Coyote Waits jlajc-10

by Tony Hillerman

  “Oh? Like what?”

  “Something to do with this little girl we’re going out to visit.” And as he said it, realized that it sounded absurd. It would be wrong. The painting would remain, forever, a crazy jumble.

  They reached the summit of the ridge. The shoulder was wide here, blocking their view of the formation. But they could see the Dineyahze place. It was built on the slope opposite them. The Dineyahze outfit included a small oblong of house with a tarpaper roof weighed down against windy weather by a scattering of old automobile tires, a hogan built of stone, a mobile home set on concrete blocks, and the usual brush arbors, corrals, and storage sheds.

  “If I’m guessing right, the Ji boy took those photographs from the ridge above the house. He wanted the same view that Jenifer would have from her yard.” He glanced at Bourebonette, who was looking impressed.

  “If I am guessing wrong,” he added, feeling sudden embarrassment, “then I have made myself look foolish.”

  “Right or wrong,” Bourebonette said, “I’d say you have made yourself look like an innovative thinker. None of that occurred to me at all.”

  The rock formation emerged slowly into view as the car moved along the ridge. And then they could see the paint.

  Leaphorn stopped the car. He pulled on the parking brake. He stared.

  Jubilation!

  It wasn’t perfect from this perspective. But you could easily make it out. The white-against-black read:

  I LOVE JEN

  “Can you see it?” he asked. “Can you read it?”

  “How about that?” Professor Bourebonette said. “Congratulations to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn.”

  Her smile engulfed him with warm approval.

  “I should have thought of it sooner,” he said. “I had all the information I needed. As soon as I knew where the girl lived, I should have guessed.”

  “Modesty,” Bourebonette said. “I think that was right out of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m sort of proud of it myself,” he said.

  “I wonder what the girl thinks?” Bourebonette said. “I think I’ll ask her.”

  “I don’t see much need to bother her now,” Leaphorn said. “We were going to ask her if she had any idea what would be going on with Taka. Now we know.”

  “We sure do,” Bourebonette said.

  She was silent while he backed the car around. Then she said: “What we don’t know is why somebody shot his father.”

  “No, we don’t,” Leaphorn said. But he was beginning to think he might know that, too. Chapter 18

  CHEE HAD HOPED to catch Janet Pete before the federal court session convened. But there was the problem of finding a parking place in downtown Albuquerque. So he emerged from the elevator just in time to see the U.S. marshals ushering Hosteen Pinto into the courtroom.

  “Jury selection today,” the receptionist at the Federal Public Defender’s office had told him. “She’ll be over in Judge Downey’s court in the new Federal Building. On Gold.”

  “How long will that take?” Chee had asked, and the answer had been “Maybe all day. Maybe tomorrow. Probably you can catch her before it starts. If you hurry.”

  He’d hurried, but not quite enough. Maybe, he thought, there would be a recess and he could talk to her then. He nodded to the bailiff at the door and started in.

  “You’ll have to sit over by the wall, and about the fourth row,” the bailiff told him. “All the front rows are for the jury panel, and they use the back rows until their names get called.”

  Chee sat against the wall in the fourth row and watched the panel being ushered in. There would be sixty of them if he remembered the procedure—men and women from around New Mexico with nothing much in common except that they lived in this judicial district and had registered to vote. Thus their names had been drawn for this duty.

  When the last one was seated a middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress began spinning the bingo cage on a table beside the judge’s bench, pulling out names. An elderly Hispano named Martinez was first. He came down the aisle through the gate in the railing, turned right, and took the first chair in the row inside the railing.

  “Mrs. Eloise Gibbons,” Blue Woman read, and a slender young woman in a gray pant-suit came down the aisle and took the chair next to Martinez.

  “Mr. William Degenhardt,” Blue Woman said, and a conservative-looking man with a conservative haircut and a conservative gray suit took the chair to her right.

