People Of Darkness

2

THE RAIN CONVERTED ITSELF ABRUPTLY into a flurry of popcorn snow. It rattled off Jim Chee’s uniform hat, bounced down the collar of his uniform jacket, and made him shiver. It was the third day of November by the First National Bank of Grants calendar back on Chee’s desk, and the very beginning of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps by the less rigid traditional calendar of the Dinee. By either calendar it was too early for this sort of weather – even at this mile-and-a-half altitude on the slope of Mount Taylor. Howard Morgan had predicted possible snow flurries on his Channel 7 weathercast, but Chee hadn’t believed it. He’d left his winter coat back at the police station.

He glanced at his vehicle – a white Chevrolet with the seal of the Navajo Nation and the legend NAVAJO TRIBAL POLICE blazoned on its door. He could retire to the car and turn on the heater. He could seek shelter at the entryway of the residence of Benjamin J. Vines, and perhaps ring the bell a few more times in the hope of attracting someone. The bell made an odd singing sound which he could hear echoing pleasantly through the heavy door. While it had attracted no response at all, Chee was tempted to ring it again just to hear it. The third alternative was to turn up the collar of his jacket to ward off the sleet and continue satisfying his curiosity about this house. It had been designed, so he’d heard, by Frank Lloyd Wright, and was reputed to be the most expensive home in New Mexico. Chee’s curiosity about it, as about all things in the white man’s world, was intense. It was all the more intense at the moment because he might very soon enter that strange world. By December 10, less than five weeks away, he had to decide whether he would accept an appointment to the FBI, and a place in the world of singing doorbells.

He pulled his jacket collar around his neck, and folded down his hat brim, and continued his inspection. Chee was standing beside a semidetached triple garage. Like the house itself, it was built of native granite, linked to the structure by a low, curving wall of the same material. Just behind the wall, in a grassy plot no more than fifteen feet long, two small markers of black marble held Chee’s attention. Gravestones. He leaned over the wall. The name chiseled into the one just to the right of where Chee stood was DILLON CHARLEY. Under it, the legend read:

He Didn’t Remember When He Was Born

Died December 11, 1953

A Good Indian

Chee grinned. Was the sardonic double meaning intended? Was Vines, or whoever had ordered this legend carved, familiar with General Sheridan’s dictum that the only good Indian was a dead Indian?

The stone to Chee’s left read:

MRS. BENJAMIN J. VINES (ALICE)

Born April 13, 1909

Died June 4, 1949

A Faithful Woman

Faithful to B. J. Vines? It seemed an odd thing to put on a tombstone, but then everything about the white man’s burial customs seemed odd to Chee. The Navajos lacked this sentimentality about corpses. Death robbed the body of its value. Even its identity was lost with the departing chindi. What the ghost left behind was something to be disposed of with a minimum risk of contamination to the living. The names of the dead were left unspoken, certainly not carved in stone.

Chee glanced again at the Charley tombstone. The name tugged at memory. There were no Charleys in Chee’s clan – the Slow Talking Dinee – and none among the other clans that occupied the Rough Rock country of his family. But here on the east margin of the reservation – among the Salt Dinee, and the Many Goats Dinee, and the Mud Clan, and the Standing Rock Clan – the name seemed fairly common. And somebody named Charley had done something recently which he should be able to remember.

“Does it seem an unusual place for a graveyard?”

The voice came from behind him. A woman, perhaps in her mid fifties, with a thin, handsome, unsmiling face. She was wearing a coat of some expensive fur over jeans. A navy knit cap covered her ears. “It’s one of B.J.’s little eccentricities, burying people by the garage. Are you Sergeant Chee?”

“Jim Chee,” Chee said. The woman was looking at him, frowning critically, making no offer to shake his hand.

“You’re younger than I expected,” she said. “They told me you were an authority on your religion. Could that be right?”

“I’m learning to be a yataalii,” Chee said. He used the Navajo word because no English word really expressed it. The anthropologists called them shamans, and most people around the reservation called them singers, or medicine men, and none of these expressions really fit the role he would play for his people if he ever finished learning to play it. “Are you Mrs. Vines?” he asked.

