Coyote Waits (15 page)

They say there were Hosteen Joseph and Delbito Willie and the young men from the Yucca Fruit People still on their way home then, and they were camped out for the night somewhere between Rol Hai Rock and Littlewater Wash. They say Delbito Willie had gone out to get some firewood because they were cooking two rabbits they had shot. He saw dust over to the northeast. They put out their fire and watched. These two men were riding toward Beautiful Mountain, leading a mule. It is said that these were white men. They saw where Delbito Willie had left the Ute ponies, on their hobbles down below the cliffs of that place. These two white men, they scouted all around, looking for the people who owned those ponies, but they never did see Delbito Willie or the Yucca Fruit People with him. So they started to steal the horses. They were cutting the hobbles when Hosteen Joseph shot one of them, and the two men got back on their horses and rode away. Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit men were chasing them. They were shooting at them and the two men were shooting and one of them, the white man with the yellow mustaches they say it was, he shot Hosteen Joseph. The bullet hit Old Man Joseph in the chest, right below the nipple they say, and it killed him.
After that they chased the two white men. They almost got away once, but the one Hosteen Joseph had shot fell off his horse and the other one had to stop and help him back on. After that they say Delbito Willie shot the other man, but didn’t kill him. And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there is lava flow. Where it’s dangerous to ride a horse even in the daylight. The Yucca Fruit men followed slowly, keeping way back where they wouldn’t get shot because that man with the yellow mustaches, they said he was a good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had left their horses and went up into the rocks.

Chee skipped rapidly through the rest of it. The next morning, one of the white men had tried to come out and one of the Yucca Fruit boys shot him again — they thought in the arm this time — and he went back up into the rocks. The Navajos had waited all that day, and the next. They drank up their own water, and the water canteens the white men had left on their horses, and finally — on the morning of the fourth day — Delbito Willie had climbed up into the rocks. He followed the bloody spots back into the formation until he could see the bodies of the two men. Then the group had taken the horses and returned to their place on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. An Enemy Way was held for all of them because of their contamination with the Utes and the white men.

Chee lingered over the section in which Ashie Pinto had described the ceremonial curing — an Enemy Way and a section of the Ghostway done, apparently, for Delbito Willie alone. It stirred his memory of an Enemy Way he’d attended as a child. The cure had been conducted by a
hataalii
who had been very tall and had seemed to him then to be incredibly ancient. The patient had been Chee’s paternal grandmother, a woman he had loved with the intensity of a lonely child, and the event had formed one of his earliest really vivid memories. The cold wind, the starlight, the perfume of the piñon and juniper burning in the great fires that illuminated the dance ground. Even now, he could see it all and the remembered aroma overpowered the mustiness of this office. Most of all, he remembered the
hataalii
standing gray and thin and tall over his grandmother, holding a tortoiseshell rattle and a prayer plume of eagle feathers, chanting the poetry from the emergence story, making Old Lady Many Mules one with White Shell Girl, restoring her to beauty and harmony.

And restore her it had. Chee remembered staying at the old woman’s place, playing with his cousins and their sheepdogs, seeing his grandmother happy again, hearing her laughter. She had died, of course. The disease was lung cancer, or perhaps tuberculosis, and people with such diseases died — as all people do. But it had been that cure that had caused him to think that he would learn the great curing ways, the songs and the sand paintings, and become a
hataalii
for his people. Unfortunately, his people showed no sign of wanting him as one of their shamans. He must have laughed because Jacobs asked, “Something funny? You find something interesting?”

“Just thinking,” Chee said.

“About what?” Jacobs said. “You’re not supposed to be holding out on me.”

“I was reading what Ashie Pinto told Tagert about these Navajo horse thieves,” Chee said. “They had a curing ceremonial for them when they got home and I was remembering my own boyish dreams about becoming a medicine man.”

Jacobs was looking at him, eyes curious. Or perhaps sympathetic. Perhaps both. Their eyes held. Chee made a wry mouth. Jacobs looked down.

“Anything in there that helps get Tagert home so I can quit doing all his work?” she asked.

Chee shrugged. “No,” he said. “Or if there is, I don’t understand it.”

