Spider Woman's Daughter (23 page)

Leaphorn’s eyes stayed closed. Bernie reached for his hand, cool and bony.

Then, when the time was right, Chee began to chant in Navajo, softly at first and then with more energy.

Bernie listened to the old songs. They reminded her of songs she had heard as a girl at the ceremonies for her grandmother, her great-aunt, and, last year, for her mother’s oldest brother. The steady, gentle rhythm, the repetition, the beauty of the Navajo words that related the stories of the Holy People, soothed and transformed her. After a while, her chest felt lighter, her breathing deeper, more regular. Rodriguez moved subtly to the rhythm of Chee’s chanting. The chaplain had closed his eyes, and she saw tears that ran beneath his eyelids, over his cheeks, dropping gently on his shirt. In her own prayers she now included him, all the people at the hospital and their families, all the people in hospitals everywhere, all the ones who were sick, and all the people who loved them. Most of all, she sent her healing thoughts to the lieutenant and to Chee.

She knew he had made whatever changes the
hataalii
he talked to instructed him to make. She also knew Diné who would criticize Chee for praying this way, without the sand paintings, without the other parts of the ceremony as prescribed by the Holy People. But times had changed. How could anyone with an open heart judge him harshly for bringing solace to a much-respected mentor, colleague, dying friend?

When it was finished, the lieutenant seemed more peaceful. His legs had stopped twitching. He lay quietly. Then he opened his eyes. He gazed at Chee, then at Bernie. He raised his right hand off the bed, his thumb and forefinger together, moving them from left to right.

They looked at each other, puzzled. Leaphorn moved his hand again, a subtle circular motion.

Bernie remembered. “Would you like to write something?”

The lieutenant nodded. She took her notebook and a pencil from her backpack. She put the pencil between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand. She opened the book to a blank page and held it steady for him. The lieutenant lifted his bandaged head an inch or two from the pillow, then drew two sharp peaks with a narrow valley between. He let his head drop, and the pencil rolled out of his hand.

They studied the mark.

“Is this a clue to who shot you?” Chee said.

Leaphorn moved his chin up and down ever so slightly.

“We will use this to solve the case,” she said. “Remember? I promised you I’d find out who shot you, and why.”

Leaphorn seemed to nod once more, and his eyelids fell shut.

Rodriguez asked if they would like coffee, a milkshake, something to eat from the cafeteria. Chee shook his head and put his hand lightly on Leaphorn’s shoulder. “I want to sit with him until the sun comes up.”

Chee looked at Bernie. “All those years, I thought this one was judging me, critical of me. I thought I never lived up to his expectations, never was good enough. Now I know that he was meant to be my teacher. I fell short only because of what I expected of myself.” She saw both exhaustion and peace in his eyes.

“I’d like some water,” Bernie said. “I’ll be back in a while.”

She and Rodriguez left together. In the lounge, a gray-haired woman snoozed in a chair with a book on her lap. The rest of the room was empty.

Rodriguez handed her a bottle of water from the little refrigerator and took one himself.

“You can rest here.” He indicated an empty couch with a swoop of his arm. “No one minds if people sleep. I can find a pillow and a blanket for you. Sure you don’t want something to eat?”

“I’m going back to sit with the lieutenant for a while, too. I’m not hungry. Even though I’m tired, I feel better than I have since the lieutenant was shot.”

“Thank your husband for letting me stay,” he said. “That was strong praying.”

“I’ll tell him,” Bernie said.

But first she walked out onto the patio, appreciating the 2:00 a.m. stillness, the clear night sky, the beauty of people like Rodriguez and the hospital staff. Interesting, she thought. The bad thing that happened to the lieutenant had changed her opinion of Santa Fe from a stuck-up rich person’s town to a place with a heart.

She carried the bottle of water back to Leaphorn’s tiny room to share with Chee. He had pulled the chair next to the hospital bed and sat quietly, eyes closed. Leaphorn seemed to be asleep. Fatigue swept over her like soft fog. The nurse had left some pillows on the second chair. She curled up there and closed her eyes.