“Of course,” the woman said. “Rosemary Vines.” She glanced at the tombstone. “The second Mrs. Vines. But let’s get out of this sleet.”

The house had puzzled Chee. Its front wall was a sweeping, virtually windowless curve, suggesting a natural formation of stone. But inside the massive entry doors and through the entry foyer the puzzle solved itself. The front was actually the back. The ceiling rose in a soaring curve toward a great wall of glass. Beyond the wall, the mountain slope fell away. Now the view was obscured by clouds and gusts of sleet, but on the usual day Chee knew the glass overlooked immense space – across the Laguna and Acoma Indian reservations to the south and east, southward across the forty-mile sea of cooled lava called the malpais toward the Zuni Mountains, and eastward across the Cañoncito Reservation to the great blue hump of the Sandia Mountains behind Albuquerque. The room was almost as spectacular as the view. A fireplace dominated the native-stone interior wall to Chee’s left, with the pelt of a polar bear on the carpet by the hearth. On the wall to his right, a hundred glassy eyes stared from trophy heads. Chee stared back: water buffalo, impala, wildebeest, ibex, oryx, elk, mule deer, and a dozen species he couldn’t name.

“It takes some getting used to,” Mrs. Vines said. “But at least he keeps all the fierce-looking ones in his trophy room. These are the ones that couldn’t bite back.”

“I had heard he was a famous hunter,” Chee said. “Didn’t he win the Weatherby Trophy?”

“Twice,” Rosemary Vines said. “In 1962 and 1971. Those were bad years for anything with fang, fur, or feathers.” She draped the mink over the back of a sofa. Under it she wore a man’s plaid shirt. She was a trim woman, one who took care of her body. But there was a tension about her. It showed in her face, in the way she held herself, in the taut muscles along her narrow jaw. Her hands twisted together at her belt line.

“I’ll have a drink,” Mrs. Vines said. “Join me?”

“No, thank you,” Chee said.

“Coffee?”

“If it’s no trouble.”

Mrs. Vines spoke into the grillwork beside the fireplace. “Maria.” The grille buzzed in response.

“Bring a Scotch and some coffee.”

She turned back to Chee. “You’re an experienced investigator. That’s right, isn’t it?” she asked. “And you’re stationed at Crownpoint and you know everything about the Navajo religion.”

“I was transferred to Crownpoint this year,” Chee said, “and I know something about the customs of my people.” This was not the time to tell this arrogant white woman that the Navajos had no religion in the white man’s meaning of the term (in fact, had no word in their language for religion). First he would find out what she wanted with him.

“Sit down,” Rosemary Vines said. She gestured toward a huge blue sofa and seated herself in a chair of stainless-steel tubing and polished leather.

“Do you also understand witchcraft?” She perched at the edge of the chair, smiling, tense, her hands twisting now in her lap. “That business about Navajo Wolves, or skinwalkers, or whatever you call them. Do you know all about that?”

“Something,” Chee said.

“I’ll want to hire you, then,” Rosemary Vines said. “You have some accrued annual leave coming…” An elderly woman – a Pueblo Indian, but Chee wasn’t sure which Pueblo – came in with a tray. Mrs. Vines took her glass – from its color, more Scotch than water – and Chee accepted his coffee. The Indian woman examined him from the corner of her eye with shy curiosity. “You have thirty days leave time,” Mrs. Vines continued. “That should be more than enough.”

For what? Chee thought. But he didn’t say it. His mother had taught him one learns through the ear and not the tongue.

“We had a burglary here,” Mrs. Vines said. “Someone broke in, they got into B.J.’s quarters and stole a box of his keepsakes. I want to hire you to get it back. B.J.’s at a hospital in Houston. I want it back before he gets home. I’ll pay you five hundred dollars now and twenty-five hundred dollars when you return the box. If you don’t get it back, you don’t get the twenty-five hundred dollars. That’s fair enough.”

“You can have the sheriff do it for you for free,” Chee said. “What does the sheriff say about it?”

