Coyote Waits (10 page)

The reading room of the Reserve Section of the University of New Mexico Library was almost empty. The row of tables was vacant except for him and a skinny, middle-aged man working his way methodically through boxes that seemed to be filled with old postcards and letters. In the silence, the sound of the tape racing over the reel seemed loud. Chee stopped it sooner than he had intended and listened again.

“. . . way out there north of Ladron Butte. That’s what my grandfather told me. He said that the Utes used to cross the San Juan River upstream from where Montezuma Creek is now, and they’d come down Tsitah Wash. That’s the route they liked to take in those days. They’d ride up the wash and come out there where Red Mesa school is now, and then go east of Tohatin Mesa and try to catch the people who lived around Sweetwater. He said a lot of the Mud Clan People used to grow corn and beans and peaches there in those days, and the Utes would try to kill the men and steal the horses and the women and children. He said in those days when his father was a boy the Mexicans used to pay sometimes a hundred dollars for a Navajo child there in Santa Fe where they sold them. And then when the
biligaana
came in the price got higher and . . .”

Chee took off the headset and pushed the rewind button. He was wasting his time. All he had accomplished by coming here was to confirm what Janet Pete had told him. Ashie Pinto had been discovered long ago by the academic world as a source of what academics treasure. He knew the old tales that contain the history of the Dinee. And he knew the story of how the Holy People had created the humans who were to become the Navajo clans. Wonderful. But what did it have to do with the murder of Delbert Nez?

Chee shifted his weight in the hard chair, stretched his legs and thought about that — reexamining the thinking that had led him here. The question that troubled him most wasn’t motive for murder. He knew the motive. Whiskey.
Todilhil
, the Navajos had named it. Water of Darkness if you translated that word into
biligaana
language. But Navajos sometimes mispronounced it.
Todilhaal
, they’d say. Making it mean “sucking in darkness,” and enjoying the wry irony of the pun. The savagery of whiskey erased the need for a motive. No Navajo policeman — or any policeman — had to relearn that message. Death slept in the bottle, only waiting to be released, and every policeman knew it. The question that nagged at Chee was a different one. What motivated the old man to come halfway across Arizona into New Mexico to an empty place beside a lonely road? There had to be a reason for that. And how the devil did he get there? Pinto made tapes for the scholars. Maybe he had been working for a scholar that day. Maybe a check of scholars who harvested Ashie Pinto’s vast memory would provide a list of names. Leads. Maybe listening to the tapes these harvesters of memory collected would tell him what attracted Pinto to the Ship Rock country. Maybe not. Whatever the truth of that, Chee now had his list of who had made these tapes.

He looked at the notebook.

Professor Christopher Tagert, University of New Mexico, Department of History.

Professor Roger Davenport, University of Utah, Department of Anthropology.

Professor Louisa Bourebonette, Northern Arizona University, Department of American Studies.

Professor Alfonso Villareal, University of New Mexico, Language and Linguistics.

Perhaps there were others. These names simply represented tapes of Pinto’s recollections available in this library. If others existed in any library they could be found, copied, and sent here. The very pleasant woman at the Special Collections desk had assured him of that. Chee decided not to bother. The only thing that seemed even vaguely promising was one of the Tagert tapes. In it, Pinto was remembering what his grandfather had told him about two white men being killed somewhere south of the San Juan and east of the Chuska. Tagert’s cross-examination focused on where the two had come from, when it had happened, and where they had died. Pinto’s answers had seemed vague but Tagert hadn’t pursued it.

Perhaps there was a later tape. He’d look Tagert up in the faculty directory, call him, and ask about it.

He checked in the tapes and the tape player at the desk.

“I noticed you didn’t sign the register,” the woman at the desk told him. “We ask people to do that.” She pointed to the ledger open on the table beside the door.

Chee filled in his name and address, left the space for “academic department” blank, and jotted “Ashie Pinto tapes” in the “material required” space, and then noted the date and the hour checked out and in. The name on the line above was John Todman. He noticed the old pictures Todman was examining were listed as “Golightly mining camp photographs.”

