Coyote Waits (12 page)

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, and — like I said — he 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.”

JOE LEAPHORN — A practical man — handled 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 and — if Jacobs knew what she was talking about — no 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 often — a 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 problems — Tagert and Chee — and 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, order — something 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 heads — yellow 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 triangle — two 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 memory — an 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.

While he waited for it, he shuffled through the folders Bolack Travel had sent him on China. One concerned a tour sponsored by the Audubon Society, which would focus on visits to bird sanctuaries. He reread parts of that. Emma had been an amateur bird watcher — keeping three feeders stocked in their backyard. The others on the trip would be interesting people, probably. But he would have nothing to talk to them about. Nothing in common. Another tour simply involved visits to cities. That left him cold. His best alternative seemed to be going alone. He would see if any of his old professors were left on the anthropology faculty at Arizona State. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. If not, maybe someone else there would help him. He’d explain he was an alum, with their master of science in anthropology degree from way back when, and he wanted to go into Asia and see if he could find any roots to his Athabaskan origins. He’d wanted to do that for years, ever since he’d become conscious as an anthropology student that his forebears had probably emerged from Mongolia. It had faded into the subconscious after he’d met Emma and married her. Emma was no traveler. Three days in Albuquerque made her vaguely uneasy, yearning for home. Three days in New York made her miserable. She would have gone with him without a murmur. But taking her would have been cruel.

When the Nez folder arrived, he was examining a picture of a Shanghai street scene, seeing himself there amid the stampede of bicycles. It depressed him.

He spent almost an hour rereading the file and jotting reminders in the slim notebook he always carried in his uniform pocket.

Chee met car. Was it the schoolteacher’s? What did he see?
Expensive whiskey? How? Where bought?
Pistol. Where did he get it?
Two fifty-dollar bills? McGinnis said he was broke.
Did Pinto have his
jish
with him? Where is it?

Then he called the FBI office at Gallup, got Jay Kennedy, and invited him to lunch.

“What do you want this time?” Kennedy asked.

“Wait a minute,” Leaphorn said. “Remember. Last time somebody wanted something it was you. You wanted me to check a homicide scene for tracks.”

“Which you didn’t find,” Kennedy said.

“Because there weren’t any,” Leaphorn said. “Besides, I’ll buy.”

“I’ll have to cancel something,” Kennedy said. “Is it important?”

Leaphorn considered. And reconsidered.

“Well?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. He considered again. “Probably not.”

He heard Kennedy sigh. “So what are we talking about? Just in case I need to look something up. Or dig into something so confidential that it might cost me my job.”

“Delbert Nez,” Leaphorn said.

“Oh, shit,” Kennedy said. “Naturally.”

“Why?”

“It was a sloppy job,” Kennedy said. “Even worse than usual.”

They met at the International Pancake House on old U.S. 66 and sat a while sipping coffee. The autumn sun warmed Leaphorn’s shoulders through his uniform jacket and the traffic streamed by off Interstate 40. He noticed how gray Kennedy had become, how — uncharacteristic of FBI agents and of Kennedy himself — he needed a haircut. Old cops, Leaphorn thought. Two old dogs getting tired of watching the sheep. Old friends. How rare they are. The Bureau would be glad to see the last of Kennedy — exiled here years ago for some violation of the old J. Edgar Hoover prohibition against bad publicity, liberalism, or innovative thinking. The story was that Kennedy’s ex-wife had been active in the American Civil Liberties Union. She had left him to marry a real estate broker, but the stigma remained.

For that matter, Leaphorn suspected there were those in his Navajo Tribal Police hierarchy who would be happy to celebrate his own retirement. He wouldn’t make them wait much longer.

Kennedy had been talking about one of those endless interagency shoving matches which involve public employees — this one an effort of the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and “The Bureau” to make one or another of them responsible for protecting Anasazi ruins under the Antiquities Act. Leaphorn had heard a lot of it before.

