Chee worked through the pages, wondering what he was looking for. He noticed that West had come out of the armed robbery with a plea bargain deal: Guilty with a four-year sentence, suspended into probation. He'd still been on probation when the narcotics arrest happened. And he was carrying a gun when arrested. (Musket hadn't been, Chee recalled. Had he been smart enough to ditch it when he saw what was happening?) Those two factors had netted West a stiffer, five-to-seven-year rap.
It was warm in the room, and airless. Chee flipped to the last page and read the data on the death of Thomas Rodney West. It was as Armijo had reported. At 11:17 A.M., July 6, the guard in tower 7 had noticed a body in the dust of the recreation yard. No inmate was near it. He called down to the guard in the yard. West was found to be unconscious, dying from three deep puncture wounds. Subsequent interrogation of inmates revealed no one who had seen what had happened. Subsequent search of the yard had produced a sharpened screwdriver and a wood rasp which had been converted into makeshift daggers. Both were stained with blood that matched West's blood type. Next of kin, Jacob West, Burnt Water, Arizona, had been notified and had claimed the body on July 8. The carbon copy of an autopsy report was the final page in the file. It showed that Thomas Rodney West, his first name mutilated by a typographical error, had died of a slashed aortal artery and two wounds to his abdominal cavity.
Chee flipped back a page and looked at the date. A busy month, July. West had been stabbed to death July 6. John Doe had been killed July 10, almost certainly, since his body was found early on the morning of July 11. On July 28 Joseph Musket disappeared after burglarizing the Burnt Water store. Any connection? Chee could think of none. But there might be, if he could identify Doe. He yawned. Up early this morning, and little sleep during the night. He lit a cigaret.
He'd read quickly again through everything in the West file, and then return to the Musket file and finish it, and get out of there. The place oppressed him. Made him uneasy. Made him feel an odd, unusual sense of sorrow.
There was nothing unusual in West's commissary credit account, or in his health check reports, or in his correspondence log, which included only his father, a woman in El Paso, and an El Paso attorney. Then Chee turned to the log of visitors.
On July 2, four days before he'd been stabbed to death, Thomas Rodney West had been visited by T. L. Johnson, agent, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Purpose: Official business. Chee stared at the entry, and then at the ones which preceded it. West had been visited five times since his arrival at the prison. By his father, and once by the woman from El Paso, and twice by someone who had identified himself as Jerald R. Jansen, attorney at law, Petroleum Towers Bldg., Houston, Texas.
"Ah." Chee said it aloud. He sat back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. Jansen. Attorney. Houston. He'd met Jansen. Jansen dead. Sitting cold and silent beside the basalt, holding the Hopi Cultural Center message between thumb and finger. Chee blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling, rocked the chair forward, and checked the dates. Jansen had visited West on February 17, and again on May 2. Long before the parole of Joseph Musket, and then after it. Then West had been visited by the dea's freckled, red-haired T. L. Johnson four days before he'd been stabbed. Chee thought about that for a moment, looking for meaning. He found nothing but a take-your-choice set of contradictory possibilities.
Then he checked Joseph Musket's log of visitors. He'd had none. Not one visitor in more than two years in prison. He checked Musket's log of correspondence. None. No letters in. No letters out. The isolated man. Chee closed the Musket file and put it atop the West file.
Armijo was no longer alone. Two convicts were at work in his office now-a burr-haired young blond who glanced up from his typewriter as Chee brought the files in and then looked quickly back at his work, and a middle-aged black man with a gauze bandage on the back of his neck. The black man seemed to be Musket's replacement as file clerk. He was sifting papers into files, eyeing Chee curiously.
"If West had any close friends in here, I'd sure like to talk to one of them," Chee said. "What do you think?"
"I don't know," Armijo said. "I don't know anything about friends."
How would he know? Chee thought. Such things as friendships were not the stuff that filled accordion files.
"Any way of finding out?" Chee asked. "Down the grapevine, or whatever you do?"
