Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 10 - Coyote Waits

by Coyote Waits(lit)

  Chee looked at the stack. A lot of mail.

  "From when? How long has he been gone?"

  "I saw him at the end of summer session." She laughed again but there was no humor in it. "Or almost the end. He usually manages to quit a little early. Had me grade his papers for him and turn in his grades. He said he had to get going on some research."

  Chee found himself a lot more interested. "My name's Jim Chee," he said.

  "Oh," she said. "I'm Jean Jacobs." She held out her hand.

  Chee shook it.

  "Can I sit down?"

  She gestured toward a chair. "Move the books."

  He sat. "Doesn't anybody know where he is? How about Mrs. Tagert?"

  "They're separated," Jacobs said. "I called her when the department chairman first got excited about finding him. She said she didn't know and she didn't want to know and if I found him to please not tell her about it."

  "Strange," Chee said.

  "Not really," Jacobs said. "Dr. Tagert wouldn't be a happy man to live with. In fact." She let that trail off, unfinished.

  "I meant strange nobody knows where he is," Chee said. "You'd think he'd keep the department informed."

  "No you wouldn't," Jacobs said. "Not if you knew him."

  Chee was remembering his own days as an undergraduate here. Usually things had been fairly well organized, but not always. And it had seemed to him that the tenure/academic freedom system made faculty members almost totally independent.

  "What's the chairman doing about it?"

  "He's pissed off. He got me to start Tagert's Trans-Mississippi West class. And I met with his seminars just to tell those poor souls what he'll expect, hand out the reading lists, and all that. And then the dean called and wanted to know when he'd be back, and what he was doing-as if it was my fault." Jean Jacobs's expression soured at the memory. "I hope the Navajos got him," she added.

  "Is that where he was going? To the Navajo Reservation?"

  "Who knows?" she said. "Or gives a damn. But that's where he'd been working."

  "You know what he was working on?"

  "Vaguely. It had to be cops and robbers. That's his field. 'Law and Order in the Old West.' He's The Authority in that particular category." She paused. "Or so he tells everybody."

  "Do you know if he was working on that with a Navajo named Ashie Pinto?"

  "Sure," she said. "Pinto was one of his informants this summer. For old stories and things like that." Her eyes went from Chee's hand to his face. "Chee," she said, recognition dawning. "You're the one who arrested Mr. Pinto. You got yourself burned trying to pull that other policeman out of the car."

  Clearly Jean Jacobs was impressed.

  "I'm on leave," Chee said, indicating the hand and feeling embarrassed. "But I'm trying to find out what Pinto was doing out there. Where the crime was committed. How he got there. So forth. And Pinto won't talk about it."

  Jean Jacobs had another question. "Why did he kill the policeman?"

  "He was drunk," Chee said. It irritated him that it didn't sound like a convincing motive. "Very drunk."

  Jean Jacobs was looking at Chee. Smiling. Approving.

  "I thought maybe Professor Tagert could tell me something helpful. Maybe he was doing something for Tagert. Working with him on something."

  "It might show in his calendar," Jean Jacobs said. "Let's look."

  Tagert's desk calendar was open to the second week in August. The spaces under Monday through Thursday were mostly filled with jottings-Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were blank except for a diagonal line drawn across them and the legend "Go hunting." Just above the Wednesday space the words "pick up Oldfart" were written in a neat, precise hand.

  Chee indicated it with his finger.

  "I don't know who that means," Jacobs said. "I'm not his TA because I like him," she explained. "He's chairman of my dissertation committee. I'm trying to get a doctorate in history. Doing it on the impact of the trading post system on the Western tribes. That falls into Doctor Tagert's field so he's chairman of my committee-like it or not."

  "He was here when I was a student," Chee said. "I remember now. One of my friends told me to avoid Professor Tagert."

  "Good thinking," Jacobs said. "Sound advice."

  "Except now. Now it looks like he had himself scheduled to pick up somebody, maybe Mr. Pinto, the day before Mr. Pinto shot a policeman. Now I think Tagert could tell me a lot."

  "Well," Jean Jacobs said, "I wish I could help you find him." She sorted aimlessly through the papers on the desktop, as if some clue to Tagert's whereabouts might be among them. Chee flipped forward in the desk calendar. The next week was blank. The following page was cluttered with notations of committee meetings, luncheon engagements, numbers to be called. "Looks like he intended to get back before classes started," Chee said.

  "I noticed that."

  He flipped the pages backward, reentering August, moving out of the time when Nez was dead, to the day Nez died because Chee hadn't done his job. That page was blank.

  Jean Jacobs must have been watching his face.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," Chee said. "Just remembering."

  He turned the pages back to the date where Tagert had left it, and back another page to a week when Chee had been a happy man. That week, too, was cluttered with the busy Tagert's notations.

  Among them, near the bottom, in the space left for Friday, Tagert had written: "Find out what Redd wants." That and a telephone number.

  Chapter 9

  Redd answered the telephone.

