painter?”

Chee was thinking maybe he was a little past dealing with girls who giggled. But she had large brown eyes, and long lashes, and perfect skin. Certainly, she knew how to flirt. “Maybe he’s catching him right now,” he said. “He said something on the radio about it.” He noticed she had miscounted his change by a dime, which sort of went with the giggling. “Too much money,” Chee said, handing her the dime. “You have any idea who’d be doing that painting?” And then he remembered her name. It was Shirley. Shirley Thompson.

Shirley shuddered, very prettily. “Somebody crazy,” she said.

That was Chee’s theory too. But he said: “Why crazy?”

“Well, just because,” Shirley said, looking serious for the first time. “You know. Who else would do all that work painting that mountain white?”

It wasn’t really a mountain. Technically it was probably a volcanic throatanother of those ragged upthrusts of black basalt that jutted out of the prairie here and there east of the Chuskas.

“Maybe he’s trying to paint something pretty,” Chee said. “Have you ever gone in there and taken a close look at it?”

Shirley shivered. “I wouldn’t go there,” she said.

“Why not?” Chee asked, knowing why. It probably had some local legend attached to it. Something scary. Probably somebody had been killed there and left his chindi behind to haunt the place. And it was tainted by witchcraft gossip. Delbert had been raised back in the Chuska high country west of here and he’d said something about that outcropor maybe one nearbybeing one of the places where members of the skinwalker clan were supposed to meet. It was a place to be avoidedand that was part of what had fascinated Officer Delbert Nez with its vandalism.

“It’s not just that it’s such a totally zany thing to do,” Delbert had said. “Putting paint on the side of a rocky ridge, like that. There’s a weirdness to it, too. It’s a scary place. I don’t care what you think about witches, nobody goes there. You do, somebody sees you, and they think you’re a skinwalker yourself. I think whoever’s doing it must have a purpose. Something specific. I’d like to know who the hell it is. And why.”

That had been good enough for Chee, who enjoyed his own little obsessions. He glanced at his watch. Where was Delbert now?

The door opened and admitted a middle-aged woman with her hair tied in a blue cloth. She paid for gasoline, complained about the price, and engaged Shirley in conversation about a sing-dance somebody was planning at the Newcomb school. Chee had another cup of coffee. Two teenaged boys came in, followed by an old man wearing a T-shirt with DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY printed across the chest. Another woman came, about Shirley’s age, and the sound of thunder came through the door with her. The girls chatted and giggled. Chee looked at his watch again. Delbert was taking too damned long.

Chee walked out into the night.

The breeze smelled of rain. Chee hurried around the corner into the total darkness behind the trading post. In the car, he switched on the radio and tried to raise Nez. Nothing. He started the engine, and spun the rear wheels in an impatient start that was totally out of character for him. So was this sudden sense of anxiety. He switched on his siren and the emergency flashers.

Chee was only minutes away from the trading post when he saw the headlights approaching on Route 33. He slowed, feeling relief. But before they reached him, he saw the car’s right turn indicator blinking. The vehicle turned northward, up ahead of him, not Nez’s Navajo Tribal Police patrol car but a battered white Jeepster. Chee recognized it. It was the car of the Vietnamese (or Cambodian, or whatever he was) who taught at the high school in Ship Rock. Chee’s headlights briefly lit the driver’s face.

The rain started then, a flurry of big, widely spaced drops splashing the windshield, then a downpour. Route 33 was wide and smooth, with a freshly painted center-line to follow. But the rain was more than Chee’s wipers could handle. He slowed, listening to the water pound against the roof. Normally rain provoked jubilation in Cheea feeling natural and primal, bred into dry-country people. Now this joy was blocked by worry and a little guilt. Something had delayed Nez. He should have gone looking for him when the radio blacked out. But it was probably nothing much. Car trouble. An ankle sprained chasing his painter in the dark. Nothing serious.

Lightning illuminated the highway ahead of him, showing it glistening with water and absolutely empty. The flash lit the ragged basalt shape of the formation across the prairie to the souththe outcrop on which Nez’s vandal had been splashing his paint. Then the boom of thunder came. The rain slackened, flurried again, slackened again as the squall line of the storm passed. Off to the right Chee saw a glow of light. He stared. It came from down a dirt road that wandered from 33 southward over a ridge, leading eventually to the “outfit” of Old Lady Gorman. Chee let the breath whistle through his teeth. Relief. That would probably be Nez. Guilt fell away from him.

At the intersection, he slowed and stared down the dirt road. Headlights should be yellow. This light was red. It flickered. Fire.

“Oh, God!” Chee said aloud. A prayer. He geared the patrol car down into second and went slipping and sliding down the muddy track. Chapter 2

UNIT 44 WAS parked in the center of the track, its nose pointed toward Route 33, red flames gushing from the back of it, its tires burning furiously. Chee braked his car to a stop, skidding it out of the muddy ruts and onto the bunch grass and stunted sage. He had his door open and the fire extinguisher in his hand while the car was still sliding.

It was raining hard again, the cold drops splashing against his face. Then he was engulfed in the sickening black smoke of burning rubber, burning oil, burning upholstery. The driver’s-side window had been shattered. Chee fired the extinguisher through it, seeing the white foam stream through the smoke, and seeing through the smoke the dark shape of Nez slumped over the steering wheel.

“Del!”

Chee snatched at the door handle, barely conscious of the searing pain. He jerked the door open and found himself engulfed in a gust of flames. He jumped back, whacking at the fire burning his uniform shirt. “Del,” he shouted again. He sprayed the extinguisher foam into the car again, dropped the extinguisher, reached through the open door, clutched the arm of Officer Delbert Nez and pulled.

Nez was wearing his seat belt.

Chee fumbled for the catch, released it, pulled with all his strength, aware as he did that his palm was hurting in a way he had never experienced before. He tumbled backward into the driving rain, he and Delbert Nez. He lay for a moment, gasping, lungs full of smoke, conscious that something was wrong with the hand, and of the weight of Delbert Nez partly across him. Then he was aware of heat. His shirt sleeve burning. He put it out, struggled out from under the weight of Nez.

Nez lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled. Chee looked at him and looked away. He picked up the extinguisher, sprayed the burning places on the officer’s trousers. He used what was left in the tank to put out the fire. “Running on fumes,” Nez had said. That was lucky. Chee had seen enough car fires to know what a full tank would do. Lucky? Fumes had provided enough fire to kill Delbert Nez.

He was on the radio, calling this in to Ship Rock, asking for help, before he was fully aware of the pain of his own burns.

“There was blood, too,” Chee was saying. “He might have been shot. I think blood on the back of his shirt, and blood on the front, too.”

Captain Largo happened to be in, doing his perpetual paperwork. While Chee was saying that, Largo took over the radio in the Ship Rock dispatcher’s office.

“We’ll send all we have from here,” Largo was saying. “And from Window Rock, and we’ll see if anybody from Crownpoint is patrolling out your direction. Blood still fresh?”

Chee looked at his hand and grimaced. “It’s still sticky,” he said. “Somewhere between slick and sticky.” A chunk of skin had flapped off the palm of his hand. The door handle, he thought. That had done it. It felt like it had burned all the way to the bone.

“You saw no other car lights?”

“One car. Just as I was leaving Red Rock a white Jeepster was turning off 33 onto the road toward Biklabito. One man in it. I think it was that Vietnamese math teacher at Ship Rock High School. I think that’s his car, anyway.” Chee’s throat hurt. So did his lungs. So did his eyes. And his face. He felt with numb fingers. No eyebrows.

“We’ll handle that part then,” Largo said. “Save any looking for tracks for daylight. Do not mess anything up around the car. You got that?” Largo paused. “Do not,” he repeated.

“Okay,” Chee said. He wanted to end this. He wanted to go find whoever had killed Delbert Nez. He should have been with Nez. He should have gone to help him.

“You came down 33 from the west? From Red Rock? Get back on 33 and head east. All the way to 666. See if you can pick up anything that way. If the guy had a vehicle that’s the only way he could have gone.” Largo paused. “Unless he was your Vietnamese schoolteacher.”

Chee didn’t get all the way to U.S. Highway 666. Three miles east of the intersection, the high beams of his headlights reflected from the back of a man walking down the asphalt. Chee braked and stared. The man was walking erratically down the center of the westbound lane. He was bareheaded, his gray hair tied in a bun, his rain-soaked shirt plastered to his back. He seemed totally oblivious of Chee’s headlights, now just a few yards behind him. Without a backward glance, with no effort to move to the side of the road, he walked steadily onward, swinging something in his right hand, zigzagging a little, but with the steady, unhurried pace of a man who has walked great distances, who will walk great distances more.

Chee pulled up beside him, rolled down his window. The object the man was swinging was a squat bottle, held by the neck. “Yaa’eh t’eeh!” Chee shouted, the standard Navajo greeting. The man ignored him, plodding steadily down the asphalt. As he moved past the police car and back into the glare of the headlights Chee saw he had something bulky stuck under his belt in the back of his trousers. It looked like the butt of a pistol.

Chee unsnapped his own pistol, took it out of its holster, and laid it on the seat beside him. He touched the siren button, producing a sudden howling. The gray-haired man seemed not to hear it.

Chee picked up the mike, raised Ship Rock, gave his location. “I have a male, about five feet eight inches tall, elderly, gray-haired, walking down the westbound lane away from the Nez site. He has what appears to be a pistol stuck under his belt and what appears to be a whiskey bottle in his right hand and is acting in a peculiar manner.”

“Peculiar manner,” the dispatcher said.

“I think he’s drunk,” Chee said. “He acts like he doesn’t hear me or see me.”

“Subject is drunk,” the dispatcher said.

“Maybe,” Chee said. “I will apprehend him now.”

Which might be easier said than done, he thought. He pulled the patrol car past the walker and spun it around so its lights shone directly into the man’s face. He got out with his pistol in his hand. He felt dizzy. Everything was vague.

“Hold it right there,” Chee said.

The walker stopped. He looked intently at Chee, as if trying to bring him into focus. Then he sighed and sat on the pavement. He screwed the cap off the bottle, and took a long, gurgling drink. He looked at Chee again and said:

“Baa yanisin, shiyaazh.”

“You are ashamed?” Chee repeated. His voice choked. “Ashamed!” With his good hand he reached over the walker’s shoulder, jerked the pistol out of the man’s belt. He sniffed the muzzle of the barrel and smelled burned powder. He checked the cylinders. All six contained cartridges, but three of the cartridges were empty. They had been fired. He jammed the pistol under his belt, snatched the bottle out of the walker’s hand, and hurled it into the sagebrush beside the road.

“Dirty coyote,” Chee said in Navajo. “Get up.” His voice was fierce.

The man stared up at him, expression puzzled. The glare of the headlights reflected off the streaks of rainwater running down his face, dripping from his hair, from his eyebrows.

“Get up!” Chee screamed.

He jerked the man to his feet, hurried him to the patrol car, searched him quickly for another weapon, took a pocketknife and some coins from a front pocket and a worn wallet from his hip pocket. He handcuffed him, conscious of the man’s thin, bony wrists, conscious of the numbness in his own right hand, and the pain in his left palm. He helped the man into the backseat, closed the door behind him, and stood for a moment looking through the glass at him.

“Shiyaazh, ” the man said again. “Baayani-sin.” My son, I am ashamed.

Chee stood with his head bowed, the rain beating against his shoulders. He wiped the back of his hand across his wet face and licked his lips. The taste was salty.

Then he walked into the sagebrush, looking for the bottle. It would be needed as evidence. Chapter 3

THERE WAS NOTHING Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn dreaded more than this—this unpleasant business of pretending to help people he could not possibly help. But those involved today were a family in Emma’s clan, his in-laws, people from Bitter Water clan. By the Navajos’ extended definition of kinship, they were Emma’s brothers and sisters. He’d rarely heard Emma speak of them but that was beside the point. It was beside the point, too, that Emma would never have asked him to interfere. Certainly not in this case, with one of their own policemen murdered. She would have tried to help them herself, though. Tried very quietly—and she would have been no less impotent than Leaphorn. But Emma was dead now and that left only him.

“We know he didn’t kill that policeman,” Mary Keeyani had said. “Not Ashie Pinto.”

By the white man’s way of reckoning kinship, the Keeyani woman was Ashie Pinto’s niece. In fact, she was the daughter of Ashie’s sister, which gave her among the Turning Mountain People the same status as a daughter. She was a small, bony woman dressed in her old-fashioned, traditional, going-to-town best. But the long-sleeved velvet blouse hung on her loosely, as if borrowed from fatter times, and she wore only a single bracelet of narrow silver and a squash blossom necklace which used very little turquoise. She sat stiffly upright in the blue plastic chair across from Leaphorn’s desk, looking embarrassed and uncomfortable.

While Mary Keeyani explained her relationship to Ashie Pinto, and therefore to Hosteen Pinto’s problem, in the proper fashion of a traditional Navajo, Louisa Bourebonette had not explained herself at all. She sat next to Mary Keeyani, looking determined.

“There is absolutely no doubt that this is all some sort of mistake,” Louisa Bourebonette said in a slow, precise, slightly southern voice. “But we haven’t had any success talking with the FBI. We tried to talk to someone at the Farmington office and then we went to Albuquerque. They simply won’t discuss it. And we don’t know who to get to look for evidence to prove he’s innocent. We thought we could hire a private detective. We thought maybe you could recommend someone who would be reliable.”

Louisa Bourebonette had given Leaphorn her card. He picked it up now and glanced at it again.

LOUISA BOUREBONETTE, PH.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,

AMERICAN STUDIES

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

This wasn’t the information he wanted. He wanted to know how this trim, gray-haired, sharp-eyed woman was connected to the sorrowful business of Delbert Nez, a young man murdered and an old man destroyed. It was partly the wisdom Leaphorn had accumulated in a long life of police work that people have reasons for whatever they do—and the more effort required, the stronger the reason must be. Among Navajos, family is an overpowering reason. Bourebonette was not Navajo. What she was doing required a lot of effort. He put the card in his desk drawer.

“Have you talked to Hosteen Pinto’s attorney?”

“She didn’t seem to know much,” Bourebonette said. She made a small, self-deprecatory face and shook her head. “Of course, they turned Mr. Pinto over to someone brand new in the job. She’d just moved in from Washington. Had just been hired. She told us the Federal Public Defender’s office had two investigators who might be helpful. But

“

Professor Bourebonette let the sentence trail off, intending to let the skepticism in her tone finish it. Leaphorn sat silently behind his desk. He glanced at her. And away. Waiting.

Bourebonette shrugged. “But I got the impression that she didn’t think they would be very helpful. I don’t think she knew them well yet. In fact, she didn’t give us much reason to believe that Mr. Pinto will be well represented.”

Leaphorn knew one of the federal defender cops. A good, solid, hardworking Hispano named Felix Sanchez. He used to be with the El Paso police department and he knew how to collect information. But there wasn’t much of anything Sanchez could do to help these women. And nothing Leaphorn could do, either. He could give them the names of private detectives in Farmington, or Flagstaff, or Albuquerque. White men. What could they do? What could anyone do? An old man had been turned mean by whiskey and had killed a policeman. Why waste what little money his family might have? Or this abrasive white woman’s money. How did she fit into this?

“If you hire a private detective it’s going to be expensive,” Leaphorn said. “He would want some money in advance as a retainer. I’d guess at least five hundred dollars. And you’d be paying his expenses. Mileage, meals, motels, things like that. And so much an hour for his fee.”

“How much?” Professor Bourebonette asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe twenty-five, thirty dollars an hour.”

Mrs. Keeyani sucked in her breath. She looked stricken. Dr. Bourebonette put a comforting hand on Mrs. Keeyani’s arm.

“That’s about what I’d expected,” Professor Bourebonette said, in a stiff, unnatural-sounding voice. “We can pay it. Who would you recommend?”

“It would depend,” Leaphorn said. “What do you—”

Professor Bourebonette interrupted him.

“One would expect, or should expect if she didn’t know better, that you people would take care of this yourselves. That the family wouldn’t have to hire someone to find out the facts in a murder case.”

The anger left Leaphorn with nothing to say. So he said the obvious.

“In a case like this, a felony committed on a reservation, the jurisdiction

“

She held up her hand. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has the jurisdiction. We know that. We’ve already been told, and we knew it already, being reasonably intelligent. But after all, one of your own men was killed.” A trace of sarcasm crept into Bourebonette’s tone. “Aren’t you a little bit curious about who actually killed him?”

Leaphorn felt himself flushing. Surely this arrogant white woman didn’t expect him to answer that. Not in the presence of the murderer’s niece.

But the professor was waiting for an answer. Let her wait. Leaphorn waited himself. Finally he said: “Go on.”

“Since you don’t seem to be investigating, and since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is content to simply bring Ashie Pinto to trial without any effort to find the actual criminal, we hope you can at least give us some advice about who to hire. Somebody honest.”

Leaphorn cleared his throat. He was trying to imagine this haughty woman in the beautifully finished office of the agent-in-charge at Albuquerque. Nothing but politeness and good manners there, he was sure.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we were discussing. And to give you that advice I must know some things. What do you have to tell this private detective? What can you give him to work on? Would it be leads he’d be following on the Reservation - around where Hosteen Pinto lived? Or around Ship Rock and Red Rock where the - where it happened? In other words, what do you know that can help? What do you know that would help him find a witness, something to prove, for example, that Hosteen Pinto was somewhere else when this crime happened? What can you give him to give him a place to start looking?”

Leaphorn paused, thinking he shouldn’t pull himself into this. It was not his case, not his business. Interfering was certain to cause offense in a department that wanted the death of a brother officer balanced with a conviction of his killer. He shouldn’t open the door he was about to open. He should simply tell these women he couldn’t help them. Which just happened to be the sad truth. Still, Mary Keeyani was Emma’s kin. And, still, there were some unanswered questions in that Nez business—as much as he knew about it.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “if you have any useful information—any witnesses, anything that would lead to concrete evidence that the FBI wouldn’t listen to—you can tell me. I’ll see to it that the Bureau pays the proper attention. Anything you know.”

“We know he didn’t do it,” Bourebonette said. But the anger was used up now. She attempted a small, wan smile. “All we can tell you is why we know he couldn’t have killed the policeman, and that’s nothing more concrete than telling you about the kind of man Ashie Pinto is. Always has been.”

But he did kill a man, Leaphorn was thinking, a long time ago. If I remember -what I read in that report, he was convicted, years ago, went to prison for killing a man.

“Are you a relative?” he asked Bourebonette.

“I am a friend,” Bourebonette said.

Leaphorn looked at her over his glasses, waiting for more than that.

“For twenty-five years,” she added. “At least.”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said.

Professor Bourebonette looked impatient, as if it probably wasn’t worth her time to explain. But she decided to.

“My interest is in comparative mythology. The evolution of myth inside cultures. The evolution of myth as cultures meet and intermix. The relationship of a society’s mythology with its economic base. Its environment. Mr. Pinto has been one of my informants. For years.” She paused.

Leaphorn glanced at her. Was she finished? No. She was remembering.

“He wouldn’t kill anyone,” she added. “He has a great sense of humor. A great memory for the funny things. A great memory for everything.” She looked into Leaphorn’s eyes and said it slowly, as if he was the judge. As if he was the jury. Could whiskey not make a killer out of a funny man, just as it did of sad men and angry men?

“He has a great sense of humor,” Bourebonette repeated.

It didn’t prove anything, Leaphorn thought. But it was interesting. It was also interesting that she was telling him this. A long way to come, a lot of time used, a lot of money to be spent if she was serious about hiring an investigator. And a very flimsy explanation of why she was doing it.

