The Oxford Book of American Det (109 page)

“Any first name on Wells?” Chee asked. The only FBI Wells he knew was Jake Wells.

He hoped it wouldn’t be Jake.

“Negative on the first name,” Virgie said.

“All right,” Chee said. “I’ll be there.”

The road tilted downward now into the vast barrens of erosion which the Navajos call Beautiful Valley. Far to the west, the edge of the sun dipped behind a cloud—one of the line of thunderheads forming in the evening heat over the San Francisco Peaks and the Cococino Rim. The Hopis had been holding their Niman Kachina dances, calling the clouds to come and bless them.

Chee reached Kayenta just a little late. It was early twilight and the clouds had risen black against the sunset. The breeze brought the faint smells that rising humidity carries across desert country—the perfume of sage, creosote brush, and dust. The desk clerk said that Wells was in room 284 and the first name was Jake. Chee no longer cared. Jake Wells was abrasive but he was also smart. He had the best record in the special FBI Academy class Chee had attended, a quick, tough intelligence. Chee could tolerate the man’s personality for a while to learn what Wells could make of his witchcraft puzzle.

“It’s unlocked,” Wells said. “Come on in.” He was propped against the padded headboard of the bed, shirt off, shoes on, glass in hand. He glanced at Chee and then back at the television set. He was as tall as Chee remembered, and the eyes were just as blue. He waved the glass at Chee without looking away from the set. “Mix yourself one,” he said, nodding toward a bottle beside the sink in the dressing alcove.

“How you doing, Jake?” Chee asked.

Now the blue eyes re-examined Chee. The question in them abruptly went away.

“Yeah,” Wells said. “You were the one at the Academy.” He eased himself on his left elbow and extended a hand. “Jake Wells,” he said.

Chee shook the hand. “Chee,” he said.

Wells shifted his weight again and handed Chee his glass. “Pour me a little more while you’re at it,” he said, “and turn down the sound.”

Chee turned down the sound.

“About thirty percent booze,” Wells demonstrated the proportion with his hands. “This is your district then. You’re in charge around Kayenta? Window Rock said I should talk to you. They said you were out chasing around in the desert today. What are you working on?”

“Nothing much,” Chee said. He ran a glass of water, drinking it thirstily. His face in the mirror was dirty—the lines around mouth and eyes whitish with dust. The sticker on the glass reminded guests that the laws of the Navajo Tribal Council prohibited possession of alcoholic beverages on the reservation. He refilled his own glass with water and mixed Wells’s drink. “As a matter of fact, I’m working on a witchcraft case.”

“Witchcraft?” Wells laughed. “Really?” He took the drink from Chee and examined it.

“How does it work? Spells and like that?”

“Not exactly,” Chee said. “It depends. A few years ago a little girl got sick down near Burnt Water. Her dad killed three people with a shotgun. He said they blew corpse powder on his daughter and made her sick.”

Wells was watching him. “The kind of crime where you have the insanity plea.”

“Sometimes,” Chee said. “Whatever you have, witch talk makes you nervous. It happens more when you have a bad year like this. You hear it and you try to find out what’s starting it before things get worse.”

“So you’re not really expecting to find a witch?”

“Usually not,” Chee said.

“Usually?”

“Judge for yourself,” Chee said. “I’ll tell you what I’ve picked up today. You tell me what to make of it. Have time?”

Wells shrugged. “What I really want to talk about is a guy named Simon Begay.” He looked quizzically at Chee. “You heard the name?”

“Yes,” Chee said.

“Well, shit,” Wells said. “You shouldn’t have. What do you know about him?”

“Showed up maybe three months ago. Moved into one of those U.S. Public Health Service houses over by the Kayenta clinic. Stranger. Keeps to himself. From off the reservation somewhere. I figured you federals put him here to keep him out of sight.” Wells frowned. “How long you known about him?”

“Quite a while,” Chee said. He’d known about Begay within a week after his arrival.

“He’s a witness,” Wells said. “They broke a car-theft operation in Los Angeles. Big deal. National connections. One of those where they have hired hands picking up expensive models and they drive ‘em right on the ship and off-load in South America.

This Begay is one of the hired hands. Nobody much. Criminal record going all the way back to juvenile, but all nickel-and-dime stuff. I gather he saw some things that help tie some big boys into the crime, so Justice made a deal with him.”