C
hee awoke, stiff but clearheaded. He watched dawn’s faint, soft pink tinge the sky. He saw Leaphorn lying still except for a slight rise and fall of his chest with his breath. And Bernie, her feet drawn up under her like their visiting cat, her straight, coal-black hair falling over one side of her face, eyes closed. Beautiful. He rose as quietly as he could and left the room.

He noticed new nurses on duty now, told them good morning. He walked through the empty hallways to the lobby and outside into the parking lot to greet the sunrise. It was good to be alive, he thought. Good to be breathing the fresh morning air, watching the wispy clouds grow brilliant against the sky’s blue expanse. The volcanic Jemez Mountains, home to Los Alamos National Laboratory and dozens of archaeological sites, spread broad and tall on the western horizon, their navy blue peaks catching the early light. To the east, a sprinkling of houses as brown as the soil, rolling foothills dotted with native piñon and juniper and, beyond that, the slopes of the Sangre de Cristos.

It was rare that he rose before Bernie. He had never seen her as tired as she had been in the days since the attack on the lieutenant. He doubted that she’d had a full night’s sleep since she witnessed the shooting. Chee thought about the shape Leaphorn had drawn, wondering how it could be a clue. It could be a symbol for something or someone. Maybe he was drawing the valley in between, not the peaks, after all.

And then, for some reason, he remembered Mrs. Benally. Remembered that he had promised to take her to pick up Jackson in exchange for an interview with Leonard Nez. And he had to be at the Window Rock office by noon to meet with Agent Cordova, Captain Largo, and the delegates from the Arizona Highway Patrol who were working the Leaphorn case. If they left now, he and Bernie would have time for a nice breakfast somewhere.

He trotted back to the hospital room to tell her of the plan, thinking of hotcakes and bacon. His stomach growled with anticipation. He expected to find Bernie awake, perhaps absorbed in a book, but she was exactly where he’d left her, asleep in the chair. Leaphorn seemed to be sleeping, too, despite the noise of the machines. Then he noticed Louisa, sitting next to Leaphorn and holding the lieutenant’s hand through the hospital rail.

She noticed Chee, put a finger on her lips, and pointed to the door. She gently placed Leaphorn’s hand on the bed without waking him, and crept out to where Chee stood.

“I didn’t expect to see you,” Chee said.

Louisa hugged him. She was a little taller than Bernie and considerably softer. “I got here as soon as I could,” she said. “Life has been crazy, but I’m here now. Here to stay.”

“Do you know you’re still a suspect in the shooting?”

Louisa nodded. “I finally felt well enough to talk to that FBI guy on the phone yesterday. I told him I’d be at the Santa Fe hospital until Joe left, and that he could find me here if he wanted to talk more and that he could arrest me if he needed to after Joe got better or . . . or left us.” She stopped, and Chee saw her eyes glisten. “I would chop off my right arm before I’d do any harm to Joe. But you know that. They’re checking my alibi.”

Chee saw the exhaustion in her face, the yellow hue to her skin. She looked years older than the last time he’d seen her.

“Why did they have such trouble finding you? They even checked the flights to Houston.”

“I never bothered to legally change my name from when I was married a million years ago. I use my maiden name, Bourebonette, professionally. It’s just when I fly that I have to book tickets as L. A. Tyler so the name matches my driver’s license.”

“L. A. Tyler? That’s pretty Hollywood.”

“Louisa Ann,” she said.

“The feds want to grill you about the message you left on the answering machine and why you disappeared,” Chee said. “You really need to take care of that.”

“I’ll tell them, you, anybody who wants to know, what happened between Joe and me and why I couldn’t get here sooner. That can wait. I want to save my energy for him.”

She paused, glancing back at the hospital bed. “Will you and Bernie be here all day?”

“I have to get back to Window Rock for a big police meeting. Bernie’s on leave because she witnessed the shooting, but we drove out together.”

