Coyote Waits (17 page)

“Right,” Roanhorse said. “Name’s Taka. Something like that.”

“He okay?”

“Looked like somebody hit him with a club when Rostik told him,” Roanhorse said.

Taka Ji was sitting stiffly on the edge of a recliner chair. Rostik was facing him, perched on the arm of the sofa. Largo leaned against the wall, his round, dark face devoid of expression. Leaphorn stopped just inside the door. Rostik glanced at him, looked irritated, chose to ignore him, continued his questioning.

He was good at it, Leaphorn noticed. Young, obviously. Probably inexperienced. But well trained in the job, and smart. Some of the questions replowed old ground from new angles. Some were new. Huan Ji’s son, still looking as if he had been hit by a club, answered them tersely.

He had not seen his father since he’d driven to school with him in the Jeepster. Right?

Taka nodded. “Yes,” he said. His voice was so small that Leaphorn could barely hear him.

And how had he gotten the Jeepster?

“My father, he said I could use it after school. He would walk home. He liked to walk. So after my biology class, I got it from the parking lot.”

“The key was left in it?”

“I have a key. My father has a key. I have one.”

“And where did you go?”

“I drove out toward Ship Rock. I am taking pictures out there. Photographs.”

“Pictures of who?”

Taka was looking straight ahead, seeing something in the wallpaper across the room. His face was pale. He closed his eyes. “I take pictures of landscapes,” he said.

“Who was with you?”

Leaphorn thought Taka hadn’t heard the question. But he had. Finally he said: “No one. I go alone.”

A Vietnamese in a Navajo school. A long time ago Leaphorn had been a Navajo in white Arizona State University. He understood what Taka had not quite said. What was it that Colonel Ji had written on the wall in his own blood? “Help Taka.” Something like that.

Rostik changed the subject.

“Did your father have enemies?”

Taka shrugged. “He was a man,” he said. “A long time ago he was a colonel in the army.” He looked up at Rostik. “The Army of the Republic of Vietnam.”

“But do you know of any enemies? Had he received any threats?”

Again it seemed Taka wouldn’t answer. Then he tilted his head, frowned. “I don’t think he would have told me.” This knowledge seemed to surprise him.

“No threat you know of then?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone named Chee?”

“Like I told you, there is a boy on the basketball team. There is a girl in my history class.”

“Does your father have any friends named Chee? Any enemies?”

“I don’t know,” Taka said. “There is a teacher. In junior high school. Her name I think is Miss Dolores Chee.”

“A friend of your father’s?”

“I don’t think so,” Taka said. “There are lots of Chees.”

Leaphorn glanced at Captain Largo and found Captain Largo glancing at him. Largo made a wry face.

And so it went. Leaphorn listened and watched. He assessed Rostik, and reassessed him. A smart young man. He assessed Taka as best he could. This was not the normal Taka. This was a stunned teenager. The death of his father was still unreal, an incredible but abstract fact. Rostik now was covering yesterday. How had Taka’s father behaved? What had he said? Leaphorn noticed the boy was shivering.

Leaphorn interrupted.

“Mr. Rostik,” he said. “Just a moment, if you don’t mind.” And he turned to Taka.

“Son. Do you have any relatives here? Anybody to go to?”

“Not here,” the boy said. “Not here at Ship Rock.”

A stranger alone in a strange land, Leaphorn thought. He asked: “Where?”

“My aunt and uncle. They live in Albuquerque.”

“Are they the ones you are closest to?” As he asked it, Leaphorn thought how different this would be for a Navajo boy. He would be smothered by family. But maybe it would have been that way for Taka Ji, too, if his people had not been uprooted by war. Perhaps the Vietnamese had not, like the
biligaana
, lost the value of the family.

Taka was nodding. “They are all there is,” he said.

“We’ll call them when you are finished here,” Leaphorn said, glancing at Rostik.

“I’m finished,” Rostik said to Taka. “I’ll just need to know where we can reach you if we need to know something else.”

“How about a friend here? Somebody you can stay with tonight?”

Taka thought. He gave Leaphorn a name, the son of another of the high school teachers.

Rostik left. They made the calls on the colonel’s telephone and Roanhorse took Taka in hand. He’d deliver him to the house of the friend.