  "Jim Chee?" he said. "Chee. Are you the cop who arrested Old Man Pinto?"

  "Right," Chee said. He was surprised. But after all, there had been a lot in the paper about it. And Redd seemed to be involved, somehow, in this odd affair. "That's what I'd like to talk to you about. What you know about Pinto."

  "Damn little," Redd said. "But go ahead and ask. What do you want to know?"

  "How about me coming over? I hate to talk on the telephone."

  "Sure," Redd said, and he gave Chee his address.

  Janet Pete was waiting in the lot behind Zimmerman Library, with the unhappy, nervous look of people who are parked in loading zones.

  "You're late," she said. "You said an hour. The cops already made me move twice."

  "It was you who said, and you said an hour and a half or so," Chee said. "By Navajo time it is now just a tiny bit past the so."

  Janet snorted. "Get in," she said. "You're sure getting a lot of mileage out of that sore hand."

  Redd's address was in Albuquerque's student ghetto-a neighborhood of small frame-stucco bungalows left over from the 1940s with weedy yards and sagging fences. Redd's residence was behind such a bungalow in what had once been a double garage. The rusty Bronco II with the reddnek plate was parked beside it, and Redd himself was standing in the door watching them as Janet Pete pulled up.

  He was a tall man with athlete's shoulders, but the first thing Chee noticed was red hair, a red mustache, and a long, narrow face sprinkled with freckles.

  "Yaa eh t'eeh," he said, handling the Navajo glottal sounds perfectly. "William Odell Redd," the man said, holding out his hand to Janet Pete, "but people call me Odell. And you'd be?"

  "Janet Pete," she said, "and this is Jim Chee."

  Odell Redd was grinning broadly at Chee. "That's the hand you got burned," Redd said. "I read about that. But come on in. You want a drink?"

  The interior of Redd's apartment was jammed but orderly. Except for books. Most of them concerned linguistics. Dictionaries were everywhere, English and foreign, ranging from French to Quechua. There was a Cherokee dictionary and beside it Navajo Tonal Syntax. Books were stacked on all flat surfaces. There was even a dictionary on the battered table in the center of what served as both Redd's living room and bedroom. But that was an incongruous Dictionary of Stamps. Other books cluttering the tabletop involved coins. The Macmillan Encyclopedic Dictionary of Numismatics was open, surrounded by tidy rows of
pennies. More pennies were piled into three cigar boxes.

  "Take that there," Redd told Janet, pointing to an overstuffed chair in the corner. The burden of books it had once held now stood in a tidy stack on the linoleum floor beside it-cleared away, Chee guessed, to make room for his coming. "I'll fix a place here for Mr. Chee to sit."

  Redd lifted a huge Spanish-English dictionary and two smaller ones from a kitchen.

  Coyote Waits chair and pushed aside enough pennies to make room for them on the table. Then he sat down himself, reversed on a kitchen chair, leaning across its wooden back, looking first at Janet Pete and then at Chee.

  "Didn't I see you two out there south of Ship Rock the other evening? Out there south of Highway 33?"

  "That's right," Chee said.

  "Interesting country," Redd said. "You probably know more about it than I do-being Navajos. All those lava flow ridges and outcrops and things. There's supposed to be a place out there somewhere where witches get together. Initiate people as skinwalkers. That sort of thing."

  "You have any idea what Pinto was doing out there?" Janet asked.

  Redd smiled at her. "I'll bet you're his kin-folks," he said. "Pinto, he's Mud Clan. Are you related?"

  "I'm his lawyer," Janet said.

  "Won't he tell you, then? I mean what he was doing out there that night. When he shot the policeman."

  Janet hesitated. She glanced at Chee, uncertain. Chee said: "Pinto won't talk about it."

  "I sort of got that impression from the papers," Redd said. "It said he was drunk. Said double the legal level. Maybe he just doesn't remember."

  "Maybe not," Chee said. "Any idea how he could have gotten out there?"

  Redd denied it with a shake of his head. "But the old man had to get there some way or other. Two hundred miles, more or less, is too far to walk. Even for a Navajo. You wouldn't think somebody would just drop him off way out there and leave him. And otherwise, you'd think the cops would have seen somebody driving away."

  "Nobody saw anything as far as we know," Janet said. "Jim got there just after it happened and he didn't see anybody. And Mr. Ji came by just about before that, and he didn't either."

  Redd looked puzzled. "Mr. Gee?"

  "Mr. Ji," Janet said. "J-I but it sounds like 'Gee.' It's Vietnamese. He's a teacher at Ship Rock."

  "Oh," Redd said. "Anyway, the best I can do about what Pinto was doing out there is guess at it. I think he was working for Professor Tagert."

  Chee waited for some expansion of that. None came.

  "Like how?" he asked. He held up his hand. "But first answer me another one. What were you doing out there when you saw Janet and me?"

  Redd laughed. "I was exercising my curiosity. I kept thinking there'd be more in the papers. You know, after the police finished their investigation, explaining what the hell was going on. There wasn't, and I kept thinking about it and I came up with a theory. So I went out to take a look and it didn't pay off."

