Coyote Waits (26 page)

“What’s going on?” Chee asked.

“I don’t know,” the bailiff said. “I think the old man’s going to change his plea, or something. But he demanded that the jury be in here to hear it. He wants to make a statement.”

“Change his plea?” Chee said, incredulous. “You mean plead guilty?”

“I don’t know,” the bailiff said, giving Chee a “you dumb bastard” look. “She has him pleaded not guilty, so if he changes it, I guess that’s what you’d get.”

“Look,” Chee said. “Those notes are important, then. They have to get that information right away.”

The bailiff looked skeptical. “All right,” he said, and waddled down the aisle.

Chee moved inside, found a back-row seat, and watched.

Hosteen Ashie Pinto, was sitting, too. Waiting. He noticed Chee, looked at him, nodded. The conference at the bench ended. Janet sat next to Pinto, whispering something to him. Pinto shook his head. Judge Downey tapped tentatively with her gavel, looking out of sorts with it all. The bailiff waited patiently for the proper opportunity to deliver his messages.

“The record will show the defendant wishes to change his plea,” Judge Downey said. “Let the record show the defendant, after consultation with counsel, requested that the jury be brought in. The record will show defendant wishes to make a statement to the court.”

Janet Pete motioned to Ashie Pinto. He stood, looked around him, wiped his hand across his lips.

“I am an old man, and ashamed,” Hosteen Pinto began. His voice was surprisingly strong. “I want everybody to know, all of you to know, how it was that I killed that policeman. And how it was—”

Pinto’s interpreter signaled him to stop. He stood, looking surprised and uncomfortable, and converted Pinto’s confession into English, and nodded to Pinto when he was finished and said: “Go on now.”

Chee sat stunned. Did the old man kill Nez? Not Redd? He’d presumed Redd was lying. He’d presumed —

“And how it was when I was a young man,” Pinto continued, “I killed a man in my father’s clan at a sing-dance out at Crooked Ridge. Every time it was the same thing. Every time it was whiskey.” There are several words in Navajo for whiskey in its various forms. Pinto used the one that translates to “water of darkness.” Then he stopped, stood, head slightly bowed, while the interpreter translated.

Chee was watching Janet Pete. She looked sad, but not surprised. Pinto must have finally confided in her. He had wanted to do this and she had arranged it. When?

Pinto was talking again, to a silent, intent audience.

“. . . When they came out of the rocks there, Mr. Redd and the man I would kill, that man had a pistol in his hand. He was pointing that pistol at Mr. Redd. Now that man with the pistol was the man who gave me the whiskey. He gave it to me some other times. Before, when I worked for him. He knew how it was for me. This whiskey. He knew that when I drank it I would do wrong things. I would tell him what I didn’t want to tell him. He knew it made my tongue loose and he knew that when it was in me it took over my mind. It made the wind that blows inside me blow as dark as night.”

The interpreter was tugging at Pinto’s sleeve.

“Going too fast,” he said, and Pinto stopped.

Pinto had gone too fast. The interpreter missed a little of it, cut some corners.

Pinto told them Redd was a good young man, that Redd had signaled him to get the man’s pistol, and when they were all three getting into his car to drive away, he had gotten it.

“So I shot him,” Pinto said. “By the car. Then I shot him again.”

The interpreter translated.

“Then Mr. Redd he carried the body of that man away. I think he didn’t want the police to find it. The man I shot is a very little man and Mr. Redd is big and he carried him back up into the rocks where nobody would find him. And I was waiting there by the car when the policeman came. He was talking to me about painting things. I didn’t know what he was talking about but he acted like he wanted to arrest me so I shot him, too.”

The interpreter translated but Chee didn’t wait to hear it. He still wondered why Pinto had set the car on fire. Maybe the old man would explain that, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Not now. He hurried out the door and down the elevator.

He’d taken a taxi from the airport. This lack of wheels was an oddity he had little experience dealing with. He stopped in the main-floor coffee shop, ordered a cup, and thought about it. He had a headache, which was as unusual as the lack of transportation. Probably the product of lack of sleep last night. Or maybe lack of breakfast. He wasn’t really hungry but he ordered a hamburger.

Redd would be arrested by now, probably. Or dead. If he hadn’t checked into a hospital fast to have that venom dealt with it had probably killed him. Chee considered that. That and the value of three or four hundred thousand dollar’s worth of old stamps. What would Redd have bought with it that he didn’t now have? A better car? A better house? Then he faced the fact that he was thinking of this because he didn’t want to think of the note he’d sent to Janet. To Dendahl, too, for that matter, but to hell with Dendahl.

“Ask for a recess,” he’d told them both. “I don’t think Pinto did it. Redd was there. He killed Colonel Ji. I think he killed Tagert and Nez. I think we can prove all of it.”

Wrong again. Redd had killed Colonel Ji because he thought Ji had seen too much. Ji would find the bodies, and the stamps.

Wrong about it all. Looking foolish. Feeling foolish.

He ate his hamburger slowly, thinking of Janet hugging him in the elevator. Was that before or after Pinto had told her? Something about his memory of the moment made him think it was after. That she already knew Pinto was guilty. But why, then, the hug? Quite a hug it was, with her pressing against him like that. The hug was about the only bright spot of this whole business.

Then Janet came hurrying up.

“I saw you in here,” she said, and sat beside him in the booth. “How much of that did you hear before you left?”

“Up to where he said he shot Delbert,” Chee said. “I left then. Did I miss anything?”

“You missed part of Mr. Pinto’s speech about whiskey. How it destroys everything it touches. He asked the jury to have all whiskey everywhere poured out on the ground. That’s what he was waiting for. Why he wouldn’t say anything before. He remembered the time he was tried before, and sent to prison. He thought that this would be the time to warn the world about whiskey.”