And so Leaphorn had asked the Turning Mountain woman and the professor to wait. He called downstairs and asked for the file marked HOMICIDE; DELBERT NEZ.

He had been away when it happened, waiting in a motel room in Phoenix to be called as a witness in a case being tried on appeal in the federal court there. Even so, he remembered a lot of it. He had read about it every day in the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Republic, of course. He had called the Ship Rock subagency station and talked to Captain Largo about it. The Navajo Tribal Police included only about 110 sworn officers, making the murder of any one of them not only memorable but close and personal. He had barely known Delbert Nez and remembered him as a small, quiet, neat young officer. But, like Leaphorn, Nez had worked out of the Window Rock office and Leaphorn had seen him often. Nez had been trying to grow a mustache. That was not an easy task for Navajos, with their lack of facial hair, and his sparse growth had provoked teasing and ribald jokes.

Leaphorn had known the arresting officer much better. Jim Chee. He had run across Chee several times on other investigations. An unusually bright young man. Clever. Some good qualities. But he had what might be a fatal flaw for a policeman. He was an individualist, following the rules if and when they agreed with him. On top of that, he was a romantic. He even wanted to be a medicine man. Leaphorn smiled at the idea. A Tribal Policeman-Shaman. The two professions were utterly incongruous.

Leaphorn found himself wondering if he had been Chee’s first client. After a tough case, in the awful malaise that had followed Emma’s death, he’d hired Chee to do a Blessing Way for him. An impulsive decision—unusual for him. He’d done it partly to give the young man a chance to try his hand as a shaman and partly as a gesture toward Emma’s people. The Yazzies were Bitter Water clansmen and traditionalists. The ceremony would be sort of an unspoken apology for the hurt he must have caused them. He’d left Emma’s mother’s place on the second morning after they’d carried the body out into the canyon—unable to endure the full four days of silent withdrawal among her relatives that tradition required. It had been rude, and he’d regretted it. And so he had called Agnes and told her he’d hired a singer. He asked her to arrange the ceremony. She had gladly done it, not needing a reminder that his own clan, the Slow Talking Dinee, was now scattered and almost extinct, or that there was little left of his own family. He’d been uneasy around Agnes. Agnes had never married and, as Emma’s sister, he would have been expected to marry her under the old tradition.

He glanced up at the two women waiting patiently across the desk and then looked back at the report. But he was thinking of Officer Chee, his hair tied in a knot at the back of his head arranging his equipment on the swept earthen floor of the Yazzie hogan. Chee had been nervous, showing Leaphorn where to sit with his back against the west wall of the hogan, spreading a small rug in front of him. Then Chee had extracted from his deerskin jish the little leather sack that was his Four Mountain bundle, two pairs of “talking prayersticks,” a snuff can containing flint arrow points, and a half dozen pouches of pollen. He had solemnly formed the shape of footprints on the earth and marked on them with the pollen the symbols of the sunrays on which Leaphorn would walk. Beyond Chee, through the hogan doorway to the east he could see the rugged ramparts of the Carrizo Mountains reflecting the rosy twilight. He had smelled the pinon smoke from the cooking fires of Emma’s kinfolks and of his own friends who had come to join him in this venture into the spirit world of his people.

At that moment he had wished desperately for a way to call it all off. He was a hypocrite. He did not believe that the ritual poetry that Officer Jim Chee would chant, or the dry paintings he would form on the hogan floor, would control the powers and force them to restore Joe Leaphorn to a life with “beauty all around him.” The beauty had gone somewhere up in the canyon rocks with Emma’s body. Gone forever. He wanted only to follow her.

But there had been no way out of it. And on the second dawn, after the long night of chanting, he had sucked in the fout great ceremonial breaths of cold morning air feeling different than he had felt for weeks. It had not cured him, but it had started the healing. He could thank Shaman Jim Chee for that, he guessed. Or for part of it. But Officer Jim Chee was another matter. If Officer Chee had done his duty, Delbert Nez might still be alive.

“Shot high in the left chest,” the report said. “Apparently at very close range.”

Leaphorn glanced up at Mary Keeyani and the professor. “Sorry I’m taking so long,” he said.

“There is time enough,” Mary Keeyani said.

Captain Largo had told him that Chee wanted to resign after the homicide. Getting Nez out of the car, Chee had been burned on both hands, one arm, one leg, and the chest. Largo had gone to the hospital at Farmington to see him. Largo was an old friend. He’d told Leaphorn about it.

“He didn’t just offer to resign,” Largo had told Leaphorn. “He insisted on it. He gave me his badge. Said he’d screwed up. That he should have gone to assist Nez when he knew Nez was in pursuit. And of course he should have gone.”

“Why the devil didn’t he go?” Leaphorn had asked. “The silly son-of-a-bitch. What was his excuse?”

“He didn’t offer any excuses,” Largo had said, his voice resenting Leaphorn’s judgmental tone. “But I reminded him that his report showed Nez had been laughing. From what little he heard on the radio Nez wasn’t taking it seriously. Like it was a joke. And I told him he couldn’t resign anyway. He can’t resign until we get Pinto tried.”

Thinking of that conversation now as he turned the page in the report, Leaphorn remembered that Largo had some sort of vague clan kinship link with Officer Chee. At least he’d heard that. Navajo Tribal Police regulations prohibited nepotism in the chain of command. But the rules were just picked up from biligaana personnel regulations. The white rules didn’t recognize clan connections.

The next sheet was the report of Sergeant Eldon George. When George arrived he had found Chee sprawled in the front seat of his vehicle, half-unconscious from shock. Pinto was asleep on the back seat, handcuffed. George had attempted to treat Chee’s burns with his first aid kit. Another Navajo Police unit had arrived, and a San Juan County Sheriff’s car, and a New Mexico State Police patrolman and then the ambulance that Chee had called to pick up Nez. Instead, it had taken Officer Chee. Pinto had been transported to the county jail at Aztec and booked on an assault charge—the toughest rap possible for a crime committed on federal trust land until the federals got involved and filed their felony homicide complaint.

Leaphorn glanced up at Mrs. Keeyani. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap, lower lip caught between her teeth, watching him.

“I must refresh my memory before I can tell you anything,” he said.

Mrs. Keeyani nodded.

The next page reminded Leaphorn that Ashie Pinto had not made a statement. When apprehended, he had said, according to the report:

“Officer, I have done something shameful.”

Sounded stilted. Leaphorn considered it. Pinto would have spoken to Chee in Navajo, probably. Chee, probably no better than half-conscious, would have passed along a translation to George. George had jotted it into his notebook, retyped it into his report. What had Pinto actually said?

According to the report, nothing else. He had admitted nothing, denied nothing, remained absolutely silent, refusing to answer any question except to confirm his identity with a nod, declining to call a lawyer, to name anyone who he might wish to be informed of his arrest. When asked to submit to the taking of a blood sample, “Subject Pinto was seen to nod in the affirmative.”

The test showed a blood alcohol level of 0.211. The percentage of alcohol in the blood that made one formally and legally drunk in New Mexico was 0.10.

There followed the Federal Bureau of Investigation report dated eleven days following the arrest. Leaphorn scanned it. Ballistics confirmed that the bullet fired into the chest of Nez had come from the pistol confiscated from Pinto, a .38 caliber revolver. It confirmed that holes in Pinto’s trousers were caused by burns. There was more, including the autopsy. Leaphorn knew what it said. Nez had been alive when the fire suffocated him. Probably unconscious, but alive. Leaphorn sighed, turned to the next page. It summarized a statement taken from Chee at the hospital. He scanned it quickly. Familiar stuff. But wait. He lingered on a paragraph. Reread it.

“Officer Chee said that for several weeks Nez had been interested in apprehending an unidentified subject who had been vandalizing and defacing a basaltic outcrop east of Red Rock and south of Ship Rock. Chee said he believed from what he heard on the radio that Nez had seen this person and expected to apprehend the subject. He said the radio signal was breaking up but that he heard Nez laughing and Nez did not appear to want a backup.”

Leaphorn snorted, an angry sound and unintentionally loud. He glanced up to see if the women had noticed. They had.

He covered his embarrassment with a question. “Did anyone tell you about the circumstances?”

“They said he was arrested out there where it happened,” Mrs. Keeyani said. “They said he had the gun that killed that policeman.”

“Did they tell you that he hasn’t denied it?” Leaphorn asked. But he was thinking of Jim Chee. Irritated. Nez did not appear to want a backup. Whether he wanted one or not, the rules said Chee should be there. But that was Chee’s reputation. He made his own rules. Smart. Unusually smart. But not a team player. So he was sitting in the trading post at Red Rock drinking coffee while Nez, alone, was dealing with a homicidal drunk armed with a pistol.

“I don’t know what my uncle told them,” Mary Keeyani said. She shook her head.

“But I know he didn’t do it. Not Hosteen Pinto. He wouldn’t kill anybody.”

Leaphorn waited, watching her face, giving her a chance to say more. She simply sat, looking down at her hands.

Finally she said: “A long, long time ago, before I was born

He got in a fight then, when he was young, and a man was killed. But he was a wild boy then, and drunk. Now he is an old man. He doesn’t drink now. Not for years.”

It was not something to argue about. Instead Leaphorn said, “He won’t tell them anything at all. That’s what I’m told. Not a word. Not even to his lawyer.”

Mrs. Keeyani looked at her hands. “That wasn’t his gun,” she said. “My uncle had an old .22 rifle. A single-shot rifle. He still has that. It’s in his hogan.”

Leaphorn said nothing. This interested him. That pistol Pinto had was a Ruger, an expensive model and not what you would expect a man like Pinto to own. On the other hand, there could be a thousand explanations of why he did own it.

“Perhaps you didn’t know about this pistol,” Leaphorn said.

Now it was Mrs. Keeyani’s turn to be surprised. “He is my mother’s brother,” she said. “He never got married. His place was there at our grandmother’s place behind Yon Dot Mountain.”

Leaphorn needed no more explanation. If Ashie Pinto had owned an expensive Ruger revolver, his relatives would have known it. He glanced back at the FBI report, looking for the name of the investigating officer. Agent Theodore Rostik. He’d never heard of Rostik, which meant he was a newcomer to the Gallup office—either fresh and green from the FBI Academy, or an older agent exiled as a lost cause. Up-and-comers in the agency were not sent to places like Farmington, or Fargo, or Gallup, or other towns considered Siberian by the Bureau hierarchy. These were the billets for new men without political connections in the agency, or those who had fallen from grace—perhaps having caused bad publicity (the agency’s mortal sin) or shown signs of original thinking. For Leaphorn the point was that Rostik might be unusually stupid, or unusually smart—either of which might cause his exile. But most likely he was simply green.

“I’ll tell you what I think you should do,” he said to Mrs. Keeyani without looking up from the report. “Hosteen Pinto has a lawyer who may be green but will be smart. The Federal Public Defender just hires the smart ones. Work with her. Tell her the strange things that trouble you. She will send out one of the investigators to learn the facts. I know one of them personally, a very good man. You should work with them.”

Leaphorn read on, not looking up, waiting for a response. He heard Mrs. Keeyani shift in her chair. But the voice he heard was Dr. Bourebonette’s. “Are they Navajos?” she asked. “Would they understand that Hosteen Pinto’s family would certainly know if Hosteen Pinto owned that pistol?”

“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. He didn’t look up because he didn’t want to show his resentment. Mrs. Keeyani he could tolerate. He respected her reason for being here—even though it wasted her time and his. Professor Bourebonette was another matter. But it was an astute question.

“Probably they wouldn’t understand that,” he agreed.

He was looking for something in the report that would tell him how Ashie Pinto had gotten from his place behind Yon Dot Mountain to Navajo Route 33 south of Ship Rock, New Mexico. Two hundred miles, more or less. Nothing in the report mentioned an abandoned car or pickup.

Dr. Bourebonette cleared her throat politely. “Does that report tell how Hosteen Pinto got over into New Mexico?”

“I was looking for that,” Leaphorn said, glancing up at her. “Do you know?”

“Someone came and got him,” she said.

“Who?”

Dr. Bourebonette glanced at Mary Keeyani.

“I don’t know,” Mary Keeyani said. “But I know somebody came and got him. I had gone over to the store at the Gap to get some kerosene for the light. And my husband, he was out with the sheep. Everybody was gone somewhere except my youngest daughter. She had come home on the school bus and she’d gone out to catch her horse and go help with the sheep and she saw dust from the car.”

“It wasn’t Pinto’s car?”

Mrs. Keeyani laughed. “Hosteen Pinto’s car broke a long time ago,” she said. “The chickens sleep in it.” Her amusement left as quickly as it had come. “She was up on the side of the hill with the horse and all she saw was the dust and maybe just a glimpse. It had come from Hosteen Pinto’s shack. The road, it runs right by my mother’s hogan and past our house and then out toward Twentynine Mile Canyon and connects up with the road to Cedar Ridge Trading Post. She said it might be a light-colored car, or maybe a pickup, or maybe it was just dusty.”

“When was this?”

“It was the evening before Hosteen Pinto got arrested over in New Mexico.”

Leaphorn flipped back through the report. He found nothing about any of this.

“Did a policeman come to talk to you?”

“A young white man,” she said. “With those little spots on his face. And a Navajo to translate for him.”

Freckles, Leaphorn thought. A culture unafflicted with freckles has no noun for them. “What did they want to know?”

“They asked about the pistol. They asked about what Hosteen Pinto was doing over there. Where did Pinto get the pistol? Where did he get the two fifty-dollar bills he had in his pocket? Did Hosteen Pinto know Delbert Nez—the man they say he shot? They asked questions like they thought Hosteen Pinto was bootlegging wine. Like how did Hosteen Pinto act when he was drunk? Did he get into fights? How did he make a living? Was he a bootlegger?” Mrs. Keeyani had been looking down at her hands. Now she looked up. “They seemed to think for sure he was a bootlegger.” She shook her head.

“How did you answer?”

“I said maybe the fifty-dollar bills were his fee. From the one who came and got him.”

“Fee?”

“He had his crystals with him,” Mrs. Keeyani said. “When he was younger he used to work finding things for people. When I was a little girl they would come from as far away as Tuba City, and even Kayenta and Leupp. He was pretty famous then.”

“He was a crystal gazer,” Leaphorn said. He leaned forward. If this man was working as a shaman, maybe there was more to this than just another senseless, sordid whiskey killing. “He still worked at it?”

“Not much.” She thought about it. “Last year he found a horse for a man who works over at Copper Mine, and then he did a little work for a white man. And he would work with Dr. Bourebonette.” She nodded at the professor. “That was about all I know about.”

“What had the white man lost?”

“I think he was hunting old-time stories.”

Leaphorn wasn’t sure what she meant. He waited for an explanation. None came.

“Was Hosteen Pinto someone the anthropologists came to see to learn the old stories? Like Professor Bourebonette?”

“Yes. Many times in the old days. Not so much now. He learned most of them from Narbona Begay I think. The brother of his mother.”

“You think it was this white man looking for stories who came for him the day before the shooting?”

Mrs. Keeyani shook her head. “I don’t know who it was. Maybe.”

Or maybe not, Leaphorn thought. And how does it help anyway? His mind kept returning to Dr. Bourebonette’s reason for being here. She knew the man, obviously. She said she liked him, had worked with him. But being here involved a lot of time and effort if you worked in Flagstaff. And she also seemed ready to pay for the expense of a private investigator.

“Are you still working with Hosteen Pinto?” he asked her. “I mean something current? Going on right now?”

She nodded. “We have been collaborating on a book,” she said.

“About mythology?”

“About the evolution of witchcraft beliefs,” she said. “Ashie Pinto had noticed it himself. How the stories had changed since his boyhood. He went to Albuquerque with me and we listened to the tapes.

“ She paused. Decided this needed explanation. “The oral history tapes in the University of New Mexico collection. Interviews with elderly Navajos. And not just Navajos. With the other Native American cultures and the Spanish-American old people. Tapes that were made back in the thirties and forties that were recording memories that go way back into the 1880s. And if you allow secondhand, second-person memories—what we call grandfather stories—some of the memories went back before the Long Walk. We’d listen to these and look at the transcripts and that would refresh Hosteen Pinto’s memories of the tales he had been told.”

Dr. Bourebonette had an austere face. The only expressions Leaphorn had identified in it were skepticism, anger, and determination—the face of a woman used to getting her way who doubted she would get it from him. Now Bourebonette’s face had changed. As she talked of this book there was animation and enthusiasm.

Leaphorn decided he might know what motivated Dr. Bourebonette.

“

It’s remarkable,” she was saying.

“What Hosteen Pinto can remember. How well he commands the little nuances of those old stories. The differences in attitudes of the teller toward the witch, for example. The shift in importance if the variation came from outside the Navajo culture. For example, from the Zuni sorcery tradition. Or the Hopi’two-heart’ legends, or—” Dr. Bourebonette stopped, midphrase. She looked embarrassed.

“You were still working with Hosteen Pinto? You hadn’t finished?”

“More or less. I was to pick him up later that week. The week it happened. In fact that’s how I found out he was arrested. I had read about the crime, but they hadn’t released Hosteen Pinto’s name. So I went out to his place and Mrs. Keeyani told me he was in jail.”

In jail, Leaphorn thought. Unavailable to answer professorial questions. A book put on hold. Perhaps never to be finished. Professor Bourebonette’s motivations seemed much less mysterious.

“Can the book be finished without him?” Leaphorn asked. His voice was as neutral as he could make it. But Professor Bourebonette read him exactly. Her sharp blue eyes stared into his. “Of course,” she said. But she nodded, conceding his point and accepting the accusation. “But it might not be as solid a work.”

Leaphorn looked away from her, back at the report, impressed with her astuteness and feeling slightly guilty. If he told Emma of this exchange, as he would have, she would have clucked her tongue, disapproving of his conduct. He turned the page, looking for the answer to the obvious question these women had posed. How had the old man gotten from the west side of the Reservation to Ship Rock country? At least he could try to find that out for them.

“It was mostly his book,” Professor Bourebonette said, as if to herself.

Leaphorn glanced up, directly into her eyes. And saw what? Anger? Disappointment?

He flipped through the remaining pages. The question that seemed so obvious to him and his visitors had not seemed so intriguing to Agent Rostik. It simply wasn’t dealt with. Well, perhaps there was some simple, irrelevant answer.

He had intended to ignore the manila envelope of photographs in the back of the folder. They weren’t the sort of images he’d want to share with these women. But now he was curious. He slid the stack out on his desk.

Nez’s body beside the burned car. More burned car, with Chee’s fire extinguisher lying beside it. The pistol, shiny and new looking. A half-dozen shots of the locale taken in daylight, with the tortured, ugly shape of a basaltic outcrop rising in the background over the grassy ridge, a liquor bottle, a pocketknife, odds and ends that the police photographer, or the officer running the investigation, thought might be relevant.

Relevant. Leaphorn picked up the photograph of the bottle. A typical Scotch bottle—nothing to distinguish it from most any other, except the cost. He put on his glasses and examined the label.

DEWARS WHITE LABEL

He turned over the photograph. The label on the back confirmed that this was the bottle Ashie Pinto was carrying when apprehended by Officer Chee. “One quart capacity,” the notation added, “approx. five sixth empty.”

Scotch. Expensive Scotch.

“Mrs. Keeyani,” Leaphorn said. “Do you know what Hosteen Pinto likes to drink? Wine? Whiskey?”

Mrs. Keeyani’s face said she resented the question. “He doesn’t drink,” she said.

“He had been drinking that night,” Leaphorn said. “Alcohol was in his blood.”

