The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  “Okay, okay,” Osborne said. “I’ll ask you about it later.” And he gave Chee the telephone number.

  Chee called it, got no answer, decided asking Peshlakai was not such a good idea anyway. He’d take a less direct approach. He called two well-regarded singers—one with the Navajo Traditional Medicine Association and the other a traditionalist who considered the NTMA too liberal/modern. Both had listed a version of the Red Ant Way, the Big Star Way, and the Upward Reaching Way as their top choices if the exposure was to violent death or to the corpse of a homicide victim. That matched what Chee had learned in his own efforts to become a singer. The next step was to find a hataali who still performed these sings—ceremonies that involved dealings with those yei who had left the Earth Surface World and returned to the existence before humanity had been fully formed.

  A sequence of telephone calls to old-timers produced the names of four shamans who performed one or more of these rarely used cures. One was Peshlakai himself, who sometimes conducted the Big Star Way. Another was Frank Sam Nakai, who had been Chee’s maternal uncle, who had tutored Chee as a would-be hataali and had recently died of cancer. One of the remaining two, Ashton Hoski, seemed to Chee the man Peshlakai would have chosen. Like Peshlakai, this hataali was too traditional to remain in the Medicine Man Association. He knew both the Upward Reaching Way and the Big Star Way, and he lived near Nakaibito, not fifty miles west of Peshlakai’s place. The remaining prospect lived far, far to the west near Rose Well on the wrong side of the Coconino Plateau. Unlikely Peshlakai would know him.

  So Chee set forth for Nakaibito to find Hostiin Ashton Hoski and confirm the innocence of Hostiin James Peshlakai. He’d used up the morning on the telephone phase and skipped lunch. In the Nakaibito Trading Post he got a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler, took it to the cash register, and paid.

  “I’m trying to find Ashton Hoski,” Chee said. “They say he is a hataali.”

  The man at the register handed Chee his change. Old Man Hoski, he explained, probably wouldn’t be home today. He guessed he’d be looking after some of his sheep grazing up near the Forest Service Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout tower.

  A good guess. The old Dodge pickup described for Chee at the trading post was pulled into the shade of a cluster of pines beside the track. No one was in it, but a thermos and what might be a lunch sack were on the seat. Chee found a comfortable and well-shaded rock and sat down to wait and to do some thinking.

  On the climb up the Chuska Mountains slope into the spruce and aspen altitude, he found himself feeling twinges of self-doubt mixed with a small measure of guilt. That had produced a sneaky hope that Hostiin Hoski wouldn’t be findable and that he therefore would be spared the sort of disreputable role of testing his faith in one shaman by more or less lying to another one. He worried those notions a few minutes, found no relief in that, and turned his thoughts to more pleasant territory. Namely Bernadette Manuelito. Bernie had touched his arm yesterday as they were leaving Leaphorn’s place.

  “Sergeant Chee,” she’d said, and stopped, and he’d stood there, hand on the handle of the car door, looking at her face and wondering what her expression meant and what she was preparing to say to him. She looked down, drew in a breath, looked up at him again.

  “I want to thank you for what you did,” Bernie said. “I mean about the tobacco can. You didn’t need to do that for me, and I could have gotten you into real trouble.”

  Chee remembered feeling embarrassed, even blushing, and he’d shrugged, and said, “Well, I didn’t want you to be suspended. And, anyway Lieutenant Leaphorn was the one who got the can back to the crime scene. Not me.”

  “I guess I should apologize, too,” Bernie had said. “I took for granted that you’d just taken the can back to Agent Osborne and explained it to him. Which was exactly what it was your duty to do, but duty or not, I was sort of hurt by it. I just didn’t give you enough credit. It was sweet of you to do that for me.”

  And while she was saying that, she was rewarding Jim Chee with just about the warmest, most affectionate smile he could ever remember receiving. He’d said something dumb, probably, “Oh, well,” and opened the car door for her, and that ended that.

