"Any theories about this bottom one?" Leaphorn asked.
"Not yet," Rostik said.
Leaphorn pushed himself erect, grunting. He was getting old for the squatting position. He looked at Captain Largo. Largo looked back, expressionless.
"Unfortunately, Chee is a common name among Navajos," Largo said. "Like Smith in Chicago, or Martinez in Albuquerque."
Leaphorn drifted into the kitchen, looking at tidiness, touching nothing. Huan Ji's bedroom was fairly large, but suggested a monastery cell-a narrow bed tightly made, a chair, a small desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers with what seemed to be a camera bag on top of it. Everything tidy. Nothing to suggest someone lived here. He stood at the desk, looking down at the blotter, the little cup holding paper clips, the pen in its holder.
Behind him, Rostik cleared his throat. "Don't touch anything. We'll go through all of this later," Rostik said. "Everything in here. Everything in the house. With trained people."
"Of course," Leaphorn said.
Taka's room was tidy by Leaphorn's standards, if not by Huan Ji's. An identical narrow bed, covers tight. Similar furniture. But the boy's desk was cluttered with books and papers and his dresser was a gallery of photographs. Leaphorn, hands in his jacket pockets, examined these pictures. Most of them were of a girl, a moderately pretty Navajo of perhaps sixteen. One of these seemed to be a school yearbook portrait, re-photographed and blown up to eleven-by-fourteen-inch size. The others were candid shots, apparently taken when the subject wasn't looking. Some included two or three other youngsters, but always with the girl. Many of them had been taken, judging from the compressed background, with a telescopic lens.
The back porch was screened, a repository for stored items. A door opened from it into a side room which Leaphorn guessed had been tacked on as a third bedroom. The door bore the stenciled legend: DARKROOM. KNOCK BEFORE OPENING. He glanced at Rostik, nodded at him, turned the knob. It was dark inside, the windows covered with opaque plastic, the air heavy with the smell of acids. Leaphorn switched on the overhead light. It was a small room, sparsely furnished. Along one side, a table bore a small enlarger, a set of developing tanks, and an array of the inevitable chemical containers. Beside that was another table and on it an open-faced cabinet held boxes which Leaphorn presumed held photographic paper. His gaze wandered over all of this and returned to the developing trays and the electric print dryer beside them. Eight-by-ten prints were stacked in the basket below the dryer.
Leaphorn picked up the top one by the edges. It was a black-and-white photograph of what seemed to be a rugged, irregular outcropping of rock. He replaced the print and picked up the one below it. At first he thought it was identical. Then he saw it was apparently another segment of the same outcropping, with some overlapping. He replaced it and reached for a third print.
Rostik touched his elbow.
"I don't want anything touched," he said. "The experts may want to go over this room."
"Then I will leave it for the experts," Leaphorn said.
On the porch again, he suddenly remembered the professor waiting in the car. He wanted to talk to Largo about Officer Jim Chee, but he didn't want to wash any Tribal Police laundry in front of Agent Rostik of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First he would explain things to Bourebonette. He'd tell her to start the engine and turn on the heater. He'd tell her that he wouldn't be much longer.
As he started across the street, he saw the old white Jeepster turn the corner. It rolled halfway down the block, stopped, began backing away from the cluster of police cars at the Huan Ji house. Then it stopped again, remaining motionless on the street. Guilt, Leaphorn thought. Or perhaps fear struggling with curiosity. Whatever the driver's motivations, the Jeepster rolled forward again. Leaphorn trotted across the street in front of it to his own car. Bourebonette had rolled down the window. She was watching him.
"It was about what we thought," he said. "Someone shot Mr. Ji twice. Fatally. No one saw it or heard anything. No suspects. And this-" he nodded toward the Jeepster now pulling into the gravel driveway at the Ji residence "-will probably be Taka, who is Mr. Ji's son."
Professor Bourebonette was looking past him at the car. "Does he know?"
"Probably not. Not unless he did it."
Bourebonette looked down. "How sad." she said. "How terrible. Is his mother home? Do you think this could-" She stopped.
"Be connected with the Nez homicide?" Leaphorn finished. "Who knows. You don't see anything on the surface, but-" He shrugged.
Across the street, Rostik and Largo were talking to a slender boy in jeans and a black leather jacket. Largo had his large hand on the boy's shoulder. They moved through the front door and disappeared into the house.
"I think I'll go back over there," Leaphorn said.
"Do they need your help?"
Leaphorn chuckled. "The man in charge is the young man in the gray suit," he said. "If he wants my help he has shown absolutely no sign of it. I'll be quick this time."
Roanhorse was waiting on the porch.
"Was that Ji's son?"
"Right," Roanhorse said. "Name's Taka. Something like that."
"He okay?"
"Looked like somebody hit him with a club when Rostik told him," Roanhorse said.
