Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 05 - The Dark Wind

by The Dark Wind(lit)

  "Like what?" the lawyer said.

  Chee tried to think of examples. He shrugged. "You see a man walk by. You go look at the tracks he made. You see him walk by, carrying something heavy in one hand. You look at the tracks. You go again tomorrow to look at the tracks after a day. And after two days. You see a fat man and a thin man squatting in the shade, talking. When they leave, you go and look at the marks a fat man makes when he squats on his heels, and the marks a thin man makes." Chee stopped again. He was thinking of his uncle, in the Chuska high country tracking the mule deer. Showing how the bucks dragged their hooves when rutting, how to estimate the age of a doe by reading the splaying of its cloven toes in its tracks. Of his uncle kneeling beside the track left in the drying mud by a pickup truck, testing the moisture in a ridge of dirt, showing him how to estimate how many hours had passed since the tire had left that print. Much more than that, of course. But he had said enough to satisfy courtesy.

  The lawyer had taken out his billfold. He extracted a business card and handed it to Chee.

  "I'm Ben Gaines," he said. "I'll be representing Mr. Pauling's estate. Could I hire you? In your spare time?"

  "For what?"

  "For pretty much what you'd do anyway," Ben Gaines gestured toward the wreck. "Putting together just exactly what happened here."

  "I won't be doing that," Chee said. "This isn't my case. This is a first-degree felony. It involves non-Navajos. This was part of the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Reservation, but now it's Hopi. Outside my territory. Outside my jurisdiction. I'm here working on something else. Came down here because I was curious."

  "All the better," Gaines said. "There won't be any question of conflict of interest."

  "I'm not sure the rules would allow it," Chee said. "I'd have to check with the captain." It occurred to Chee that one way or another he'd be doing what the lawyer wanted. His curiosity would demand it.

  Gaines was chuckling. "I was just thinking that it might be just as well if your boss didn't know about this arrangement. Nothing wrong with it. But if you ask a bureaucrat if there's a rule against something, he'll always tell you there is."

  "Yeah," Chee said. "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want to know what happened to Pauling here," Gaines said. "The report sounded like there were three people here when it happened. I want to know for sure. You heard a shot. Then you heard a car, or maybe a truck, driving away. I want to know what went on." Gaines waved around him. "Maybe you can find some tracks that'll tell."

  "Plenty of tracks now," Chee said. "About a dozen federal cops, Arizona State Police, county law, so forth, trampling all around. And yours and mine and hers." Chee nodded to Miss Pauling. She had walked back to the wreckage and stood staring at the cabin.

  "My law firm pays forty dollars an hour for work like this," Gaines said. "Find out what you can."

  "I'll let you know," Chee said, making the answer deliberately ambiguous. "What else you want to know?"

  "I get the impression," Gaines said slowly, "that the police aren't sure what happened to the car you heard driving away. They don't seem to think it ever left this part of the country. I'd like to know what you can find out about that."

  "Find out what happened to the car?"

  "If you can," Gaines said.

  "It would help if I knew what I was looking for," Chee said.

  Gaines hesitated a long moment. "Yes," he said. "It would. Just tell me what you find out."

  "Where?"

  "We'll be staying at that motel the Hopis run. Up on Second Mesa," Gaines said.

  Chee nodded.

  Gaines hesitated again. "One other thing," he said. "I've heard there was a cargo on that plane. If you happened to turn that up, there'd be a reward for that. I'm sure some pay-out would be available from the owners if that turned up." Gaines smiled at Chee, his eyes friendly and moist. "A big one. If you happen onto that, let me know about it. Quietly. Then I'll get to work and find out a way to get into contact with whoever owned whatever it was. You find the stuff. I find the owners. Sort of a partnership between the two of us. You know what I mean?"

  "Yes," Chee said. "I know."

  Chapter Nine

  The late-afternoon sun slanted through the windows of the Burnt Water Trading Post, breaking the cavernous interior into a patchwork of harsh contrasts. Dazzling reflected sunlight alternated with cool darkness. And in the sunlight, dust motes danced. They reminded Chee of drought.

  "Shrine?" Jake West said. "Hell, between you people and the Hopi, this country is covered up with shrines." West was sitting in a patch of darkness, his heavy bearded head silhouetted against an oblong of sunlight on the wall.

  "This one is in the arroyo just east of the windmill," Chee said. "By a dried-up spring. It's full of prayer plumes. Some of 'em fresh, so somebody's been taking care of it."