“He used to drink,” Mrs. Keeyani said. “Just now and then. He’d say if he took one little spoonful he just couldn’t stop. For a long time, he wouldn’t drink, and then somebody would have to go into Flagstaff or Winslow or some place and bring him home from jail. And then he wouldn’t drink any more for a long time. For months. But finally four-five years ago, he did it again, and he got sick in the jail at Flag. Had to go to the hospital and the doctor said it would kill him. And after that—” She paused, shook her head. “No more drinking after that.”

“But when he drank, what did he drink?”

Mrs. Keeyani shrugged. “Wine,” she said. “Anything. Whatever was cheap.”

“How about Scotch?”

Mrs. Keeyani looked puzzled. “Is it sweet?”

“No. It’s very strong and expensive, but not sweet. Why?” Leaphorn asked.

Mrs. Keeyani smiled, remembering. “My uncle had a sweet tooth,” she said. “We used to call him Sugarman. Anything sweet, he loved it. If she saw Hosteen Pinto’s pickup coming, my mother would say, hurry up children, hide that cake I baked. Hide the candy. Hide the sugar sack. Here comes my brother the Sugarman.” She chuckled at the memory. Then, not wanting her mother misjudged, added, “She’d give him a piece of cake.”

“But you don’t know if he drank Scotch?”

“If it was sweet, he drank it. If it was cheap.”

Leaphorn glanced at the photograph of the bottle. The Scotch that came in that was definitely not cheap.

Leaphorn sighed. After a lifetime in police work, he understood himself well enough to know he wouldn’t tolerate this apparent violation of the natural order. He had been curious about how Pinto came to be two hundred miles away from home with no way of getting there, or getting back. But that could be explained by hitchhiking. He could think of no such easy explanation for this bottle of Dewars Scotch. Or two fifty-dollar bills. Or how he got that pistol.

Leaphorn stood.

“Ladies,” he said, “I will see what I can find out.” Chapter 4

JIM CHEE CAME slouching out of the Burn Doctor’s examining room at the University of New Mexico Hospital Burn and Trauma Center feeling distinctly down. Predictions concerning his hand had been ambiguous. Then he noticed the woman sitting against the wall in the waiting room. Something about her reminded him of Janet Pete. She was immersed in a Newsweek, her sleek, dark hair visible above the cover and her very nice legs neatly crossed. He stared. She turned the page of the magazine, giving him a look at more than her forehead.

Depression vanished, replaced by delight. It was Janet Pete.

“Hey,” Chee said. “Janet. What are you doing here?”

“I was waiting for you,” Janet Pete said, grinning at him. “I wanted to see how you look toasted.”

“Not much improvement,” Chee said, displaying the bandage on his hand. He used his good arm to hug her.

Janet hugged back, hard against Chee’s damaged chest.

“Aaagh!”

Janet recoiled. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Just a play for sympathy,” Chee said, breathing hard.

“I didn’t notice the bandages under your shirt,” Janet said, repentant.

“One on my leg, too,” Chee said, tapping his thigh and grinning at her. “The doctor said that altogether if you average it out, I was somewhere between medium rare and medium.”

“I just heard about it,” she said. “It happened just when I was moving. Back in Washington, they have so much local homegrown homicide that one way out here doesn’t make the paper. Not even if it’s a policeman.”

“I’d heard you’d come back home,” Chee said. “Or almost home. I was going to hunt you up when I got all these bandages off.” He was looking down at her, conscious that he was smiling like an ape, conscious that the receptionist was watching all this, conscious that Janet Pete had come to see him. “But how did you find me here?”

“I called your office in Ship Rock. They told me you were on sick leave. And the dispatcher asked around for me and found out you’d come to the burn center here for a checkup.” She touched the bandage with a tentative finger. “Is it better? Are you going to be all right?”

“Mostly just scars. Except for this hand. They think it will be all right, too. Probably. Or close enough so I can use it. But let’s get out of here. You have time for coffee?”

Janet Pete had time.

Walking from the university hospital, across the campus to the Frontier Restaurant, Janet touched gently on the death of Nez and deduced that Chee wasn’t ready to talk about it. Chee touched on Janet’s coming home from her law-firm job in Washington, and sensed this was a subject better returned to later. And so as they walked through the mild Albuquerque morning, they skipped further back in time and reminisced.

“Remember that day we met?” Janet said. “At the San Juan County jail. You were trying to keep my client locked up without charging him with anything. And I was being righteously indignant about it. Remember that?” She was laughing.

“I remember how I outsmarted you,” Chee said.

“Like hell you did,” Janet said. She stopped laughing. She stopped walking. “How? What do you mean?”

Chee looked back at her, grinning.

“What do you mean?” Janet demanded.

“Remember, you were getting your man out of lockup, and you had gotten his sack of stuff from the booking desk, and you got sore at me, thinking I was trying to worm some incriminating information out of him in the interrogation room. So when you went to call the FBI to complain about my conduct and get me called off, you took your client to the telephone with you.”

Janet was frowning. “I remember that,” she said. “The agent-in-charge said you didn’t have FBI authorization to talk to the man. What was his name?”

“Bisti,” Chee said. “Roosevelt Bisti.”

“Yes,” Janet said. “I remember he was sick. And I remember the fed said he wanted to talk to you and he told you to butt out. Didn’t he? So how did you outsmart me, wise guy?”

“When you went to the phone you took along Bisti, but you left his sack behind.”

Janet digested this. She walked toward him, shaking her head.

“You searched through his stuff,” she said, accusingly. “Is that what you’re telling me? That’s not outslicking me. That’s cheating.”

They were walking again, Chee still grinning. His hand hurt a little, and so did the burn on his chest, but he was enjoying this. He was happy.

“Whose rules?” he asked. “You’re a lawyer so you have to play by the biligaana rules. But you didn’t ask me what rules I was using.”

Janet laughed. “Okay, Jim,” she said. “Anyway, I got Old Man Bisti out of jail and out of your unfair clutches.”

“You enjoyed that job, didn’t you? I mean your work out on the Big Rez? Why don’t you go back to it? They’re short-handed. I’ll bet you could get your job back in a minute.”

“I am going back to it.”

“With the DNA?” Chee’s delight was in his voice. The Dinebeüna Nahülna be Agaditahe was the Navajo Tribe’s version of a legal aid society—providing legal counsel for those who couldn’t afford to pay. He’d be seeing Janet Pete a lot.

“Same sort of work but not the DNA,” she said. “I’ll be working for the Department of Justice. With the Federal Public Defender here in Albuquerque. I’ll be one of the court-appointed defense attorneys in federal criminal cases.”

“Oh,” Chee said. His quick mind formed two conclusions. Janet Pete, being Navajo and being the most junior lawyer on the staff, would have been given Ashie Pinto to represent. From that conclusion, the second was instantaneous and took the joy from the morning. Janet Pete had come to see Officer Jim Chee, not Friend Jim Chee.

“I went to school here, you know,” Chee said, simply to have something to say, to cover his disappointment.

They were walking under the sycamores that shaded the great brick expanse of the central mall. A squadron of teenaged skateboarders thundered past. Janet Pete glanced at him, curious about the change of subject and the sudden silence which had preceded it.

“After four years,” she said, “a campus starts to feel like home.”

“Seven for me,” Chee said. “You go a couple of semesters and then run out of money, and come back again when you’ve stacked some up again. That’s the average here, I think. About seven years to get a bachelor’s degree. But it never started to feel like home.”

“It was different at Stanford,” Janet said. “People either had money or they had the big scholarships. You lived around the campus, so you got acquainted, made friends. It’s more a community, I guess.” She glanced at him again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“Your mood changed. A cloud over the sun.”

“I shifted from the social mode into strictly business,” Chee said.

“Oh?” Puzzlement in her voice.

“You’re representing Ashie Pinto. Right?” The tone was a little bleaker than he’d intended.

They walked past the Student Union without an answer to that, toward the fountain formed of a great slab of natural stone. Chee remembered the local legend that the university architect, lacking funds for an intended sculpture, had scrounged the monolithic sheets of rough marble from a quarry and arranged them in something that might suggest Stonehenge, or raw nature, or whatever your imagination allowed.

It worked beautifully and usually it lifted Chee’s spirits.

“I came to see you because I like you,” Janet Pete said. “If you weren’t my friend, which you happen to be, I would have come looking for you because you’re the arresting officer and it’s my job.”

Chee thought about that.

“So I had two reasons,” she said. “Is that one too many reasons for you?”

“What did I say?” Chee asked. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Hell you didn’t. Then why am I feeling like I’m on the defensive?” Janet said. “And not exactly knowing why.” She hurried a little faster. “Boy,” she said. “Boy, I can see why that white girl of yours went back to Wisconsin.”

Chee caught up with her.

“What was her name? Mary?”

“Mary Landon,” Chee said. “Look, I’m sorry. I know how it is. Somebody has to represent Pinto and naturally it would be you. So what do you want to know?”

Janet Pete, still walking fast, was out of the trees now, angling across the parking lot past Popejoy Hall. Chee followed her out under a morning sky that was dark blue and sunny—with just enough of those puffy forenoon clouds to suggest autumn was not too far along to produce afternoon thunder-heads.

“FBI’s not cooperating, huh?” Chee said. “What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” Janet said.

“Come on, Janet. I said I was sorry.”

“Well,” she said. And then she laughed up at him, squeezed his arm.

“I can be as touchy as you are,” she said. “I can be a real bitch.” She laughed again. “But notice how neatly I put you in the wrong. Did you appreciate that?”

“Not much,” Chee said. “Is that something you learn in law school?”

“It’s something you learn from your mother.”

Jim Chee’s taste for coffee had been brutalized by years of drinking the version he used to make for himself in his trailer under the cottonwood trees at Ship Rock—recently he’d taken to using little filter things that fit over his cups. The Frontier coffee tasted fresh but weak. Over a second refill they decided that he would cash in his return ticket on the Mesa Airlines flight and ride back to Ship Rock with Janet Pete. Tomorrow he’d show her the scene of the crime. By tomorrow, he thought, he would feel like talking about it.

“Did you know Hosteen Pinto still won’t say anything about what happened?” Janet asked. “He’ll talk to me about other things but not about the crime. He just shuts up.”

“What’s there to say?”

“Well, everything. Whether he did it, for one thing. Why he did it, if he did. What he was doing out there. Did you know he’s a shaman, a crystal gazer? He finds things for people. That seems to be his only income. That and getting fees as an informant. From scholars, I mean. He’s sort of an authority on old stories, legends, what happened when. So the history professors, and the mythologists, and the sociologists, and that sort of people are always having him remember things on tape for them. He has a car, but it doesn’t run, so how did he get there? I mean where he was when you arrested him. What was he doing about two hundred miles from home? That’s what I want him to tell me. And if he did it, why. Everything.”

“He did it because he was drunk,” Chee said. “Nez picked him up to get him out of the rain, tried to put him in the backseat of the patrol car, and Pinto got sore about it.”

“That seems to be the official ‘theory of the Coyote Walts crime.’ I know that’s what the U.S. attorney is going to trial with,” Janet said.

“And that seems to be pretty much what went on,” Chee said.

“But why didn’t Nez take that pistol away from him? You guys have a sort of standard procedure for things like that, don’t you? For handling drunks?”

Chee had wondered about that himself. “He wasn’t arresting him,” he said. “We take drunks in for their own protection. So they don’t freeze. Or drown.” As Janet Pete knew very well.

She sipped her coffee. Her dark eyes looked skeptical over the rim.

“He didn’t take the pistol because he didn’t see the pistol,” Chee added. “The old man had it stuck in his belt, behind him.”

Janet sipped. “Come on,” she said. “Gimme a break. Isn’t that sort of a usual place to stick a pistol?”

Chee shrugged.

“So how did Pinto get there?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe the guy in the white car brought him,” Chee said. “You’ve seen the FBI report, haven’t you? What did they say?”

Janet had put her cup down. “White car? What white car?”

“When I was driving down from Red Rock, I met a white—anyway a light-colored vehicle. It was raining and getting dark. But I think I recognized it. It’s an old banged-up Jeepster that one of the teachers at Ship Rock drives. What’d they say about that in the report?”

“They didn’t mention it,” Janet said. “All news to me.”

“They didn’t run that down?” Chee said. He shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” Janet said. “You gave them all they needed. Their suspect, arrested at the scene of the crime, holding the murder weapon. All that’s missing is the motive. Being drunk takes care of that. He doesn’t even deny he did it. So why waste time and complicate things by digging out all the facts?” The question sounded bitter.

“How about that fancy bottle he was carrying? Does the report show where that came from?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know it was fancy.”

“Like something you’d give a fancy drinker for Christmas. If you wanted to impress him. It wasn’t what a drunk would be buying.”

Janet finished her coffee, put down the cup, looked at him for a while.

“You know, Jim, you don’t have to do any of this. I know how you must feel. And I’m having trouble separating friend from lawyer when

“

He held up his right palm, interrupting her.

“When I think I’m hearing a lawyer, I’ll shut up,” he said. The thing about Janet Pete was that he could talk to her about things that were hard to talk about. She wasn’t Mary Landon. No soft, pale hair, no bottomless blue eyes, no talent for making him feel like the ultimate male. But by tomorrow, he thought, he could talk to her about listening to Delbert Nez laughing on the radio. He could talk to her about how the dreadful feeling grew as he sat over his coffee at the Red Rock Trading Post, and waited, and waited, and waited. He could tell her how long it had taken him to sense that he had made an unforgivable, irredeemable mistake. She would understand why, when Ashie Pinto was convicted, he would resign from the tribal police and find some job that he was fitted for. She would understand why he had to see the old drunk convicted. He hadn’t done his job. He hadn’t kept Delbert Nez alive. But at least he had arrested his killer. Done one thing right.

She’d have to defend the old man, get him a light sentence—or perhaps some sort of an insanity plea bargain that would put him in a hospital for a while. He had no problem with that. It didn’t matter to him if the old man was punished. That would do no possible good.

But he needed Janet Pete to understand that a verdict finding Pinto innocent would make Jim Chee doubly guilty. Chapter 5

JOE LEAPHORN STOOD at the door of Ashie Pinto’s house reexamining his understanding of what the law allowed in a criminal investigation. He was sure that only the most genial judge would tolerate what was going on here. It would be labeled as a search without a warrant, perhaps as downright breaking and entering. However, Mary Keeyani and Louisa Bourebonette had not been impressed with such niceties, nor with Leaphorn’s uneasiness.

“I thought we were just going to check around out here,” Leaphorn had said. “Ask some questions. See if anyone had seen anything. We don’t have any legal right to break into the suspect’s house.”

“He’s my uncle,” Mary Keeyani had said. She was using the tire tool from Professor Bourebonette’s car, prying at the padlock hasp that secured Ashie Pinto’s door.

“It’s not as if we were actually breaking in,” Bourebonette said. “We’re here for his own benefit.”

Joe Leaphorn wasn’t exactly sure why he was here. Partly curiosity, partly some irrational sense of responsibility to Emma’s clan sister—sort of a family gesture to soothe his conscience. Certainly he had no reason to be here that would sound either plausible or professional if this meddling into a federal homicide case caused any complications. True, that seemed extremely unlikely. But he stood aside as Mary Keeyani opened the violated door. The women filed in past him.

“He keeps his papers in a tin box,” Mary Keeyani said. “It’s in here somewhere if I can find it.”

Leaphorn left the women to their questionable task. He walked across the hard-packed earth behind Pinto’s house and inspected Pinto’s truck. It was a 1970-vintage Ford short-bed pickup with the left front tire flat, the left rear critically low, the glass missing from the driver’ s-side window, and chicken manure on the seat. He released the hood catch and raised it. The battery was missing—the first thing taken on the back side of the Reservation when a truck gets too worn out to fix. Obviously, Ashie Pinto hadn’t driven this truck for a long, long time.

He closed the hood and walked down the slope through the snakeweed to Pinto’s outhouse. The raw planks used to build it a lifetime ago had shrunk and warped. Through the gaping cracks Leaphorn admired Pinto’s view while he urinated—a grand expanse of tan-silver grass and black-silver sage sloping down Blue Moon Bench toward the cliffs of the Colorado River Canyon. On the way back to the house he made another stop at the hogan that adjoined it. It was round and windowless, built of stone, its tarpaper roof insulated with a layer of earth. Leaphorn pulled open the board door and peered into the darkness. He saw an iron cot, boxes, an old icebox apparently used for storage, nothing that looked interesting.

Nor was there anything interesting under Ashie Pinto’s brush arbor—just an old bridle hanging from a crossbar, the bit rusted, the leather stiff and cracked. Leaphorn took it down, looked at it, hung it back where he’d found it, yawned. A wasted day, he thought. The only useful thing Leaphorn could think of that might be found here was something that would tell them how Pinto got from here on the western fringe of the Big Reservation over to Ship Rock territory. Probably at least two hundred miles. Someone with a vehicle must have taken him. Logically they would have sent word they were coming. Probably mailed to Pinto at the Short Mountain Trading Post. Possibly, as Mary Keeyani believed, this letter would have been saved in Pinto’s repository of documents.

“When you just get maybe one letter a year—or maybe just eight or ten your whole life—then probably you save them,” Mary Keeyani had explained. True enough. He walked back to the house.

In Leaphorn’s experience, men who lived alone tended to be either totally sloppy or totally neat—one extreme or the other. Ashie Pinto was neat. From his vantage point leaning against the doorjamb, Leaphorn could see everything in the living room-bedroom of Pinto’s two-room house. The bedstead stood on the cracked and worn linoleum, a blue-and-white J. C. Penney blanket folded across it; beside the single window, a three-drawer chest, beside the chest an armchair, the upholstery of its back and seat water-stained; a metal-and-Formica table, two wooden chairs; a tall cabinet with double doors which, since the room had no closet, must hold Pinto’s spare clothing. There was nothing on the table, nothing on the chairs, nothing on the bed, but the top of the chest held a cigar box; a framed photograph which seemed, from Leaphorn’s viewpoint, to be of Pinto himself; a large wash basin of white ceramic; and something flat, black, and metallic.

Mary Keeyani was looking through the drawers of the chest and Professor Bourebonette was making clattering noises in the kitchen.

“A tin box?” she said. “Square or round?”

“Round,” Mary Keeyani said. “I think a fruitcake came in it. Maybe cookies.”

Leaphorn struggled with his sense of official decorum on one hand and his curiosity on the other. What was that atop the chest? He reached a compromise.

“Mrs. Keeyani. What’s that black thing on top of the chest there? Beside the cigar box.”

“It’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She retrieved it, came to the door, and handed it to him with a plastic sack containing five cassettes. “My uncle did a lot of that.

Taping stuff for those biligaana he worked for.”

Professor Bourebonette appeared in the kitchen door. She displayed a round tin can with a cluster of red roses decorating the lid.

“That’s it,” Mary Keeyani said.

The tape recorder was of the bulky, heavy sort sold about twenty years ago. It contained a cassette. Leaphorn pushed the play button. He heard the faint sound of friction recorders make when running over blank tape. He pushed Stop, and Rewind, waited for the reversing process to stop and pushed Play again.

The speaker produced an old man’s voice, speaking in Navajo.

“They say Coyote is funny, some of those people say that. But the old people who told me the stories, they didn’t think Coyote was funny. Coyote was always causing trouble. He was mean. He caused hardship. He hurt people. He caused people to die. That’s the way the stories go that I was told by my uncles when I was a boy. These uncles, they say

“

Professor Bourebonette was standing beside him. Leaphorn pushed the stop button, looked up at her.