Taka Ji was sitting stiffly on the edge of a recliner chair. Rostik was facing him, perched on the arm of the sofa. Largo leaned against the wall, his round, dark face devoid of expression. Leaphorn stopped just inside the door. Rostik glanced at him, looked irritated, chose to ignore him, continued his questioning.
He was good at it, Leaphorn noticed. Young, obviously. Probably inexperienced. But well trained in the job, and smart. Some of the questions replowed old ground from new angles. Some were new. Huan Ji's son, still looking as if he had been hit by a club, answered them tersely.
He had not seen his father since he'd driven to school with him in the Jeepster. Right?
Taka nodded. "Yes," he said. His voice was so small that Leaphorn could barely hear him.
And how had he gotten the Jeepster?
"My father, he said I could use it after school. He would walk home. He liked to walk. So after my biology class, I got it from the parking lot."
"The key was left in it?"
"I have a key. My father has a key. I have one."
"And where did you go?"
"I drove out toward Ship Rock. I am taking pictures out there. Photographs."
"Pictures of who?"
Taka was looking straight ahead, seeing something in the wallpaper across the room. His face was pale. He closed his eyes. "I take pictures of landscapes," he said.
"Who was with you?"
Leaphorn thought Taka hadn't heard the question. But he had. Finally he said: "No one. I go alone."
A Vietnamese in a Navajo school. A long time ago Leaphorn had been a Navajo in white Arizona State University. He understood what Taka had not quite said. What was it that Colonel Ji had written on the wall in his own blood? "Help Taka." Something like that.
Rostik changed the subject.
"Did your father have enemies?"
Taka shrugged. "He was a man," he said. "A long time ago he was a colonel in the army." He looked up at Rostik. "The Army of the Republic of Vietnam."
"But do you know of any enemies? Had he received any threats?"
Again it seemed Taka wouldn't answer. Then he tilted his head, frowned. "I don't think he would have told me." This knowledge seemed to surprise him.
"No threat you know of then?"
"No."
"Do you know anyone named Chee?"
"Like I told you, there is a boy on the basketball team. There is a girl in my history class."
"Does your father have any friends named Chee? Any enemies?"
"I don't know," Taka said. "There is a teacher. In junior high school. Her name I think is Miss Dolores Chee."
"A friend of your father's?"
"I don't think so," Taka said. "There are lots of Chees."
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Leaphorn glanced at Captain Largo and found Captain Largo glancing at him. Largo made a wry face.
And so it went. Leaphorn listened and watched. He assessed Rostik, and reassessed him. A smart young man. He assessed Taka as best he could. This was not the normal Taka. This was a stunned teenager. The death of his father was still unreal, an incredible but abstract fact. Rostik now was covering yesterday. How had Taka's father behaved? What had he said? Leaphorn noticed the boy was shivering.
Leaphorn interrupted.
"Mr. Rostik," he said. "Just a moment, if you don't mind." And he turned to Taka.
"Son. Do you have any relatives here? Anybody to go to?"
"Not here," the boy said. "Not here at Ship Rock."
A stranger alone in a strange land, Leaphorn thought. He asked: "Where?"
"My aunt and uncle. They live in Albuquerque."
"Are they the ones you are closest to?" As he asked it, Leaphorn thought how different this would be for a Navajo boy. He would be smothered by family. But maybe it would have been that way for Taka Ji, too, if his people had not been uprooted by war. Perhaps the Vietnamese had not, like the biligaana, lost the value of the family.
Taka was nodding. "They are all there is," he said.
"We'll call them when you are finished here," Leaphorn said, glancing at Rostik.
"I'm finished," Rostik said to Taka. "I'll just need to know where we can reach you if we need to know something else."
"How about a friend here? Somebody you can stay with tonight?"
Taka thought. He gave Leaphorn a name, the son of another of the high school teachers.
Rostik left. They made the calls on the colonel's telephone and Roanhorse took Taka in hand. He'd deliver him to the house of the friend.
"I'll lock the place up," Captain Largo said. "We'll keep an eye on it until the feds go over it."
"One last look at the darkroom," Leaphorn said. "No one will ever know."
With Largo peering over his shoulder, he went through the stack of prints in the dryer basket-eleven photographs of segments of the same outcropping of what seemed to be part of a long basaltic ridge. They were taken-or seemed to be-from the same viewpoint, as if the camera with a telescopic lens had been shifted slightly on a tripod for each exposure.
"Landscapes," Largo said. "If those are his landscapes he's not going to get rich with them."
"No," Leaphorn said, and placed them back in the dryer basket. "You recognize the place?"
"They could have been taken any of a hundred places," Largo said. "It just looked like a big bunch of extruded lava. Fairly old.
Could be out there around Ship Rock. Could be down in the malpais south of Grants. Could be over east of Black Mesa. Could be lots of places."
On the porch, Largo paused to lock the front door.
"Can you think of any reason those pictures might have been taken?" Leaphorn asked.
"None," Largo said. "No idea why any teenage kid does anything."
"They might have been taken by the colonel," Leaphorn said. "He was a photographer, too."