  Blue Woman continued the litany, filling the row of chairs inside the railing, and then the two rows behind it. Slightly more women than men, Chee estimated. Altogether, seven Anglos and Hispanics, a Vietnamese or Cambodian, a middle-aged Navajo woman, a man who might be an Apache, and two who were clearly Pueblo Indians, although Chee couldn’t identify which of the Pueblos.

  Janet Pete and a man who Chee guessed must be the federal prosecutor assigned to this case were standing in front of the high desk where the judge sat. The three were discussing something with her. Would that be an advantage? Woman judge, woman lawyer? Chee doubted it. It would be fairly common these days.

  Chee felt tremendously drowsy. It was warm in the courtroom and he’d slept very little last night. He thought of his hand, which was itching under the bandage. How much use of it would he recover? He thought of what he wanted to tell Janet Pete—about Ji’s son being the driver of the car he’d seen the night Nez was killed. About Ji’s message on the wall. He thought of how Janet Pete looked. She was wearing something dark green with a skirt that came far below her knees. She had pretty knees, not that he’d seen them often, and pretty ankles.

  Janet was standing facing the jury panel now and the judge was asking if any panelist knew her, knew her family, had had any dealing with her. A very classy woman, Chee thought. He felt a wave of affection, and of chauvinistic Navajo pride in her. And more than that, he felt a hunger for her. And a sense of failure. Since the day she’d come to the hospital to see him he’d lost ground with her. He was sure of that. She liked him less now than she did that morning.

  The prosecutor was standing, undergoing the same scrutiny from the jury panel. One man on the front row put up his hand, and said he knew the man. They were members of the same church. He was excused.

  Then Ashie Pinto stood. The business suit issued by the Bernalillo County jail for this appearance was too large for him, making him look even thinner than Chee had remembered.

  “Face the jury panel, please, Mr. Pinto,” the judge said.

  Hosteen Pinto reacted to his name. He looked back at the judge, puzzled.

  “Interpreter!”

  The interpreter responded to the impatience in Judge Downey’s voice. He awoke from whatever had been occupying his thoughts, stood, said something in Navajo too low for Chee to understand.

  Hosteen Pinto looked at the man, cupped a hand behind his ear.

  “She wants you to look out at those people,” the interpreter said, much louder now. “So they can see you.”

  Pinto looked out at them, his expression sometimes embarrassed, sometimes determined. Pinto’s eyes moved across the courtroom, hesitating a moment when they came to the Navajo panelist, hesitating another moment when they met the eyes of Jim Chee.

  Chee looked away, down at his itching hand.

  No one knew Hosteen Ashie Pinto. The whites didn’t know him, nor the Hispanics, nor the Apache, nor the Pueblos, nor the Asian. Nor Janet Pete, nor me. He is a shaman. He is a stranger to us all.

  The prosecutor looked at his notes then looked up. “Mrs. Greyeyes, I believe you live at Nakaibito. On the Navajo Reservation. Is that correct?”

  “Actually, closer to Coyote Canyon,” Mrs. Greyeyes said.

  “But on the Reservation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a Navajo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any clan relationships with the defendant?”

  “I don’t know what he is.”

  The prosecutor lo
oked at his notes.

  “I have two clans written down here. Turning Mountain Dinee and the Bitter Water People.” He looked at the interpreter. “Is that right? Two clans?”

  “Mother’s and father’s,” the interpreter said. “Two clans.”

  “I am born to the Sage Brush Hill People,” the woman said. “And born for Towering House Clan.”

  “So there is no connection? Correct?”

  “We’re not kinfolks,” the woman said.

  Judge Downey leaned forward and stared at the interpreter. “Miss Pete,” she said, “do you think your client should know what is going on here? Shouldn’t it be interpreted for Mr. Pinto?”

  Janet Pete looked abashed.

  “I would like to have it interpreted,” she said.

  “So ordered,” said Judge Downey.

  The interpreter was a man of perhaps forty with a disheveled look that was probably genetic. He explained in loud and precise Navajo the exchange between Mrs. Greyeyes and the prosecutor.

  Chee began to doze. Snapped awake. The man with the conservative look was being questioned now by Janet Pete.