  "What's the theory?"

  "I had the notion that Pinto had found Butch Cassidy for Tagert," Redd said.

  He smiled at them, waiting.

  Finally, Janet said: "Butch Cassidy?"

  Redd nodded. "What do you know about Western history?" he asked. "I mean about the academic politics of Western history."

  "Little bit of the history. No politics," Chee said.

  "Well, the guru for years in that field was Frederick Jackson Turner. He died back in the thirties, I think. Taught at Harvard and way back at the end of the nineteenth century he came up with this theory that the wide open western frontier had free land, gold, silver, grazing for anybody who could take it-" Redd paused, looking slightly abashed "-take it away from the Indians, I mean. Anyway, he thought this changed European immigrants into a new kind of people. Made democracy work. Turner and his followers dominated academic Western history down through this century. The Anglo white man was the hero and there wasn't much attention paid to the Spanish, or the French, or the Indians. But now there's a new wave. Donald Worster at the University of Kansas, Patricia Limerick at Colorado University, Tagert here, a guy named Henderson at UC Berkeley, and a few others are the leaders. Or, at least Tagert would like to be one."

  Redd paused, looking from one to the other. "This takes a little time to explain."

  "No rush," Janet said.

  "Well, the way I understand this feud started, this Dr. Henderson wrote a textbook, and Tagert did a paper criticizing part of it, and then Henderson took a whack in Western History Quarterly at a paper Tagert had done about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang." Redd paused again. "I should have explained that Tagert and Henderson both specialize in law and order-or the lack of it-on the frontier. To get to the point, they hate each other's guts. And Tagert thinks he's onto something that will put Henderson down. It involves something he learned from Pinto."

  "You're one of Tagert's students?" Janet asked.

  Chee felt his jaw tighten. This interruption broke the flow of whatever Redd was trying to tell them. And, by Navajo standards, such an interruption was rude. One let a speaker finish, and then waited to make sure he was indeed finished, before one spoke. But then Janet Pete was really Navajo only by blood and birth. She hadn't been raised on the Reservation in the Navajo Way. Had never had a kinaalda to celebrate her puberty, had never been taught.

  "No way," Redd said. "I studied it down at UTEP. But you can't make a living at it. Now I'm working on a doctorate in linguistics. There's a better chance of a teaching job and if you can't get that, you can be a translator. Lot of people need them. Oil companies. Export-import. Law firms. Lots of jobs."

  "But you know a lot about history, and Tagert," Janet said.

  "I know a lot about Tagert," Redd replied. "A lady who works for him is a good friend of mine."

  "Jean Jacobs?" Janet said. "Jim told me he met her today at Tagert's office. She was very helpful."

  "Nice gal," Redd said, with an expression that said he meant it. "We go way back."

  Chee found himself feeling impatience-a rare emotion with him. Wishing he had left Janet Pete behind. Wanting to get on with it.

  "Do you know enough about Tagert to have any idea where he might be?" He noticed his tone wasn't right. So did Redd. So did Pete.

  "No," Redd said. "No idea, really." He got up, turned his chair around, and sat again.

  The conversation had become formal. Ah, well, Chee thought, I've screwed up. He sensed Janet Pete's eyes on him. Time to pull the rabbit from the hat. But he had no rabbit. He felt disgusted with himself. "You said you'd seen us out near the place where Pinto killed Delbert Nez. You said you were checking on a theory."

  "I was just curious," Redd said. "I know Mr. Pinto some. I wondered what he could be doing out there."

  "You started to tell us that Pinto was working for Dr. Tagert. To tell us what he was doing. Something about Western history and a professor named Henderson, and-"

  "Oh, yeah. I drifted away from the point I was trying to make. Well, this Henderson is out with a new book, about banditry, organized gangs, so forth, but mostly it's about the Pinkerton organization." Redd paused, glanced at them. "You know about the Pinkertons?"

  Chee nodded.

  "Well, they're supposed to have hounded Butch Cassidy out of the country. About 1901. Down to Argentina and then to Bolivia. Well, Henderson had gone down there and dug into the records at La Paz, old military records, and established from the official report all the details of how this Bolivian mounted infantry patrol caught the two of 'em in a little village and shot 'em. Nothing much new in it, except the details. Thing is, Tagert doesn't think it happened that way."

  Redd paused, awaiting some reaction. In a second or two he got one.

  "That's the way it was in the movie," Janet said.

  Redd looked surprised. "Movie?"

  "Butch Cassidy and the Sunshine Kid, I think it was. Robert Redford and somebody-or-other. And the Bolivian army kills them." Janet shuddered. "Blows them all to pieces. Gruesome
."

  It wasn't the reaction Redd had expected, but he went on. Enjoying the attention, Chee thought sourly, and then was disgusted with himself for his bad temper. Redd could hardly be more cooperative. He seemed to be one of those perpetual graduate students who inhabit the fringes of every university-but a decent sort of fellow.