“And they hide him out here until the trial?”

Something apparently showed in the tone of the question. “If you want to hide an apple, you drop it in with the other apples,” Wells said. “What better place?” Chee had been looking at Wells’s shoes, which were glossy with polish. Now he examined his own boots, which were not. But he was thinking of Justice Department stupidity. The appearance of any new human in a country as empty as the Navajo Reservation provoked instant interest. If the stranger was a Navajo, there were instant questions. What was his clan? Who was his mother? What was his father’s clan? Who were his relatives? The City Navajo had no answers to any of these crucial questions.

He was (as Chee had been repeatedly told) unfriendly. It was quickly guessed that he was a “relocation Navajo,” born to one of those hundreds of Navajo families which the federal government had tried to reestablish forty years ago in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other urban centers. He was a stranger. In a year of witches, he would certainly be suspected. Chee sat looking at his boots, wondering if that was the only basis for the charge that City Navajo was a skinwalker. Or had someone seen something? Had someone seen the murder?

“The thing about apples is they don’t gossip,” Chee said.

“You hear gossip about Begay?” Wells was sitting up now, his feet on the floor.

“Sure,” Chee said. “I hear he’s a witch.”

Wells produced a pro-forma chuckle. “Tell me about it,” he said.

Chee knew exactly how he wanted to tell it. Wells would have to wait awhile before he came to the part about Begay. “The Eskimos have nine nouns for snow,” Chee began.

He told Wells about the variety of witchcraft on the reservations and its environs: about frenzy witchcraft, used for sexual conquests, of witchery distortions, of curing ceremonials, of the exotic two-heart witchcraft of the Hope Fog Clan, of the Zuni Sorcery Fraternity, of the Navajo ‘chindi,’ which is more like a ghost than a witch, and finally of the Navajo Wolf, the anti’l witchcraft, the werewolves who pervert every taboo of the Navajo Way and use corpse powder to kill their victims.

Wells rattled the ice in his glass and glanced at his watch.

“To get to the part about your Begay,” Chee said, “about two months ago we started picking up witch gossip. Nothing much, and you expect it during a drought. Lately it got to be more than usual.” He described some of the tales and how uneasiness and dread had spread across the plateau. He described what he had learned today, the Tsossies’ naming City Navajo as the witch, his trip to Mexican Water, of learning there that the witch had killed a man.

“They said it happened in the spring—couple of months ago. They told me the ones who knew about it were the Tso outfit.” The talk of murder, Chee noticed, had revived Wells’s interest. “I went up there,” he continued, “and found the old woman who runs the outfit. Emma Tso. She told me her son-in-law had been out looking for some sheep, and smelled something, and found the body under some chamiso brush in a dry wash. A witch had killed him.”

“How—“

Chee cut off the question. “I asked her how he knew it was a witch killing. She said the hands were stretched out like this.” Chee extended his hands, palms up. “They were flayed. The skin was cut off the palms and fingers.” Wells raised his eyebrows.

“That’s what the witch uses to make corpse powder,” Chee explained. “They take the skin that has the whorls and ridges of the individual personality—the skin from the palms and the finger pads, and the soles of the feet. They take that, and the skin from the glans of the penis, and the small bones where the neck joins the skull, and they dry it, and pulverize it, and use it as poison.”

“You’re going to get to Begay any minute now,” Wells said. “That right?”

“We got to him,” Chee said. “He’s the one they think is the witch. He’s the City Navajo.”

“I thought you were going to say that,” Wells said. He rubbed the back of his hand across one blue eye. “City Navajo. Is it that obvious?”

“Yes,” Chee said. “And then he’s a stranger. People suspect strangers.”

“Were they coming around him? Accusing him? Any threats? Anything like that, you think?”

“It wouldn’t work that way—not unless somebody had someone in their family killed.

The way you deal with a witch is hire a singer and hold a special kind of curing ceremony. That turns the witchcraft around and kills the witch.” Wells made an impatient gesture. “Whatever,” he said. “I think something has made this Begay spooky.” He stared into his glass, communing with the bourbon. “I don’t know.”

“Something unusual about the way he’s acting?”

