Coyote Waits (14 page)

“I know she was assigned to do it. It’s her job. But Janet lets me know she halfway believes Pinto didn’t do it. She sees a lot of unanswered questions. What’s his motive, she says. He was drunk, and he’d killed someone before when he was drunk and served time for it. And he was caught red-handed and doesn’t even deny it. But for her, that’s not enough.” Chee shook his head.

“You think it would be kinda nice if it was enough just because you were the one who nabbed him,” Jacobs said. “But you’ve got to consider she’s his defense attorney. And she’s a woman in a field men have dominated. And so she feels like she’s got something to prove. At least I would. Maybe she feels like she has to prove something to you, too.” Jacobs made a wry face. “You know, you’ve been a cop awhile. Into law enforcement. She’s brand new at the game.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just talking.”

“You are missing the implication,” Chee said. He stood up. His voice had sounded stiff, but to hell with it. This woman felt like listening. He felt like letting some of this anger out. “You see, I screwed up on this. If I hadn’t screwed up, I would have been there when Nez was making this arrest — or whatever he was doing — and he wouldn’t have been killed. But I was over in Red Rock drinking coffee, thinking all was good because I heard Delbert laughing.”

He was standing with his arms hanging by his side. That made his hand hurt. He folded his arms.

“But I did get there. Too late to help Delbert, but I got there in time to catch the man who killed him. I was a good enough cop for that.”

Jacobs was silent for a while, thinking about it, her face full of sympathy. She was a talented listener. He had noticed it before. When you talked to this woman, she attended. She had all her antennae out, focused on the speaker. The world was shut out. Nothing mattered but the words she was hearing. Listening was ingrained in the Navajo culture. One didn’t interrupt. One waited until the speaker was finished, gave him a moment or two to consider additions, or footnotes or amendments, before one responded. But even Navajos too often listened impatiently. Not really listening, but framing their reply. Jean Jacobs
really listened
. It was flattery, and Chee knew it, but it had its effect.

“I can see why you’d want to find Tagert. I can see why you’d want to make sure.”

“Sure!” Chee said it louder than he intended. “I
am
sure. How sure can I be? The killer at the scene, drunk, with the smoking gun. He doesn’t even deny it. How goddamn sure can you be?”

“It sounds sure to me,” Jacobs said.

“And the FBI is happy. They took it to the federal grand jury, and got the indictment. They’re ready for trial.”

“This Lieutenant Leaphorn, is he—”

“A vote of no confidence,” Chee said.

“The tribal police think you got the wrong man?”

“Maybe. More likely Leaphorn is freelancing. He does that some. He’s sort of our supercop. Old as the hills. Knows everybody. Remembers everything. Forgets nothing. I worked with him a time or two before. Everybody does sooner or later because he handles the tough investigations wherever they are.”

“You didn’t get along?”

“I don’t think he held me in extremely high regard,” Chee said. “But we got along all right. To be fair about it. He even hired me to do a Blessing Way for him.”

He saw the question in Jacobs’s face.

“It’s a curing ceremonial,” he explained. “I’m a would-be shaman. A singer. A medicine man.
Hataalii
is the Navajo word for it. I was going to be one of the people who conducts the curing ceremonies to restore people to harmony. Or I was trying to be. Nobody seemed to want my services.” He produced a humorless chuckle. “And Lieutenant Leaphorn was my only legitimate patient. Only one outside the family.”

“You do sand paintings,” Jacobs said. “Is that right? That’s about all I know about it.”

Even while he was speaking, Chee had the sensation of standing outside himself, watching and listening. He saw self-pity, and heard it. Some anger, yes. But mostly he saw a man who felt sorry for himself. He hated that in others, hated it even more in himself. Now he felt ashamed. And beyond his anger, he was suddenly aware of the implications of Leaphorn’s involvement. It couldn’t be merely casual. How had the lieutenant found out about Tagert? That must have taken some digging. Chee felt his anger seeping away, replaced by a sense of urgency.

“Sorry about unloading my troubles,” he said. “I didn’t come in here for that. I came in to see if I could look at some of the paperwork. See if maybe it would tell us what Tagert and Pinto were working on. Tell us if Tagert was with him that day.”

“We can look,” Jean Jacobs said. “But I don’t think it’s going to help much.”