  “Mr. Degenhardt, I want you to tell me if you have ever had or if anyone in your family, or even a close friend, has ever had any unpleasant experience involving a member of the Navajo Tribe. Have you ever been in a fight with a Navajo? Anything like that?”

  Mr. Degenhardt thought about it.

  The interpreter said: “She asked him if he ever been in a fight with a Navajo.”

  Mr. Degenhardt shook his head. “No.”

  “Can you think of any reason why you could not give this gentleman here, Mr. Pinto, a fair trial?”

  “She say you be fair?” the interpreter said.

  “No, Ma’am,” Degenhardt said.

  “He say yes, he be fair,” the interpreter said.

  Chee stopped listening. Who was the interpreter who translated Ashie Pinto’s words from the tape to the transcript? Had he been as lazy as this one? Skipping? Summarizing? Or, if he was a traditional Navajo, perhaps leaving out unpleasant parts about witches and skinwalkers? He was remembering he’d decided yesterday to hear Hosteen Pinto’s story in Hosteen Pinto’s very own words. This business of selecting a jury would take hours. Chee got up and moved quietly out the door.

  Finding a parking place near the Federal Building downtown was child’s play compared to finding a place to park anywhere near the university library. Finally Chee left his pickup in a POLICE VEHICLES ONLY space behind the campus police station. He identified himself to the duty sergeant, explained his business, and got reluctant approval to leave it there.

  By the time he climbed the stairs to the Reserve Room in Zimmerman Library, checked out the tapes and transcripts, and went to work, it was almost noon. He was hungry. He should have stopped for lunch.

  He started with the horse thief tape. He’d listened to some of it already, with a lot of skipping around, and he’d read a copy of the transcript in Tagert’s office. Now as he listened to Pinto’s voice droning the same story into his earphones his sleepiness returned. But he fought it off, checking what he was hearing with the library’s copy of the transcript. When he came to a discrepancy, he stopped the tape and replayed it. The revisions tended to be minor corner-cuttings or sometimes eliminations of repetition. By one P.M. he’d found nothing that changed the meaning or left out anything significant.

  Sleepiness was almost overpowering. His stomach grumbled with hunger. He put down the transcript, took off the earphones, yawned and stretched. The air around him had the deadness common to rooms without open windows, common to rooms where old things are stored. The silence was absolute, the place empty except for himself and the young woman who sat behind the desk at the entrance, working on files.

  He would walk across the mall to the Union and get something to eat. No, he would walk across Central Avenue to the Frontier and have a green chile enchilada. But first he would skip ahead and see if the translator had cheated when the subject became witchcraft. When he’d read the transcript before, it had seemed that Pinto had said remarkably little about why the Ghostway cure had been needed for Delbito Willie. Perhaps he’d actually said more.

  He ran the tape fast forward, listening to Pinto’s old voice quacking in his ears until he found the proper place.

  “

  And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there was a lava flow. It is dangerous to ride a horse in there, even in daylight, because, you know, he might get his hoof in one of those cracks—just a little slip, you know, and break his leg and throw you onto the rocks.”

  Chee stopped the tape and checked the translation. Just as he remembered, the copy he’d read omitted the digression about the horse breaking its leg. He started the tape again.

  “

  The Yucca Fruit Clan men followed very slowly. The lava was rough there and they kept way back anyway because of the man with the yellow mustache. They say he was a very good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had tied up their horses and went up into the rocks. Right there, Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit Clan men they stopped, too, because they knew Yellow Mustache would be protecting his horses with his rifle and because they saw then where it was the white men had gone. It was up there in the place where the witches gather. It was up there in the cave where the evil ones come to make somebody into a skinwalker. Some of those Yucca Fruit Clan men knew about it. They lived over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains, but they had heard about this place. And you could tell it was this place because of the way the rocks were formed there. They say it looked like the ears of a mule sticking up. If you looked at it from the west, that’s the way it looked. Two sharp spires with a low saddle between them. They say it looked like a saddle, like one of those McClellan saddles, with the steep rise up the back side and the horn sticking up on the other side. Reminded people of a saddle.”