“I’ll lock the place up,” Captain Largo said. “We’ll keep an eye on it until the feds go over it.”

“One last look at the darkroom,” Leaphorn said. “No one will ever know.”

With Largo peering over his shoulder, he went through the stack of prints in the dryer basket — eleven photographs of segments of the same outcropping of what seemed to be part of a long basaltic ridge. They were taken — or seemed to be — from the same viewpoint, as if the camera with a telescopic lens had been shifted slightly on a tripod for each exposure.

“Landscapes,” Largo said. “If those are his landscapes he’s not going to get rich with them.”

“No,” Leaphorn said, and placed them back in the dryer basket. “You recognize the place?”

“They could have been taken any of a hundred places,” Largo said. “It just looked like a big bunch of extruded lava. Fairly old. Could be out there around Ship Rock. Could be down in the malpais south of Grants. Could be over east of Black Mesa. Could be lots of places.”

On the porch, Largo paused to lock the front door.

“Can you think of any reason those pictures might have been taken?” Leaphorn asked.

“None,” Largo said. “No idea why any teenage kid does anything.”

“They might have been taken by the colonel,” Leaphorn said. “He was a photographer, too.”

Largo nodded. “True,” he said. But he wasn’t particularly interested.

“Odd though,” Leaphorn said. “When he feels better I might ask him.”

“Maybe the colonel did take them,” Largo said. “But so what. People are always taking pictures of rocks. They think they see a shape like a duck, or Ronald Reagan, or God knows what.”

“You think the boy did it?”

“The killing? I don’t. How about you?”

Leaphorn shook his head. The sort of a shake that avoids an answer.

“I’ve got another question,” Leaphorn said. “While Chee is a common name among us Dinee, unfortunately, it is not all that damn common. How the hell did your Jim Chee get himself mixed up with this?”

Largo’s expression was grim. “I intend to find out.”

“So do I,” Leaphorn said.

JANET PETE HAD not liked the idea. Basically, no matter what she said, Jim Chee understood that she hadn’t liked it because she hadn’t trusted him. At worst, she thought he might betray her. Chee doubted that she really believed that, although the possibility that she did lingered in his memory. And rankled. At best, she wasn’t certain she could depend on his discretion. On his good judgment. That rankled, too. In a way, that was even worse.

Chee had finally let his temper show. That was a weakness new to him, and he realized it. He explained it to himself as a product of raw nerves; of a hand which, with every twinge, reminded him it might never be fully useful again; of traumatic memories which recalled his failure to perform his duty. However he explained it, he didn’t like the way it felt.

“Janet,” he said. “Spare me all that lawyer talk. I’ve told you I won’t ask the old man for a confession. I won’t ask him what he was doing out there that night. Or how he got there. Or what the hell caused him to shoot Nez. I just want to ask him about the story he told to the professor. Just why he thinks the Enemy Way sing was done for all those horse thieves, and the Ghostway Chant added for one of them. I won’t ask him anything that would make any sense to the FBI. Or to you either, for that matter.”

That had touched a nerve. Janet’s voice turned chilly.

“I’ll spare you the lawyer talk. You spare me the ‘I’m more Indian than you are’ crap. Okay?”

Chee hesitated. “Right,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “But you play by the rules. I’m going to be there every minute. Ashie Pinto only answers what I want him to answer. You two speak better Navajo than I do, so if I want you to explain a question, you by God explain it until I understand what you’re getting at or it doesn’t get answered. Understood?”

Chee had understood perfectly.

Janet Pete set it up for three that afternoon and Chee took a cab down to the County Detention Center where federal prisoners were being held. It was a sunny, windless autumn afternoon with a fringe of high clouds drifting in from the northwest, reminding him that the TV weatherman had reported snow in Flagstaff last night and the front — as always — was drifting eastward. He showed his credentials to the desk clerk and a deputy jailer escorted him to the visitors’ room.

Janet Pete was waiting. She sat behind a long wooden table in a straight wooden chair looking small and tired and beautiful.

“
Yaa’ eh t’eeh
,” Chee began, and swallowed it and said, “Hello, Janet,” instead.

She smiled at him. “
Yaa’ eh t’eeh
,” she said. “I do know a little Navajo.”