“You go on, then,” Louisa said. “That’s a long drive. Bernie must be worn out. She didn’t even stir when I came in. When she wakes up, I need to talk to her, to apologize for acting so odd. Then I might go to the lounge for a nap, let Bernie sit with Joe.”

Chee remembered what Bernie had said about how she thought someone ought to be with the lieutenant while he was in the hospital. But he’d miss her company on the drive back to the Four Corners.

Louisa said, “I’ll loan her my car if I need to stay longer than she can. She and I can work that out later when we see how Joe’s doing.” Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “I watched both my parents die. They were lucky enough to die at home. I am here for Joe for the duration. When Bernie wakes up, she can decide what to do. You go on. You’ve got to find out who did this to him. You know better than to argue with a fierce old woman.”

“Tell Bernie I’ll call her,” Chee said.

“I’ll tell her you love her, too. I’m sorry I didn’t tell Joe that more often.”

“Do that for me.”

As he drove out of the hospital parking lot onto St. Michael’s Drive, Chee thought about the way Bernie’s eyes had lit up when she saw the Klah weaving. Instead of stopping for breakfast, he’d get a photo for her with the camera on his phone on his way out of town. He could print it and surprise her with it. She could show it to her mother—even give it to her, if she liked. The detour shouldn’t take long. He’d pick up coffee afterward.

Chee noticed just one vehicle in the AIRC lot, an old red pickup with a faded bumper sticker: “America: Love It or Give It Back.” Rakes, hoes, and shovels poked their heads over the sides of the truck bed. Chee parked next to it, in front of the visitor center. It was early, he realized. The campus wasn’t officially open.

Chee snapped a few photos of flowers, including large bright red peony blossoms that had been buds when he and Bernie had visited before. He photographed the little cemetery the couple who originally owned the property had built for their pets: cats, dogs, even a parrot. Another indication that white people lived in an altered universe. He sent the flowers and a couple of other shots to Bernie with a text:
Guess where I am?
He knew her phone was on mute from last night, so the chirp of an arriving message wouldn’t wake her.

A black garden hose stretched along the flagstones. Chee followed it to find Mark Yazzie offering water to daylilies.

“Yá’át’ééh,” Chee called to him.

“Yá’át’ééh.” Yazzie gave Chee a snaggletoothed grin. “What happened to your uniform? Did you go undercover to arrest me?”

Chee said, “Your luck holds. I’m off duty. I was at the hospital with a friend. I came to get some photos of this place for Bernie. Then I head home.”

“Go ahead. All these flowers look pretty good today.”

“I’d like to get a picture inside the museum, too,” Chee said.

“I can’t help you there. Ask Dr. Davis about that.”

“When will she be here?” Chee asked. “I didn’t see another car.”

“Oh, she parks over at the museum. She’s been putting in a lot of hours getting ready for the new collection.” Mark Yazzie pointed with his lips. “You know how to walk there?”

“One foot in front of the other. Thanks.
Ahééhee’ shínaí
.”

The museum’s front door was locked. Chee walked to the rear of the building and saw Davis’s Lexus in the loading zone. Through the tinted windows, he noticed a stack of boxes and a small navy duffel. The back seats were folded flat.

He found the building’s back door propped open with a rock.

“Dr. Davis? Are you here?”

Inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The only noise was the whirl of what he assumed was the ventilation system. Other than the red
EXIT
signs, illumination came from a single source, a room at the end of the corridor.

Chee headed in that direction, his steps reverberating against the cement floor of the museum’s inner sanctum. Unlike the fancy public area, this was a basic, utilitarian work space, with simple metal shelves for open storage and a few plain tables. The environment reminded him of his brief stint as a hotel desk clerk in Albuquerque during his university days. In contrast to the opulent lobby, the staff offices were tiny windowless spaces furnished with castoffs and crammed with excess equipment.

He turned when he heard the thud of a heavy door close behind him. In the dim light, he could barely see Davis standing in the hallway with a gun in her hand, the muzzle pointed squarely at Chee’s midsection.