  "Pahos," West said. "You call 'em prayer plumes, but for the Hopis they're pahos."

  "Whatever," Chee said. "You know anything about it?"

  Through the open front door came the sound of a car, moving fast, jolting into the trading post yard. Over the noise, West said he didn't know anything about the shrine. "Never heard of that one," he said. There was the sound of a car door slamming. The smell of aroused dust drifted to their nostrils.

  "That Cowboy?" Chee asked.

  "Hope so," West said. "Hope there's not somebody else that parks like that. You'd think they'd teach the sons-a-bitches how to park without raising a cloud of dust. Ought to teach that before they let 'em into a car."

  At the door a bulky young man in a khaki uniform paused to exchange remarks with a cluster of old men passing the afternoon in the shade. Whatever he said provoked an elderly chuckle.

  "Come on in, Cowboy," West said. "Chee here needs some information."

  "As usual," Cowboy said. He grinned at Chee. "You caught your windmill vandal yet?"

  "Our windmill vandal," Chee corrected. "You solved the great airplane mystery?"

  "Not quite," Cowboy said. "But progress has been made." He extracted an eight-by-ten glossy photograph from a folder he was carrying and displayed it. "Here's the dude we're looking for. You guys see him, promptly inform either Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee or call your friendly Coconino County Sheriff's Department."

  "Who is he?" West said. The photograph obviously had been blown up from a standard police mug identification shot. It showed a man in his middle forties, with gray hair, close-set eyes, and a high, narrow forehead dominating a long, narrow face.

  "Name's Richard Palanzer, also known as Dick Palanzer. What the feds call a 'known associate of the narcotics traffic.' All they told me is he was indicted a couple of years ago in Los Angeles County for conspiracy, narcotics. They want us looking for him around here."

  "Where'd the picture come from?" Chee asked. He turned it over and looked at the back, which turned out to be bare.

  "Sheriff," Cowboy said. "He got it from the dea people. This is the bird they think drove off with the dope after the plane crash." Cowboy accepted the photograph back from Chee. "That is if Chee didn't do the driving. I understand the feds can't decide whether Chee rode shotgun or drove."

  West looked puzzled. He raised his eyebrows, looked from Dashee to Chee and back.

  Dashee laughed. "Just a joke," he said. "Chee was out there when it happened, so the dea was suspicious. They're suspicious of everybody. Including me, and you, and that fellow over there." Dashee indicated a geriatric Hopi who was easing himself out of the front door with the help of an aluminum walker and a solicitous middle-aged woman. "What was it Chee wanted to know?"

  "There's a little shrine in that arroyo by the windmill," Chee said. "By a dried-up spring. Lots of pahos in it. Looks like somebody's taking care of it. You know anything about it?"

  At the word "shrine," Cowboy's expression changed from joviality to neutrality. Cowboy was listed on the payroll of the Coconino County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department as Albert Dashee, Jr. He'd accumulated sixty hours credit at North
ern Arizona University before saying to hell with it. But he was Angushtiyo, or "Crow Boy," to his family, a member of the Side Corn Clan, and a valuable man in the Kachina Society of his village of Shipaulovi. Chee was becoming a friend, but Crow Boy was Hopi and Chee Navajo, and shrines, any shrines, involved the Hopi religion.

  "What do you want to know?" Cowboy asked.

  "From where it is, you can see the windmill," Chee said. "Whoever tends it might have seen something." He shrugged. "Long shot. But I've got nothing else."

  "The pahos," Cowboy said. "Some of them new? Like somebody is taking care of it now?"

  "I didn't look at them real close," Chee said. "I didn't want to touch anything." He wanted Cowboy to know that. "But I'd say some were old and some were new and somebody is taking care of it."

  Cowboy thought. "It wouldn't be one of ours. I mean not Shipaulovi village. That's not our village land. I think that land down there belongs either to Walpi or to one of the kiva societies. I'll have to see what I can find out."

  As the Navajos saw it, the land down there was Navajo land, allotted to the family of Patricia Gishi. But this wasn't the time for renewing the old Joint Use arguments.

  "Just a long shot," Chee said. "But who knows?"

  "I'll ask around," Cowboy repeated. "Did you know they're fixing that windmill again today?" He grinned. "You ready for that?"