“Good as any, I guess,” Chee said. “Anyway, it’s just about what you’d expect from a nutty old Navajo shaman. The spoken word has great power, you know.” He sounded bitter.

She was grinning at him. “Don’t be sarcastic. It does have power. Did you notice the press was here? He wasn’t so nutty.”

The grin disappeared. “I got your note. I want to hear all about that. About Odell Redd.”

“All right,” Chee said. “You want something to eat?”

“Maybe some coffee.” She signaled the waitress. “How did you figure Redd out?”

“You mean about him shooting Delbert Nez? How did I get that wrong, too?”

She noticed his tone. She was serious now.

“You didn’t get it wrong. You arrested Ashie Pinto. Hurt as you were, you arrested him. It was me. I thought he didn’t do it.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Okay.”

“I was wrong about something else, too,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like about you,” she said. “You made me think for a while that all you cared about was proving you were right.”

“What do you mean?” Chee asked.

“Oh, forget it,” she said. And to his amazement Janet Pete hugged him again, even harder this time.

LEAPHORN HAD SPENT all morning in his office. By a little after ten, he’d leaned back in his chair and spent a long moment just enjoying the scene — his in-basket was empty, his out-basket full but neat, the surface of the desk bare. Wood visible. Nothing cluttering the blotter except a ballpoint pen.

He picked up the pen, dropped it in the top drawer, and looked at the desk again. Even better.

Then he worked through the Nez homicide again. He fished the Gallup
Independent
out of the wastebasket where it had landed in this paroxysm of housecleaning. He reread the story of Ashie Pinto’s confession and his indictment of alcohol. Leaphorn agreed with every word of it. Death in a bottle, Pinto had called it. Exactly. Death, sorrow, and misery. The story said Judge Downey had delayed his sentencing pending a medical and psychiatric examination of Pinto. The worst the law allowed under the circumstances would be life in prison. Downey would probably give him something less. But it wouldn’t matter, life or ten years. The story said he was “about eighty.”

Satisfaction from the clean desk waned. Leaphorn considered Officer Jim Chee. A screwup, but an interesting young man. Intelligent, the way he had made the connections to tie everything in. But he’d never make a good administrator. Never. Nor a team player, and law enforcement often required that. Maybe he would work better in criminal investigations. Like Leaphorn. He smiled at the thought. Where screwing up didn’t matter much if you had a creative thought now and then. He would talk to Captain Largo about it. Largo knew Chee better than he did.

He considered everything about the affair of Delbert Nez. .

His mother would have said Coyote was waiting for Nez. Bad luck. For that matter for Redd as well. All he seemed to have wanted was some decent pay for his skills as a linguist. And he ended his game killing the wrong person for the wrong reason. Anyway, Coyote ate Redd. They’d found the old Bronco in a ditch and got him to the hospital, another Dead on Arrival.

He turned to his map and pulled out the few pins this business had inspired. They hadn’t helped much this time.

Even a pin for Professor Bourebonette. The question of her motive. He smiled to himself, thinking of that. Emma had always accused him of being too cynical. She was right this time, as she often was. He had checked on Bourebonette. He’d called an old friend in the anthropology department at Arizona State. Did he know someone at Northern Arizona who would know Bourebonette, the mythologist in American Studies there? Could this person determine how she was coming on her new book? She could. The manuscript was off to the publishers. It should be out early next year. So much for that. He would get a copy. He’d like to read it.

They’d talked of mythology on their way back from Short Mountain Trading Post that night. She had talked a little, and slept a bit, and when she awoke she was full of conversation. She’d questioned him about his own knowledge of Navajo myth and where he had learned it. And then they had covered the nature of imagination. How the human intelligence works. The difference between mind and brain. It had been a pleasant ride. She had talked, too, of the time she’d spent in Cambodia and Thailand collecting animism myths and working with the shamans who select the exact place where the bones of one’s crucial ancestor must be kept to ensure good family fortune.

From his window, Leaphorn could see four cattle semitrailers in a convoy rolling to a stop at the tribal barns across Navajo Route 3. That would be rodeo livestock for the Tribal Fair. He made a face. The fair was an annual problem for every cop on the Reservation. Then, too, it meant winter was coming. This year he dreaded winter.

He would go to lunch. Alone. He picked up his cap, put it on. Took it off again. Picked up the telephone. Dialed information.

She answered the telephone on the second ring.

“Hello.”

“This is Joe Leaphorn,” he said. “How are you?”

“Very well,” she said. “Are you here in Flag?”

“Window Rock,” he said. “My office.”

“Oh? By the way, I found out you did some checking up on me. About my book.”

“I was skeptical about your motives,” Leaphorn said. “It’s one of my flaws. Cynicism. Emma used to fuss at me about it.”

“Well, I guess that’s reasonable. For a policeman.”

“Professor Bourebonette, I think I’m going to China,” Leaphorn said. “Would you like to go along?”

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

FICTION
The Wailing Wind
Hunting Badger
The First Eagle
The Fallen Man
Finding Moon
Sacred Clowns
Coyote Waits
Talking God
A Thief of Time
Skinwalkers
The Ghostway
The Dark Wind
People of Darkness
Listening Woman
Dance Hall of the Dead
The Fly on the Wall
The Blessing Way
The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (for children)

NONFICTION
Seldom Disappointed
Hillerman Country
The Great Taos Bank Robbery
Rio Grande
New Mexico
The Spell of New Mexico
Indian Country

Cover illustration by Peter Thorpe