“Gordo Sena,” Mrs. Vines said. “B.J. has no use for Sena. Nor do I. B.J. wouldn’t want him involved in any way. Besides, what good would it do? They’d send out some ignorant deputy. He’d ask a lot of questions and look around and then he’d go away and that would be the end of it.” She sipped Scotch. “There’s absolutely nothing for the police to go on.”

“I’m police,” Chee said.

“It will be simple enough for you,” Mrs. Vines said. “The People of Darkness stole the box. You find them and get it back.”

Chee felt swallowed by the sofa, engulfed in velvety royal-blue comfort. He considered what Mrs. Vines had said, seeking some sense in it. Her eyes were studying him. One of her hands held the glass. The ice moved in the trembling liquid. The other hand fidgeted on the denim of her jean leg. Sleet rattled and scratched at the plate-glass window. Beyond the glass, night was coming.

“The People of Darkness,” Chee said.

“Yes,” said Rosemary Vines. “It must have been them. Did I tell you nothing was taken except the box? Look around you.” She gestured at the room. “They didn’t take the silver, or the paintings, or anything else. Just the box. They came to get it. And they took it.”

The silver service was on the sideboard – a great urn and a dozen goblets on a massive tray. Worth a lot, Chee thought. And behind it, on the wall, a perfect little Navajo yei rug which on the reservation would bring two thousand dollars from the greediest of traders.

Chee resisted an impulse to ask Mrs. Vines what she meant by “People of Darkness.” He’d never heard of them. But it would be smarter to simply let her talk.

She talked, perched on the edge of the chair, sipping occasionally. She said that when she had come to this place-the house then still under construction – the foreman of the B. J. Vines ranch had been a Navajo named Dillon Charley – the man now buried next to Vines’ first wife by the garage. Vines and Charley had been friends, Rosemary Vines said. “The old man had organized himself some sort of church,” Mrs. Vines said “B.J. was interested in it. Or seemed to be. He claimed he wasn’t; said he was just humoring the old man. But he was interested. I’d hear the two of them talking about it. And I know B.J. contributed money. And when you Navajo Police were arresting them, B.J. helped get them out of jail.”

“Arresting them?” Chee asked. Understanding dawned. “Was it for using peyote?” If it was, Dillon Charley’s cult was part of the Native American Church. It had flourished on the Checkerboard Reservation after World War II, and had been outlawed by the Tribal Council because of its use of the psychedelic drug in its ritual; but the federal court had thrown the tribal law out on grounds that it violated freedom of religion.

“Peyote. Yes. That was it,” Rosemary Vines said. “Drug abuse.” Her voice was scornful. “B.J. is never discriminating in his interests. Anyway, B.J. gave them some sort of thing out of that precious box of his. He and Dillon Charley had the box out several times. And whatever it was seemed to be very important to their religion. And now they’ve stolen it.”

“What was in the box?” Chee asked.

Mrs. Vines took a drink. “Just keepsakes,” she said.

“Like what?” Chee asked. “Anything valuable? What was it these people wanted?”

“I’ve never seen the inside of that goddamned box,” Rosemary Vines said. She laughed. “B.J. has his little secrets. He has his private side, just as I have.” Her tone said this was a source of an old resentment. “B.J. called it his keepsake box, and he said nothing in it was worth anything to anyone but him.” She laughed again. “Obviously wrong about that.”

“Do you have any idea what he gave Dillon Charley out of the box? Any idea at all?”

She looked over the glass at him, her expression wry. “Would moles make any sense?”

Now Chee laughed. This conversation, more and more, reminded him of his very favorite tale from the white culture: Alice in Wonderland.

“No,” he said. “Moles wouldn’t make any sense to me.”

“What’s your word for moles?”

“Dine’etse-tle, “Chee said. He pronounced the series of gutturals.

She nodded. “That’s what Dillon Charley called it,” she said. “I asked him what B.J. had given him and that’s what he said. We had a Navajo maid then – that was back when Navajos would work for B.J. – and I asked her what the word meant, and she said ‘moles.’ ”

“That’s right,” Chee said. Technically, when broken into its parts, it meant more than that. “Dinee” was the word for “people.” The expression literally meant “people of darkness.”