  Chee stopped the tape. None of this, not a word of it, was in the transcript he’d read at Tagert’s office. He turned the pages of the library copy. None of it was here, either. Two pages were missing, cut out with a very sharp knife or a razor blade.

  He ran the tape again, hearing how Delbito Willie wanted to go in after the white men, to see if they were dead. If they were he would take the rifle of Yellow Mustache—a very fine rifle. The argument had lasted two days, with all of the Yucca Fruit men against it until finally, when they all agreed the white men must be dead by now, one of the Yucca Fruit Clan agreed to go partway with Willie—but not as far as the witches’ cave. And Willie had gone in and had come out with the rifle of Yellow Mustache, and the word that both men were indeed dead.

  He checked the tape and transcript in at the desk.

  “Is there a way to find out who did the translating? Any record kept of that?”

  “Just a minute,” the woman said. “I think so.”

  She disappeared into a door marked STAFF ONLY.

  Chee waited, rechecking his reasoning. He thought he knew who the translator would be.

  He was right.

  The woman reappeared, holding a file card.

  “Someone named William Redd,” she said. Chapter 19

  LEAPHORN WAS HAVING one of those frustrating mornings which cause all bureaucrats to wish the telephone had never been invented.

  At first, he got nothing but a no answer at the number of Mr. Doan Van Ha, the Albuquerque uncle to whom Taka Ji had been sent for safekeeping. Finally, when someone did pick up the phone it proved to be an elderly woman who identified herself as Khanh Ha. Her command of English was barely rudimentary. After a few minutes of total failure to communicate, Khanh Ha said: “You stay. I get boy.”

  Leaphorn stayed, telephone receiver held to his ear, listening to the silence in the home of the Ha family. Minutes ticked away. He noticed his windows were dusty. Through them he noticed that one of the that used the cottonwoods across the road from the Justice Building had lost some wing feathers and fle
w out of balance. He noticed that the high clouds he had seen when he came to work had thickened and spread from the northern horizon across most of the sky. Maybe it would snow. They needed it. It was late. He thought of Emma, of how she gloried in these days when time hung stalled between the seasons, urging winter on, then cheering for spring, then happily announcing that tomorrow it would be summer and thunderstorm season. Then pleased to see the summer die, anxious for the peaceful gold of autumn. Emma. Happiness was always on her side of the horizon, safely in Dinetah, safely between the Sacred Mountains. She never felt any need to learn what lay beyond them.

  A door slammed faintly in distant Albuquerque. Then came the sound of footsteps on a hard floor, and a boyish voice said: “Hello?”

  “This is Lieutenant Leaphorn, Taka,” Leaphorn said. “Remember? We talked at your house in Ship Rock.”

  “You have the wrong number,” the boy said. “I think so.”

  “I am calling for Taka Ji,” Leaphorn said.

  “This is Jimmy Ha,” the boy said. “I think they took Taka to my aunt’s house. Down in the South Valley.”

  “Do you have that number?”

  Jimmy Ha had it, but it took another five minutes to find it. Then, when Leaphorn dialed it, he got another no answer.

  He fiddled ineffectively with his paperwork, passing enough time to make another try sensible. Again, no answer. He hung up, dialed the Federal Public Defender’s office in Albuquerque.

  No, Jim Chee wasn’t there. He had been in this morning but he’d left.

  “To go where?” Leaphorn asked.

  To the federal courthouse.

  “How about Janet Pete? Is she in?”

  Janet Pete was at the courthouse, too. A jury was being selected.

  “When she comes in would you tell her that I have to get a message to Jim Chee. Tell her to get word to him that I have to talk to him. Tell her it’s important.”

  When he hung up, he made no pretense of doing paperwork, he simply sat and thought. Why had Colonel Ji been killed? He swiveled in his chair and stared at his map. It told him nothing. Nothing except that everything seemed to focus on a rock formation south of Ship Rock. Nothing made any sense. And that, he knew, was because he was seeing it all from the wrong perspective.