  Except it didn’t end it. Not at all. As they were driving over to the FBI offices on Gallup’s Coal Avenue, he had been remembering the first time a woman had called him “sweet.” It had been Mary Landon, pale, blue-eyed, with hair like golden silk. He had been pretty sure Mary loved him while she had her adventure as a just-out-of-college schoolteacher at Crownpoint Middle School. But not as long as he remained a Navajo, not as the father of her Wisconsin children. Mary had been the first, and Janet Pete the last. And that had been way back when they were talking wedding plans and before he had finally, finally, reluctantly faced the fact that Janet saw him as he would be when she had remade him into a match of herself—another of the beautiful people Maryland/Virginia beltway elite. Janet had seen him as a rough diamond she’d found in the West who would become a gem in her urbane, Ivy League East after a little polishing.

  And now Bernadette Manuelito had said what seemed to have become for Chee the magic word. He thought about her. The landscape spread below the Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout on this cool late summer day almost extended forever. The vivid greens of high-country aspen, fir, and spruce turned into the darker shades of lower elevations where juniper and piñon dominated. That quickly faded into the pale-tan immensity of the grazing country. Shadows formed along the serrated cliffs of Chaco Mesa, and to the south the blue shape of the San Mateo rose, capped by the spire of Tsoodzil, the sacred Turquoise Mountain guarding the south boundary of Dine’ Bike’yah.

  “Our heartland,” Bernie had called it. “Our Holy Land. Our Dine’tah.” He’d always remembered that.

  That had been another summer day like this, with squadrons of cumulus clouds drifting across the sky and dragging their shadows across the valley. Bernie was brand new in the NPD, and he was taking her around—showing her where a Toadlena bootlegger lived, the locale of a family suspected of stealing cattle, and some of the places where terrain caused communication blind spots, and the good places where even their old radios would reach Shiprock or Window Rock. He’d stopped beside the dirt road up Chuska Peak to check in. Bernie had got out to collect another of those seedpods that attracted her. He’d joined her, stretching his legs and his cramped back muscles, thinking that he wasn’t quite as young as he had been, thinking Janet Pete had court duty in Farmington that day and they had a dinner date that night. And then finding himself comparing Bernie’s delight with a landscape that offered nothing but beauty and poverty with how Janet would have reacted.

  Thinking about it now, he realized that might have been the moment when he first wondered if the bright young lawyer’s beauty and style would be enough to let them bridge the cultural chasm between them.

  He was pondering that when he heard the tinkle of sheep bells, and the flock began flowing past the spruce thicket above him. A slender, gray-haired man and a shepherd dog emerged a moment later. The man walked toward Chee while the dog raced past the flock, directing it toward a down-slope meadow.

  Chee stood, identified himself by clan and kinfolk, and waited while the gray-haired man identified himself as Ashton Hoski.

  “They say that you are a hataali and can conduct the Upward Reaching Way, and also the Big Star Way,” Chee said.

  “That is true,” Hostiin Hoski said, and he laughed. “Years pass and there is never a need for either one. I start thinking that the Dineh have learned not to be violent. That I can forget those sings. But now I get patients again. Do you need to have the ceremony done for someone? For yourself?”

  “It might be necessary,” Chee said. “Do you already have a patient you are preparing for?”

  Hoski nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Probably in October. As soon as the thunder sleeps.”

  Chee felt a sick premonition. He hesitated.

  “I know who you are,” Hoski said. “
You are a policeman. I have seen you on the TV news. At the court trial of that man who killed his brother-in-law, and then last week at that head-on collision out on Highway Six Sixty-Six. I’ll bet you have the same ghost sickness—the very same ghost—as the man I will be singing for.”

  “Yes,” Chee said. “It is a job that causes you to be around too much death.”

  “Were you around the corpse of this man who was shot up in the Coyote Canyon country? That would make it very easy. That was the same man.”

  Chee swallowed. He didn’t want to ask this question. He was almost certain he didn’t want to know the answer. Or what to do with it if it was what he expected.

  “Who is your other patient?” Chee asked.