“Hell of it is I don’t know how he usually acts. This wasn’t my case. The agent who worked him retired or some damn thing, so I got stuck with being the delivery man.” He shifted his eyes from glass to Chee. “But if it was me, and I was holed up here waiting, and the guy came along who was going to take me home again, then I’d be glad to see him. Happy to have it over with. All that.”

“He wasn’t?”

Wells shook his head. “Seemed edgy. Maybe that’s natural, though. He’s going to make trouble for some hard people.”

“I’d be nervous,” Chee said.

“I guess it doesn’t matter much anyway,” Wells said. “He’s small potatoes. The guy who’s handling it now in the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it must have been a toss-up whether to fool with him at all. He said the assistant who handled it decided to hide him out just to be on the safe side.”

“Begay doesn’t know much?”

“I guess not. That, and they’ve got better witnesses.”

“So why worry?”

Wells laughed. “I bring this sucker back and they put him on the witness stand and he answers all the questions with ‘I don’t know’ and it makes the USDA look like a horse’s ass. When a U.S. Attorney looks like that, he finds an FBI agent to blame it on.” He yawned. “Therefore,” he said through the yawn, “I want to ask you what you think. This is your territory. You are the officer in charge. Is it your opinion that someone got to my witness?”

Chee let the question hang. He spent a fraction of a second reaching the answer, which was they could have if they wanted to try. Then he thought about the real reason Wells had kept him working late without a meal or a shower. Two sentences in Wells’s report. One would note that the possibility the witness had been approached had been checked with local Navajo Police. The next would report whatever Chee said next.

Wells would have followed Federal Rule One—Protect Your Ass.

Chee shrugged. “You want to hear the rest of my witchcraft business?” Wells put his drink on the lamp table and untied his shoe. “Does it bear on this?”

“Who knows? Anyway there’s not much left. I’ll let you decide. The point is we had already picked up this corpse Emma Tso’s son-in-law found. Somebody had reported it weeks ago. It had been collected, and taken in for an autopsy. The word we got on the body was Navajo male in his thirties probably. No identification on him.”

“How was this bird killed?”

“No sign of foul play,” Chee said. “By the time the body was brought in, decay and the scavengers hadn’t left a lot. Mostly bone and gristle, I guess. This was a long time after Emma Tso’s son-in-law saw him.”

“So why do they think Begay killed him?” Wells removed his second shoe and headed for the bathroom.

Chee picked up the telephone and dialled the Kayenta clinic. He got the night supervisor and waited while the supervisor dug out the file. Wells came out of the bathroom with his toothbrush. Chee covered the mouthpiece. “I’m having them read me the autopsy report,” Chee explained. Wilson began brushing his teeth at the sink in the dressing alcove. The voice of the night supervisor droned into Chee’s ear.

“That all?” Chee asked. “Nothing added on? No identity yet? Still no cause?”

“That’s him,” the voice said.

“How about shoes?” Chee asked. “He have shoes on?”

“Just a sec,” the voice said. “Yep. Size ten D. And a hat, and...”

“No mention of the neck or skull, right? I didn’t miss that? No bones missing?” Silence. “Nothing about neck or skull bones.”

“Ah,” Chee said. “Fine. I thank you.” He felt great. He felt wonderful. Finally things had clicked into place. The witch was exorcised. “Jake,” he said. “Let me tell you a little more about my witch case.”

Wells was rinsing his mouth. He spit out the water and looked at Chee, amused. “I didn’t think of this before,” Wells said, “but you really don’t have a witch problem. If you leave that corpse a death by natural causes, there’s no case to work. If you decide it’s a homicide, you don’t have jurisdiction anyway. Homicide on an Indian reservation, FBI has jurisdiction.” Wells grinned. “We’ll come in and find your witch for you.”

Chee looked at his boots, which were still dusty. His appetite had left him, as it usually did an hour or so after he missed a meal. He still hungered for a bath. He picked up his hat and pushed himself to his feet.

“I’ll go home now,” he said. “The only thing you don’t know about the witch case is what I just got from the autopsy report. The corpse had his shoes on and no bones were missing from the base of the skull.”

Chee opened the door and stood in it, looking back. Wells was taking his pyjamas out of his suitcase. “So what advice do you have for me? What can you tell me about my witch case?”

“To tell the absolute truth, Chee, I’m not into witches,” Wells said. “Haven’t been since I was a boy.”