19

“H
ey, there. It’s Jim Chee. Don’t shoot. I just came for a photo.”

She angled the muzzle to the floor. “Hi. What a surprise.”

“I guess.”

“I get a little jumpy here alone,” Davis said. “The security guys hate me for disabling the alarm. Even Yazzie tells me to keep the door locked, but that’s a pain when I’m going in and out for a smoke. You, Mr. Handsome, are the first person who has ever come visiting before official working hours.”

“I didn’t mean to bother you. Are you always here this early?”

“Come on down. I’ll show you what I’m doing.” She gave him a smile that made him keenly aware he was a man in the prime of life alone in the building with a dangerously attractive woman.

Chee followed her to a back room with shelves stacked deep with ceramics. Boxes, bubble wrap, and rolls of tape sat on the table.

“I need to move some of these pots from our collection out of here so we’ll have room for the new ones we’ll be receiving from the McManus gift. Some of these old beauties have to go into off-site storage. Out with the old, in with the older.”

“How do you decide which ones to box up? Couldn’t you get somebody else to do this for you?”

“Some of these are similar to the ones included in the gift. It takes an expert like me to know the difference. These are my babies.”

She perched on the edge of the table where she’d been organizing the pots and set her gun down next to her leg. It reminded Chee that his weapon was locked in his truck.

“You know, I’m almost sure you and I have met before,” he said. “With Leaphorn at Chaco Canyon, when you were a researcher.”

“I wondered how long it would take you to put that together,” she said. “Chaco. Place of mystery and magic. These rare beauties are from Chaco, too.” Her perfect lips moved to the hint of a grin. Davis picked up a tall, slender pot painted with vertical lines, perhaps to make it look taller. It reminded Chee of the urn in her office. She wore black cotton gloves. “A masterpiece, isn’t it? Dates to about 1200. Not brought in from an outlier but created in the canyon itself. Among the McManus pots we’ll be getting are a few more of these. So very, very special.”

“I don’t know much about pottery,” he said. “Why the gloves?”

Davis put the pot down and began to wrap it. “They prevent oil from my hands from adhering to the surface. Now, tell me, why are you here? I’d like to think it’s because you knew you’d find me alone.”

“Nothing like that. I was hoping to get a picture of the Klah blanket for Bernie. The gardener told me you’d come in early. I thought you might bend the no-photography rules an inch or two.”

“Where is your wife? Waiting in the truck?”

“She’s at the hospital with Leaphorn.”

“He’s not dead yet?”

Chee let the comment hang, wondering what she’d say next.

“No photos allowed in here, but let me think about it, since you’re so cute.

“You know, each pot tells a story. Even after years of working with them, pieces like this take my breath away.” Davis picked up some bubble wrap and the tape gun and began to create a transparent cocoon for the pot she’d shown him. “Every time I stand here, I think of the women who made these, mothers and daughters, aunts and grandmothers, old and young. The hours they spent digging clay, cleaning it, tempering it, shaping the pots, painting on the slip. Firing them, decorating them. It humbles me to think that my hands touch what those women’s hands made.”

Chee caught a glimpse of silver on her right arm. “I bet a man made your pretty watchband.”

“You’re right about that, but it’s a bracelet.” She put the pot in a box and moved closer to him, close enough that he smelled perfume intermixed with cigarettes. She pulled up her sleeve so he could see the piece. He noticed the way the silver seemed to flow around the procession of open hearts.

“A jeweler in Gallup, a Navajo, made it,” Davis said. “Tsosie. Maybe you know him?”

“I met a guy who sells at Earl’s—you mean Garrison Tsosie?”

“That might be his brother. Notah Tsosie made this. My fiancé asked him to come up with a broader, more masculine one for himself, this for me, and an identical one for Ellie—Eleanor Friedman, used to be Friedman-Bernal. You remember her from those days?”

“What does she look like?”