Armijo looked doubtful.
"Who's in charge of inside security?" Chee asked.
"That would be the deputy warden," Armijo said. "I'll call him."
While Armijo dialed, the sound of the burr head's typewriter resumed. Typing makes it hard for him to listen, Chee thought.
The deputy warden for security wanted to talk to Chee directly, and then he wanted to know what Chee was doing in the prison, and why, specifically, he wanted to talk to a friend of West.
"Nothing to do with anything in here," Chee assured him. "We've got an unsolved burglary on the reservation, and we're looking for a parole violator named Musket. Musket got sent up with West. They were friends from way back. Did an armed robbery or so together before going into drugs. I just need to know if West and Musket stayed friendly in prison. Things like that."
The deputy warden said nothing for several seconds. Then he told Chee to wait, he'd call back.
Chee waited almost an hour. Burr head typed, eyeing him now and then. The black man with the bandaged neck finished emptying the Out basket into the proper accordion files and left. Armijo had explained that he was working on his annual report, which was late. He used a pocket calculator, comparing figures and compiling some sort of list. Chee sat in his gray metal chair, thinking now and then, and now and then listening to the sounds that came through the door beside his right ear. Footsteps, approaching and receding, an occasional distant metallic sound, once an echoing clang, once a whistle, shrill and brief. Never a voice, never a spoken word. Why did Johnson visit Thomas Rodney West? Had West heard of the impending drug delivery near Burnt Water and summoned the agent to trade information for a parole recommendation? West must have been connected to the group involved in the transfer. Why else had Jansen visited him twice? Johnson could have known that. Probably would have. Almost certainly did. Obviously did. Had he visited, hoping to pry out of West some information about the impending shipment? That seemed the best bet.
The sound now was the telephone shrilling. Armijo spoke into it, listened. Handed it to Chee.
"Fellow will talk to you," the deputy warden said. "Name's Archer. Good friend of West. Very good." The deputy warden laughed. "If you know what I mean."
"Girl friend?" Chee asked.
"I think it was boy friend," the D.W. said.
The same middle-aged Chicano appeared, to guide Chee, taking him down a long, blank corridor. The two convicts they met on the journey walked against the walls, giving them the middle of the aisle. The interview room was windowless and the fluorescent tubes which lit it gave its dirty white paint a grayish tinge. The man named Archer was big, perhaps forty years old, with the body of a man who worked on the weights. His nose had been broken a long time ago and broken again more recently and the scars from one of the breaks glistened white against the pallor of his skin. Archer was sitting behind the counter that split the small room, looking curiously at Chee through a pane of glass. A guard leaned against the wall behind him, smoking.
"My name's Jim Chee," Chee said to Archer. "I know Tom West's father. I need a little information. Just a little."
"This can be a short conversation," Archer said. "I wasn't in the yard when it happened. I don't know a damned thing."
"That's not what I'm asking about," Chee said. "I want to know why he wanted to talk to T. L. Johnson."
Archer looked blank.
"Why he wanted to talk to Johnson the narcotics agent."
Archer's face flushed. "T. L. Johnson," he said slowly, memorizing the name. "Was that who it was? Tom didn't want to talk to that son of a bitch. He didn't know nothing to tell him. He was scared to d
eath of it." Archer snorted. "For a damn good reason. The son of a bitch set him up."
"It wasn't West's idea, then?"
"Hell, no, it wasn't. Nobody in here is going to volunteer to talk to a narc. Not in here, they're not. The bastard set him up. You know what he did? He arranged to take him out of here. Right down the front walk, right out the front gate, right into his car, and drive away. Just drove down toward Cerrillos, out of sight of the prison, and sat there. No way for West to prove he hadn't snitched." Archer glared at Chee, his pallid face still flushed. "Dirty son of a bitch," he said.
"How do you know about this?" Chee asked.
