The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  Leaphorn stopped again, drank coffee. Looked over the cup at Chee. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Denton? No. I just saw him on television a time or two. At the sentencing, I guess. I just remember thinking if they had charged him with being ugly he was guilty.”

  “Well, Mrs. Verbiscar said they got invited to a meal at his house and the big impression he made on her was that he was bashful. She said she noticed he had a grand piano in the living room and asked him if he played and he said no, he’d bought that for Linda to play if he could get her to marry him. She said he seemed real shy. Sort of clumsy. Nothing much to say.”

  Chee laughed. “What some people would call ‘deficient in social graces.’”

  “I guess,” Leaphorn said. “He seemed that way to me when I interviewed him with Lorenzo Perez. But to get on with this, both of Linda’s parents said they liked him. Way too old for their daughter, but she seemed to love him dearly. And a little after she turned twenty-one she said she wanted to marry him. And she did. Catholic wedding. Flower girls, ushers, the whole business.”

  “Now the bad part starts,” Chee said. “Am I right?”

  Leaphorn shook his head. “Unless a lot of people were lying to me that didn’t start until the day Denton killed the swindler. But I was thinking like you are. When she went missing, I went to talk to people who knew her.”

  Leaphorn’s first call had been on the woman Linda Verbiscar had lived with in Gallup. Linda and Denton were a match made in heaven, she’d said. Linda didn’t date much. Uneasy with men. Sex would wait until she met the right man, and married him, and then it would be forever. But something about Denton, homely as he was, attracted her right away. And awkward and bashful as he was, you saw it was mutual.

  “According to her roommate, Miss Verbiscar seemed to like the awkward and bashful types,” Leaphorn said, and chuckled. “And broken noses. The only other man she seemed real friendly with was a Navajo. Couldn’t remember his name, but she remembered the crooked nose. She said Linda never went out with him, but he’d come in the place middle of afternoons when it was quiet. He’d get a doughnut or something and Linda would sit down and talk to him. Nothing going there, but with Denton it got to be real, genuine, romantic love.”

  Leaphorn paused with that, looked thoughtful. “Or, so her roommate said.”

  “Okay,” said Chee. “Maybe I’ve been too cynical.”

  And then Leaphorn had gone to Denton’s massive riverside house and talked to his housekeeper and his foreman. It was the same story, with a variation—the variation being that now Denton was falling deeply in love. Obsessively in love, the housekeeper had said, because Mr. Denton was an extremely focused man who tended to be obsessive. His overpowering obsession had been to find that legendary mine. Which was what the housekeeper and the foreman said got him into the trouble with McKay. But the bottom line was, there was no way they would believe the official police theory. Linda would never, never leave Wiley Denton. Something had happened to her. Something bad. The police should stop screwing around and find her.

  While Leaphorn talked, Chee finished his hamburger, and his coffee, and another cup. The waiter left his ticket and disappeared. The gusty wind rattled sand against the window where they sat. And finally Leaphorn sighed.

  “I talk too damn much. Blame it on being retired, sitting around the house with nobody to listen to me. But I wanted you to see why I think there was more to that killing than we knew.”

  “I can see that,” Chee said. “Any chance they thought Denton might have figured Linda had sold him out? Bumped her off in the famous jealous rage?”

  “I asked ’em both. They said she’d left to go downtown to have lunch with some lady friends that morning. Usual huggy-kissy good-bye at the car with Wiley. Then about middle of the afternoon Denton had asked if she had called. He was wondering why she was late. Held up dinner for her. Then McKay showed up. The help told Perez they’d heard McKay and Denton talking in the den, and then the talking got loud, and then they heard the shot.”

  Leaphorn paused, looking for comment.

  “Does that match what you were told?”

  “Just the same,” Leaphorn said. “They said after the shot, Denton came rushing out and told them to call nine one one. Said McKay had tried to rob him. Pulled a pistol on him so he’d shot McKay and he thought he’d probably killed him.”

  “So Linda never came home?”