“He was doing that for me,” she said. “I asked him for that story. I wonder how far he got.”

“Ashie Pinto? For your book?”

“Not really. He told me he knew the original correct version of one of the Coyote myths. The one about the red-winged blackbirds and the game they play with their eyeballs. Throwing them up in the air and catching them, and Coyote forcing them to teach him the game.” She glanced at Leaphorn, quizzical. “You know the story?”

“I’ve heard it,” Leaphorn said. He looked at the tin she was holding. “Are you going to open Mr. Pinto’s box?”

Bourebonette read into Leaphorn’s tone some hint of disapproval. She looked at the box and at Leaphorn and said, “I’ll just give it to Mary. She’s his niece.”

Mary Keeyani had no qualms. She worked off the lid. Inside Leaphorn could see a jumble of papers: envelopes, receipts, what seemed to be a car title, odds and ends. She put it on the table where she and Bourebonette sorted through it.

“Here’s a letter from me,” Bourebonette said, extracting an envelope. “And another one.” She glanced at Leaphorn. “That’s all of them. We didn’t do much business by mail.”

Mary Keeyani stopped sorting. “Here’s all he has in here for this year,” she said. She displayed two envelopes. “No use going back any further than that.” She extracted a single sheet of notepaper from one envelope, read it, slipped it back into the envelope, and dropped it back into the box. She repeated the process, put the lid on the box, and stood, looking disappointed.

“Nothing helpful?” Bourebonette said.

Nothing helpful, Mrs. Keeyani had agreed. Nothing that would tell them who had driven out here over this awful rocky track and hauled an old man across the Reservation to commit a murder. Leaphorn drove carefully over that rocky track now, sorting out his reaction to this. It was what he had expected, or should have, and yet he felt disappointed. Why? He hadn’t thought a search through Pinto’s documents, if he had any, would be revealing. But if you give luck a chance, sometimes it rewards you.

His real hope was in finding a witness. The FBI seemed to have decided its case was made and hadn’t looked for one. And strange vehicles came so rarely down these tracks—which were really little more than miles and miles of shared driveways—that people remembered them. A visit from a stranger to anyone on your side of the mountain was exciting. But, unfortunately, Ashie Pinto’s place, even though it was four miles from the road, was the first place on this track. Mary Keeyani’s outfit, where he was about to park now, occupied a little cluster of shacks with a shared hogan, out of sight more than a mile down the slope. It was only by chance that one of the children out with the sheep had noticed the dust raised by the vehicle that took Pinto away. There had been no one else to see it.

Leaphorn stifled a yawn. It was almost sundown. A long day. He was tired. He had driven more than two hundred and fifty miles, and two hundred and fifty miles with two strange women is more exhausting than that distance in the relaxing solitude to which he was accustomed. And before he was done with this day, he had to drive another four hours back to Window Rock. A day wasted. Nothing accomplished. Well, almost nothing. He stopped the car beside Mrs. Keeyani’s house, a weathered mobile home set on concrete blocks. At least, he would get rid of this sense of family responsibility—and get rid of these two women—when he wrapped this up.

So wrap it up.

“Mrs. Keeyani,” he said, “who all had Hosteen Pinto worked with? I mean in recent years. Besides Dr. Bourebonette.”

Mrs. Keeyani was sitting beside him, getting her stuff together.

“He used to work with a man from Tucson. Somebody named Dr. Drabner. But not this year, I think. And then there was an old professor from the University of Utah. I don’t remember his name but he spoke pretty good Navajo.”

“I think that was a Dr. Justin Milovich,” Bourebonette said. “He was into linguistics.”

“Milovich,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She climbed out of the car, where three dogs greeted her with much tail wagging, jumping, and rowdy enthusiasm. “That was him.”

“Anyone else? That’s it?”

“Nobody else I knew of.”

“How about that history professor from the University of New Mexico?” Bourebonette said. “Tagert. How about Tagert? Hosteen Pinto used to work with him a lot.”

“Not no more he don’t,” Mary Keeyani said.

Her tone and her face raised a question and Professor Bourebonette asked it. “Something happened?”

“He would give my uncle whiskey.”

“Oh,” Bourebonette said. “The son-of-a-bitch.” She turned to Leaphorn. “When he drinks he just about kills himself.”

Or someone else, Leaphorn thought.

“I told that man not to ever give my uncle any whiskey but he did it anyway,” Mary Keeyani said. “So when the last time he wrote my uncle a letter about working for him, when my uncle brought it to me, I wouldn’t even read it for him. I just tore it up. And I made my uncle promise not to work for him any more.”

“When was that?” Leaphorn asked.

“Last year. Way last spring a year ago.”

“When was the last time he heard from Milovich or Drabner? Can you remember?”

“Longtime for Milovich,” she said. “Drabner, I think it was last winter. Maybe even last fall. It was that letter in the box.”

They were back on U.S. 89, Bourebonette and he, rolling southward toward the Tuba City junction, when the turnoff to Short Mountain reminded Leaphorn of Old Man McGinnis and his Short Mountain Trading Post.

He slowed, looked at Bourebonette. “I’m thinking of that bottle of whiskey Ashie Pinto had. The bottle he had when Chee arrested him. Remember what Mary Keeyani said about that New Mexico historian giving him booze?”

“I thought about that, too,” she said. “Maybe Pinto picked up his mail himself, and there was a letter from Dr. Tagert and Ashie didn’t let Mary see it. Maybe he got somebody else to read it for him and help him answer it.”

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said, pleased with her. “Maybe not, too. But didn’t the Pintos do their trading at Short Mountain?”

“That was his mailing address.”

“Let’s go check.”

The road from Highway 89 to Short Mountain Trading Post was a little better than Leaphorn remembered it from his days as a patrolman working out of Tuba City. It had been improved by gravel and grading from terrible to fairly bad. Leaphorn maneuvered the patrol car back and forth across its washboard surface, avoiding the worst of the bumps such roads develop. It was twilight when they dropped down into Short Mountain Wash and parked on the hard-packed earth that formed the trading post yard.

It was empty. Leaphorn parked near the porch, turned off the ignition and sat. He had brought Emma here once, long ago, to see this place and to meet Old John McGinnis. He’d described McGinnis as he’d known him, honorable in his way but notoriously grouchy, pessimistic, perverse, quick with insults and overflowing with windy stories and gossip. Over the front door nailed to the porch beam a faded sign proclaimed:

THIS ESTABLISHMENT FOR SALE INQUIRE WITHIN

The sign had been there at least fifty years. According to local legend, McGinnis had hung it there within weeks after he’d bought the store from the Mormon who’d established it. The legend had it that young McGinnis had been outsmarted in the deal. Those who knew him found that incredible.

“He’s rude,” he’d told Emma. “No manners at all and he may snap at you. But look him over. I’d like to know what you think of him.”

So, of course, McGinnis had been courtly, charming, full of smiles and compliments, showing Emma the best of his pawn goods and his collection of lance points, pots, and assorted artifacts—perverse as always. Emma had been charmed.

“I don’t see why you say those bad things about him,” she’d said. “He’s a good man.”

As always when it came to judging people, Emma was correct. In his prickly, eccentric way, John McGinnis was a good man.

Leaphorn was aware that Professor Bourebonette had glanced at him and glanced away. He supposed she was wondering why he was just sitting here. But she said nothing, and made no move to open her door. Willing to wait, sensing the value of this moment to him. He found himself favorably impressed with the woman. But then this sort of sensitivity would be something one in her profession would polish—part of their technique for establishing rapport with those they need to use. How long would her formula cause her to wait?

Cold evening air settling into Short Mountain Wash pushed a breeze across the yard, moving a tumbleweed languidly toward the porch. A water barrel stopped it. The buildings here had looked tired and decrepit the first time he’d seen the place. In the red light of the sunset they looked worse. A plaster-and-stone building behind the main post had been partially burned and left unrepaired, the shed where hay was stored leaned to the left. Even the porch seemed to have sagged under the weight of age and loneliness.

Coyote Walts

Now a naked light bulb hanging over the trading post door went on, a feeble yellow glow in the twilight.

“Well,” Leaphorn said. “He’s ready to receive a customer. Let’s go talk to him.”

“I only met him once,” Bourebonette said. “He helped me find some people. I remember he seemed fairly old.”

“He knew my grandfather,” Leaphorn said. “Or so he claims.”

Bourebonette looked at him. “You sound skeptical.”

Leaphorn laughed, shook his head. “Oh, I guess he really did know him. But with McGinnis—” He laughed again.

The front door opened and McGinnis stood in it, looking out at them.

“After closing time,” he said. “What you want?”

He was smaller than Leaphorn remembered—a white-haired, bent old man in faded blue overalls. But he identified Leaphorn as soon as he climbed out of the car.

“Be damned,” McGinnis said. “Here comes the Sherlock Holmes of the Navajo Tribal Police. And I betcha I can guess what brought him out here to the poor side of the Reservation.”

“Yaa eh t’eeh,” Leaphorn said, “I think you know Dr. Bourebonette here.”

“Why, yes indeed I do,” McGinnis said. To Leaphorn’s amazement, he made something like a bow. “And it’s good to see you back again, Ma’am. Can you come on in and have something to drink? Or maybe join me at my supper. It’s only some stew but there’s plenty of it.”

Professor Bourebonette was smiling broadly. “Mr. McGinnis,” she said, “I hope you got my letter, thanking you for your help.” She held out her hand.

McGinnis took it, awkwardly, his face expressing an emotion Leaphorn had never seen there before. Shyness? Embarrassment? “I got it,” McGinnis said. “Wasn’t necessary. But much appreciated.”

He ushered them through the gloomy dimness of his store toward his living quarters in the back. Not much stock, Leaphorn noticed. Some shelves were bare. The case where McGinnis had always kept his pawn goods locked behind glass held only a scattering of concha belts, rugs, and the turquoise and silver jewelry by which the Navajos traditionally measured and preserved their meager surplus. There was a sense of winding down in the store. Leaphorn felt the same sensation when he stepped through the doorway into the big stone-walled room where McGinnis lived.

“You want to talk about Hosteen Pinto,” McGinnis said. “What I know about him.” McGinnis had removed a pile of National Geographies from a faded red plush chair for Bourebonette, motioned Leaphorn toward his plastic-covered sofa, and lowered himself into his rocking chair. “Well, I don’t know why he killed that policeman of yours. Funny thing for him to do.” McGinnis shook his head at the thought of it. “They say he was drunk, and I’ve seen him drunk a time or two. He was a mean drunk. Cranky. But no meaner than most. And he told me he’d quit that drinking. Wonder what he had to burn up that officer for. What did he say about that?”

Leaphorn noticed that Professor Bourebonette looked surprised and impressed. He was neither. McGinnis was shrewd. And why else would Leaphorn be coming here to talk to him? Now McGinnis was pouring water from a five-gallon can into his coffeepot. He struck a match to light his butane stove and put the pot on it.

“I understand he won’t talk about it,” Leaphorn said.

McGinnis stopped adjusting the flame. He straightened and looked at Leaphorn. He looked surprised. “Won’t say why he did it?”

“Or whether he did it. Or didn’t do it. He just won’t talk about it at all.”

“Well, now,” McGinnis said. “That makes it interesting.” He sorted through the odds and ends stacked on a shelf above the stove, extracted two cups and dusted them. “Won’t talk,” McGinnis said. “And old Ashie was always a forthcoming man.”

“That’s what the FBI report says. He won’t admit it, won’t deny it, won’t discuss it,” Leaphorn said. Professor Bourebonette stirred in her chair.

“What was he doing way over there anyhow?” asked McGinnis. “Didn’t his folks know? Mary Keeyani keeps a close eye on him. He don’t get away with much that she don’t know about.”

“Mary doesn’t know,” Bourebonette said. “Somebody came and got him. Must have been that.”

“But Mary don’t know who?” McGinnis chuckled. “I know who then. Or, I’ll bet I do.”

“Who?” Leaphorn said. He tried to make it sound casual, resisted the impulse to lean forward. He remembered how McGinnis loved to drag things out and the more you wanted it, the longer he made you wait.

“If it was somebody he was working for, that is,” McGinnis said. “He’d been working for Professor Bourebonette here—” he nodded toward her “—and for somebody from the University of New Mexico. I think his name was Tagert. And for a couple of others off and on. People who wanted his folk tales like the professor, or wanted to put down some of his memories.”

McGinnis stopped, tested the side of the coffeepot for temperature with the back of his finger and looked at Leaphorn. Waiting.

“Which one was it?”

McGinnis ignored Leaphorn’s question. “You sure Mary didn’t know?” he asked Bourebonette.

“Absolutely sure.”

“Had to be Tagert then.” He waited again.

“Why Tagert?” Leaphorn asked.

“Tagert used to give him whiskey. Mary found out about it. She wouldn’t let him work for Tagert any more.”

Leaphorn considered this. It fit with what Mrs. Keeyani had said. And it made a certain amount of sense, even though the way McGinnis told it, it seemed nothing more than a guess. But McGinnis knew more than he’d told. Leaphorn was sure of that. He was also tired, with hours of driving ahead of him. He didn’t want to sit here while McGinnis amused himself.

“Did you write a letter for him? For Hosteen Pinto?”

McGinnis tested the coffeepot again, found the heat adequate, filled one cup, handed it to Professor Bourebonette.

“If you like sugar in it, I can get you that. I’m all out of milk unless I have some condensed out in the store.”

“This is fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You known Lieutenant Leaphorn long? If I might ask such a question.”

“You may. We met just this morning.”

“Notice how he gets right to the point. That’s unusual in a Navajo. Usually they’re more polite about it.” McGinnis glanced at Leaphorn. “We got plenty of time.”

“Pinto got a letter from Tagert here,” Leaphorn said. “He happened to pick it up himself, didn’t he? You read it to him and then you answered it for him. That about right?”

McGinnis poured Leaphorn’s coffee into a mug that bore the legend JUSTIN BOOTS. It reminded Leaphorn that the boots Emma had bought him for his birthday after they were married were Justins. They couldn’t afford them then. But he’d worn them almost twenty years. Emma. The sure knowledge that he would never see her again sat suddenly on his shoulders, as it sometimes did. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, McGinnis was holding the mug out to him, expression quizzical.

Leaphorn took it, nodded.

“You had it about right,” McGinnis said. “He was in the store when the mail came, as I remember it. Tagert wanted to interview him about something. He wanted to know if he could come and get him on some date or other. He asked Ashie to let him know if that date was all right or to name another if it wasn’t.”

“Anything else?” Leaphorn asked. He sipped the coffee. Even by the relaxed standards of the Window Rock Tribal Police headquarters it was bad coffee. Made this morning, Leaphorn guessed, and reheated all day.

“Just a short letter,” McGinnis said. “That was it.”

“What was the date?”

“I don’t remember. Would have been early in August.”

“And Pinto agreed?”

“Yeah,” McGinnis said. He frowned, remembering—the plump, round face Leaphorn remembered from a decade ago shrunken now into a wilderness of lines and creases. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, the upshot was he asked me to write Tagert back and tell him he’d be ready in the afternoon.”

Professor Bourebonette, either politer or more starved for caffeine than Leaphorn, was sipping her coffee with no apparent distaste. She put down the cup.

“So now we know how he got to Ship Rock,” she said. “Tagert came and got him.”

But Leaphorn was studying McGinnis. “Pinto said something about it, or something like that? He didn’t just immediately say write him back?”

“I’m trying to remember,” McGinnis said, impatiently. “I’m trying to get it all back in my mind. We was in this room, I remember that much. Ashie’s getting too damn old to amount to much but I’ve known him for years and when he comes in we usually come back here for a talk. Find out what’s going on over by the river, you know.”

He rocked forward in his chair, got up clumsily. He opened the cabinet above the stove and extracted a bottle. Old Crow.

“The lieutenant here don’t drink,” McGinnis said to Professor Bourebonette. He glanced at Leaphorn. “Unless he’s changed his ways. But I will offer you a sip of bourbon.”

“And I will accept it,” the professor said. She handed McGinnis her empty coffee cup and he poured the whiskey into it. Then he fumbled at the countertop, came up with a Coca-Cola glass and filled it carefully up to the trademark by the label. That done, he sat again, put the bottle on the floor beside him, and rocked.

“I didn’t offer Hosteen Pinto a drink. I remember that. Wouldn’t be the thing to do, him being alcoholic. But I poured myself one, and sat here and sipped at it.” McGinnis sipped his bourbon, thinking.

“I read the letter to him and he said something strong.” McGinnis examined his memory. “Strong. I think he called Tagert a coyote, and that’s about as strong as a Navajo will get. And at first he wasn’t going to work for him. I remember that. Then he said something like Tagert paid good. And that’s what had brought him in here in the first place. Money. You notice that belt out in the pawn case?”

McGinnis pushed himself out of the rocker and disappeared through the doorway into the store.

Leaphorn looked at Bourebonette. “I’ll tell the FBI about Tagert,” he said.

“You think they’ll do anything?”

“They should,” he said. But maybe they wouldn’t. Why would they? Their case was already made. And what difference did it make anyway?

McGinnis reappeared carrying a concha belt. The overhead light reflected dimly off the tarnished silver.

“This was always old Pinto’s fallback piece. The last thing he pawned when he was running low.” McGinnis’s gnarled hand stroked the silver disks. “It’s a dandy.”

He handed it to Professor Bourebonette.

Leaphorn could see it was indeed a dandy. An old, heavy one made of the turn-of-the-century silver Mexican five-peso pieces. Worth maybe two thousand dollars from a collector. Worth maybe four hundred in pawn credit.

“Trouble is he’d already pawned it,” McGinnis said. “Not only pawned it. He’d been in twice to bump up the loan. He wanted another fifty dollars in groceries on it and we was jawing about that when the mail truck came up.”

McGinnis was rocking while he remembered, holding the Coca-Cola glass in left hand, tilting it back and forth in compensation for the rocking motion. Exactly as he’d seen him do it when Leaphorn was twenty years younger, coming in here to learn where families had moved, to collect gossip, just to talk. Leaphorn felt a dizzying sense of dislocation in time. Everything was the same. As if twenty years hadn’t ticked away. The cluttered old room, the musty smell, the yellow light, the old man grown older, as if in the blink of an eye. Suddenly he knew just what McGinnis would do next, and McGinnis did it.

He leaned, picked up the Old Crow bottle by the neck, and carefully recharged his glass, dripping the last of the recharge until it was exactly up to the trademark.

“I’ve seen Pinto poor before. Many times. But that day he was totally tapped out. Said he was out of coffee and cornmeal and lard and just about everything and Mary wasn’t in any shape to help him with her own bunch to feed.”

McGinnis fell silent, rocking, tasting the whiskey on his tongue.

“So he took the job,” Professor Bourebonette said.

“So he did,” McGinnis said. “Had me write Tagert right back.” He took another tiny sip, and savored it in a silence that made the creaking of his rocker seem loud.

A question hung in Leaphorn’s mind: Why had Pinto called Tagert a coyote? It was a hard, hard insult among the Navajos—implying not just bad conduct but the evil of malice. Mary Keeyani said Tagert had given him whiskey. Would that be the reason? Leaphorn noticed his interest in this affair growing.

“But I know he didn’t want to,” McGinnis added. “I said, What’s wrong with this fella? He looks all right to me. He pays you good money, don’t he? He’s just another one of them professors. And old Ashie said Tagert wants me to do something I don’t want to do. And I said what’s that, and he said he wants me to find something for him. And I said well hell, you do that all the time, and he was quiet a while. And then he said, you don’t have to go looking for Coyote. Coyote’s always out there waiting.”