Who else, he wondered, would be interested in Ashie Pinto’s old tapes? Probably no one. He turned the page, scanned it. Turned it again. And again. And again. Six pages back, on a page where the first dates were mid-July, he found the legend “Navajo language tapes — Pinto.”

The person who signed for them was William Redd.

Chee pursed his lips. He turned the page again. William Redd had also required the same tapes the previous day, and the day before, and the day before that. He jotted the name and address in his notebook and glanced at his watch.

It was still early. He would drive past that address and see if an old green Bronco II was parked there, with REDDNEK vanity plates.

JIM CHEE IN Albuquerque was Jim Chee separated from his vehicle — a duck out of water. He had left his pickup at the Farmington airport yesterday, flown Mesa to Albuquerque, and taken a taxi to his motel. This morning he’d called a cab again to get to the University Medical Center for his appointment at the Burn and Trauma Center. His medical insurance would pay for all that. But taxis were expensive and, like all cities of the trans-Mississippi West, Albuquerque had grown on the presumption that humans over fourteen were driving themselves around in their own cars. There was some bus service if you understood how to use it. Chee didn’t, and taxicabs made Chee uneasy.

Now, afoot at the university library, Chee did a typical Western thing. He called a friend to ask for a ride.

“I’m supposed to be working,” Janet Pete said.

“This will be working. Pick me up in the parking lot behind Zimmerman Library and we’ll go work some more on the Ashie Pinto business.”

“Like what?” Janet sounded suspicious. “Remember you noticed that REDDNK vanity plate on the Bronco parked out by the lava? Well, I was in the Reserve Room listening to Ashie Pinto tapes and I noticed a guy named Redd had been checking them out. R-E-D-D. Like on the plate. He’d checked them out for four consecutive days just about a week before the murder.”

As Chee said it, it sounded monumentally trivial. He expected Janet to say something like “So what?” Instead she said nothing at all.

“Well?” Chee said. “Is that a good enough excuse?”

“I can’t right now, Jim. I’m right in the middle of finishing something. With people waiting. Can I pick you up in an hour? Hour and a half?”

“Good enough,” Chee said, trying to keep from feeling disgruntled, thinking that Janet was doing something important while he was killing idle time, wondering what she was thinking. “I’ll walk over to the Union and drink coffee.”

Walking across the brick-paved mall he had another idea. Since he couldn’t check on Redd now, he’d go find Professor Tagert, while he was waiting, and see if Tagert could tell him anything.

The Department of History had moved since Chee’s days on the campus. He found it in a handsome old building he remembered as a dormitory.

The woman at the desk in the department office looked at him curiously, taking in the bandage on his hand first, and his being a Navajo second. “Dr. Tagert?” she said, and chuckled. She sorted quickly through papers on the desk and extracted what looked like a list. “He has office hours this afternoon. Right now in fact. And his office is room 217.” She gestured down the hallway and chuckled again. “I wish you luck.”

The door of 217 was open.

Chee looked into a cluttered room, lit by two dusty windows, divided by two long desks placed back to back in its center. Books were everywhere, jamming bookcases that occupied the walls, stacked on chairs, tumbled out of untidy piles on the desks. Behind the nearest desk, her back to Chee, a woman was typing.

Chee tapped at the door.

“He’s still not here,” the woman said without looking around at him. “We haven’t heard from him.”

“I’m looking for Professor Tagert,” Chee said. “Any idea where I could find him?”

“None,” she said, and turned around, looking at Chee over the tops of reading glasses. “Which class are you in?”

“I’m a cop,” he said. He fished out his identification and handed it to her. Not a worry in the world if the Bureau bitched about him nosing into an FBI case. He was going to quit anyway.

She looked at the identification, at him, at his damaged hand. She was a plump woman in her late twenties, Chee guessed, with a round, good-natured face and short brown hair.

“On duty?”

Shrewd, Chee thought. “More or less,” he said. “I’m working on a case that involves a man Dr. Tagert did some business with. I wanted to see what Dr. Tagert could tell me about this guy.”

“Who is it?” She smiled at him, shrugged. “None of my business, maybe. But I’m Tagert’s teaching assistant. Maybe I could help.”