“Why do you call Dillon Charley’s church the ‘People of Darkness’?” he asked her.

“That’s what B.J. called them. Or something like that. It’s been so many years, it’s hard to remember.”

But you do remember, Chee thought. He said, “There’s another possible motive for taking that box. This is a legendary place.” He motioned around the room. “B. J. Vines is a legendary person. So maybe there’s a legend about his keepsake box. Maybe there’s a rumor that he keeps it full of gold, or diamonds, or thousand-dollar bills. So somebody who came to take it wouldn’t be interested in paintings, or silver, or Navajo rugs. Was it locked? Would they have to carry it out and break it open before they could find out what was in it?”

“It was always locked,” Rosemary Vines said. “You’d have thought B.J. kept the crown jewels in it. But B.J. said it was just mementos, odds and ends to remember. I don’t think he was lying.” She smiled her taut, humorless smile. “B.J. is very big about saving keepsakes. He saves everything. If he can’t frame it, he stuffs it.” The humorless smile became a humorless chuckle. “You’d think he was afraid of losing his memory.”

“But an outsider…”

“An outsider wouldn’t have known where B.J. kept it,” Mrs. Vines said. Her voice was impatient. “Dillon Charley knew. I can only presume that Dillon told his son.” She rose, a graceful motion. “Come along and I’ll show you.”

Chee followed her. “One more point,” he said. “Your husband knows all about this People of Darkness business. Wouldn’t he rather go after the box himself?”

“I said he was at a hospital,” Mrs. Vines said. “He had a stroke last summer. Away hunting in Alaska. They flew him back. He’s partly paralyzed on his left side. They’re fitting him with a device in Houston so he can get around better, but I don’t want him chasing after burglars.”

“No,” Chee agreed.

She paused at an open doorway which led off the hall, motioning Chee past her. “He’s the kind who would, crutches and all,” she said. “He’d try to go after them in an iron lung. That’s why I want the box back right away. I want it back when he gets home. I don’t want him worrying about it.”

The room that Rosemary Vines called “B.J.’s office” was down a carpeted hallway. It was large, with a beamed ceiling, a stone fireplace flanked by windows that looked across the mountain slope, and a great glass-surfaced desk. Three of the walls were covered with the heads of cats, each snarling in terminal rage. Chee’s glance took in three lions, two lionesses, four tigers, and a variety of panthers, leopards, pumas, cheetahs, and predator cats which Chee could not identify. In all, forty or fifty, he guessed. The light reflected from hundreds of bared teeth.

“The burglar came through that window beside the fireplace and he went directly to the place where B.J. kept the box and he took it. He didn’t disturb anything else,” Rosemary Vines said. “He knew where it was.” She looked at Chee. “Would you?”

Chee examined the room. Rosemary Vines had said her husband collected mementos. He did indeed. The room was cluttered with them. The west wall, the only one free of Vines’ array of trophy predators, was a gallery of photographs and framed certificates. Vines beside a dead tiger. Vines at the controls of a speedboat. Vines holding a trophy. Vines dwarfed by the wheel of one of those immense ore trucks at the Red Deuce Mine. Vines’ broad, gray-bearded face beaming under a pith helmet. His narrower, younger, black-bearded face peering out the cockpit window of a plane. Chee glanced away from the gallery of Vineses. Two glass-fronted cabinets, one crowded with trophies and cups, the other with carved and sculpted items of wood and stone. Shelves, a table, every flat surface carrying its burden of the artifacts of memory. Mrs. Vines was watching him, her face amused. “All those objets d’art are his sculpture,” she said. She gestured toward the gallery of photographs. “And as you can see, my husband has a problem with his ego.”

“Would it have been in the desk?” Chee asked.

“Wrong,” Mrs. Vines said. She walked to the fireplace wall and lifted down the head of the smallest tiger. Behind it, a metal panel swung slightly open, one corner bent.

“They knew where to look, and they knew they had to bring something to pry this door open, and that’s exactly what they did,” Mrs. Vines said. “Didn’t even bother to shut the panel, or hang the head back up.”