“Oh, a little shorter than I am. Mousy brown hair.” Davis pushed a strand of her own blond hair behind her ear. “I’m not surprised she didn’t make an impression.”

“I remember her,” Chee said. “She got in some trouble a long time ago, right?”

“She was trouble,” Davis said. “She told some terrible lies about my boyfriend, my Randall. She claimed he falsified his research data. She meddled where she shouldn’t have, creating a situation that would have ended Randall’s career. Ellie had a bad accident at the ruins where she’d gone to spy on him. She moved to Arizona after that. I lost contact with her, but I never forgot what she did either.”

Chee felt cold sweat on the back of his neck. This woman made him uncomfortable. “When we asked you about EFB, you said you hadn’t heard of it. But that was Ellie’s business.”

Davis laughed. “If you remember correctly, I said EFB wasn’t in the AIRC records. It wasn’t, because her startup was older than our files. And she hasn’t applied to do appraisals with us or our donors since she’s set up shop in Santa Fe.”

“I was called out to Chaco Canyon yesterday. A park worker discovered a woman’s body. She seems to have died of a gunshot. The feds think it might have been Ellie.”

“Really?” Chee noticed the way she asked it, her slight change in tone.

“No ID, but she’d been reported missing and the body fits her description,” he said. “The animals had been at her, so it’s hard to say how long she’s been dead.”

“Did she kill herself?”

The question caught him off guard. “We don’t know for sure yet. Why do you ask?”

“She was moody. She had a gun. And she probably had a guilty conscience. I think she was the one who shot Leaphorn.”

“Leaphorn saved her life. Why would she shoot him?”

Davis picked up a grapefruit-size bowl decorated with black lines and angles on a white background. She began to wrap it. “It goes back to the job Leaphorn had working for Collingsworth, checking on the McManus appraisal. Did Bernie talk to you much about that?”

She wrapped the bowl as she talked. “Ellie did the evaluations Leaphorn questioned. She told me she was scared that he’d expose her shady appraisal business.”

“So you talked to her?” Chee swallowed his surprise.

“She called me when she found out the AIRC had acquired the McManus collection. She knew some of those pots were not what the McManuses had assumed they were. She thought Leaphorn would find out.”

“Why would she fake the appraisal?”

Davis chucked. “You’re cute. You don’t understand how evil works.”

“I guess I don’t.”

“Usually, people fake appraisals to get more money,” Davis said. “But Ellie hated the idea of Indian pots going outside the country, and she especially detested the fact that her favorite rare pots from Chaco Canyon would be exiled to some rich guy’s house in Asia. After she’d had a few drinks, she’d get maudlin about it and say idiotic things like ‘The poor Anasazi clay babies, forever refugees.’ So she liberated the ancient pots and sent substitutes to take their places.”

“Where did she get fake pots?”

“They weren’t fake pots.” Davis had one of those disdainful expressions Chee had observed on people who considered themselves smarter than average. “They were exact replicas Ellie made using photos from the appraisal material. She shaped them by hand in her little apartment, so she could honestly say they were created at Chaco Canyon.”

“That’s complicated,” Chee said.

Davis smiled. “Not for Ellie. She’d started making pots in high school, before she became an archaeologist. She’d studied Anasazi technique in grad school. Ellie found a source in the canyon for good clay and ground shards as the temper, to give hers aged authenticity.”

She winked at Chee. “I know you’re thinking destroying those old shards, that’s illegal. It wasn’t as suspect as it sounds. Ellie had a huge collection of broken pieces, authorized for the work she was doing, tracking a certain family of Chaco potters. She only destroyed the ones she didn’t need, and I had already helped her photograph and document them. We could argue the morality of destroying those shards, but Ellie had a greater purpose in mind.”

“And you approved?”

Davis ignored the question. “We used to joke that Ellie was part Anasazi, the way she could copy the old designs, the details. She was a whiz at the painting, too.”

