“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 ghettoa 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 itcleared 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 dobeing 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 kinfolks,” 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 orderor the lack of iton 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 impatiencea 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 universitybut a decent sort of fellow.
Redd was telling them that Tagert didn’t believe Cassidy had been killed in Bolivia. Tagert believed part of the tale told by Cassidy’s kinfolks. The family claimed that Cassidy had slipped back into the United States in 1909, had bought a farm under an assumed name, had lived out his life as a law-abiding citizen, and had finally died as an old, old man about 1932. Tagert believed some of that. But not the law-abiding part.
“He published a paper in Western Archives about ten years ago, connecting Cassidy with a 1909 bank robbery in Utah,” Redd said. “In stuffy old history faculties that stirred up a controversy, and Henderson blew him out of the water. He found out that Tagert had relied on some old trial testimony that had since been discredited. That infuriated Tagert. And this new book
“ Redd grinned broadly. “Jean said Tagert was absolutely livid. In a downright rage. Stomping around the office, having a regular tantrum.” He laughed, shook his head, savoring the memory.
“I take it that Jean Jacobs doesn’t care much for the professor,” Janet said.
Redd’s delight vanished. “Does the slave love her master?” Redd asked. “That’s what we are. Lincoln didn’t mention graduate students when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We’re the Grand Republic’s last vestige of indentured labor. We do the master’s research for him, or we don’t get our dissertation approved. Then you don’t get the union card.”
Chee swallowed. How did all this Cassidy stuff relate to Ashie Pinto? How could it? But he wasn’t going to show impatience again. He would behave like a Navajo. He would endure.
“I remember how it was in law school,” Janet said. “If you were working your way through.”
“Anyway,” Redd said, “old Tagert had dug out an old newspaper account of a train robbery up in Utah. I think it was the newspaper at Blanding. Three men, one of them killed, and the other two getting away and some people on the train claiming one of the robbers was Cassidy. He found a later account reporting that the two bandidos had turned up in Cortez, and got away again, and the posse had chased them south and lost track of ‘em south and west of Sleeping Ute Mountain. Again, one of the cops said the blond bandit was Butch Cassidy. He claimed he’d known him way back when Cassidy was connected with the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.”
Redd paused. Shook his head. “Pretty slim evidence, but it was all Tagert had, and he used it in that paper, along with what Cassidy’s kinfolks had said, andlike I saidhe got blown out of the water by Henderson’s Bolivian stuff.” Redd shook his head again, expression wry.
Being raised Navajo, Jim Chee understood how human nature affected storytellers and how they worked an audience. Now, at last, Redd would tell them something pertinent.
“He had nothing but that.” Redd looked at Chee. The dramatic pause. “Then Ashie Pinto picked up Butch Cassidy’s trail on the Big Reservation.” Chapter 10
JOE LEAPHORNA practical manhandled it by telephone. He got Professor Tagert’s home number in Albuquerque from information. No one answered. He called the university switchboard for Tagert’s office number. There a woman answered. She said her name was Jean Jacobs, Tagert’s teaching assistant. From Jacobs, Leaphorn learned two interesting facts.
First, Tagert was two weeks overdue for his academic duties andif Jacobs knew what she was talking aboutno one seemed to know his whereabouts.
Second, the arresting officer in the Pinto case, Jim Chee, off duty and on convalescent leave, was performing as Chee performed all too oftena mile outside the rules. He had presented himself at Tagert’s office asking questions. How could Chee have come to know about Tagert?
Thinking of this, Leaphorn found himself violating one of his own rules. He was allowing his mind to shift back and forth between two problemsTagert and Cheeand thus getting nowhere on either. Chee could wait. First he would see if he could fit Tagert’s absence from his university classrooms into this puzzle.
Leaphorn swiveled his chair to face the map that dominated his wall behind his desk. It was a magnified version of the “Indian Country” map produced by the Automobile Club of Southern California. Smaller versions were used throughout the Four Corners territory for its details and its accuracy. Leaphorn had hired a photographer to copy it and make him a double-sized print on a matte paper. Emma had pasted this to a sheet of corkboard. For years, he had sprinkled it with coded pins, using it, so he said, to reinforce his memory. Actually Leaphorn’s memory was remarkable, needing no reinforcement. He used the map in his endless hunt for patterns, sequences, ordersomething that would bring a semblance of Navajo hohzho to the chaos of crime and violence.
From his desk, Leaphorn extracted a box of pins, the sort mapping companies provide. He selected three with large yellow headsyellow being Leaphorn’s code for problems with no priority beyond their inherent oddity. He stuck one in the map between Bekahatso Wash and Yon Dot Mountain, at about the place where Ashie Pinto’s hogan stood. Another he placed between Birdsprings Trading Post and Jadito Wash. There Nez had lived. He put the third south of Navajo Route 33 on a line between Ship Rock and Beautiful Mountain, the place where Pinto had shot Delbert Nez. Then he leaned back and inspected his work.
The triangle formed by the pins was huge. It emphasized two points in Leaphorn’s mind. The Nez home was at least 150 miles south of the Pinto place in a part of the Reservation where intercourse with both the Hopis and the busy world of the biligaana was easy if not inevitable. Pinto lived in a different world of the pure, traditional Navajo culture. Everything separated them. Distance. Age. Culture. And yet they had come together violently at the point of the triangletwo hundred miles from either
one’s home. Duty had taken Nez to that rendezvous. But what had taken Pinto there?
That was the second point. The pins made it clear he could hardly have been there by chance. One could not get from pin A at Pinto’s hogan to pin C beside Navajo Route 33 without changing roads a half-dozen times. Pinto could not have simply happened past en route to somewhere else. He had gone there for a purpose. And Leaphorn’s reasoning said Pinto’s purpose must be linked to why the old man had killed Delbert Nez.
But three pins were not enough to tell him anything. So Leaphorn, being Leaphorn, studied the map to see if they would fit into any other pattern.
He noticed only one thing that interested him. While Leaphorn rejected traditional Navajo witchcraft beliefs and detested them, they were part of his job. Belief in witches, and fear of them, lay at the root of many of the troubles, many of the tragedies, that occupied him as a policeman.
Pin C, where Delbert Nez had died, was very close to a rugged volcanic outcropping, nameless on the map, but which local families called Tse A’Digash. Witchery Rock. Around this long irregular ridge were clustered a measles rash of red pins marked with the letter a. The a stood for A’Digash. Witchcraft. Each pin in the quarter-century accumulation marked some sort of disturbance, assault, threat, or misdemeanor in which fear of these so-called skinwalkers had played some part.
Leaphorn’s eyes were on the map but he was seeing Tse A’Digash in his memoryan ugly black ridge of old lichen-covered lava that ran for three or four miles south of Navajo 33. Now a yellow pin stuck out in the cluster of red ones. A coincidence? Perhaps. Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical of coincidences. Perhaps that pin, too, should be red with an a in its center.
In fact Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical in general. He took another yellow pin from the desk drawer and stuck it in just south of Flagstaff. Professor Bourebonette had said she lived south of town. Her motivation, so she said, was merely friendship. He had absolutely no way to calculate how she actually fit into this.
Then Leaphorn picked up his phone, dialed the records office downstairs, and asked for the file on the Delbert Nez homicide.
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