  “Never got to the luncheon with her lady friends, in fact,” Leaphorn said. “And when they booked Denton into the Gallup jail and he called his lawyer, he told the lawyer he was worried about her. See if he could find her. Let him know.”

  “Sounds persuasive,” Chee said.

  “Then after Denton bonded out, he hired a private investigators outfit in Albuquerque to find her. Next, when he went away to do his prison time, he had advertisements placed in papers here and there, asking her to come home.”

  This surprised Chee. This wasn’t the sort of information the Legendary Lieutenant could have obtained casually on the cop grapevine. Interest there would have died with the confession. Leaphorn obviously maintained his interest. He’d made this something personal.

  “Placed advertisements from the federal prison?”

  “Easy enough. Just had his house manager do it.”

  “Saying what?”

  “In the Arizona Republic it was a little box ad in the personals. Said ‘Linda, I love you. Please come home.’ About the same in the Gallup Independent, and the Farmington Times, and the Albuquerque Journal, and the Deseret News in Salt Lake. Then he ran some more offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information about her whereabouts.”

  “Never a word?”

  “I guess not.”

  This also surprised Chee. It seemed out of character.

  “You talked to him about it?”

  “I tried to after he came home from prison,” Leaphorn admitted. “He called me a son of a bitch and hung up.”

  4

  Officer Bernie Manuelito had risen even earlier than usual, driven over to her mother’s place at Hogback, had a most unsatisfactory visit, went on to Farmington thinking she would use this unexpected (and undeserved) day off to shop, decided that was a bad idea considering the mood she was in, and headed south on Route 371 to the Tsale Trading Post. She’d have a talk with old man Rodney Yellow. Hostiin Yellow was her mother’s senior brother, the elder male in the Yoo’l Dineh—the Bead People clan—and a shaman. He had been very active in the Medicine Man Association and in the movement to train young singers to keep some of the less-used curing rituals alive. More important to Bernie, he had conducted the kinaalda ceremony for her when she reached puberty, had given her her secret ceremonial “war name,” and was her very favorite uncle.

  Hostiin Yellow was also an authority on what the scientists out at the Chaco National Monument called “ethnobotany.” Maybe he could tell her something about the various stickers and seedpods she’d found on the victim’s pant legs and socks. Which was why, she told herself, she was going to visit him. That and family duty. She glanced down at the speedometer. Eleven miles over the limit. Oh, well. Never any traffic on 371. The emptiness was one of the reasons she loved to drive it. That and passing the grotesque monuments of erosion of the Bisti Badlands, and seeing the serene shape of the Turquoise Mountain rising to the east. Pretty soon now it would be wearing its winter snowcap, and monsoon rains of late summer had already started turning the grazing country a pale green. Enjoying that, she forgot for a moment how arrogant Sergeant Chee had acted, but the memory of it came right back again.

  “And just keep your mouth shut about it,” Chee had said, giving her his stern “I’m your boss” look. He had taken the tobacco tin from her hand, put it in a plastic evidence sack, and placed the sack in his shirt jacket pocket, and said: “I’ll see what I can do about this,” and walked into Captain Largo’s office. When he came out he gave her another of those looks and told her to go home, take t
he rest of the week off, and: “For God’s sake, don’t talk to anybody about this.”

  That was it. He didn’t even have the decency, the respect, to tell her she was suspended. Maybe she wasn’t. Just take the rest of the week off, he said—looking very dour. Big deal. That was just a day and a half before her shift ended anyway. What had Largo said after Chee told him about the tobacco tin? The captain had already been angry after his meeting with the FBI guys. Not that he chewed her out much. Just asked a bunch of questions. And glared at her. But then he hadn’t known about her taking the tin away—a tin that Chee seemed to think would have had prints on it. Hers now, if none other.

  Hostiin Yellow wasn’t at his place behind the Tsale Trading Post. The lady there said he was supposed to be doing his botanical talk for the kids at the Standing Rock School. Bernie took the dirt road shortcut thirteen miles over the mesa and saved about thirty minutes by driving too fast. She caught him coming out of a classroom, trailed by a swarm of middle-school kids, and steered him into the room reserved as a faculty lounge. There they went through the ritual of family concern and affection. But she could tell Hostiin Yellow had sensed instantly that this was not a casual “drop in on the way” visit.