Professor Bourebonette had offered to share driving on the way home and Leaphorn had explained to her that Tribal Police rules prohibited it. Now, about fifty miles east of Tuba City, Leaphorn began wishing he hadn’t. He was exhausted. Talking had helped keep sleep at bay for the first hour or so. They talked about McGinnis, about what Tagert might have wanted Hosteen Pinto to find, about Pinto’s reluctance. They discussed how Navajo mythology related to the origin story of the Old Testament, and to myths of the Plains Indians, and police techniques in criminal investigations, and civil rights, and academic politics. She had told him about the work she had done studying mythology in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, before the intensifying war made it impossible. And now Leaphorn was talking about his days as a graduate student at Arizona State, and specifically about a professor who was either weirdly absent-minded or over the hill into senility.

“Trouble is, I’m beginning to notice I’m forgetting things myself,” he concluded.

The center stripe had become double, waving off in two directions. Leaphorn shook his head, jarring himself awake. He glanced at Bourebonette to see if she’d noticed.

Professor Bourebonette’s chin was tilted slightly forward, her head leaned against the door. Her face was relaxed in sleep.

Leaphorn studied her. Emma had slept like that sometimes on late night returns. Relaxed. Trusting him. Chapter 6

THE BATTERED WHITE Jecpster proved remarkably easy to locate. It sat in space number seventeen in a weedy parking lot guarded by a sign that declared:

SHIP ROCK HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER/STAFF PARKING ONLY

Janet Pete parked her little Toyota two-door beside the jeep. She’d changed out of her go-see-a-sick-friend skirt into jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt.

“There it is. Exactly as you planned,” she said. “You want to wait here for the owner?” She motioned to the cars streaming out of the teacher/staff parking lot, a surprising number it seemed to Chee. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“I want to know who I’m talking to,” Chee said, climbing out. “I’ll go ask.”

The secretary in the principal’s office looked at Jim Chee’s badge, and through the window to where he was pointing, and said “Which one?” and then said, “Oh.”

“That’s Mr. Ji’s,” she said. “Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice sounded hopeful.

“Gee,” Chee said. “How does he spell it?”

“It’s H-U-A-N J-I,” she said, “so I guess if you pronounced it the way we pronounce ‘na-va-ho’ it would be ‘Mr. Hee.’”

“I heard he was a Vietnamese. Or Cambodian,” Chee said.

“Vietnamese,” the secretary said. “I think he was a colonel in their army. He commanded a Ranger battalion.”

“Where could I find him?”

“His algebra class is down in room nineteen,” she said, gesturing down the hallway. “School’s over but he usually keeps part of them overtime.” She laughed. “Mr. Ji and the kids have a permanent disagreement over how much math they are going to learn.”

Chee paused at the open door of room nineteen. Four boys and a girl were scattered at desks, heads down, working on notebooks. The girl was pretty, her hair cut unusually short for a young Navajo woman. The boys were two Navajos, a burly, sulkylooking white, and a slender Hispano. But Chee’s interest was in the teacher.

Mr. Huan Ji stood beside his desk, his back to the class and his profile to Chee, staring out the classroom window. He was a small man, and thin, rigidly erect, with short-cropped black hair and a short-cropped mustache showing gray. He wore gray slacks, a blue jacket, and a white shirt with a tie neatly in place and looked, therefore, totally misplaced in Ship Rock High School. His unblinking eyes studied something about level with the horizon. Seeing what? Chee wondered. He would be looking across the tops of the cottonwoods lining the San Juan and southwestward toward the sagebrush foothills of the Chuskas. He would be seeing the towering black shape of Ship Rock on the horizon, and perhaps Rol-Hai Rock, and Mitten Rock. No. Those landmarks would be beyond the horizon from Mr. Ji’s viewpoint at the window. Chee was creating them by looking into his own memory.

Mr. Ji’s expression seemed sad. What was Huan Ji seeing in his own memory? Perhaps he was converting the gray-blue desert mountains of Dinetah into the wet green mountains of his homeland.

Chee cleared his throat.

“Mr. Ji,” he said.

Five students looked up from their work, staring at Chee. Mr. Ji’s gaze out the window didn’t waver.

Chee stepped into the classroom. “Mr. Ji,” he said.

Mr. Ji jerked around, his expression startled.

“Ah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

“I wonder when I might talk to you,” Chee said. “Just for a moment.”

“We’re about finished here,” Ji said. He looked at the five students, who looked back at him. He looked at his watch. “You can go now,” he said. “If you have finished, give me your papers. If not, bring them in tomorrow—finished and corrected.” He turned to Chee. “You are a parent?”

“No sir,” Chee said. “I’m Officer Chee. With the Navajo Tribal Police.” As he said it, he was conscious of Mr. Ji noticing the thick bandage on his hand, his denims, his short-sleeved sport shirt. “Off duty,” he added.

“Ah,” Mr. Ji said. “What can I tell you?”

Chee heard hurrying footsteps—Janet Pete coming down the hallway toward them. Hosteen Pinto would be legally represented in this conversation, he thought. Well, why not? But it bothered him. Where does friend end and lawyer start?

“Mr. Ji?” Janet asked, slightly breathless.

“This is Janet Pete,” Chee said. “An attorney.”

Mr. Ji bowed slightly. If Mr. Ji ever allowed confusion to show, it would have shown now. “Is this about one of my students?” he said.

The last of Mr. Ji’s students hurried past them, the urge to be away overcoming curiosity.

“Miss Pete represents Ashie Pinto,” Chee said.

It seemed to Jim Chee that Mr. Ji momentarily stopped breathing. He looked at Janet Pete, his face showing no emotion at all.

“Is there a place we could talk?” Chee asked.

Someone was in the teachers’ lounge. They walked out to where Janet’s Toyota was parked.

“Is this your car?” Chee pointed to the Jeepster.

“Yes,” Ji said.

“It was seen out on Navajo 33 the night Officer Delbert Nez was killed.”

Ji said nothing. Chee waited.

Ji’s face was blank. (The inscrutable Oriental, Chee thought. Where had he heard that? Mary Landon had used it once to describe him. “You are, you know. You guys came over the icecap from the steppes of Mongolia or Tibet or someplace like that. We came out of the dark forests of Norway.”)

“What was the date?” Ji asked.

Chee told him. “That was the night of the rain. Good hard rain. It would have been between seven-thirty and eight. But getting dark because the storm was coming.”

“Yes,” Ji said. “I remember it. I was there.”

“Did you see anyone? Anything?” Janet Pete asked.

“Where?” Ji asked.

Chee suppressed a frown. It seemed a stupid question.

“Where you were. Out beyond Ship Rock,” he said. “East of Red Rock on Route 33.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything,” Ji said.

“How about after you turned north on Route 63?”

“Route 63?” Ji looked genuinely puzzled. Not too surprising. Not many people, including those who routinely drove that dusty, bumpy route, would know its map number.

“The gravel road close to Red Rock that goes north toward Biklabito and Ship Rock.”

“Oh,” Ji said, nodding. “No. I saw nothing. Not that I remember.”

“You didn’t see the fire, Nez’s car burning?”

“I think I saw a glow. I thought it was the lights of a car. I really don’t remember much about that now.”

“Do you remember what you were doing out there?”

Ji smiled and nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “It looked like it might rain. Rain clouds back over the mountains. It rains a lot in my country and I miss it out here. I thought I would drive out and enjoy it.”

“How did you go?” Chee asked.

Ji thought. “I drove south on U.S. 666 toward Gallup, and then I turned west on that paved road over to Red Rock, and then circled back on the gravel road.”

“Did you see a Tribal Police car?”

“Ah, yes,” Ji said. “One passed me.”

“Where?”

“On the Red Rock road.”

That would have been Delbert’s Unit 44. “Did you see it again?”

“No.”

“You would have passed it,” Chee said. “It had pulled off the left side of the road and driven down a dirt track.”

“I didn’t notice it,” Ji said. “I think I would have remembered that.”

“Did you meet anyone, I mean on your way home?”

Mr. Ji thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “But I don’t remember.”

And that was exactly all they learned.

From the parking lot, they drove southward down 666, across the San Juan bridge.

“You want to go see where it happened?” he asked Janet.

She looked at him, surprised. “Do you?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But yes, I guess I do.”

“You haven’t been back?”

“I was in the hospital in Albuquerque for weeks,” Chee said. “And then, I don’t know, there just wasn’t any reason.”

“Okay,” Janet said. “I think I should see it.”

“You have a better reason than I do,” Chee said. “I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. It’s FBI business. I’ll just testify as the arresting officer.”

Janet nodded. She saw no reason to comment on any of this. Chee knew she already knew it.

“I didn’t do any of the investigating,” he added, knowing she would have known that, too.

“Do you think the FBI took a statement from Mr. Ji?”

Chee shook his head. “He would have mentioned it.”

“Doesn’t it surprise you that they didn’t?”

He shook his head. “Not now. Remember? You explained it to me. They have all they need for a conviction. Why waste their time?”

She was frowning. “I know I said that. But they’d seen your statement. They knew you’d met that car driving away from the scene. You described it as a white Jeepster, said who owned it. I’d think just simple curiosity

“ She let it trail off.

“They had their man, and their evidence,” Chee said. “Why make things complicated?”

Janet thought about that. “Justice,” she said.

Chee let it pass. Justice, he thought, wasn’t a concept that fit very well in this affair. Besides, the sun was just dipping behind the Chuskas now. On the vast, rolling prairie that led away from the highway toward the black shape of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadow—an infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful. Chee’s spirit lifted. No time to think of justice. Or of the duty he had left undone.

Janet’s Toyota topped the long climb out of the San Juan Basin and earth sloped away to the south—empty, rolling gray-tan grassland with the black line of the highway receding toward the horizon like the mark of a ruling pen. Miles to the south, the sun reflected from the windshield of a northbound vehicle, a blink of brightness. Ship Rock rose like an oversized, free-form Gothic cathedral just to their right, miles away but looking close. Ten miles ahead Table Mesa sailed through its sea of buffalo grass, reminding Chee of the ultimate aircraft carrier. Across the highway from it, slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged black form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore.

They did the right turn off 666 onto Navajo 33, driving into the setting sun.

“Here’s probably about where he was when we first made radio contact,” Chee said. “Just about here.” His voice sounded stiff in his own ears.

Janet nodded.

He slowed, pointing. “I was way over there, twenty-five, thirty miles behind Ship Rock, driving south on the road from Biklabito. I was back there behind the rock. Something like that screws up radio communication. It keeps fading in and out.”

Chee cleared his throat. He pulled down the sunshade. Janet flipped down the one on the driver’s side, found she was too short to be helped by it, and fished out her sunglasses. She was thinking that Chee wasn’t as ready to talk about this as he’d thought he was.

“Going to be quite a sunset,” she said. “Look north.”

North, over Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado, over Utah’s Abajo Mountains, great thunder,heads were reaching toward their evening climax. Their tops, reflecting in the direct sun, were snowy white and the long streamers of ice crystals blown from them seemed to glitter. But at lower levels the light that struck them had been filtered through the clouds over the Chuskas and turned into shades of rose, pink, and red.

Lower still, the failing light mottled them from pale blue-gray to the deepest blue. Overhead, the streaks of high-level cirrus clouds were being ignited by the sunset. They drove through a fiery twilight.

“There’s where it happened,” Chee said, nodding to the left. “He pulled off the pavement right up there, and the car was burning over by that cluster of junipers, way off there.”

Janet nodded. Chee noticed her forehead, her cheeks rosy in the reflected light. Skin as smooth as silk. Her eyes were intense, staring at something. An intelligent face. A classy face. She frowned.

“What’s that over on those rocks?” She gestured. “Those white marks up in that formation over there?”

“That’s what was bothering Delbert,” Chee said, and made a chuckling sound. “That’s the artwork of our phantom vandal. Delbert noticed somebody had been painting those formations maybe six weeks ago. He wanted to catch the guy.”

“It bothered him? I don’t guess there’s a law against it. Nothing specific anyway,” she said. “But it bothers me too. Why ugly up something natural?”

“With Nez, I think it was a mixture of being bothered and thinking it was sort of weird. Who would climb up in there and waste all that time and paint turning black basalt into white? Anyway, Delbert was always talking about it. And that night, it sounded like he thought he’d seen the guy. He was laughing about it.”

“Maybe he did see him,” Janet said. She was staring out at the formation. “What caused all that? I know it must be volcanic but it doesn’t look like the normal ones. Frankly, they don’t teach you anything about geology in law school.”

“In anthropology departments either,” Chee said. “But from what I’ve been told, the volcanic action that formed Ship Rock lasted for tens of thousands of years. The pressure formed a lot of cracking in the earth’s surface, and every thousand years or so—or maybe it’s millions of years—there would be another bubbling up of melted rock and new ridges would form. Sometimes right beside the old ones.”

“Oh,” Janet said.

“These run for miles and miles,” Chee said. “Sort of parallel the Chuska Mountains.”

“Is there a name for them?”

Chee told her.

She made a wry face. “My parents wanted me to speak perfect English. They didn’t talk Navajo much around me.”

“It means something like ‘Long Black Ridges.’ Something like that.” He glanced at Janet, not knowing where she stood on the issue of Navajo witchcraft. “Lot of traditional Navajos wouldn’t want to go around those lava formations—especially at night. According to Navajo mythology, at least on the east side of the Reservation, those lava flows are the dried blood of the monsters killed by the Hero Twins. I think that’s one of the things that got Nez so interested. You know. Who was breaking that taboo?”

“Maybe Nez caught whoever it was, and the guy killed him,” Janet said.

“And gave the pistol to Hosteen Pinto,” Chee said. “You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”

Janet shrugged. “It’s as good as anything else I’ve thought of,” she said. “Let’s take a look at it.” She glanced at Chee, looking suddenly doubtful. “Or would there be a lot of snakes this time of year?”

“Always some snakes in places like that,” Chee said. “But they’re no problem if you use your head.”

“Just thinking about snakes is a problem.”

Janet said. But she turned the Toyota off the asphalt.

Getting to part of the formation where the painter worked involved maneuvering the little Toyota across about a mile of trackless stone, cactus, Russian thistle, buffalo grass, sage, and snakeweed. After dropping a wheel with a rattling jolt into a little wash, Janet switched off the ignition.

“It’s easier to walk,” she said. “Especially easier on my poor car.”

It wasn’t quite as easy as it looked. As with all large objects seen through the thin, dry, high desert air, the outcrop was bigger and more distant than it seemed. The sun had dipped well below the horizon when they climbed the steep final slope toward its base. Overhead the high clouds had faded from rose to dark red. Far to the west across Arizona, clouds over the Kaibito Plateau were blue-black, outlined by fiery yello’tv.

Janet stopped to stare.

“Did you miss these sunsets in Washington?” Chee asked.

“I’m looking at that car,” she said, pointing.

Pulled behind a clump of junipers was a dark green Ford Bronco II, dirty, dented, and several years old. They detoured to walk behind it. It wore a New Mexico vanity license plate.

“REDDNEK,” Janet read. “You think the irony was intended?”

Chee shrugged. He didn’t catch the irony. The vehicle was empty. What was it doing here? Where was the driver?

“A redneck who can’t spell it,” she explained.

“Oh.”

On the ridge beyond the vehicle, Janet stopped again. She stood, head tilted back, staring up at the massive, unbroken slab of basalt which confronted them here.

“I don’t see any sign of paint,” Janet said. The red light changed the color of her shirt, and her faded jeans, and her face. Her hair was disheveled, her expression intent, and, taken all together, she looked absolutely beautiful to Jim Chee. It would be a lot better, he thought, if friends didn’t look like that.

“Let’s see if we can find where he climbed up,” he said.

That wasn’t easy. The first upward possibility dead-ended on a shelf that led absolutely nowhere except up a vertical face of stone. The second, a pathway that opened inside a split in a basaltic slab, took them perhaps seventy-five yards upward and in before it finally dwindled away into an impossibly narrow crack. They found the third atop a sloping hump of debris by ducking under a tilted roof of fallen stone.

“I haven’t brought up the subject of snakes,” Janet said. She was brushing the dirt from her hands on her pant legs. “If I do, I hope you’ll try to say something positive.”

“Okay,” Chee said. He thought for a minute, catching his breath. “If you like snakes, this is a fine example of the places you come to find them.”

“I don’t like snakes,” Janet said. “I know all that BS about Navajos and snakes being friends, but I don’t like them. They scare me.”

“We’re not supposed to be friends,” Chee said. “The way it goes in the legend, First Man and Big Snake learned to respect one another. The way you do that is by not putting your hand, or your foot, or any other part of you where you can’t see. That way you don’t step on your little brother, or sit on him, or poke him in the eye. And in return, he buzzes his rattlers to tell you if you’re getting in dangerous territory. Very efficient.”

“I still don’t like them,” Janet said, but she was staring up into the formation. “Look. I think that’s paint.”

It was. Above them and to their left, Chee could see a face of the basalt cliff reflecting white. Reaching it involved climbing up a deep crack into a long, narrow pocket. But eons of erosion had filled it with enough fallen rocks and blown dust to form a floor. There Chee leaned against the stone, breathing hard, the bottom level of the paint just above his head.

“Look here,” Janet said. She was kneeling on the dirt. “Can you believe this? I think somebody carried a ladder in here.”

If Janet was breathing hard it didn’t show. But Chee was, and was embarrassed by it. It was being out of shape, he thought. Too long in the hospital bed. Too many weeks without exercise. Climbing with one hand in a bandage hadn’t been easy. He would have to get back into doing some exercises.

He took a long, deep breath and squatted beside her. Two narrow, rectangular shapes had been pressed into the earth, the proper distance apart to have been made by the feet of a ladder.

“A determined painter,” Janet said. “With a plan, obviously. Why else haul a ladder up in here? He had to know he was going to be reaching up somewhere where he’d need it.”

Chee was examining the holes the ladder had left. He was wishing they’d climbed in here when the light was better.

“I think that’s interesting,” Janet said.

He stood and brushed off his jeans with his good hand, wondering if Nez actually caught the son-of-a-bitch. Did Nez chase him? Did he even know Nez was after him?

“Did this crazy rock painter kill Nez?” Janet asked.

“Ashie Pinto shot Nez in the chest,” Chee said. “But did this nutty rock painter have anything to do with it? Did he see it happen?”

“He seems nutty all right,” Janet said. She had climbed halfway out of the pocket and was staring up into the broken, slanted wilderness of slabs, crags, boulders, and cliffs of the upthrust. “You can see several painted places back in there. One big squarish place, and a narrow vertical strip and some other small places.”

Chee climbed up beside her.

“If he saw it happen, and I can find him, then you could just plead Pinto guilty,” Chee said. “No use letting it go to trial. Just make a deal for him.”

Janet let it pass, staring up into the formation. “Odd,” she said.

“It doesn’t seem to form any pattern,” Chee agreed. “Or communicate anything or make any sense.” With his knife, he scraped at the painted stone where they were standing, collecting a sample from the lower edge of the brush mark. Then he bent close, examining it in the dimming red glow of the twilight.

“He’s sending some sort of signal to flying saucers,” Janet said. “Or when the Mesa airliner comes over here flying down to Gallup, this says ‘YOU’RE LOST’ to the pilot. Or the guy who is doing it, they lost his luggage and when you look down from the airplane this is some sort of awful obscene insult.”

“Look at this,” Chee said.

Janet bent closer. “What?”

“It washed down a little,” Chee said, indicating the flow with his finger.

“So?”

“So I think the paint was fresh when it started raining. He was still painting when the rain began.”