But he was thinking about the Ghostway. He didn’t know it. Frank Sam Nakai, who was a respected
hataalii
and Chee’s maternal uncle and mentor in all things metaphysical, didn’t know it either. Why would part of it have been done for Delbito Willie and for no one else on the raiding party? And why had Ashie Pinto, with his Navajo storyteller’s predilection for telling everything in exhaustive detail, skipped so quickly over this?

Maybe Pinto would tell him that, even if he would tell him nothing else.

AS WAS HIS fashion (except when it violated his sense of order), Leaphorn went through channels. The former Vietnamese colonel named Huan Ji lived in Ship Rock, which was in the jurisdiction of the Ship Rock subagency of the Navajo Tribal Police. Leaphorn dialed the Ship Rock Tribal Police office and asked for Captain Largo.

“I’ve heard of him,” Largo said. “He teaches at the Ship Rock High School. Math, I think it is, or maybe one of the sciences. But we never had any business with him. What’s he up to?”

Leaphorn told him about the conversation with Kennedy.

“I remember now,” Largo said. “It was his car Jim Chee met when he was going to the Nez killing. The Bureau had us run it down for them. What’d he tell them?”

“They didn’t talk to him,” Leaphorn said.

“They didn’t?” Largo said, surprised. Then, “Oh, yeah.” He laughed — which with Largo was a deep, rumbling sound. “From what I hear he’s sort of an untouchable. Supposed to have worked for the CIA in Nam.”

“I think somebody ought to talk to the man,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’ll come and do it.”

“You want me to save you the drive?”

“No use you pissing off the Bureau,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll do it.”

“That sounds like you’re still thinking of retiring,” Largo said, and laughed again.

“One of these days. Anyway, I’m at the point where if a yelling match started with the feds, anybody who decided to fire me would have to move fast.”

Largo didn’t comment on that. He said, “Let me know when you’re coming, and if you need any help. Right now, I’ll just look that address up for you.”

“I’ll probably come this afternoon,” Leaphorn said. “Just as soon as I get my paperwork done.”

But just as he was moving the penultimate report from in-basket to out-basket, the telephone rang.

“A woman down here to see you,” the desk clerk said. “A Professor Bourebonette.”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said. He thought a moment. “Ask her to come on up.”

He put down the telephone, pulled the ultimate report out of the basket, opened it on his desk, and then stared out the window at the sun and shadows on Window Rock Ridge. A question of motive again. What brought the professor here? A long drive from Flagstaff. Either she had risen in the predawn darkness or she had spent the night somewhere. At the Window Rock motel perhaps, or at Gallup. A strong motive. Friendship, she said. Friendship might well be part of it. But what else?

As she came through his door, Professor Bourebonette’s words were apologetic. But her expression wasn’t.

“I realize we’re imposing on your time. Hosteen Pinto isn’t your responsibility. But I wondered if you could bring me up to date. Have you learned anything?”

Leaphorn was standing. “Please,” he said, motioning her to a chair. He sat, too, closed the waiting folder. “I haven’t learned anything very useful.”

“What did Professor Tagert say? I called his office and they told me he wasn’t in. They didn’t know when to expect him. That seems awfully odd. Their semester started two or three weeks ago. He’d have to be keeping office hours.”

“Dr. Tagert seems to have jumped ship,” Leaphorn said. “I got the same information you did.”

“He’s missing?” Dr. Bourebonette sounded incredulous. “Are the police looking for him?”

This was something that always had to be explained. Leaphorn did it, patiently.

“It doesn’t work that way with adults. You have a right to be missing if you want to be. It’s nobody’s business but your own. The police ‘look’ only if there’s some crime involved. Or some reason to suspect foul play.”

Professor Bourebonette was frowning at him. “There’s certainly a crime involved here. And isn’t he what you call a material witness?”

“He might be,” Leaphorn said. “If he is, nobody knows it. The crime is the Nez homicide. There’s nothing to connect him to that. Absolutely nothing.”

Bourebonette absorbed this statement, her eyes on Leaphorn but her thoughts, obviously, on something else. She nodded, agreeing with some inner notion. Leaphorn considered her. What was she thinking? It would be something intelligent, he was sure of that. He wished the thought, whatever it was, would provoke some remark that would give him a clue to what she was doing here.