  “I think you might know of him,” Hoski said. “Hostiin James Peshlakai.”

  21

  Sergeant Jim Chee usually enjoyed driving, but the journey from Hostiin Hoski’s high-country sheep meadow to Gallup’s Gold Avenue offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been totally glum. He had made Osborne very aware of his opinion that Hostiin James Peshlakai was not a promising suspect in the Doherty homicide. Now his sense of duty, or honor, or whatever he could call it, required him to reverse that. Not that he thought Osborne had lent much weight to his opinion or, for that matter, would lend any weight at all to Peshlakai’s arranging a Big Star Way for himself. However, Chee was an officer of the law. Duty required it. Why hadn’t he been smart enough to leave well enough alone?

  He could deal with that, of course. He’d simply tell Osborne what he had found, try to explain the implications, try not to notice that Osborne’s interest, if he showed any at all, was simply polite, and then forget it—just as Osborne would.

  But another problem that had surfaced on this trip wouldn’t go away. He was finally facing the fact that he was falling in love with Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

  That, too, was a matter of honor. He was Bernie’s supervisor, and that, under Chee’s ethical code, made her off limits and out of bounds. Besides he didn’t know whether Bernie shared his feelings. She liked him, or at least pretended to as employees sometimes do. She had referred to him as “sweet” with a tone and a look that was obviously sincere even by Chee’s uncertain judgment. But what he had done for her had been a bit risky, even after Leaphorn’s assistance took most of the risk away. Therefore, it was only natural that a well-raised woman would express her thanks. So how could he find out where he stood? By romancing her, or trying to. But how could he do that as long as he was the fellow ordering her around every day? He couldn’t think of a good way. And what would happen if he did?

  Chee parked just down the street from the FBI offices, pushed the buzzer, identified himself, and was clicked in. He made his way through the metal detector and past the row of cubicles where agents did their paperwork, then found Osborne awaiting him in a hearing room. They exchanged the usual greetings.

  “Well,” said Osborne, “what’s new?”

  “I’ve had to change my thinking about James Peshlakai,” Chee said. “I think you’ll want to take a close look at him.”

  “Why? Something happen?”

  “Remember what I started telling you about a curing ceremony that traditionals have after being involved with death, or corpses, or violence? Well, I checked on that. Peshlakai has arranged one.”

  Osborne was sitting behind his desk, studying Chee. He nodded.

  “He contacted a singer and arranged it the same day Doherty’s body was found. In the morning.”

  Osborne’s expression was inscrutable. “Was it something called a Big Star Way?” he asked. “Is that it?”

  Short silence while Chee digested this. “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s the one.”

  “He told us he had to be out of jail in October to have that done.”

  “Out? You picked him up?”

  “We got a warrant. Searched his place and his truck. The truck seems to be clean, so far anyway, but there was dried blood on a shirt. He’d tried to wash it, but getting blood out isn’t easy. Blood on a pair of pants, too. It’s not Peshlakai’s blood type, but it matches Doherty’s. The forensic people are doing DNA checks now.”

  Chee had taken a chair across from Osborne. He got up now, hesitated. Sat down again. He felt like a fool. And yet something still seemed wrong about this. One thing, specifically: No one is more conditioned against violence than those who spend years and years learning the curing ways of the Dineh.

  “I guess he’s held in the county jail?” Chee said. “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Why not,” Osborne said. “I hope you have better luck than we did.”

  “Did he say he wanted a lawyer?”

  “We told him the court would appoint him a public defender. All he said was something like it being a bad business. It wasn’t good to talk about.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Pretty much. Except we’ve found another slug in the sand out at that old placer site. It’s the right caliber to match Peshlakai’s rifle, but we don’t have a report from the laboratory yet. And then he told us he had to be released in time for the sing, or whatever you call it.”

  “The slug could have been shot at anything,” Chee said.

  “Obviously,” Osborne said. “They’re looking for traces of blood, or bone, or fabric on it.”

  “Have you learned anything about the cellphone?”