“Ah,” Janet Pete said. “So maybe there was a witness. Maybe

“ Her voice trailed off, turning squeaky. She shrank away from the slab where she had been leaning, away from a buzzing sound.

“Jim,” she whispered. “Don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”

“Only if you don’t think it’s a rattlesnake,” Chee said. “Move back toward me. It’s under the edge of that slab. See it?”

Janet made no effort to see it. “Let’s go,” she said. And went, and it was still light enough to see that the old green Bronco II was no longer parked behind the junipers.

She rolled the Toyota to a halt under the cottonwood tree that shaded Jim Chee’s home—a well-scuffed and dented aluminum trailer parked on the low north bluff of the San Juan River. Chee made no move to get out. He was waiting for her to turn off the ignition. She left the motor running and the headlights on.

“The only other time I was here you had a pregnant cat,” she said. “Remember that? It seems like a long time ago.”

“I didn’t have a cat,” Chee said. “It was just hanging out here.”

“You were looking out after it.” She grinned at him. “Remember? You were afraid a coyote was going to get it. And I thought about getting one of those cases they ship animals in on airplanes to use as a cat house. Coyote-proof. And you bought one in Farmington. What happened?”

“You moved away,” Chee said. “You followed your boyfriend to Washington and joined his law firm and got rich and came home again.”

“I meant what happened to the cat,” Janet said.

“I couldn’t deal with the cat,” Chee said. “It was a biligaana cat. Ran away from some tourists I guess. And I thought maybe it could become a natural Navajo Reservation-type cat and live on its own. But it wasn’t working.”

“But what happened?”

“I put it in the shipping case and sent it to Mary Landon,” Chee said.

“Your white schoolteacher,” Janet said.

“White schoolteacher, but not mine,” Chee said. “She moved back to Wisconsin. Going to graduate school.”

“Not yours anymore?”

“I guess maybe she never was.”

They sat in the Toyota considering this, listening to the engine run.

Janet looked at him. “You all right now?”

“More or less,” Chee said. “I guess so.”

They considered that.

“How about you?” Chee said. “How about your ambitious lawyer? I don’t remember his name. How about your own ambitions?”

“He’s back in Washington. Getting rich, I guess. And here I am, trying to defend a destitute drunk who won’t even tell me he didn’t do it.”

Chee, who had been listening very, very carefully, heard nothing much in her voice. Just a flat statement.

“You’re all right now? Is that the message you’re sending me?”

“We don’t write,” she said, voice still flat. “I guess so. Except it leaves you feeling stupid. And used. And confused.”

“I’ll make some coffee,” Chee said.

No response. Janet Pete merely looked out the windshield, as if she was seeing something in the darkness under the cottonwoods.

“Maybe somebody told you about my coffee,” Chee said. “But I don’t boil it anymore. Now I’ve got some of these things where you put a little container on top of the cup, and coffee grounds in the container, and pour boiling water through. It’s much better.”

Janet Pete laughed and turned off the ignition.

The coffee was, in fact, excellent. Hot and fresh. She was tired and she sipped it gratefully, surveying Jim Chee’s narrow quarters. Neat, she noticed. That surprised her. Everything in place. She glanced at his bed—a blanket-covered cot suspended from the wall. Monastic was the word for it. And above it, a shelf overflowing with books. She recognized Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Buchanan’s A Shining Season, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, and Zolbrod’s Dine Bahane, which had seemed to her to be the best translation of the Navajos’ origin story. Odd that Chee would be reading a white man’s version of the Navajo Bible.

“You still planning to be a medicine man?” she asked.

“Someday,” Chee said. “If I live long enough.”

She put down her cup. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “I don’t think I learned much useful. I don’t think I answered any questions about Ashie Pinto. Like how he got there. Or why. Or who killed Officer Nez.”

“That’s the only one I can answer,” Chee said. “Your client did it. I don’t know why. Neither does he, exactly. But the reason was rooted in whiskey. The Dark Water. That’s what the Navajo word for it means in English.”

Janet let all that pass. “How about you?” she asked. “You think we solved any mysteries?”

Chee was leaning against the stove, holding his cup clumsily in his left hand. He sipped. “I think we added a new one. Why Mr. Ji lied to us.”

“How?”

“He said he didn’t meet anyone on the way home. He must have seen me coming toward him, just as he was turning off Route 33 onto the gravel.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Janet said. “It’s been weeks.”

“I had my siren going and my cop lights blinking.”

Janet considered that. “Oh,” she said. “You’d think he’d remember that.”

“He would have just driven past a fire. A big one not far off the road. Then here comes a cop car, siren going. This isn’t Chicago. Nothing much happens out here. He would have remembered.”

She frowned. “So what does it mean—that he was pretending he was there when he actually wasn’t? Or pretending he didn’t see your patrol car? That wouldn’t make sense.

Or, maybe somebody else was driving his car and he was covering for them. Or

what?” She rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead, picked up the cup again and drained it. “I’m too damn tired to think about it,” she said. “And I’ve got to go. Got to drive down to Window Rock tonight.”

“That’s too far,” Chee said. “Two hard hours. Just stay here.” He paused, gestured. “I’ll roll my sleeping bag out on the floor.”

They looked at each other. Janet sighed.

“Thanks,” she said. “But Emily’s expecting me.”

Emily. Chee vaguely remembered the name. Someone Janet had shared an apartment with when she worked in Window Rock.

He stood in the doorway watching the Toyota on its climb back up to the road, then sat on the bunk and removed his shoes. He was tired, but the coffee would keep him awake. He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off over the bandage, yawning.

Three new questions added today, he thought. Not just why Mr. Ji had lied. There was also the methodical insanity of the painter to puzzle over. And most important of all, there was Janet Pete. Chapter 7

THE VOICE OF Ashie Pinto had an odd sort of singsong quality through the earphones Jim Chee was wearing. It rose and fell, recounting the time in myth when Changing Woman had her second menstrual period. “They say that much time had passed but I don’t know how much in days as we count them now. The old men would tell about this very carefully. Careful not to make any mistakes, they would tell it, but if they told the number of the days I do not remember that now. They told how First Man had instructed Changing Woman, and First Woman had watched after her, and I think they must have told Changing Woman to tell them when her second period began. And when it did, Talking God came to the place there where the Holy People were staying near Huerfano Mesa. He came to the hogan First Man had built east of the mesa. They say that Calling God came with him but they say Talking God was in charge of it.”

Pinto’s voice shifted from singsong into a creaky-voiced chant. Chee recognized one of the Talking God songs from the Blessing Way. He had memorized that ceremonial himself, and given it twice when his ambition to be a medicine man had been alive and thriving.

“‘e ne ya! Now I am the child of Changing Woman. My moccasins are of white shell

“

The earpiece of the tape player was hurting Chee’s earlobe. He listened to another couple of minutes of the tape, noticing that Pinto’s version was just a little different in phrasing from the chant Frank Sam Nakai had taught him. His maternal uncle was Hosteen Nakai, and he was a medicine man of good reputation. Chee tended to consider Nakai’s versions correct and to disapprove of variations. He pushed the fast-forward button and looked around him.

The reading room of the Reserve Section of the University of New Mexico Library was almost empty. The row of tables was vacant except for him and a skinny, middle-aged man working his way methodically through boxes that seemed to be filled with old postcards and letters. In the silence, the sound of the tape racing over the reel seemed loud. Chee stopped it sooner than he had intended and listened again.

“

way out there north of Ladron Butte. Trial’s what my grandfather told me. He said that the Utes used to cross the San Juan River upstream from where Montezuma Creek is now, and they’d come down Tsitah Wash. That’s the route they liked to take in those days. They’d ride up the wash and come out there where Red Mesa school is now, and then go east of Tohatin Mesa and try to catch the people who lived around Sweetwater. He said a lot of the Mud Clan People used to grow corn and beans and peaches there in those days, and the Utes would try to kill the men and steal the horses and the women and children. He said in those days when his father was a boy the Mexicans used to pay sometimes a hundred dollars for a Navajo child there in Santa Fe where they sold them. And then when the biligaana came in the price got higher and

“

Chee took off the headset and pushed the rewind button. He was wasting his time. All he had accomplished by coming here was to confirm what Janet Pete had told him. Ashie Pinto had been discovered long ago by the academic world as a source of what academics treasure. He knew the old tales that contain the history of the Dinee. And he knew the story of how the Holy People had created the humans who were to become the Navajo clans. Wonderful. But what did it have to do with the murder of Delbert Nez? Chee shifted his weight in the hard chair, stretched his legs and thought about that—reexamining the thinking that had led him here. The question that troubled him most wasn’t motive for murder. He knew the motive. Whiskey. Todilhil, the Navajos had named it. Water of Darkness if you translated that word into biligaana language. But Navajos sometimes mispronounced it. Todilhaal, they’d say. Making it mean “sucking in darkness,” and enjoying the wry irony of the pun. The savagery of whiskey erased the need for a motive. No Navajo policeman—or any policeman—had to relearn that message. Death slept in the bottle, only waiting to be released, and every policeman knew it. The question that nagged at Chee was a different one. What motivated the old man to come halfway across Arizona into New Mexico to an empty place beside a lonely road? There had to be a reason for that. And how the devil did he get there? Pinto made tapes for the scholars. Maybe he had been working for a scholar that day. Maybe a check of scholars who harvested Ashie Pinto’s vast memory would provide a list of names. Leads. Maybe listening to the tapes these harvesters of memory collected would tell him what attracted Pinto to the Ship Rock country. Maybe not. Whatever the truth of that, Chee now had his list of who had made these tapes.

He looked at the notebook.

Professor Christopher Tagert, University of New Mexico, Department of History.

Professor Roger Davenport, University of Utah, Department of Anthropology.

Professor Louisa Bourebonette, Northern Arizona University, Department of American Studies.

Professor Alfonso Villareal, University of New Mexico, Language and Linguistics.

Perhaps there were others. These names simply represented tapes of Pinto’s recollections available in this library. If others existed in any library they could be found, copied, and sent here. The very pleasant woman at the Special Collections desk had assured him of that. Chee decided not to bother. The only thing that seemed even vaguely promising was one of the Tagert tapes. In it, Pinto was remembering what his grandfather had told him about two white men being killed somewhere south of the San Juan and east of the Chuska. Tagert’s cross-examination focused on where the two had come from, when it had happened, and where they had died. Pinto’s answers had seemed vague but Tagert hadn’t pursued it.

Perhaps there was a later tape. He’d look Tagert up in the faculty directory, call him, and ask about it.

He checked in the tapes and the tape player at the desk.

“I noticed you didn’t sign the register,” the woman at the desk told him. “We ask people to do that.” She pointed to the ledger open on the table beside the door.

Chee filled in his name and address, left the space for “academic department” blank, and jotted “Ashie Pinto tapes” in the “material required” space, and then noted the date and the hour checked out and in. The name on the line above was John Todman. He noticed the old pictures Todman was examining were listed as “Golightly mining camp photographs.”

Who else, he wondered, would be interested in Ashie Pinto’s old tapes? Probably no one. He turned the page, scanned it. Turned it again. And again. And again. Six pages back, on a page where the first dates were mid-July, he found the legend “Navajo language tapes—Pinto.”

The person who signed for them was William Redd.

Chee pursed his lips. He turned the page again. William Redd had also required the same tapes the previous day, and the day before, and the day before that. He jotted the name and address in his notebook and glanced at his watch.

It was still early. He would drive past that address and see if an old green Bronco II was parked there, with REDDNEK vanity plates. Chapter 8

JIM CHEE IN Albuquerque was Jim Chee separated from his vehicle—a duck out of water. He had left his pickup at the Farmington airport yesterday, flown Mesa to Albuquerque, and taken a taxi to his motel. This morning he’d called a cab again to get to the University Medical Center for his appointment at the Burn and Trauma Center. His medical insurance would pay for all that. But taxis were expensive and, like all cities of the trans-Mississippi West, Albuquerque had grown on the presumption that humans over fourteen were driving themselves around in their own cars. There was some bus service if you understood how to use it. Chee didn’t, and taxicabs made Chee uneasy. Now, afoot at the university library, Chee did a typical Western thing. He called a friend to ask for a ride.

“I’m supposed to be working,” Janet Pete said.

“This will be working. Pick me up in the parking lot behind Zimmerman Library and we’ll go work some more on the Ashie Pinto business.”

“Like what?” Janet sounded suspicious.

“Remember you noticed that REDDNEK vanity plate on the Bronco parked out by the lava? Well, I was in the Reserve Room listening to Ashie Pinto tapes and I noticed a guy named Redd had been checking them out. R-E-D-D. Like on the plate. He’d checked them out for four consecutive days just about a week before the murder.”

As Chee said it, it sounded monumentally trivial. He expected Janet to say something like “So what?” Instead she said nothing at all.

“Well?” Chee said. “Is that a good enough excuse?”

“I can’t right now, Jim. I’m right in the middle of finishing something. With people waiting. Can I pick you up in an hour? Hour and a half?”

“Good enough,” Chee said, trying to keep from feeling disgruntled, thinking that Janet was doing something important while he was killing idle time, wondering what she was thinking. “I’ll walk over to the Union and drink coffee.”

Walking across the brick-paved mall he had another idea. Since he couldn’t check on Redd now, he’d go find Professor Tagert, while he was waiting, and see if Tagert could tell him anything.

The Department of History had moved since Chee’s days on the campus. He found it in a handsome old building he remembered as a dormitory.

The woman at the desk in the department office looked at him curiously, taking in the bandage on his hand first, and his being a Navajo second. “Dr. Tagert?” she said, and chuckled. She sorted quickly through papers on the desk and extracted what looked like a list. “He has office hours this afternoon. Right now in fact. And his office is room 217.” She gestured down the hallway and chuckled again. “I wish you luck.”

The door of 217 was open.

Chee looked into a cluttered room, lit by two dusty windows, divided by two long desks placed back to back in its center. Books were everywhere, jamming bookcases that occupied the walls, stacked on chairs, tumbled out of untidy piles on the desks. Behind the nearest desk, her back to Chee, a woman was typing.

Chee tapped at the door.

“He’s still not here,” the woman said without looking around at him. “We haven’t heard from him.”

“I’m looking for Professor Tagert,” Chee said. “Any idea where I could find him?”

“None,” she said, and turned around, looking at Chee over the tops of reading glasses. “Which class are you in?”

“I’m a cop,” he said. He fished out his identification and handed it to her. Not a worry in the world if the Bureau bitched about him nosing into an FBI case. He was going to quit anyway.

She looked at the identification, at him, at his damaged hand. She was a plump woman in her late twenties, Chee guessed, with a round, good-natured face and short brown hair.

“On duty?”

Shrewd, Chee thought. “More or less,” he said. “I’m working on a case that involves a man Dr. Tagert did some business with. I wanted to see what Dr. Tagert could tell me about this guy.”

“Who is it?” She smiled at him, shrugged.

“None of my business, maybe. But I’m Tagert’s teaching assistant. Maybe I could help.”

“Where would Tagert be, this time of day?”

She laughed. “I can’t help you with that. He’s supposed to be sitting right there—” she pointed across the desk “—having his office hours. And he was supposed to be here all last week, meeting his classes. And the week before that, attending the presemester faculty meetings. Nobody knows where the hell he is.” She pointed across the desk at a stack of envelopes overflowing a wire basket on the adjoining desk. “Unopened mail,” she said.

Chee looked at the stack. A lot of mail.

“From when? How long has he been gone?”

“I saw him at the end of summer session.” She laughed again but there was no humor in it. “Or almost the end. He usually manages to quit a little early. Had me grade his papers for him and turn in his grades. He said he had to get going on some research.”

Chee found himself a lot more interested. “My name’s Jim Chee,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m Jean Jacobs.” She held out her hand.

Chee shook it.

“Can I sit down?”

She gestured toward a chair. “Move the books.”

He sat. “Doesn’t anybody know where he is? How about Mrs. Tagert?”

“They’re separated,” Jacobs said. “I called her when the department chairman first got excited about finding him. She said she didn’t know and she didn’t want to know and if I found him to please not tell her about it.”

“Strange,” Chee said.

“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Dr. Tagert wouldn’t be a happy man to live with. In fact

“ She let that trail off, unfinished.

“I meant strange nobody knows where he is,” Chee said. “You’d think he’d keep the department informed.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Jacobs said. “Not if you knew him.”

Chee was remembering his own days as an undergraduate here. Usually things had been fairly well organized, but not always. And it had seemed to him that the tenure/academic freedom system made faculty members almost totally independent.

“What’s the chairman doing about it?”

“He’s pissed off. He got me to start Tagert’s Trans-Mississippi West class. And I met with his seminars just to tell those poor souls what he’ll expect, hand out the reading lists, and all that. And then the dean called and wanted to know when he’d be back, and what he was doing—as if it was my fault.” Jean Jacobs’s expression soured at the memory. “I hope the Navajos got him,” she added.

“Is that where he was going? To the Navajo Reservation?”

“Who knows?” she said. “Or gives a damn. But that’s where he’d been working.”

“You know what he was working on?”

“Vaguely. It had to be cops and robbers. That’s his field. ‘Law and Order in the Old West.’ He’s The Authority in that particular category.” She paused. “Or so he tells everybody.”

“Do you know if he was working on that with a Navajo named Ashie Pinto?”

“Sure,” she said. “Pinto was one of his informants this summer. For old stories and things like that.” Her eyes went from Chee’s hand to his face. “Chee,” she said, recognition dawning. “You’re the one who arrested Mr. Pinto. You got yourself burned trying to pull that other policeman out of the car.”

Clearly Jean Jacobs was impressed.

“I’m on leave,” Chee said, indicating the hand and feeling embarrassed. “But I’m trying to find out what Pinto was doing out there. Where the crime was committed. How he got there. So forth. And Pinto won’t talk about it.”

Jean Jacobs had another question. “Why did he kill the policeman?”

“He was drunk,” Chee said. It irritated him that it didn’t sound like a convincing motive. “Very drunk.”

Jean Jacobs was looking at Chee. Smiling. Approving.

“I thought maybe Professor Tagert could tell me something helpful. Maybe he was doing something for Tagert. Working with him on something.”

“It might show in his calendar,” Jean Jacobs said. “Let’s look.”

Tagert’s desk calendar was open to the second week in August. The spaces under Monday through Thursday were mostly filled with jottings—Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were blank except for a diagonal line drawn across them and the legend “Go hunting.” Just above the Wednesday space the words “pick up Oldfart” were written in a neat, precise hand.

Chee indicated it with his finger.

“I don’t know who that means,” Jacobs said. “I’m not his TA because I like him,” she explained. “He’s chairman of my dissertation committee. I’m trying to get a doctorate in history. Doing it on the impact of the trading post system on the Western tribes. That falls into Doctor Tagert’s field so he’s chairman of my committee—like it or not.”

“He was here when I was a student,” Chee said. “I remember now. One of my friends told me to avoid Professor Tagert.”

“Good thinking,” Jacobs said. “Sound advice.”

“Except now. Now it looks like he had himself scheduled to pick up somebody, maybe Mr. Pinto, the day before Mr. Pinto shot a policeman. Now I think Tagert could tell me a lot.”

“Well,” Jean Jacobs said, “I wish I could help you find him.” She sorted aimlessly through the papers on the desktop, as if some clue to Tagert’s whereabouts might be among them. Chee flipped forward in the desk calendar. The next week was blank. The following page was cluttered with notations of committee meetings, luncheon engagements, numbers to be called. “Looks like he intended to get back before classes started,” Chee said.

“I noticed that.”

He flipped the pages backward, reentering August, moving out of the time when Nez was dead, to the day Nez died because Chee hadn’t done his job. That page was blank.