"When they brought him back, Tom told me." Archer shook his head. "He was mad and he was scared. He said the narc wanted to know about when a shipment was going to come in, and where, and all about it, and when Tom told him he didn't know nothing,.Johnson laughed at him and just parked out there and said he was going to stay parked until all the cons figured he had time to spill his guts."
"Scared," Chee asked. "Was he? He didn't ask to get put in segregation, where he'd be safe. Or if he did ask, it wasn't in the files."
"He talked about it," Archer said. "But once you go in there you got to stay. That's rat country. Everybody in there is a snitch. You go in there you can't come out."
"So he decided to risk it?"
"Yeah," Archer said. "He had a lot of respect in here. So do I." He looked at Chee, his expression strained. "It seemed like we could risk it," he said. "It seemed like a good gamble."
Archer had argued for the gamble, Chee guessed. Now he wanted Chee to understand it.
"Can you tell me anything about who killed him, or why, or anything?"
Archer's face assumed the same expression Chee had always noticed in official police identification photographs.
"I don't have no ideas about that," he said. "Look, I've got to get out of here. Work to do."
"One more thing," Chee said. "He got sent up here with a man named Joseph Musket. Friends from way back. Did they stay friends?"
"Musket's out," Archer said. "Paroled."
"But were they friends up until then?"
Archer looked thoughtful. Chee guessed he was looking for traps. Apparently he found none.
"They were friends," Archer said. He shook his head, and his face relaxed. "Really," he said, "Tom was a great guy. He had a lot of respect in here. People didn't screw with him. The bad ones, you know, they'd walk around him. He looked after Musket some, I think." Then Archer's expression changed. "Maybe I said that wrong. Tom was Musket's friend, but I don't know if it really worked both ways. I didn't never trust Musket. He was one of them guys, you know, who you never know about." Archer got up. "Just too damn smart. Just too damn clever. You know what I mean?"
On his way out, Chee stopped at Armijo's office a final time to use the telephone. He dialed the deputy warden's number.
"I wonder if I could get you to check and see if a dea agent named T. L. Johnson asked permission to take Thomas West out of the prison," Chee asked. "Was that arranged?"
The deputy warden didn't have to look it up. "Yeah," he said. "He did that. Sometimes we let that happen when there's a good reason for privacy."
Chapter Twenty
Chee took the roundabout way home-circling north through Santa Fe and Chama instead of southward down the Rio Grande valley through Albuquerque. He took the northern route because it led through beautiful country. He planned to play the tapes he had made of Frank Sam Nakai singing the Night Chant and thereby memorize another section of that complicated eight-day ritual. Beauty helped put him in the mood for the sort of concentration required. Now it didn't work. His mind kept turning to the distraction of unresolved questions. Ironfingers? "Too damn clever," Archer had called him, but not too smart to give stolen jewelry to a girl. Had Johnson, as it seemed, deliberately set up Thomas Rodney West for a prison yard killing? And if he had, why? Who had taken the body of Palanzer from the carryall? And why had the body been left there, in its cocoon of Lysol mist, in the first place? The moon rose over the jagged ridge of the Sangre de Cristo range as he drove up the Chama valley. It hung in the clear, dark sky like a great luminous rock, flooding the landscape with light. When he reached Abiquiu village, he pulled off at the Standard station, bought gas, and used the pay phone. He called Cowboy Dashee's home number. The phone rang six times before Cowboy answered. Dashee had been asleep.
"I didn't think bachelors went to bed so early," Chee said. "Sorry about that. But I need to know something. Did they find the dope?"
"Hell," Dashee said. "We didn't find nothing. That's why I'm trying to get some sleep. The sheriff wanted us out there at daylight. Everybody figured they'd hauled that stuff up the arroyo in that carryall and then hid it someplace around there. If they did, we sure as hell couldn't find it."
"Does anybody really know what you're looking for?" Chee asked. "Any idea how big it is, or what it weighs, or how big a hole it would take to bury it?"