Look they did. But first Jean Jacobs closed the door. And locked it. “I feel sort of sneaky,” she said. “Looking through the old bastard’s stuff. Even though I work with a lot of it every day.”

“Just remember, I’m the arresting officer,” Chee said, and felt his mood improving.

The out-basket was empty. They checked the in-basket.

The mail, the memos, were a month old and, as far as Chee could tell, without relevance.

“How does he file things?” Chee asked.

“By subject, usually. Sometimes mail gets filed by name of the correspondent. Mostly by subject.”

“Let’s see if he has a Pinto file.”

No Pinto file.

“How about a Cassidy file?”

Cassidy folders occupied half a drawer in Tagert’s filing cabinet. Chee and Jacobs stacked them on his desktop and started sorting.

“What am I looking for?” Jacobs asked.

“Good question,” Chee said. “Anything related to Pinto, I’d say, for starters. Anything that relates to this robbery up in Utah and the chase. Stuff like—”

“Here’s stuff about the Utah robbery,” Jacobs said. “Copies of newspaper stories.”

The headline in the
Blanding Defender
was multiple lines, in turn-of-the-century newspaper fashion:

OLD HOLE IN WALL
GANG BELIEVED
INVOLVED IN
TRAIN ROBBERY
WITNESS SAYS HE SAW
BUTCH CASSIDY AMONG
GANG WHICH BOARDED
COLORADO & SOUTHERN
TRAIN AT FRY CREEK
WOUNDED BANDIT SAYS IT IS TRUE
DEAD BANDIT IS IDENTIFIED
AS RUDOLPH “RED” WAGONSTAFF
HIS FRIENDS SAY HE USED TO
RUSTLE CATTLE WITH CASSIDY
AND THE WYOMING WILD BUNCH

The story below repeated all that with more details and with a rehashing of what happened in the robbery. Three men had boarded the train when it stopped to pick up mail at Fry Creek. They had entered the mail car, and engaged in a gunfight with the two mail clerks. One clerk was killed, the other wounded in the upper chest. The bandit now identified as Wagonstaff was shot in the neck and died the next day in the Blanding hospital.

The bandits had stopped the train north of Blanding where an accomplice was waiting with horses. An off-duty Garfield County deputy sheriff had fired from the train window at the departing robbers. His bullet struck one in the back, causing him to fall from his horse.

The newspaper account continued:

As their bad luck had it, this fellow was carrying the bags which contained most of the loot which had attracted the bandits. He is now in the hospital here in Blanding but the doctor has little hope for him. He told Sheriff Lester Ludlow that his name is Davis and that Butch Cassidy was leading the group.
Sheriff Ludlow said most of the loot taken in the robbery was recovered in the bags Davis had been carrying — which was the payroll money for the Parker Mine. He said the bandits probably got away with no more than three or four hundred dollars — mostly in bank notes, stamps and other supplies being delivered to post offices along the route south from Salt Lake City.

The rest of the story was mostly information about the dead and wounded mail clerks and about the posse formed to pursue the bandits. Chee skipped through it hurriedly and went on to the next item. It was dated a week later. Davis had died. The posse had tracked the two survivors southward. They had been seen by a Mormon rancher near Montezuma Creek — two men with four horses. Sheriff Ludlow expressed optimism. “The Sheriff said in his telegram to this newspaper: ‘They will be caught.’”

A week later, Ludlow was not making such optimistic statements. “They have slipped away onto the Navajo Reservation. We have wired authorities throughout Arizona and New Mexico to look for them.”

The only mention of the robbery the following week concerned the wounded mail clerk. He was released from the hospital.

“Finding anything?” Jacobs asked. “Reading these old papers is like eating peanuts. You can’t stop. Here’s a piece about a stagecoach robbery. Imagine!”

“Wonder why he saved that?” Chee was thinking of motivations.

“One of the passengers said it was Butch Cassidy.”

Chee was still thinking of motivations, remembering the bandits had gotten away with very little money. That led to a thought of the coin-collector books at Redd’s place, the pennies on his table. If coins were involved, they’d be antiques now. And valuable.

“Redd had about a million pennies when we were there,” he said. “Do you know what that’s all about?”