Jean Jacobs must have been watching his face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Chee said. “Just remembering.”

He turned the pages back to the date where Tagert had left it, and back another page to a week when Chee had been a happy man. That week, too, was cluttered with the busy Tagert’s notations.

Among them, near the bottom, in the space left for Friday, Tagert had written: “Find out what Redd wants.” That and a telephone number. Chapter 9

REDD ANSWERED THE telephone.

“Jim Chee?” he said. “Chee. Are you the cop who arrested Old Man Pinto?”

“Right,” Chee said. He was surprised. But after all, there had been a lot in the paper about it. And Redd seemed to be involved, somehow, in this odd affair. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. What you know about Pinto.”

“Damn little,” Redd said. “But go ahead and ask. What do you want to know?”

“How about me coming over? I hate to talk on the telephone.”

“Sure,” Redd said, and he gave Chee his address.

Janet Pete was waiting in the lot behind Zimmerman Library, with the unhappy, nervous look of people who are parked in loading zones.

“You’re late,” she said. “You said an hour. The cops already made me move twice.”

“It was you who said, and you said an hour and a half or so,” Chee said. “By Navajo time it is now just a tiny bit past the so.”

Janet snorted. “Get in,” she said. “You’re sure getting a lot of mileage out of that sore hand.”

Redd’s address was in Albuquerque’s student ghetto—a neighborhood of small frame-stucco bungalows left over from the 1940s with weedy yards and sagging fences. Redd’s residence was behind such a bungalow in what had once been a double garage. The rusty Bronco II with the REDDNEK plate was parked beside it, and Redd himself was standing in the door watching them as Janet Pete pulled up.

He was a tall man with athlete’s shoulders, but the first thing Chee noticed was red hair, a red mustache, and a long, narrow face sprinkled with freckles.

“Yaa eh t’eeh,” he said, handling the Navajo glottal sounds perfectly. “William Odell Redd,” the man said, holding out his hand to Janet Pete, “but people call me Odell. And you’d be?”

“Janet Pete,” she said, “and this is Jim Chee.”

Odell Redd was grinning broadly at Chee. “That’s the hand you got burned,” Redd said. “I read about that. But come on in. You want a drink?”

The interior of Redd’s apartment was jammed but orderly. Except for books. Most of them concerned linguistics. Dictionaries were everywhere, English and foreign, ranging from French to Quechua. There was a Cherokee dictionary and beside it Navajo Tonal Syntax. Books were stacked on all flat surfaces. There was even a dictionary on the battered table in the center of what served as both Redd’s living room and bedroom. But that was an incongruous Dictionary of Stamps. Other books cluttering the tabletop involved coins. The Macmillan Encyclopedic Dictionary of Numismatics was open, surrounded by tidy rows of pennies. More pennies were piled into three cigar boxes.

“Take that there,” Redd told Janet, pointing to an overstuffed chair in the corner. The burden of books it had once held now stood in a tidy stack on the linoleum floor beside it—cleared away, Chee guessed, to make room for his coming. “I’ll fix a place here for Mr. Chee to sit.”

Redd lifted a huge Spanish-English dictionary and two smaller ones from a kitchen.

Coyote Waits chair and pushed aside enough pennies to make room for them on the table. Then he sat down himself, reversed on a kitchen chair, leaning across its wooden back, looking first at Janet Pete and then at Chee.

“Didn’t I see you two out there south of Ship Rock the other evening? Out there south of Highway 33?”

“That’s right,” Chee said.

“Interesting country,” Redd said. “You probably know more about it than I do—being Navajos. All those lava flow ridges and outcrops and things. There’s supposed to be a place out there somewhere where witches get together. Initiate people as skinwalkers. That sort of thing.”

“You have any idea what Pinto was doing out there?” Janet asked.

Redd smiled at her. “I’ll bet you’re his kinfolks,” he said. “Pinto, he’s Mud Clan. Are you related?”

“I’m his lawyer,” Janet said.

“Won’t he tell you, then? I mean what he was doing out there that night. When he shot the policeman.”

Janet hesitated. She glanced at Chee, uncertain. Chee said: “Pinto won’t talk about it.”

“I sort of got that impression from the papers,” Redd said. “It said he was drunk. Said double the legal level. Maybe he just doesn’t remember.”

“Maybe not,” Chee said. “Any idea how he could have gotten out there?”

Redd denied it with a shake of his head. “But the old man had to get there some way or other. Two hundred miles, more or less, is too far to walk. Even for a Navajo. You wouldn’t think somebody would just drop him off way out there and leave him. And otherwise, you’d think the cops would have seen somebody driving away.”

“Nobody saw anything as far as we know,” Janet said. “Jim got there just after it happened and he didn’t see anybody. And Mr. Ji came by just about before that, and he didn’t either.”

Redd looked puzzled. “Mr. Gee?”

“Mr. Ji,” Janet said. “J-I but it sounds like ‘Gee.’ It’s Vietnamese. He’s a teacher at Ship Rock.”

“Oh,” Redd said. “Anyway, the best I can do about what Pinto was doing out there is guess at it. I think he was working for Professor Tagert.”

Chee waited for some expansion of that. None came.

“Like how?” he asked. He held up his hand. “But first answer me another one. What were you doing out there when you saw Janet and me?”

Redd laughed. “I was exercising my curiosity. I kept thinking there’d be more in the papers. You know, after the police finished their investigation, explaining what the hell was going on. There wasn’t, and I kept thinking about it and I came up with a theory. So I went out to take a look and it didn’t pay off.”

“What’s the theory?”

“I had the notion that Pinto had found Butch Cassidy for Tagert,” Redd said.

He smiled at them, waiting.

Finally, Janet said: “Butch Cassidy?”

Redd nodded. “What do you know about Western history?” he asked. “I mean about the academic politics of Western history.”

“Little bit of the history. No politics,” Chee said.

“Well, the guru for years in that field was Frederick Jackson Turner. He died back in the thirties, I think. Taught at Harvard and way back at the end of the nineteenth century he came up with this theory that the wide open western frontier had free land, gold, silver, grazing for anybody who could take it—” Redd paused, looking slightly abashed “—take it away from the Indians, I mean. Anyway, he thought this changed European immigrants into a new kind of people. Made democracy work. Turner and his followers dominated academic Western history down through this century. The Anglo white man was the hero and there wasn’t much attention paid to the Spanish, or the French, or the Indians. But now there’s a new wave. Donald Worster at the University of Kansas, Patricia Limerick at Colorado University, Tagert here, a guy named Henderson at UC Berkeley, and a few others are the leaders. Or, at least Tagert would like to be one.”

Redd paused, looking from one to the other. “This takes a little time to explain.”

“No rush,” Janet said.

“Well, the way I understand this feud started, this Dr. Henderson wrote a textbook, and Tagert did a paper criticizing part of it, and then Henderson took a whack in Western History Quarterly at a paper Tagert had done about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.” Redd paused again. “I should have explained that Tagert and Henderson both specialize in law and order—or the lack of it—on the frontier. To get to the point, they hate each other’s guts. And Tagert thinks he’s onto something that will put Henderson down. It involves something he learned from Pinto.”

“You’re one of Tagert’s students?” Janet asked.

Chee felt his jaw tighten. This interruption broke the flow of whatever Redd was trying to tell them. And, by Navajo standards, such an interruption was rude. One let a speaker finish, and then waited to make sure he was indeed finished, before one spoke. But then Janet Pete was really Navajo only by blood and birth. She hadn’t been raised on the Reservation in the Navajo Way. Had never had a kinaalda to celebrate her puberty, had never been taught

“No way,” Redd said. “I studied it down at UTEP. But you can’t make a living at it. Now I’m working on a doctorate in linguistics. There’s a better chance of a teaching job and if you can’t get that, you can be a translator. Lot of people need them. Oil companies. Export-import. Law firms. Lots of jobs.”

“But you know a lot about history, and Tagert,” Janet said.

“I know a lot about Tagert,” Redd replied. “A lady who works for him is a good friend of mine.”

“Jean Jacobs?” Janet said. “Jim told me he met her today at Tagert’s office. She was very helpful.”

“Nice gal,” Redd said, with an expression that said he meant it. “We go way back.”

Chee found himself feeling impatience—a rare emotion with him. Wishing he had left Janet Pete behind. Wanting to get on with it.

“Do you know enough about Tagert to have any idea where he might be?” He noticed his tone wasn’t right. So did Redd. So did Pete.

“No,” Redd said. “No idea, really.” He got up, turned his chair around, and sat again.

The conversation had become formal. Ah, well, Chee thought, I’ve screwed up. He sensed Janet Pete’s eyes on him. Time to pull the rabbit from the hat. But he had no rabbit. He felt disgusted with himself. “You said you’d seen us out near the place where Pinto killed Delbert Nez. You said you were checking on a theory.”

“I was just curious,” Redd said. “I know Mr. Pinto some. I wondered what he could be doing out there.”

“You started to tell us that Pinto was working for Dr. Tagert. To tell us what he was doing. Something about Western history and a professor named Henderson, and—”

“Oh, yeah. I drifted away from the point I was trying to make. Well, this Henderson is out with a new book, about banditry, organized gangs, so forth, but mostly it’s about the Pinkerton organization.” Redd paused, glanced at them. “You know about the Pinkertons?”

Chee nodded.

“Well, they’re supposed to have hounded Butch Cassidy out of the country. About 1901. Down to Argentina and then to Bolivia. Well, Henderson had gone down there and dug into the records at La Paz, old military records, and established from the official report all the details of how this Bolivian mounted infantry patrol caught the two of ‘em in a little village and shot ‘em. Nothing much new in it, except the details. Thing is, Tagert doesn’t think it happened that way.”

Redd paused, awaiting some reaction. In a second or two he got one.

“That’s the way it was in the movie,” Janet said.

Redd looked surprised. “Movie?”

“Butch Cassidy and the Sunshine Kid, I think it was. Robert Redford and somebody-or-other. And the Bolivian army kills them.” Janet shuddered. “Blows them all to pieces. Gruesome.”

It wasn’t the reaction Redd had expected, but he went on. Enjoying the attention, Chee thought sourly, and then was disgusted with himself for his bad temper. Redd could hardly be more cooperative. He seemed to be one of those perpetual graduate students who inhabit the fringes of every university—but a decent sort of fellow.

Redd was telling them that Tagert didn’t believe Cassidy had been killed in Bolivia. Tagert believed part of the tale told by Cassidy’s kinfolks. The family claimed that Cassidy had slipped back into the United States in 1909, had bought a farm under an assumed name, had lived out his life as a law-abiding citizen, and had finally died as an old, old man about 1932. Tagert believed some of that. But not the law-abiding part.

“He published a paper in Western Archives about ten years ago, connecting Cassidy with a 1909 bank robbery in Utah,” Redd said. “In stuffy old history faculties that stirred up a controversy, and Henderson blew him out of the water. He found out that Tagert had relied on some old trial testimony that had since been discredited. That infuriated Tagert. And this new book

“ Redd grinned broadly. “Jean said Tagert was absolutely livid. In a downright rage. Stomping around the office, having a regular tantrum.” He laughed, shook his head, savoring the memory.

“I take it that Jean Jacobs doesn’t care much for the professor,” Janet said.

Redd’s delight vanished. “Does the slave love her master?” Redd asked. “That’s what we are. Lincoln didn’t mention graduate students when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We’re the Grand Republic’s last vestige of indentured labor. We do the master’s research for him, or we don’t get our dissertation approved. Then you don’t get the union card.”

Chee swallowed. How did all this Cassidy stuff relate to Ashie Pinto? How could it? But he wasn’t going to show impatience again. He would behave like a Navajo. He would endure.

“I remember how it was in law school,” Janet said. “If you were working your way through.”

“Anyway,” Redd said, “old Tagert had dug out an old newspaper account of a train robbery up in Utah. I think it was the newspaper at Blanding. Three men, one of them killed, and the other two getting away and some people on the train claiming one of the robbers was Cassidy. He found a later account reporting that the two bandidos had turned up in Cortez, and got away again, and the posse had chased them south and lost track of ‘em south and west of Sleeping Ute Mountain. Again, one of the cops said the blond bandit was Butch Cassidy. He claimed he’d known him way back when Cassidy was connected with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.”

Redd paused. Shook his head. “Pretty slim evidence, but it was all Tagert had, and he used it in that paper, along with what Cassidy’s kinfolks had said, and—like I said—he got blown out of the water by Henderson’s Bolivian stuff.” Redd shook his head again, expression wry.

Being raised Navajo, Jim Chee understood how human nature affected storytellers and how they worked an audience. Now, at last, Redd would tell them something pertinent.

“He had nothing but that.” Redd looked at Chee. The dramatic pause. “Then Ashie Pinto picked up Butch Cassidy’s trail on the Big Reservation.” Chapter 10

JOE LEAPHORN—A practical man—handled it by telephone. He got Professor Tagert’s home number in Albuquerque from information. No one answered. He called the university switchboard for Tagert’s office number. There a woman answered. She said her name was Jean Jacobs, Tagert’s teaching assistant. From Jacobs, Leaphorn learned two interesting facts.

First, Tagert was two weeks overdue for his academic duties and—if Jacobs knew what she was talking about—no one seemed to know his whereabouts.

Second, the arresting officer in the Pinto case, Jim Chee, off duty and on convalescent leave, was performing as Chee performed all too often—a mile outside the rules. He had presented himself at Tagert’s office asking questions. How could Chee have come to know about Tagert?

Thinking of this, Leaphorn found himself violating one of his own rules. He was allowing his mind to shift back and forth between two problems—Tagert and Chee—and thus getting nowhere on either. Chee could wait. First he would see if he could fit Tagert’s absence from his university classrooms into this puzzle.

Leaphorn swiveled his chair to face the map that dominated his wall behind his desk. It was a magnified version of the “Indian Country” map produced by the Automobile Club of Southern California. Smaller versions were used throughout the Four Corners territory for its details and its accuracy. Leaphorn had hired a photographer to copy it and make him a double-sized print on a matte paper. Emma had pasted this to a sheet of corkboard. For years, he had sprinkled it with coded pins, using it, so he said, to reinforce his memory. Actually Leaphorn’s memory was remarkable, needing no reinforcement. He used the map in his endless hunt for patterns, sequences, order—something that would bring a semblance of Navajo hohzho to the chaos of crime and violence.

From his desk, Leaphorn extracted a box of pins, the sort mapping companies provide. He selected three with large yellow heads—yellow being Leaphorn’s code for problems with no priority beyond their inherent oddity. He stuck one in the map between Bekahatso Wash and Yon Dot Mountain, at about the place where Ashie Pinto’s hogan stood. Another he placed between Birdsprings Trading Post and Jadito Wash. There Nez had lived. He put the third south of Navajo Route 33 on a line between Ship Rock and Beautiful Mountain, the place where Pinto had shot Delbert Nez. Then he leaned back and inspected his work.

The triangle formed by the pins was huge. It emphasized two points in Leaphorn’s mind. The Nez home was at least 150 miles south of the Pinto place in a part of the Reservation where intercourse with both the Hopis and the busy world of the biligaana was easy if not inevitable. Pinto lived in a different world of the pure, traditional Navajo culture. Everything separated them. Distance. Age. Culture. And yet they had come together violently at the point of the triangle—two hundred miles from either one’s home. Duty had taken Nez to that rendezvous. But what had taken Pinto there?

That was the second point. The pins made it clear he could hardly have been there by chance. One could not get from pin A at Pinto’s hogan to pin C beside Navajo Route 33 without changing roads a half-dozen times. Pinto could not have simply happened past en route to somewhere else. He had gone there for a purpose. And Leaphorn’s reasoning said Pinto’s purpose must be linked to why the old man had killed Delbert Nez.

But three pins were not enough to tell him anything. So Leaphorn, being Leaphorn, studied the map to see if they would fit into any other pattern.

He noticed only one thing that interested him. While Leaphorn rejected traditional Navajo witchcraft beliefs and detested them, they were part of his job. Belief in witches, and fear of them, lay at the root of many of the troubles, many of the tragedies, that occupied him as a policeman.

Pin C, where Delbert Nez had died, was very close to a rugged volcanic outcropping, nameless on the map, but which local families called Tse A’Digash. Witchery Rock. Around this long irregular ridge were clustered a measles rash of red pins marked with the letter a. The a stood for A’Digash. Witchcraft. Each pin in the quarter-century accumulation marked some sort of disturbance, assault, threat, or misdemeanor in which fear of these so-called skinwalkers had played some part.

Leaphorn’s eyes were on the map but he was seeing Tse A’Digash in his memory—an ugly black ridge of old lichen-covered lava that ran for three or four miles south of Navajo 33. Now a yellow pin stuck out in the cluster of red ones. A coincidence? Perhaps. Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical of coincidences. Perhaps that pin, too, should be red with an a in its center.

In fact Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical in general. He took another yellow pin from the desk drawer and stuck it in just south of Flagstaff. Professor Bourebonette had said she lived south of town. Her motivation, so she said, was merely friendship. He had absolutely no way to calculate how she actually fit into this.

Then Leaphorn picked up his phone, dialed the records office downstairs, and asked for the file on the Delbert Nez homicide.

While he waited for it, he shuffled through the folders Bolack Travel had sent him on China. One concerned a tour sponsored by the Audubon Society, which would focus on visits to bird sanctuaries. He reread parts of that. Emma had been an amateur bird watcher—keeping three feeders stocked in their backyard. The others on the trip would be interesting people, probably. But he would have nothing to talk to them about. Nothing in common. Another tour simply involved visits to cities. That left him cold. His best alternative seemed to be going alone. He would see if any of his old professors were left on the anthropology faculty at Arizona State. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. If not, maybe someone else there would help him. He’d explain he was an alum, with their master of science in anthropology degree from way back when, and he wanted to go into Asia and see if he could find any roots to his Athabaskan origins. He’d wanted to do that for years, ever since he’d become conscious as an anthropology student that his forebears had probably emerged from Mongolia. It had faded into the subconscious after he’d met Emma and married her. Emma was no traveler. Three days in Albuquerque made her vaguely uneasy, yearning for home. Three days in New York made her miserable. She would have gone with him without a murmur. But taking her would have been cruel.

When the Nez folder arrived, he was examining a picture of a Shanghai street scene, seeing himself there amid the stampede of bicycles. It depressed him.

He spent almost an hour rereading the file and jotting reminders in the slim notebook he always carried in his uniform pocket.

Chee met car. Was it the schoolteacher’s? What did he see?

Expensive whiskey? How? Where bought?

Pistol. Where did he get it?

Two fifty-dollar bills? McGinnis said he was broke.

Did Pinto have his jish with him? Where is it?

Then he called the FBI office at Gallup, got Jay Kennedy, and invited him to lunch.

“What do you want this time?” Kennedy asked.

“Wait a minute,” Leaphorn said. “Remember. Last time somebody wanted something it was you. You wanted me to check a homicide scene for tracks.”

“Which you didn’t find,” Kennedy said.

“Because there weren’t any,” Leaphorn said. “Besides, I’ll buy.”

“I’ll have to cancel something,” Kennedy said. “Is it important?”

Leaphorn considered. And reconsidered.

“Well?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. He considered again. “Probably not.”

He heard Kennedy sigh. “So what are we talking about? Just in case I need to look something up. Or dig into something so confidential that it might cost me my job.”

“Delbert Nez,” Leaphorn said.

“Oh, shit,” Kennedy said. “Naturally.”

“Why?”

“It was a sloppy job,” Kennedy said. “Even worse than usual.”