“As much as I do,” Chee said, which was a blatant lie, but a guard ushered in Hosteen Ashie Pinto before she could say so.

Here, in this still, sterile room lit by a battery of fluorescent tubes, Ashie Pinto was not the man Chee remembered. He remembered a stumbling drunk illuminated in the yellow glare of his headlights, wet with rain, blurred by Chee’s own shock and Chee’s own pain. Now he was smaller, desiccated, frail, dignified, and terribly old. He sat in the chair next to Janet Pete, acknowledged her with a nod. He looked at Chee, and then at the heavy bandages wrapped on Chee’s left hand. Then Ashie Pinto repeated the only thing Chee had ever heard him say.

“I am ashamed,” he said, and looked down.

Chee looked down, too. And when he looked up, Janet was watching him. He wondered if she had understood the Navajo phrase.

“I think I told you Mr. Pinto speaks hardly any English at all,” she said. “I told him you were coming, of course, so he remembers who you are. He still does not want to say anything at all about the crime and I told him not to answer any questions until I tell him to.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “The question I want to ask him takes some explaining. Stop me if you get lost.”

And so Chee began.

“My uncle,” he said, “I think you may have heard of Frank Sam Nakai, who is a singer of the Blessing Way and the Mountain Top Chant and many of the other curing songs. This man is the brother of my mother, and he has tried to teach me to follow him and become a
hataalii
. But I am still an ignorant man. I have much yet to learn. I have learned a little of the Ways of the Holy People. And what I have learned has brought me here to ask you a question. It is a question about something you told to a professor named Tagert.”

Chee stopped, eyes on Pinto. The man sat as still as death, waiting. His skin was drawn tight over the skull bones, seeming almost transparent in its thinness. The desiccation made his eyes seem protuberant, larger than they were. They were black eyes, but the cornea of one was clouded by a film of cataract.

Sure now that Chee had finished his statement, Pinto nodded. Chee was to continue.

“You were telling the professor about a time, perhaps before you were born, when some young men of the Yucca Fruit People rode over to Sleeping Ute Mountain to get back some horses the Utes had stolen from them. Do you remember that?”

Pinto remembered.

Chee summarized the rest of the adventure, taking time to tell it carefully. He wanted to draw Pinto’s consciousness out of this room, out of his role as prisoner and into his past. Finally he had reached the place which had puzzled him.

“The way the
biligaana
professor wrote down what you told him may not be exactly what you told him. But what he wrote down is like this. That you said the
hataalii
the Yucca Fruit People called decided that an Enemy Way sing should be held for all of those young men. Is that true?”

Pinto considered. He smiled slightly, nodded.

“Then the
biligaana
professor wrote down that you told him that this singer decided he should also hold a Ghostway Chant for the man they called Delbito Willie. Is that true?”

There was no hesitation now. Hosteen Pinto nodded.

“That is the first of my questions,” Chee said. “Do you know why this Ghostway was needed?”

Pinto studied Chee’s face, thinking. He smiled slightly, nodded again.

“My uncle,” Chee said, “will you tell me why?”

“Not yet,” Janet Pete said. “I didn’t understand a lot of that. What are you driving at?”

“Basically, why a certain cure was prescribed for one of those men and not for the others. That suggests he broke a specific taboo. I wonder what it was?”

Janet Pete was obviously lost. “But how . . . ? Oh, go ahead and answer it.”

Hosteen Pinto glanced at Janet Pete, then back at Chee, then at something out the window beside Chee’s shoulder. Chee waited. Through the glass came the sound of an ambulance siren, the sound of brakes applied. Somewhere in the building a door slammed, the clang of steel on steel. Chee could smell dust, an astringent floor cleaner, the aroma peculiar to old, old men. Pinto released his breath, a sighing exhalation. He looked at Janet Pete again, smiling.
This man
, Chee thought,
this kindly old man is the man who murdered Delbert Nez. The man who burned my friend in his car. The man whose actions caused this terrible burn across my hand. Why did he do it? Whiskey
. Todilhil.
The Water of Darkness. Twice it had turned this old man into a coyote
.

Hosteen Pinto shifted in his chair, seeking some comfort for old bones. “This young woman has become like a granddaughter to me,” he said. “She tells me that she knows you. She says that you are an honorable man. She says you follow the Navajo Way.”