  Chee was not ready for that. It depressed him. The windmill would be vandalized again-as certain as fate. Chee knew it in his bones, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening. Not until he understood what was happening. When the new vandalism happened it would be Cowboy's fault as much as his own, but Cowboy didn't seem to mind. Cowboy wouldn't have to stand in Captain Largo's office, and hear Captain Largo reading the indignant memo from the pertinent bureaucrat in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and have Largo's mild eyes examining him, with the unspoken question in them relative to his competence to keep a windmill safe.

  "With the bia doing it, I thought it would be Christmas before they got it done," Chee said. "What the hell happened?"

  "Something must have gone wrong," West said.

  "The bia got efficient. It happens every eight or ten years," Cowboy said. "Anyway, I saw a truck going in there. They said they had all the parts and they was fixing it today."

  "I think you can relax," West said. "They probably got the wrong parts."

  "You going to stake it out again?" Cowboy asked.

  "I don't think that will work now," Chee said. "The plane crash screwed that up. Whoever it was learned I was out there. They'll make damn sure next time nobody's watching."

  "The vandal was out there the night the plane crashed?" West asked.

  "Somebody was," Chee said. "I heard somebody climbing out of the wash. And then while I was busy with the crash, somebody screwed up the windmill again."

  "I didn't know that," West said. "You mean the vandal was right down there by the wreck? After it happened?"

  "That's right," Chee said. "I'm surprised everybody didn't know that by now. They're handing the report around for everybody to read." Chee told West and Cowboy about the lawyer and the sister of the pilot.

  "They was in here yesterday morning, asking for directions," West said. "They wanted to find the airplane, and they wanted to find you." West was frowning. "You mean to tell me that fellow had read the police report?"

  "That's not so unusual," Cowboy said. "Not if he is the lawyer for somebody involved. Lawyers do that all the time if there's something they want to know."

  "So he said he was the pilot's lawyer," West said. "What was his name?"

  "Gaines," Chee said.

  "What did he want to know?" West asked.

  "He wanted to know what happened."

  "Hell," West said. "Easy enough to see what happened. Fellow ran his airplane into a rock."

  Chee shrugged.

  "He wanted to know more than that?" West persisted.

  "He wanted to find the car. The one that drove away after the crash."

  "He figured it was still out there somewhere, then?"

  "Seemed to," Chee said. He wanted to change the subject. "Either one of you heard any gossip about a witch killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?"

  Cowboy laughed. "Sure," he said. "You remember that body was picked up last July-the one that was far gone?" Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.

  "John Doe?" Chee asked. "A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?"

  "And it was one of your Navajo witches," Dashee said. "Not one of our powaqa."

  Chapter Ten

  Cowboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.

  "Struck gold," Cowboy said. "We go to Shi-paulovi."

  "Find where the report started?" Chee asked.

  "Better than that," Cowboy said. "We found the man who found the body."

  Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. "There's been a lot of gossip about this man," Dashee said, speaking in English, "but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts."

  Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, "It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore." Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. "They all acted just like bahanas," Lomatewa said. "Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people." Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.

  "We weren't told to do it that way," Lomatewa said. "The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The kikmongwi, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a bahana idea."

  Chee allowed the pause to stretch a respectful few moments. Cowboy leaned forward, raised a hand, opened his mouth.

  Chee cut him off. "That's like what my uncle taught me," Chee said. "He said we must always respect the old ways. That we must stay with them."

  Lomatewa looked at him. He smiled his skeptical smile. "You're a policeman for the bahanas," he said. "Have you listened to your uncle?"

  "I am a policeman for my own people," Chee said. "And I am studying with my uncle to be a yataalii." He saw the Navajo word meant nothing to Lomatewa. "I a
m studying to be a singer, a medicine man. I know the Blessing Way, and the Night Chant, and someday I will know some of the other ceremonials."

  Lomatewa examined Chee, and Cowboy Dashee, and Chee again. He took the cane in his right hand and made a mark with its tip in the dust. "This place is the spruce shrine," he said. He glanced at Cowboy. "Do you know where that is?"

  "It is Kisigi Spring, Grandfather," said Cowboy, passing the test.

  Lomatewa nodded. He drew a crooked line in the dust. "We came down from the spring at the dawn," he said. "Everything was right. But about midmorning we saw this boot standing there in the path. This boy who was with us said somebody had lost a boot, but you could see it wasn't that. If the boot had just fallen there, it would fall over on its side." He looked at Chee for agreement. Chee nodded.