“Have you considered that Tagert might be dead?” she asked. “Have you considered that whoever killed your officer also killed Tagert? Have you thought of that?”

Leaphorn nodded. “I have.”

Bourebonette was silent again, thinking. Long silences didn’t seem to bother her. Unusual in a white. From downstairs Leaphorn could hear a telephone ringing. He smelled coffee brewing. Professor Bourebonette was wearing a cologne of some sort. The aroma was very, very faint. So faint it might be his imagination.

“The trial should be postponed,” Bourebonette said suddenly. “Until they can find Professor Tagert.” She stared at Leaphorn, her eyes demanding. “How can we arrange that? Surely they can’t try Mr. Pinto without knowing what’s going on. Nobody knows what actually happened out there.”

Leaphorn shrugged. But the shrug wasn’t good enough.

“I think we have a right to expect some sort of effort toward simple justice,” Bourebonette said. Her voice sounded stiff. “Mr. Pinto has a right to demand that.”

“I’ll admit I would have liked a little solider investigation,” Leaphorn said. “But it’s not my responsibility. It’s a federal case and the federals have all they need to convince a jury beyond any reasonable doubt. The game is played a little—”

“Game!”

Leaphorn interrupted the interruption with an upraised palm. He, too, could be aggressive. “—a little differently when the defendant does not deny the crime,” he continued. “In the first place, that reduces any worry that you have that you might have arrested the wrong person. In the second place, it leaves you without the defendant’s story to check. So there’s much less the arresting agency can do, even when it has the very best of intentions.”

Bourebonette was studying him. “And you think they’ve done all that’s necessary?”

He hesitated. “Well,” he said, “I would want to talk to Tagert, and there’s another loose end or two.”

“Like what? Lack of a motive?”

Leaphorn closed his eyes. Memory has no temporal limits. When he opened them again two seconds later memory had shown him a score of bloody scenes.

“Whiskey is the perfect motive,” he said.

“Then what?”

He wanted to turn the question around, to ask this woman to tell him why this drunken shooting was worth so much of her time. It was probably the book. Friendship and the book. She needed Pinto free to finish it. But maybe there was something deeper. If he asked her, she would simply repeat that Pinto was innocent, that Pinto was a friend.

“Well, Officer Chee met a car when he was driving toward the crime scene. This car might have driven past the scene. Perhaps not, but most likely it did. Maybe the driver saw something. Probably not, but I would have found him and asked.”

“Of course,” Bourebonette said. “You mean nobody did.”

“I hear they didn’t.”

“But why not?”

“Why not? Because they had their case. Smoking gun. Motive. No denial. They have other work to do, stacked on their desks.” He made an illustrative gesture at his own desk. Except for the single folder it was uncharacteristically, point-defeatingly clean.

“Too much trouble running him down. Too much trouble finding the car. When an old man is being tried for murder.” Her voice was bitter.

“We found the car,” Leaphorn said. “It belongs to a schoolteacher at Ship Rock. I’m going to talk to him today.”

“I’ll go with you,” Bourebonette said.

“I’m afraid that—” Then he stopped. Why not? No damage to be done. It wasn’t his case anyway. If the Bureau got mad, it would get no madder because this woman was along. And he wanted to know what she was after. This business was interesting him more and more.

They took the road that wanders over Washington Pass via Red Lake, Crystal, and Sheep Springs. Winding down the east slope of the Chuskas, Leaphorn stopped at an overlook. He pointed east and swept his hand northward, encompassing an immensity of rolling tan and gray grasslands. Zuni Mountains to the south, Jemez Mountains to the east, and far to the north the snowy San Juans in Colorado.

“
Dinetah
,” he said. She would know the meaning of the word. “Among the People.” The heartland of the Navajos. The place of their mythology, the Holy Land of the Dinee. How would she react?

Professor Bourebonette said nothing at all for a moment. Then: “I won a bet with myself,” she said. “Or part of a bet. I bet you would stop here and enjoy the view. And I bet you’d say something about naming this pass after Washington.”