Kennedy quit talking. “I’m not holding your attention,” he said.

“You ever been to China?” Leaphorn asked.

Kennedy laughed. “Not yet,” he said. “If the Bureau opens an office there — say in North Manchuria — I’ll get the assignment.”

“Think you’d like to go?”

Kennedy laughed again. “It’s on my wish list,” he said. “Right after Angola, Antarctica, Bangladesh, Lubbock, Texas, and the Australian outback. Why? Are you planning to go?”

“I guess not,” Leaphorn said. “Always sort of wanted to. Wanted to go out in the steppe country. Outer Mongolia. The part of the world where they think the Athabaskans originated.”

“I used to want to go back to Ireland,” Kennedy said. “Where my great-grandfather came from. I outgrew that notion.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Do you know if anybody checked on that pistol Pinto used?”

“Somebody checked,” Kennedy said. “It was a common type, but I don’t remember the brand. American made, I think it was, and an expensive model. It had been recently fired. The slug in Nez came from it. Check of Pinto’s hand showed he’d recently fired something.”

“Where did it come from?”

“No idea,” Kennedy said. “The old man isn’t saying. Totally silent from what I hear. I guess he bought it at some pawnshop.”

“I don’t think so,” Leaphorn said.

Kennedy peered at him, expression quizzical. “You’ve been asking around,” he said. “Any reason for that?”

Leaphorn made a wry face. “Turns out Ashie Pinto is sort of shirttail, linked-clan kinfolks of mine,” he said. “Through Emma’s clan.”

“You know him?”

“Never heard of him.”

“But you got roped in.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t think he bought the pistol because he was broke. Not even eating money. What do you know about those two fifties he had?”

“Nothing.”

“Where did Pinto get his hands on them?”

“No idea.” Kennedy looked irritated. “How would we know something like that?”

“Did anybody check on the driver of the car Chee met going to the fire?”

Kennedy shook his head. “I told you it was a sloppy job. But damn it, Joe, why would they check on that? Look what you had there. No big mystery. A drunk gets arrested and kills the policeman. Doesn’t even deny it. What’s to investigate? I know you think we loaf around a lot, but we do have things to do.”

“Did Pinto have his
jish
with him? You know where that is?”

“
Jish
?” Kennedy said. “His medicine bundle? I don’t know.”

“He was a shaman. A crystal gazer. If he was on a job, he’d have his crystals with him, and his
jish
.”

“I’ll find out,” Kennedy said. “Probably he wasn’t working. Left it home.”

“We didn’t find it at his place.”

Kennedy looked at him. “You been out to his place, then.”

The waitress delivered the waffles, which smelled delicious. Leaphorn applied butter, poured on syrup. He was hungry and he hadn’t been hungry much lately. This Ashie Pinto business must be good for him.

Kennedy had hardly looked at his waffle. He was still looking at Leaphorn.

“We?” he said. “You been out searching Pinto’s hogan? Who’s we?”

“Pinto’s niece,” Leaphorn said. And a woman named Bourebonette. A professor at Northern Arizona University. You guys turn up anything about her?”

“Bourebonette? No. Why would we? How would she fit into this?”

“That’s what bothers me,” Leaphorn said. “She says Pinto was one of her sources for myths, legends, so forth. That’s her field. Mythology. She says she’s into it because he’s a friend. Just that.”

Kennedy peered at him. “You sound like you have trouble believing that.”

Leaphorn shrugged. “Sophisticated, urbane university professor. Old illiterate Navajo. And she’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“You’re getting even worse with age,” Kennedy said. “Emma used to make you a little more human.” He buttered his waffle. “Okay, then. What do you think motivates the woman?”

Leaphorn shrugged again. “Maybe she’s working on a book. Needs more out of him to finish it off.”

“She could get to him in prison. They’re not going to put somebody like that in solitary. Not even for killing a policeman.”