Largo nodded. "True," he said. But he wasn't particularly interested.
"Odd though," Leaphorn said. "When he feels better I might ask him."
"Maybe the colonel did take them," Largo said. "But so what. People are always taking pictures of rocks. They think they see a shape like a duck, or Ronald Reagan, or God knows what."
"You think the boy did it?"
"The killing? I don't. How about you?"
Leaphorn shook his head. The sort of a shake that avoids an answer.
"I've got another question," Leaphorn said. "While Chee is a common name among us Dinee, unfortunately, it is not all that damn common. How the hell did your Jim Chee get himself mixed up with this?"
Largo's expression was grim. "I intend to find out."
"So do I," Leaphorn said.
Chapter 14
Janet pete had not liked the idea. Basically, no matter what she said, Jim Chee understood that she hadn't liked it because she hadn't trusted him. At worst, she thought he might betray her. Chee doubted that she really believed that, although the possibility that she did lingered in his memory. And rankled. At best, she wasn't certain she could depend on his discretion. On his good judgment. That rankled, too. In a way, that was even worse.
Chee had finally let his temper show. That was a weakness new to him, and he realized it. He explained it to himself as a product of raw nerves; of a hand which, with every twinge, reminded him it might never be fully useful again; of traumatic memories which recalled his failure to perform his duty. However he explained it, he didn't like the way it felt.
"Janet," he said. "Spare me all that lawyer talk. I've told you I won't ask the old man for a confession. I won't ask him what he was doing out there that night. Or how he got there. Or what the hell caused him to shoot Nez. I just want to ask him about the story he told to the professor. Just why he thinks the Enemy Way sing was done for all those horse thieves, and the Ghostway Chant added for one of them. I won't ask him anything that would make any sense to the FBI. Or to you either, for that matter."
That had touched a nerve. Janet's voice turned chilly.
"I'll spare you the lawyer talk. You spare me the 'I'm more Indian than you are' crap. Okay?"
Chee hesitated. "Right," he said. "Sorry about that."
"Okay, then," she said. "But you play by the rules. I'm going to be there every minute. Ashie Pinto only answers what I want him to answer. You two speak better Navajo than I do, so if I want you to explain a question, you by God explain it until I understand what you're getting at or it doesn't get answered. Understood?"
Chee had understood perfectly.
Janet Pete set it up for three that afternoon and Chee took a cab down to the County Detention Center where federal prisoners were being held. It was a sunny, windless autumn afternoon with a fringe of high clouds drifting in from the northwest, reminding him that the TV weatherman had reported snow in Flagstaff last night and the front-as always-was drifting eastward. He showed his credentials to the desk clerk and a deputy jailer escorted him to the visitors' room.
Janet Pete was waiting. She sat behind a long wooden table in a straight wooden chair looking small and tired and beautiful.
"Yaa' eh t'eeh," Chee began, and swallowed it and said, "Hello, Janet," instead.
She smiled at him. "Yaa' eh t'eeh," she said. "I do know a little Navajo."
"As much as I do," Chee said, which was a blatant lie, but a guard ushered in Hosteen Ashie Pinto before she could say so.
Here, in this still, sterile room lit by a battery of fluorescent tubes, Ashie Pinto was not the man Chee remembered. He remembered a stumbling drunk illuminated in the yellow glare of his headlights, wet with rain, blurred by Chee's own shock and Chee's own pain. Now he was smaller, desiccated, frail, dignified, and terribly old. He sat in the chair next to Janet Pete, acknowledged her with a nod. He looked at Chee, and then at the heavy bandages wrapped on Chee's left hand. Then Ashie Pinto repeated the only thing Chee had ever heard him say.
"I am ashamed," he said, and looked down.
Chee looked down, too. And when he looked up, Janet was watching him. He wondered if she had understood the Navajo phrase.
"I think I told you Mr. Pinto speaks hardly any English at all," she said. "I told him you were coming, of course, so he remembers who you are. He still does not want to say anything at all about the crime and I told him not to answer any questions until I tell him to."
"Okay," Chee said. "The question I want to ask him takes some explaining. Stop me if you get lost."
And so Chee began.
"My uncle," he said, "I think you may have heard of Frank Sam Nakai, who is a singer of the Blessing Way and the Mountain Top Chant and many of the other curing songs. This man is the brother of my mother, and he has tried to teach me to follow him and become a hataalii. But I am still an ignorant man. I have much yet to learn. I have learned a little of t
he Ways of the Holy People. And what I have learned has brought me here to ask you a question. It is a question about something you told to a professor named Tagert."
Chee stopped, eyes on Pinto. The man sat as still as death, waiting. His skin was drawn tight over the skull bones, seeming almost transparent in its thinness. The desiccation made his eyes seem protuberant, larger than they were. They were black eyes, but the cornea of one was clouded by a film of cataract.
Sure now that Chee had finished his statement, Pinto nodded. Chee was to continue.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 10 - Coyote Waits Page 14