"Seem to," Cowboy said. "They were talking about a hundred pounds or so and something as bulky as maybe three forty-pound sacks of flour. Or maybe a bunch of smaller packages."
"So they do know what they're after," Chee said. "The dea was there?"
"Johnson was. And a couple of fbi agents from Flagstaff."
"And you didn't find anything interesting? No dope, no machine guns, no tape-recorded messages on how to ransom the cargo, no dead bodies, no maps. Absolutely nothing?"
"Found a few tracks," Cowboy said. "Nothing useful. There just flat wasn't any big cache of dope hidden up there. If they hauled it up there in that gmc in the first place, then they just hauled it off again, and we didn't see any sign of that. Wouldn't make sense anyway. Think about it. No sense to it."
Chee did think about it. He thought about it intermittently all the way north to Chama and then on the long westward drive across the sprawling Jicarilla Apache reservation. As Cowboy said, there was no sense to it. Another apparently irrational knot to be unraveled. Chee could think of only one possible place to find an end to the string. Whoever was vandalizing Windmill Sub-unit 6 had been a hidden witness at the crash. He must have seen something. It was merely a matter of finding him.
It was afternoon when Chee returned to the windmill. He stood looking at it, realizing that any sensible, sensitive human could come to detest it. It was an awkward discordant shape. It clashed with the gentle slope on which it stood.
The sun reflected painfully bright from the zinc coating which armored it against softening rust. It made ugly clanking, groaning noises in the breeze. The last time he'd been here his mood had been cheerful as the morning, and then the mill had seemed merely neutral-a harmless object. But today heat shimmered off the drought-stricken landscape and dust moved in the arid wind, and his mood was as negative as the weather. This ugly object represented injustice to thousands of Navajos. Any one of them might be vandalizing it, or all of them, or any member of their multitudinous families. Or maybe they were taking turns vandalizing it. Whatever, he didn't blame them and he'd never solve the mystery. Maybe it wasn't a Navajo at all. Maybe it was some artistic Hopi whose sense of aesthetics was offended.
Chee walked past the steel storage tank and peered into it. Bone dry. A reservoir for dust. Leaning against the hot metal, Chee took inventory of what he knew. It was all negative. The vandal always used some simple means-no dynamite, cutting torches, or machinery. In other words, nothing to trace down. He apparently arrived on foot or by horse, since Chee had never found any wheel tracks which he couldn't account for. And Jake West had guessed it wasn't a local Navajo, for what that was worth. West could be misleading him deliberately to protect a friend, or West could be wrong. West had not, however, been wrong about bia efficiency. The bia crew had apparently brought the wrong parts, or done something wrong. The gearbox was still not operating and the mill's creaks and groans were as impotent as they'd been for most of the summer.
Chee repeated his methodical examination o
f the grounds, working in widening circles. He found no off-brand cigarets smeared with odd-colored lipstick, no discarded screwdrivers with handles which still might retain fingerprints, no lost billfolds containing driver's licenses with color photographs of the windmill vandal, no footprints, no tire tracks, nothing. He hadn't expected to. He sat down on the slope, cupped his hand against the dusty wind, and managed to get a cigaret lit. He stared down toward the mill, frowning. He hadn't found anything specific, but something in his subconscious was teasing him. Had he found something without realizing it? Exactly what had he found? Almost nothing. Even the rabbit droppings and the trails of the kangaroo rats were old. The little desert rodents which congregate wherever there is water had moved away. Last year the inevitable leakage around the windmill had provided for them. But now the thick growth of sunflowers, tumbleweeds, and desert asters which had flourished around the storage tank were just dead stalks. The plants were dead and the rodents were gone because the vandal had dried up their chance of living here. Desert ecology had clicked back into balance on this hillside. The rodents would have returned to the arroyo with its seeping spring, with its pahos and its guardian spirit, Chee guessed, but the spring, too, was virtually dry. The victim of drought. Or was it?
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 05 - The Dark Wind Page 12
