Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 10 - Coyote Waits

by Coyote Waits(lit)

  "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 gue
ssed, 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.