  He put the big cardboard box holding his collection of botanical and mineral specimens on the table, sat himself in one of the folding chairs, and eyed her curiously while she completed her recitation of family news.

  And finally she said: “And how about you? You look tired.”

  And he said: “Girl Who Laughs, stop chattering now and tell me your trouble.”

  Thinking about it later, she decided hearing her war name spoken did it—broke through her dignity and reduced her from woman to niece. Hostiin Yellow had given her that secret name—to be revealed to no one outside the bosom of her family. It was the name of her sacred identity and used only in dealing with the Holy People. If it became known to witches, it could be used against her.

  She sat in the chair he pointed her to, dug out a tissue to deal with the unwelcome tears, and told him everything. Of finding Doherty’s body curled in the cab of his truck; of possibly losing her job because she hadn’t handled it right; of taking away the old tobacco tin, which turned out to have tiny bits of placer gold mixed with the sand in it, and how that was getting her into trouble with everybody; of her mother being unsympathetic and telling her she never should have gone into police work. Her mother saying this trouble was good, maybe it would bring her to her senses. And when she told her mother how curt Sergeant Jim Chee had been, she had taken Chee’s side. Called him a good man. Said Bernie should start treating him better.

  When the lightning storms ended and the Season When the Thunder Sleeps made it possible, she would ask him to do for her the proper sing to protect her from ghost sickness.

  Finally, with that said, Girl Who Laughs became Officer Bernadette Manuelito again, and she got to the reason she thought she had come to look for him, knowing now it was just a cover story—just an excuse.

  She took an envelope from a pocket and poured its contents onto the tabletop. Hostiin Yellow looked at the little litter of seedpods and burrs, and up at her.

  “When I reached in to see if the victim had a pulse, to see if he was still alive, I noticed his socks and his trouser legs had picked up all sorts of stickers,” Bernie said. “Chamisa seeds, for example, but no chamisa grows way up there where we found his truck. The same with some of these other seeds, so I thought maybe they had come from where he was when he was shot.”

  Hostiin Yellow had reached up and extracted a pencil from his tsiiyeel, using the bun in which traditional Navajos wear their hair as a holder. Now he was using the pencil tip to sort Bernie’s botanical material into separate bunches.

  “I thought maybe you could help me find where it came from,” Bernie said. But even as she said it, she knew it was an impossible job. The stuff she’d collected could have grown just about anywhere that was hotter and drier than the Chuska Mountain high-country zone. About anywhere in the millions of acres of tundra from which the mountains rose.

  “Chamisa seed,” said Hostiin Yellow, inspecting the fragment held between thumb and finger. “Chamisa needs some salt. In the old days, before people could buy salt blocks for their sheep, they used to have to drive them down out of the mountains to the halbatah—the ‘gray lands’ where the salt-holding plants grow. No salt in the high country soil. The runoff from the melting snow leaches it out.”

  He glanced at Bernie. She nodded. She knew all this. Hostiin Yellow had taught her as a child.

  “If there are no salty plants, sheep start eating the stuff that poisons them.” He held up another seed. “This sacatan grass grows down in the Halgai, in the flatlands. There used to be plenty of it everywhere. Good food for the animals, but they bite it off right down to the roots. So pretty soon it’s crowded out by this.” He held up silvery needle-grass seeds. “Not even goats will eat this unless they’re starving.”

  Hostiin Yellow finished his descriptive inventory without seeming to Bernie to add anything that would help pin down the location of the source.

  “You think all of these came from the same place? Why do you think that?”

  “Well,” Bernie said. “Not a very good reason, I guess. Jim Chee said there was a new Zip Lube oil-change sticker on the windshield and the sales slip in the glovebox. It showed he had the oil changed the morning he was killed and he’d driven only ninety-three miles from the station in Gallup. And from the Zip Lube place to the truck it was thirty-five miles. So that leaves fifty-eight miles to get to where his socks collected the stickers and from that place to where we found him.”