  Osborne considered that a moment. He opened his desk drawer, extracted a pencil, tapped it on the desk, and said: “Cellphone? Like what?”

  “Like I was surprised he had one. Do you know where he got it? Or why?”

  “The why looks obvious to me,” Osborne said. “No telephone lines in there.”

  “I meant, who would he be calling? Who would he know who’d have a telephone number. That sort of thing. I presume you checked his calling log.”

  Osborne tapped with the pencil again, looking thoughtful.

  Chee grinned. “Let me guess what you’re thinking. You’re remembering that when you checked in here, you were warned that one of your predecessors got in trouble for saying some things that maybe he shouldn’t have said to me, and it was generally believed I had unethically and illegally taped that call—or at very least had caused people to believe I had taped it. Therefore, you’re being careful. I don’t blame you. Part of that is true, or partly true. But we have a different situation here. We’re on the same side of this one, in the first place. Besides, I don’t have any way to tape this.”

  Osborne was grinning, too.

  “Since you’re not wired, I’ll admit I heard about that business, and I also heard it turned out you were right. We had the wrong guy in that one. But this time it looks like we have the right one. And if we don’t, if the DNA turns out wrong or we don’t find other evidence, then he’s free as a bird.”

  He reopened the drawer, put the pencil away. “So what are you asking me?”

  “Who Peshlakai was calling on that cellphone.”

  “Not much of anybody,” Osborne said. “He had it a couple of years and only thirty-seven calls were logged in that time. Most of them to his daughter over at Keams Canyon. A couple of other kinfolks, a doctor in Gallup.”

  “How about any calls to Wiley Denton?”

  Osborne looked thoughtful. “Denton?” he said. “Now, why would Mr. Peshlakai be calling Mr. Denton?”

  “How about like you’d call a taxi,” Chee said, swallowing a twinge of resentment at this game playing. “Perhaps he wanted a ride home.”

  “From where?”

  “How about from where he’d parked Mr. Doherty’s body in Mr. Doherty’s pickup truck?”

  Osborne laughed. “I guess that would play,” he said. “Why do all cops think so much alike?”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “I don’t know,” Osborne said. “Yes, Peshlakai called Mr. Denton a total of thirteen times. Two of them were the first calls charged to the telephone and calls twelve and thirteen wer
e recorded the day Doherty was killed.”

  Chee considered this, remembering the conversation with Bernie, Leaphorn, and Professor Bourbonette at Leaphorn’s home. He shook his head. As Bernie had said, now all they needed was a motive that fit a traditionalist shaman and a wealthy white man with a missing wife and an obsession with finding a legendary gold mine.

  They knew Chee at the McKinley County Detention Center, of course, but that didn’t help. The bureaucratic machinery had worked faster than usual. Someone named Eleanor Knoblock seemed to have been assigned as Hostiin Peshlakai’s public defender, and Ms. Knoblock had signed an order providing that no one be allowed to interview her client without arranging it with her and speaking to Peshlakai in her presence. Chee jotted down her telephone number, but he decided to let things rest for the day. He’d already made his full quota of mistakes and had enough problems to worry about.

  22

  When his telephone rang, Joe Leaphorn usually dropped whatever he was doing and hurried over to answer it—a habit he suspected was probably common with lonely widowers whose only conversation tends to be talking back to the television set. Having Professor Louisa Bourbonette adopt his guest room as her base of operations for her oral history research had taken some of the edge off that problem, and this morning he wanted to think instead of talk. The solution to the riddle of Linda Denton and the odd and illogical business with Wiley Denton’s affairs with gold-mine maps hung just at the edge of his vision—almost in sight, but always dancing away.

  The phone rang again, and again. It occurred to Leaphorn that Louisa had taken her tape recorder up to Mexican Hat yesterday to capture the recollections of an elderly Mormon rancher. She’d returned long after he’d retired for the night, and this damned telephone was certain to awaken her. He picked it up, said a grumpy-sounding “Hello.”