Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 10 - Coyote Waits

by Coyote Waits(lit)

  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 t
he 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 Jeepster 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 tea
chers' 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.")