Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 15 - The Wailing Wind

by The Wailing Wind(lit)

  He looked at Chee again, and at Bernie. Both nodded.

  "So I'm left wondering why Denton lied to me about it. Which brings us to some other things." He described what Mrs. McKay had told him about the call from her husband, about Denton questioning McKay about the whereabouts of the mine and McKay giving him only a rough description. That led Leaphorn to the peculiar question of the two maps.

  "If we believe Mrs. McKay, her husband told Denton he was selling him a map of a mine site on Mesa de los Lobos. But Denton told me McKay tried to sell him a location in the southeastern end of the Zu¤i Mountains. I can't think of a reason she would have to lie about it. How about Denton? Any thoughts about why he'd want to mislead me about that?" Leaphorn asked. "Any ideas about that? Or any of this?"

  Chee broke the extended silence.

  "If we make this McKay homicide a premeditated murder, it looks to me like it makes connecting it with Doherty a lot more plausible. Or does it?"

  "It might," said Bernie, "if we could find the motive for either one of them."

  "Who owns the land?" Louisa asked. She rose and walked to the coffeepot.

  "Have you run into anything at all," Chee asked, "that connects Doherty and McKay in the past? Anything that would have got him looking into the McKay stuff down at the sheriffs office beyond this Golden Calf business?"

  "Not that I know of," Leaphorn said. "To tell the truth I haven't been thinking much about the Doherty homicide until now. Until wondering if it might help explain this funny business with Denton and the damned maps."

  Louisa was back with Leaphorn's coffeepot. She poured them each a cup. "Have any of you checked into who owns the land all this map business is about?"

  "I guess it could be owned by about anybody," Leaphorn said. "It's part of Checkerboard. Partly land reserved for the Navajo tribe that could be leased out. And some of it was granted to the railroad and then sold off into various ownerships. Part of it is Bureau of Land Management property, and that's probably leased for ranching. Maybe a little of it might be U.S. Forest Service, but I doubt that."

  "You know," said Bernie, "I think Professor Bourbonette is asking a good question."

  "Yes," said Leaphorn. "It might tell us something."

  "I'll find out," Louisa said.

  Leaphorn chuckled. "Louisa used to be a real estate operator. For a little while when she was in school," he said.

  Louisa's expression suggested she did not like the tone of that. "When I was a student, and a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and an assistant professor," she said. "Doing what you do to make a halfway decent living in the academic world. I was in charge of checking titles, looking into credit, and some price estimating. So, yes, I know how to find out who owns property."

  "Great," Chee said. "It wouldn't hurt to know that."

  "Another question I want to bring up. See if you have any suggestions," said Leaphorn, who was eager to change the subject.

  "Mrs. McKay said her husband told her he had what he called'some just-in-case backup insurance,' in case Denton was intending to cheat him. Anyone have any ideas about that?"

  They discussed that while they drank their coffee. But no one came up with anything that seemed plausible to Leaphorn.

  "And finally, how about this one. How did whoever killed Doherty get home again? I doubt if old Hostiin Peshlakai could have walked all the way from the Arizona border back to his hogan. And I doubt if Wiley Denton was much of a walker. If you agree with that, who was the accomplice and how did it work?" He gazed at Chee. "If Agent Osborne is about to make Peshlakai the official suspect, how did he solve that puzzle?"

  Chee laughed. "I've been wondering about that myself. If the Feds have an answer, they haven't told me."

  "Hostiin Peshlakai had a cellphone," Bernie said.

  "What!" said Chee. "How do you know?"

  "It was in a boot box on a shelf with some of his ceremonial things," Bernie said.

  Chee looked abashed, shook his head. "I noticed that box," he said. "His pollen containers, his medicine bundle, other things. But I guess I didn't really look at it."

  "Well," said Leaphorn, "that might solve the riddle for Peshlakai. Maybe he walked a mile or two from the truck and then called a friend to come and pick him up." He thought about that idea. "Or something like that."

  "But I wonder how many of Peshlakai's friends have telephones," Bernie said.

  "If you turn it around, Denton uses his cell phone to call George Billie, that man who works for him," Chee said.

  "Or," said Leaphorn, and laughed, "maybe Denton uses it to call Peshlakai to set everything up. How about that for linking your two homicides?"

  "That would work fine," said Bernie. "Then all you'd need to go with that is a motive that fits both a superrich white oil-lease magnate and a dirt-poor Navajo shaman."

  Chapter Twenty

  Technically, it was not Sergeant Chee's day off, but he had logged it as off-duty time because he didn't want someone in authority demanding that he explain what he'd done with it. He had intended to use it to eliminate any doubts he might have of Hostiin Peshlakai's innocence. His instincts as a traditional Navajo told him Peshlakai was not guilty of shooting Thomas Doherty or anyone else. However, his instincts as a policeman were at war with that. He wanted to resolve this problem, and he had thought of a way to do it. His reasoning went like this.

  If Peshlakai was-as Chee was almost certain-a well-schooled and believing Navajo medicine person, then Peshlakai would avoid violence. But if circumstances had driven him to it, if he had killed anyone, he would be beset by guilt, by knowledge that he had violated the rules laid down by various Holy People. Thus, he would seek a cure for the sickness brought on by these broken taboos. Shamans cannot cure themselves.

  The first step, Chee decided, would be to ask Peshlakai himself about it. He called the fbi office in Gallup, asked for Osborne, and asked Osborne if he'd noticed that Peshlakai had a cellphone in his hogan. Osborne had noticed. Had he gotten the number, checked calls Peshlakai had been making? That was being done. Chee asked for the number.

  "You want to call him?" Osborne asked. "About what?"

  "It's a medical question," Chee said. "I want to ask him which curing ceremonial he'd recommend for me. You know, for being involved in this murder case."

  A moment of silence followed as Osborne digested this. "I'm still new here," he said. "Do you have a special treatment for things like that? As if it was a heart attack or something?"

  "I think you could relate it better to psychiatric treatment. The point is that stressful happenings get a person out of harmony with his environment," Chee said, wishing he hadn't gotten into this. He cleared his throat. "For example, if you have-"

  "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 Me
dicine 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 pi¤on 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."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  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?