  “That’s the shortest way from Gallup? The thirty-five miles?”

  Bernie nodded. “North out of Gallup on six sixty-six, then northwest to Nakaibito, and then up that gravel road past the Tohatchi lookout, and on toward Cove.”

  “So,” said Hostiin Yellow, “this poor fellow collected his stickers quite a ways from where you found him. Down the mountain. East side or west side. Either New Mexico stickers or Arizona stickers.”

  He stared past her, out the window, looking at the mountains, lost in thought.

  “Was this all you got? Any other seeds you didn’t bring with you?”

  Bernie shook her head. “Well,” she said, “I noticed a bunch of those goathead stickers in the soles of his sneakers.”

  “Goatheads? You mean the puncturevine, I think. Dark green, spreads very close to the ground. Seeds usually have three long sharp thorns?”

  She nodded.

  Hostiin Yellow frowned. “That doesn’t fit well with the chamisa and the spikeweed and the other plants,” he said. “Puncturevine likes more water, loose soil. Gets crowded out where there’s too much heat.”

  He leaned back, stuck the pencil back into his bun. “You know, I think this man must have been walking up some sort of drainage, an arroyo, or a narrow canyon, where the puncturevine would have some damp sand and some shade. You know anything that might fit that idea?”

  That thought interested Bernie. Placer mining required runoff water, didn’t it? And sand, of course. There was sand in the Prince Albert tin. The one Chee had ordered her to keep her mouth shut about.

  “I found an old tobacco tin not far from the body. The sand in it had a little bit of gold dust mixed in it.”

  “Gold dust, was it? I think . . .” He stopped, studying her. “How bad do you need to find this place? Can’t you just let the other cops do it?”

  I need to find it to save my dignity, she thought. To restore my self-respect. To show those jerks I’m not a dummy.

  “Pretty bad,” Bernie said. “I need to save my job.”

  Hostiin Yellow was pushing the piles of her seeds into a single heap, returning them to her sack. He said: “I need to say something to you about this gold. Gold has always brought trouble for the Dineh. It makes the belagaana crazy. General Carlton thought we had a lot of gold in our mountains, so he had the army
round up us Navajos and move us away on that long walk to Bosque Redondo. They drove the Utes out of Colorado to get the gold in their mountains. And drove the tribes out of the Black Hills, and pretty much killed the California Indians. Everywhere they find gold, they destroy everything for it. They tear up our Mother the Earth, they break the cycle of life for everything.”

  Bernie nodded.

  He handed her the sack. “It makes people crazy,” he said. “And crazy people are dangerous. They kill each other for gold.”

  “My uncle,” Bernie said. “I think you are telling me Mr. Doherty was murdered because of that gold. And I think you know where he got all those stickers in his pants. Can you just tell me?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Right now, I think you should let the other policemen find that place.”

  Bernie nodded. But she could tell from his expression that he didn’t interpret that gesture as consent. She sat and watched him.

  And Hostiin Yellow watched her. As hunter for the white men, his Girl Who Laughs had lost her laughter. Why must she care who had done this crime? If a belagaana did it, let the belagaana punish him if they must. If it was a Navajo—one who still lived by Changing Woman’s laws—then he would come to be cured of the dark wind that had caused him to kill. But no good to tell this young woman all this. She knew it. And Girl Who Laughs would live her life her own way. That, too, was Navajo. He was proud of that, too. And of her.

  She was glancing away from him now, at something outside the window. Her face reminded him of the old photograph in the museum at Window Rock—the women who had endured their captivity at Bosque Redondo. The narrow, straight nose, the high cheekbones, the strong chin. None of the roundness here that the gene pool of the Zuñis, Hopis, and Jemez had contributed to the Dineh. Beauty, yes. Dignity, too. But nothing soft about Girl Who Laughs.

  Hostiin Yellow sighed.

  “Girl Who Laughs, you have always been stubborn. But I want you to listen to me now,” he said. “The belagaana have always killed for gold. You already know that. You have seen it. But have you thought about how some people kill for religion?”