“It’s all about how a graduate student stays alive,” Jacobs said. “Pays the rent. When Odell gets his paycheck, he cashes it at the bank and buys all the pennies he can afford. And then he sorts through them looking for keepers. Some of them are worth something to the collectors. Certain dates, certain mints. Maybe, for example, you find a 1947 penny minted in Baltimore might be worth a dime, or a ’54 minted in Denver maybe would be worth twenty cents. He keeps those out and sells them to the coin stores, and takes the others back and buys more pennies.”

“Hey,” Chee said. “That’s smart. How much does he make?”

She laughed. “You don’t get rich. One week he found an Indian head worth almost four dollars. That week he made about five dollars an hour for his time.”

“What if you found coins taken in that train robbery? Would it be like a gold mine?”

“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Odell talked about that — how great it would be to find all those old coins. But he looked it up and it was a bad time for coins. They made tons of silver dollars and five-dollar gold pieces during those years. Scarcity is what makes coins expensive.”

“Like how much would a nineteen-hundred silver dollar be worth?”

“Maybe twenty dollars to a coin dealer, if it was in perfect condition,” she said. “And the newspaper said most of the money was bank notes.”

So much for that idea
. And while he was thinking that, he found what he’d been looking for without knowing he’d been looking for it.

The manila folder was labeled PINTO/CASSIDY. In it was a thick sheaf of paper, typed double-spaced.

“They say it was the summer my brother was born. That’s when they say this thing happened.” Penciled in the margin was the notation “1909/10?”

They say the Utes had been bad about coming down that year. They would come down that trail past Thieving Rock and Blue Hill and at night they would steal horses and sheep from the people around Teec Nos Pos in the flats around the San Juan River, and even as far over as Cineza Mesa. They say this happened several times, and one time the Utes shot at a Navajo man over there. He was out there with his sheep and those Utes shot at him and he ran away. They say it was a Piaute Clan man named Left-handed.
Now Left-handed had a son named Delbito Willie and he had married a woman of the Yucca Fruit Clan and he was living with her over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. But he had come over there around Teec Nos Pos to see about his brothers and sisters and everybody told him about the Utes shooting at his father.
They say this Delbito Willie talked to two of his wife’s brothers, and some young men in his own Piaute Clan, and he told them they should go up north, go up there around Sleeping Ute Mountain, and they should steal some Ute horses and get all their sheep and goats back.
The Piaute Clan headman over there in those days was an old fellow they called Kicks His Horse and they talked about this idea with him, and he said they should wait. They say he said that because it was in
Yaiisjaastsoh
season, which in the
biligaana
language is Season to Plant Late Crops. They call it July. At that time there is lightning and the snakes are out feeding and then you can have the kind of curing ceremonial they would need before they went on that kind of a raid. And when they got back they would need to have an Enemy Way sing to cure them, and that could not be held either because you can’t hold those ceremonials until the Season When the Thunder Sleeps. You can’t hold them until the ground is frozen and the snakes are in the ground.
But they say Delbito Willie he was angry about the Utes shooting at his father and he wanted to go anyway. He didn’t care what anybody said. They say the Piaute Clan men listened to their headman and wouldn’t go, so Delbito Willie went back to his wife’s Yucca Fruit people and talked to them about it. He got seven of them to listen to him, mostly young men, they say, but one of them was Old Man Joseph. And so they got their best horses and they went off to the north toward Sleeping Ute Mountain. They say they forded the San Juan there at —

“Find something interesting?” Jean Jacobs was leaning over his shoulder.

“I think this is what Redd was telling us about,” Chee said. “Pinto’s story that puts Cassidy on the Navajo Reservation. Anyway it’s about a raid to steal Ute horses. And the dates would be about right.”

Chee flipped through the pages, read about Old Man Joseph being thrown from his horse. Flipped again, read about Delbito Willie deciding that they should take only horses and mules from the pastures west of Sleeping Ute Mountain and not try to drive the goats because the Utes would chase them. Flipped again, read about the two of the men splitting off from the party to head west to Teec Nos Pos, taking eleven of the Ute horses. One of the Piaute Clan men had been shot in the leg somewhere back in one of the pages Chee had skipped. But a fight with the Utes wasn’t what he was looking for. He flipped again, scanning rapidly. Then he stopped.