“So she stole the real pots, substituted hers in the McManus collection. The lieutenant figured this out—”

“ ‘Stole’ sounds too harsh. I called it rescue,” Davis said. “The McManus collection set her off because it had rare cylindrical jars. Pots like this one.” Davis held up a jar painted with linked rectangles over a white base. It reminding Chee of one of the sketches he’d seen in the lieutenant’s little notebook.

“Making the substitutions hadn’t occurred to Ellie before she encountered these and fell in love with them,” Davis said. “But the good-girl part of her got nervous about the values, so she lowered them in the appraisal to what the pots she made would have been worth. The McManuses had so many items, they never noticed. Or if they did, they were glad to pay lower insurance. Ellie thought everything was fine until Leaphorn started nosing around.”

“And that’s why she tried to kill him,” Chee said. “Do I have that straight?”

“Kill him, then kill herself. The world of Native American art appraisers is a small, closed circle. Word gets out that her evaluations can’t be trusted, and it’s over. The problems with that old job would have ruined her future. She was done either way.”

Chee thought about it. “Ellie probably did the same with other appraisals, too. Why didn’t she just take the proceeds from selling the stuff and disappear, move to an island somewhere? Why come back here?”

Davis put the wrapped cylinder in a box. “She kept the pots, never sold any of them. After the McManus collection, she never agreed to another job that involved Indian art if it was being sold outside the United States. She said the intrigue made her too nervous.”

“So the McManus pots were the only ones she switched? You believe that?”

Davis smiled. “I hated her for the lies she told about my Randall. But she didn’t lie about that.”

Chee took a breath. “So Ellie has a secret stash of rare pots, and she shoots the man who saved her life to preserve her business reputation?”

“You got it.”

“Why didn’t she just talk to Leaphorn, explain what happened? If she still had the pots—”

“Actually, she made an appointment to have lunch with him. Then she got cold feet.”

“You know a lot about this,” Chee said.

“We used to be friends.”

Chee nodded. “The FBI will need to talk to you.”

Davis looked surprised. “You take care of it. You’re a cop. You do your job.”

Chee shook his head. “I’m not convinced that a few old pots gave her enough motive to try to kill a good man who had saved her life.”

Davis stared at him. “You don’t understand a thing. That Leaphorn is pure evil. He left my Randall on that mesa. Left his body for the coyotes.”

“You’re wrong about Leaphorn,” Chee said. And you’re wrong about Ellie, he thought. “I should let you focus on your work. I’ve got to get back to Bernie. We have a long drive home.”

“Which way do you go?”

“Through Cuba.”

“Cuba? Someone was recommending a restaurant to me there. El Bruno’s? Ever heard of it?” Davis asked.

“It’s on the main street, down from a rent-a-garage place, commercial storage units.”

“Storage units? I didn’t know Cuba had a business like that.”

“It’s been there as long as I can remember,” Chee said. “They’ve got a big yard for RVs and camping trailers there because it’s not that far from Chaco.”

Davis picked up another bowl. “I’ll have to let you out. The back door locked when I closed it. Give me a minute to finish these last pots. You mentioned a photo of the Klah tapestry? You know where the rug room is. Go get your picture. Enjoy it. I’ll find you there.”

As soon as he reached the hallway, Chee took out his phone. No signal, probably because of the building. He texted Cordova:
asap re Leaphorn
. He quietly tried the back door. Locked, as Davis had said.

He found the rug room unlocked, and the light came on automatically when he entered. He closed the door behind him and tried his cell again, same result.

He looked at the Klah rug, took some photos for Bernie, a long view and then close-ups of the various design elements. He told himself to enjoy the moment. If Davis tried anything, he could overpower her, keep her there until Cordova sent backup.

When he tried to open the rug room door, the handle wouldn’t budge, and he recalled Marjorie punching a code into the keypad next to it. He unsuccessfully entered the most common combinations of numbers, then several variations.

Through the window he saw her approach, pushing a dolly. In one smooth move she opened the door, stationed the dolly to block his exit, and pointed a weapon at him.