They met at the International Pancake House on old U.S. 66 and sat a while sipping coffee. The autumn sun warmed Leaphorn’s shoulders through his uniform jacket and the traffic streamed by off Interstate 40. He noticed how gray Kennedy had become, how—uncharacteristic of FBI agents and of Kennedy himself—he needed a haircut. Old cops, Leaphorn thought. Two old dogs getting tired of watching the sheep. Old friends. How rare they are. The Bureau would be glad to see the last of Kennedy—exiled here years ago for some violation of the old J. Edgar Hoover prohibition against bad publicity, liberalism, or innovative thinking. The story was that Kennedy’s ex-wife had been active in the American Civil Liberties Union. She had left him to marry a real estate broker, but the stigma remained.

For that matter, Leaphorn suspected there were those in his Navajo Tribal Police hierarchy who would be happy to celebrate his own retirement. He wouldn’t make them wait much longer.

Kennedy had been talking about one of those endless interagency shoving matches which involve public employees—this one an effort of the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and “The Bureau” to make one or another of them responsible for protecting Anasazi ruins under the Antiquities Act. Leaphorn had heard a lot of it before.

Kennedy quit talking. “I’m not holding your attention,” he said.

“You ever been to China?” Leaphorn asked.

Kennedy laughed. “Not yet,” he said. “If the Bureau opens an office there—say in North Manchuria—I’ll get the assignment.”

“Think you’d like to go?”

Kennedy laughed again. “It’s on my wish list,” he said. “Right after Angola, Antarctica, Bangladesh, Lubbock, Texas, and the Australian outback. Why? Are you planning to go?”

“I guess not,” Leaphorn said. “Always sort of wanted to. Wanted to go out in the steppe country. Outer Mongolia. The part of the world where they think the Athabaskans originated.”

“I used to want to go back to Ireland,” Kennedy said. “Where my great-grandfather came from. I outgrew that notion.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Do you know if anybody checked on that pistol Pinto used?”

“Somebody checked,” Kennedy said. “It was a common type, but I don’t remember the brand. American made, I think it was, and an expensive model. It had been recently fired. The slug in Nez came from it. Check of Pinto’s hand showed he’d recently fired something.”

“Where did it come from?”

“No idea,” Kennedy said. “The old man isn’t saying. Totally silent from what I hear. I guess he bought it at some pawnshop.”

“I don’t think so,” Leaphorn said.

Kennedy peered at him, expression quizzical. “You’ve been asking around,” he said. “Any reason for that?”

Leaphorn made a wry face. “Turns out Ashie Pinto is sort of shirttail, linked-clan kinfolks of mine,” he said. “Through Emma’s clan.”

“You know him?”

“Never heard of him.”

“But you got roped in.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t think he bought the pistol because he was broke. Not even eating money. What do you know about those two fifties he had?”

“Nothing.”

“Where did Pinto get his hands on them?”

“No idea.” Kennedy looked irritated. “How would we know something like that?”

“Did anybody check on the driver of the car Chee met going to the fire?”

Kennedy shook his head. “I told you it was a sloppy job. But damn it, Joe, why would they check on that? Look what you had there. No big mystery. A drunk gets arrested and kills the policeman. Doesn’t even deny it. What’s to investigate? I know you think we loaf around a lot, but we do have things to do.”

“Did Pinto have his jish with him? You know where that is?”

“Jish?” Kennedy said. “His medicine bundle? I don’t know.”

“He was a shaman. A crystal gazer. If he was on a job, he’d have his crystals with him, and his jish.”

“I’ll find out,” Kennedy said. “Probably he wasn’t working. Left it home.”

“We didn’t find it at his place.”

Kennedy looked at him. “You been out to his place, then.”

The waitress delivered the waffles, which smelled delicious. Leaphorn applied butter, poured on syrup. He was hungry and he hadn’t been hungry much lately. This Ashie Pinto business must be good for him.

Kennedy had hardly looked at his waffle. He was still looking at Leaphorn.

“We?” he said. “You been out searching Pinto’s hogan? Who’s we?”

“Pinto’s niece,” Leaphorn said. “And a woman named Bourebonette. A professor at Northern Arizona University. You guys turn up anything about her?”

“Bourebonette? No. Why would we? How would she fit into this?”

“That’s what bothers me,” Leaphorn said. “She says Pinto was one of her sources for myths, legends, so forth. That’s her field. Mythology. She says she’s into it because he’s a friend. Just that.”

Kennedy peered at him. “You sound like you have trouble believing that.”

Leaphorn shrugged. “Sophisticated, urbane university professor. Old illiterate Navajo. And she’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“You’re getting even worse with age,” Kennedy said. “Emma used to make you a little more human.” He buttered his waffle. “Okay, then. What do you think motivates the woman?”

Leaphorn shrugged again. “Maybe she’s working on a book. Needs more out of him to finish it off.”

“She could get to him in prison. They’re not going to put somebody like that in solitary. Not even for killing a policeman.”

“I don’t know then. What do you think?”

“Why not just believe she’s nuts? Likes the old bastard. She’s doing it for humanitarian reasons. You actually went all the way out there and searched the old man’s hogan?”

“I didn’t search. No warrant.”

“You’re getting serious about this, aren’t you?” Kennedy said. “You think there’s something more to it than just Pinto being drunk and killing your man?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “I’m just curious.” The waffle was wonderful. He chewed a second bite, swallowed, sipped his coffee. “Have you found that car that Chee saw? The old white Jeepster?”

“Didn’t we already cover that? You asked me about the driver.”

“And I noticed how you didn’t exactly answer. You just sort of nodded, and said it had been sloppy work, and then did your little sermon about why waste time on a made case.” Leaphorn was grinning at him. “When the Bureau dumps you I hope you don’t get into playing poker for a profession.”

Kennedy made a wry face. He chewed for a while.

“It took you longer to get to it than I expected,” Kennedy said. “But you never fail to get there. Right to the touchy spot.”

“Touchy?”

“How much do you know about the car?”

“Nothing,” Leaphorn said. “Just what was in the report. Chee saw an old white Jeepster coming from the direction of the crime, turning on a gravel road toward Ship Rock. Chee thought it belonged to an Oriental who teaches at the high school. There was nothing in the report about checking on that car.”

“They found it,” Kennedy said. He eyed Leaphorn. “This is one of those ‘you don’t remember where you heard it’ times.”

“Sure,” Leaphorn said.

“The car belonged to a man named Huan Ji. He teaches math at Ship Rock High School. Just been there four years. No way he’d have anything to do with this crime. He couldn’t have known Pinto or Nez.”

Leaphorn waited for more. Kennedy sipped the last of his coffee, signaled the pretty Zuni girl who was their waitress.

“Ready for a refill,” he said, indicating his cup.

Kennedy had said all he wanted to say about Juan Gee and the car. Why?

“What was this Gee doing way out there in the rain?” Leaphorn asked. “What did he see? What did he tell you?”

Kennedy grimaced and peered across his coffee cup at Leaphorn.

“You remember the Howard case in Santa Fe. The defrocked CIA agent who was working for the State of New Mexico, and the CIA thought he had sold out to the Russians, and we had him staked out watching him until somebody could get around to filing charges. You remember.”

“I remember,” Leaphorn said, grinning. “The part I remember best was the ingenious way he slipped away from you guys. Had his wife drive the car.”

Kennedy grinned, too, even broader than Leaphorn. “Embarrassment squared. Embarrassment to the third power,” he said. The grin turned into a chuckle. “Can you imagine what it was like in the Albuquerque office when the powers found out Howard was safely behind the Iron Curtain? Hell was raised. Fits thrown. Carefully written reports were sent out explaining why it hadn’t occurred to the Bureau that Howard might have his wife driving the car on the escape run.”

“I can imagine the CIA people were rubbing it in.”

“I think you can be sure of it,” Kennedy said.

“Can I be sure that all of this is going to have some bearing on why nobody talked to this Juan Gee?”

“You can,” Kennedy said. “It seems the Bureau was aware that Huan Ji was a friend of the Agency. He was a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army. In intelligence, and he was working for Washington as well as Saigon. We have this vague, scuttlebutt impression that he was one of the very hard people, involved with the sort of stuff we used to hear the horror stories about.”

“Like dropping Vietcong out of helicopters so the one you didn’t drop would be willing to talk?”

“I don’t know,” Kennedy said. “It was just gossip. But anyway he was a client, so to speak, of the CIA and so when everything went to hell over there in 1975 and the Saigon government collapsed, they got him out and helped him get started in the States.”

“A Vietnamese named Juan?” Leaphorn asked.

“It’s H-U-A-N and J-I. Sounds like ‘Gee.’”

“So why didn’t the FBI talk to him?” Leaphorn asked, thinking he already knew the answer.

Kennedy looked slightly defensive. “Why talk to him? The case was all locked up. The arrest was made. We had the smoking gun. No mystery. Nothing to resolve. We didn’t really need another witness.” He stopped.

“And bothering this guy would look bad to the CIA. Would maybe irritate the CIA, which is already sneering at you guys for letting Howard walk away.”

“More or less, I’d say,” Kennedy admitted. “I’m not privy to the upper councils, but I’d say that is a close guess.”

Leaphorn ate more waffle.

“And what the hell’s wrong with that? Why waste everybody’s time? Why piss off the Agency? Why bother Mr. Ji?”

“I just wonder what he was doing out there,” Leaphorn said. ‘That’s all.”

Kennedy finished his waffle. “I’ve got to go to Farmington,” he said. “A hundred bumpy miles up Route 666. And then a night in a Holiday Inn.”

“You sure you don’t want to go to China?”

“About as much as I want to go to Farmington,” Kennedy said. “And don’t forget to leave a generous tip.”

Leaphorn watched Kennedy leave. He saw his car pull out of the Pancake House parking lot onto old 66, heading for the long drive north to Farmington. He was still wondering what Colonel Ji was doing out in the rain by the rock where the witches gather. Chapter 11

THE HAND MAN’S reputation was as good as they get in modern medicine. He had identified himself as an “Indian Indian,” smiling as he said it and giving Chee a name which Chee instantly forgot. His voice carried a slight British accent with a trace of lilt in it, and he asked his questions in a soft, gentle voice without looking at Chee, never taking his eyes off the ugly, puckered cavity burned across Chee’s left palm. With the Burn Doctor, a woman named Johns, the Hand Man discussed tendon damage, ligament damage, nerve damage, regeneration of tissue, “prognosis for usage,” and “viability of surgical techniques.”

“You clutched the handle of a car door? Is that how I understand it? And the car was burning?” He glanced at Chee’s right hand.

“But you are right-handed, is it not true? Why did you use your left hand?”

“I guess because it’s natural to open the driver’s door that way,” Chee said. “If I had another reason I don’t remember it.”

“It’s almost as if your subconscious sensed the forthcoming damage and protected the hand most useful to you.” The Hand Man said it in a clipped, didactic tone, still staring at the angry red mass of scarring on Chee’s palm, never glancing up. “Would you agree?”

“I doubt it,” Chee said. “I’d guess it was also because I was going to pull Delbert out of there with my right hand. But it’s all sort of hazy to tell the truth.”

“Ah, well,” the Hand Man said, no longer interested. And that was that. The Burn Doctor put on a new bandage, using a different wrapping technique. She gave Chee a prescription and instructions, and said she would see him in a week.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked the Burn Doctor.

“Think?”

“About surgery. About how much use I’ll regain of my fingers. Things like that?”

“We’ll have to decide,” the Burn Doctor said. “You’ll be informed.”

“Appreciate it,” Chee said, but the Burn Doctor didn’t notice the irony.

He used the pay telephone again. This time Janet Pete was out. She was in Santa Fe, the receptionist at the Federal Public Defender’s office told him. She was involved with picking a jury for a forthcoming trial. Would she be home this evening? The receptionist had no idea.

Chee called Professor Tagert’s office. Jean Jacobs answered. No, Tagert still hadn’t checked in.

“Can I come over? Do you have time to talk?”

“Sure,” Jacobs said. “About what?”

“Mr. Redd told us about Tagert’s interest in Butch Cassidy. He said Ashie Pinto had helped Tagert find what might be Cassidy’s trail. Out on the Reservation.”

“Okay,” Jacobs said. “I know he’s obsessed with Cassidy but I don’t know much about it.”

Chee walked, feeling disgruntled. Janet Pete knew he would be back in Albuquerque today. He’d written her a note, telling her. So, maybe she couldn’t avoid the Santa Fe duty. On the other hand, maybe she could have. Chee had been around long enough to know how priorities worked when there was a conflict between duty and desire.

He crossed the mall with fallen sycamore leaves blowing around his feet. His hand hurt. His fingers wouldn’t respond properly. He felt discouraged. Blue. Bored. Undecided. He found the door of Dr. Tagert’s office open. Jean Jacobs sat, elbows on desk, chin on hands, staring out the window. She looked blue, bored, and undecided.

“I’m glad to see you,” Jean Jacobs said. “I’ve got a million things to do.” She slapped an angry palm onto a pile of paperwork. “All this goddamn Tagert work, and all my own work and—oh, to hell with it.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Sometimes that’s about it.”

“So screw it all,” she said. “I hope you have just walked in here with something that is not only totally time-wasting but mysterious. We’ll figure out how to find the vanished professor of history.” She paused. “Even better, we’ll figure out where they hid the bastard’s body.”

“I guess he’s not back yet then,” Chee said. He decided she wasn’t going to ask him to sit down, even though she obviously expected him to stay. So he moved a stack of folders off a chair and sat.

“I think he’s dead,” Jacobs said. “I’ll bet your Mr. Pinto shot him the same time he shot the officer.”

“I think that’s possible,” Chee said. “But then, what happened to his body?”

Jacobs made a “who knows” gesture. “Did Odell tell you anything interesting? Or useful?”

“I’m not sure how useful. He told us all about Tagert’s disagreement about Butch Cassidy with that other professor. And he told us that Pinto knew an old story about Cassidy, or some other bandido, coming across the Reservation after a robbery in Utah and getting killed by some of us Navajos. Tagert thought that maybe he could find some proof of that. And he’d given up on trying to prove Cassidy died of old age.”

“I heard a little about that yarn,” Jacobs said. “Not much. But I think Tagert was excited about it. That was last summer.” She paused, looked at Chee, a shy look. “What did you think of him?”

“Of Redd? He seemed like a nice guy. He said you were a friend.”

“Ummm,” she said. “A friend.”

Her expression was so sad, so close to matching Chee’s own mood, that he said: “Having troubles?”

And she heard the sympathy in his voice.

“I’m just down today,” she said, and laughed a shaky laugh. “You too, I’ll bet. You didn’t look all that cheerful anyway when you walked in.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “It hasn’t been one of my better days.”

“Hand hurt?”

“A little.”

“You look down,” Jacobs said. “Troubles?”

“Not really,” Chee said. He shrugged. “I was hoping to meet a friend. She had to go to Santa Fe.” He considered that. “At least she said she had to go to Santa Fe.”

Jacobs was frowning. “She didn’t go?”

“Oh, I guess she went. I meant maybe she didn’t really have to go.”

“Oh,” Jacobs said. She made a wry face. “I know exactly what you mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Chee said.

“I was just guessing. With me, I think it’s more important for me to be with Odell than it is for Odell to be with me.”

“Okay,” Chee said. He laughed. “We’re on the same wavelength.”

“You’ve got a bad hand. You fly all the way in from Farmington or wherever, and your girlfriend thinks going to Santa Fe is more important.”

“Maybe she couldn’t get out of it. And she’s not exactly my girlfriend. We’re more just friends.”

“Uh-huh,” Jacobs said. “Like Odell said.”

Chee wanted to get off this subject.

“You work for Tagert. Part-time anyway. Did you ever notice anything in the paperwork that would give you any idea what he and Pinto were doing out there?”

“I wasn’t that interested, to tell the truth,” she said. “You know, it seems pretty mean to me that they still have you working on this when your hand’s like that. You should be on sick leave.”

“Actually, I am,” Chee said. “I’m doing this on my own time.”

Jacobs lowered her chin, peering at him over her reading glasses, her smooth, round face furrowed by a frown. “Why? Why are you doing it?”

“I’m curious,” Chee said. “I just want to find out how Hosteen Pinto got out there, and what he was doing. Things like that. It doesn’t really need to be done. Not for the trial. Pinto doesn’t even deny he killed Delbert. I’m just doing it because I don’t have anything else to do. And nobody else gives a damn.”

“Somebody else is doing it, too,” Jacobs said.

“What? Who?”

“I got a call a couple of days ago. From a Navajo tribal policeman in Window Rock. He wanted to talk to Tagert. Wanted to know where he could find him.”

“Who was it? You sure it was a Navajo tribal policeman? Not the FBI? Or maybe an investigator from the Federal Public Defender’s office.”

“It was from Window Rock. He said Navajo Tribal Police.”

“What was the name?”

“A funny name. I don’t remember. I remember he was a lieutenant.”

“Leaphorn!”

“That was it,” Jacobs said. “Lieutenant Leaphorn. Do you know him?”

Chee was thinking. He came to the only possible conclusion. “That son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

Jacobs looked startled at the bitterness. She looked away, picked up a pen. Put it down.

“Sorry,” Chee said.

“It sounds like you know him. Is he your boss?”

“I know him. No, he’s not my boss.”

“He just asked if Tagert was here. If I knew where to find him.” She studied Chee. “Is it bad?”

“No,” Chee said. “I don’t know. It’s just—”

He sighed. “You don’t want to hear all this,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“It’s more than curiosity with me,” he began, and told her about his radio conversation with Nez, the fading in and out, the nut who painted basalt, the laughter that led him to fail his friend. He told her of arresting Pinto. He told her about Janet Pete back from Washington taking the Federal Public Defender’s job and representing Pinto.

“I know she was assigned to do it. It’s her job. But Janet lets me know she halfway believes Pinto didn’t do it. She sees a lot of unanswered questions. What’s his motive, she says. He was drunk, and he’d killed someone before when he was drunk and served time for it. And he was caught red-handed and doesn’t even deny it. But for her, that’s not enough.” Chee shook his head.

“You think it would be kinda nice if it was enough just because you were the one who nabbed him,” Jacobs said. “But you’ve got to consider she’s his defense attorney. And she’s a woman in a field men have dominated. And so she feels like she’s got something to prove. At least I would. Maybe she feels like she has to prove something to you, too.” Jacobs made a wry face. “You know, you’ve been a cop awhile. Into law enforcement. She’s brand new at the game.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just talking.”

“You are missing the implication,” Chee said. He stood up. His voice had sounded stiff, but to hell with it. This woman felt like listening. He felt like letting some of this anger out. “You see, I screwed up on this. If I hadn’t screwed up, I would have been there when Nez was making this arrest—or whatever he was doing—and he wouldn’t have been killed. But I was over in Red Rock drinking coffee, thinking all was good because I heard Delbert laughing.”

He was standing with his arms hanging by his side. That made his hand hurt. He folded his arms.

“But I did get there. Too late to help Delbert, but I got there in time to catch the man who killed him. I was a good enough cop for that.”

Jacobs was silent for a while, thinking about it, her face full of sympathy. She was a talented listener. He had noticed it before. When you talked to this woman, she attended. She had all her antennae out, focused on the speaker. The world was shut out. Nothing mattered but the words she was hearing. Listening was ingrained in the Navajo culture. One didn’t interrupt. One waited until the speaker was finished, gave him a moment or two to consider additions, or footnotes or amendments, before one responded. But even Navajos too often listened impatiently. Not really listening, but framing their reply. Jean Jacobs really listened. It was flattery, and Chee knew it, but it had its effect.