“Where would Tagert be, this time of day?”

She laughed. “I can’t help you with that. He’s supposed to be sitting right there—” she pointed across the desk “ — having his office hours. And he was supposed to be here all last week, meeting his classes. And the week before that, attending the presemester faculty meetings. Nobody knows where the hell he is.” She pointed across the desk at a stack of envelopes overflowing a wire basket on the adjoining desk. “Unopened mail,” she said.

Chee looked at the stack. A lot of mail.

“From when? How long has he been gone?”

“I saw him at the end of summer session.” She laughed again but there was no humor in it. “Or almost the end. He usually manages to quit a little early. Had me grade his papers for him and turn in his grades. He said he had to get going on some research.”

Chee found himself a lot more interested. “My name’s Jim Chee,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m Jean Jacobs.” She held out her hand.

Chee shook it.

“Can I sit down?”

She gestured toward a chair. “Move the books.”

He sat. “Doesn’t anybody know where he is? How about Mrs. Tagert?”

“They’re separated,” Jacobs said. “I called her when the department chairman first got excited about finding him. She said she didn’t know and she didn’t want to know and if I found him to please not tell her about it.”

“Strange,” Chee said.

“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Dr. Tagert wouldn’t be a happy man to live with. In fact . . .” She let that trail off, unfinished.

“I meant strange nobody knows where he is,” Chee said. “You’d think he’d keep the department informed.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Jacobs said. “Not if you knew him.”

Chee was remembering his own days as an undergraduate here. Usually things had been fairly well organized, but not always. And it had seemed to him that the tenure/academic freedom system made faculty members almost totally independent.

“What’s the chairman doing about it?”

“He’s pissed off. He got me to start Tagert’s Trans-Mississippi West class. And I met with his seminars just to tell those poor souls what he’ll expect, hand out the reading lists, and all that. And then the dean called and wanted to know when he’d be back, and what he was doing — as if it was my fault.” Jean Jacobs’s expression soured at the memory. “I hope the Navajos got him,” she added.

“Is that where he was going? To the Navajo Reservation?”

“Who knows?” she said. “Or gives a damn. But that’s where he’d been working.”

“You know what he was working on?”

“Vaguely. It had to be cops and robbers. That’s his field. ‘Law and Order in the Old West.’ He’s The Authority in that particular category.” She paused. “Or so he tells everybody.”

“Do you know if he was working on that with a Navajo named Ashie Pinto?”

“Sure,” she said. “Pinto was one of his informants this summer. For old stories and things like that.” Her eyes went from Chee’s hand to his face. “Chee,” she said, recognition dawning. “You’re the one who arrested Mr. Pinto. You got yourself burned trying to pull that other policeman out of the car.”

Clearly Jean Jacobs was impressed.

“I’m on leave,” Chee said, indicating the hand and feeling embarrassed. “But I’m trying to find out what Pinto was doing out there. Where the crime was committed. How he got there. So forth. And Pinto won’t talk about it.”

Jean Jacobs had another question. “Why did he kill the policeman?”

“He was drunk,” Chee said. It irritated him that it didn’t sound like a convincing motive. “Very drunk.”

Jean Jacobs was looking at Chee. Smiling. Approving.

“I thought maybe Professor Tagert could tell me something helpful. Maybe he was doing something for Tagert. Working with him on something.”

“It might show in his calendar,” Jean Jacobs said. “Let’s look.”

Tagert’s desk calendar was open to the second week in August. The spaces under Monday through Thursday were mostly filled with jottings — Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were blank except for a diagonal line drawn across them and the legend “Go hunting.” Just above the Wednesday space the words “pick up Oldfart” were written in a neat, precise hand.

Chee indicated it with his finger.

“I don’t know who that means,” Jacobs said. “I’m not his TA because I like him,” she explained. “He’s chairman of my dissertation committee. I’m trying to get a doctorate in history. Doing it on the impact of the trading post system on the Western tribes. That falls into Doctor Tagert’s field so he’s chairman of my committee — like it or not.”

“He was here when I was a student,” Chee said. “I remember now. One of my friends told me to avoid Professor Tagert.”