Chee inspected the panel. It was mounted on heavy hinges and secured with a lock that looked expensive. Whoever had opened it had jammed something like a crowbar between panel and frame and pried until the lock gave. The door was thick and surprisingly heavy on its hinges, but it hadn’t been strong enough to withstand the leverage. Chee was mildly surprised. The door looked stronger than it was.

“How big was the box?” Chee asked.

“Just about the size of that empty space,” Mrs.Vines said. “B.J. had it made. It had the knob of a combination lock in the front of it. What I want you to do is find those people, and tell them unless they give it back – and everything that was inside of it – I’ll make damn sure they go to prison for it.” She moved to the doorway and motioned Chee out ahead of her. “You might also tell them B.J. will put a spell on them if he gets home and finds that box gone.”

“What?” Chee said.

Mrs. Vines laughed. “The Navajos around here think he’s a witch,” she said.

“I had the impression that he got along well with the Dinee,” Chee said.

“That was a long time ago. Dillon Charley died and that was the end of getting along with Navajos. Within a year or two nearly every one of them who was working here had quit. We haven’t had one of your people on the payroll for years. Maria is an Acoma. Most of the hired hands are Lagunas or Acomas.”

“What happened?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Mrs. Vines said. “I’m sure it was something B.J. did, but God knows what. I asked Maria, and she said the Navajos think B.J. is bad luck.”

“And you haven’t reported this burglary to the sheriff?”

“Gordo Sena would do absolutely nothing for us,” Mrs. Vines said. “B.J. got him beaten for reelection once, many years ago, and tried it a couple of times since. Sena’s not an honest man, and I don’t want him involved with this in any way whatsoever.”

“I’m going to have to report it,” Chee said. “I have to get along with the sheriff. We’re in the same line of work.”

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Vines said. “If he sends someone out, I’ll tell him we’re not signing a complaint and not pressing charges and it was all a mistake.”

Chee retrieved his hat from the sofa. It was damp. “The man you want to find is old Dillon Charley’s son. He took over the church. His name’s Emerson Charley and he lives around Grants somewhere. He used to come around here some after his father died and get into arguments with B.J.”

“About what?”

“I think he wanted whatever was in the box,” Mrs. Vines said. “I heard him say something about having their luck locked up in it. Something like that. I remember hearing old Dillon saying about the same thing. He was laughing about it, but Emerson wasn’t laughing.”

Chee revolved his hat in his hands, looking thoughtful.

“Two more questions,” he said. “How would Emerson Charley have known about the safe?”

“That’s easy,” Rosemary Vines said. “Dillon knew about it. Dillon was in here with B.J. a lot. I’m sure Dillon told his boy about it. After all, Emerson was going to keep Dillon’s crazy cult going. What’s the other question?”

“How did Dillon Charley die?”

“How?” Mrs. Vines looked puzzled. Then she laughed. “Oh,” she said. “I see what you’re thinking. Nothing mysterious. He died of cancer.” She laughed again. “That’s the reason for that strange line on the tombstone about him being a good Indian. He’d been sick and he came back from Albuquerque one day and told B.J. that the doctor told him he couldn’t be cured. He told B.J. the doctor told him he was going to be a good Indian in a couple of months.” Rosemary Vines grimaced. “Laughing at his own death – that’s the sort of weird thing that impressed B.J. He put it on the tombstone.” She handed him an envelope.

“I’m going to have to talk to my office about this,” Chee said. “And give it some thought. I’ll let you know in a couple of days. Maybe I’ll return this.”

“Your superiors will approve,” Mrs. Vines said. “I already checked on that.”

“I’ll call you,” Chee said.

The old woman from Acoma opened the front door for Chee and held it against the gusting wind. He nodded to her as he stepped into the darkness.

“Tenga cuidado,” the old woman said.

It occurred to Chee as he started the cold engine that she couldn’t speak Navajo, and he wouldn’t understand her Keresan language, and that it would have been more logical of her to say “Be careful” in English instead of Spanish, which he might not understand. Then it occurred to him that perhaps Mrs. Vines did not speak Spanish, and that the warning might not have anything to do with the weather.