Coyote Waits (19 page)

“What did he see?”

“He said he didn’t see anything.”

“He left a note,” Largo said. “Wrote it on the wallpaper there where he was lying. He wrote ‘Take care of Taka’ and under that he wrote ‘Tell Chee I lied.’ He put his finger in his own blood and wrote it.”

“Be damned,” Chee said.

“What do you think he meant?”

Chee hesitated. “Well, I knew he lied about one thing. He said he didn’t see any other cars. He had to have seen my police car. He was coming toward me, his Jeepster was, and he did a right turn just before we met. My siren was going and the flasher. And my headlights were right on him. No way he wouldn’t have seen me.”

The three of them considered that.

Leaphorn said: “Odd thing to lie about.”

“I thought so, too,” Chee said. “I wondered why.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think it would lead anywhere.”

Leaphorn considered this, and nodded. He said: “Why did you go talk to him? You’re on convalescent leave. And it’s a federal case.”

Chee felt himself flushing. “The FBI hadn’t talked to him,” Chee said. “I thought he might have seen something.”

Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He said: “The water’s boiling for your coffee.”

Once Joe Leaphorn had been addicted to cigarettes — smoking unfiltered Pall Malls at a rate of two packs a day and, when he shifted to filters in response to Emma’s concern, three packs a day. He had broken that habit early in Emma’s terminal illness. He had bitten the nicotine deprival bullet as a sort of offering to her, who loved him. And to the gods — that this small, lovely woman would be left with him. As the yearning for cigarettes faded he had found it replaced by a delight in coffee. Now he awoke each morning in his lonely bed anticipating that first sip and savoring it. His working day was measured out in the intervals between the cups. Being Leaphorn, being logical, he’d known that this obsessive affair with coffee represented a flaw in his character, a weakness, as well as a risk to his health. He’d made a logical compromise: no more than four cups before noon and nothing but decaffeinated stuff after lunch. With that he lived fairly happily.

But today he’d had almost no coffee. He had drunk his usual two cups with what was left of last night’s mutton stew for breakfast. He had stopped at the store beside the highway at the Newcomb junction for another cup. But none had been available. At lunch in Shiprock the product served had been a reheated stale brew obviously left over from breakfast and undrinkable even by Leaphorn’s relaxed standards. And then the homicide of Huan Ji had interfered. Now, as Jim Chee poured boiling water through the coffee grounds, the aroma that reached Leaphorn’s nostrils was indescribably delicious.

He’d never seen coffee made that way before. Chee had arrayed three mugs beside the sink, put a little black cone-shaped gadget atop one of them, inserted a paper filter into it, dumped a spoonful of Folger’s into that, and poured the water through. Then he replaced the grounds and repeated the process in the other cups. Wasteful, Leaphorn thought, and time-consuming. But when he tasted the results, he was impressed. Downright fine. As good as any he’d ever tasted. He studied Chee over the rim of the cup. Odd young man. Good-looking in a way, with the sort of long, sensitive face women seemed to like. A fairly good cop, excellent in some categories, weak in others. He remembered that Largo had tried him out as an acting sergeant once. It hadn’t lasted long for some reason he had forgotten or, more likely, had never known. But he could guess the reason. Chee wasn’t an organization man. He was a loner. Liked to freelance. A man who worked inside the system only until the system interfered. One of those who marched to his private drummer. This business of trying to be a
hataalii
and a policeman at the same time, for example. It wasn’t just impractical. How the hell could a cop get time off at the drop of a hat for a nine-day sing? It was incongruous. It was like being an investment banker and a Catholic priest at the same time. Or a rabbi and a clown. People wouldn’t accept it. They expect a shaman or a priest to be different from ordinary humans, expect him to live in the shadow on the dangerous mystical fringe of the supernatural.

Now Chee was refilling the pot, the heavy bandage on his left hand making it a clumsy project. The fruit of freelancing, Leaphorn thought. But in fairness he should say a dead policeman was the result of the rules bending, the burned hand the product of Chee’s bravery. He wondered if he would have walked into that fire, gripped that red-hot door handle, to save another man’s life. He wasn’t sure he would have. He might have stood there, calculating the odds of success — trying to do what was rational.

“Is it still painful?” Leaphorn asked. “The hand?”

“Not much.” Chee sat on the bunk again. “Not if I’m careful.”

“You mentioned one thing Ji lied about when you talked to him. Do you think that’s what the message was about?”

Chee was tucking a stray end of the gauze back into the bandage — concentrating on that.

“No,” he said. “I doubt it.”

Smart, Leaphorn thought. Of course it wasn’t that. “What do you think it was?”

Chee hesitated. “This is new to me,” he said. “I need a minute to get it together.”

Leaphorn sipped, enjoyed it. Wonderful coffee.

“Take your time,” he said.

Chee looked up from the bandage. His face was full of anger.

“I have a question for you. What pulled you into this? Into the Delbert Nez homicide?”

Leaphorn considered Chee’s expression, the anger in his voice. “Somebody shot Huan Ji,” he said. “That pulled me into it.”

“No,” Chee said, shaking his head. “Last week you were looking for a professor named Tagert. What’s up? You think I arrested the wrong man? You think I screwed that up, too?”

Captain Largo shifted in his chair. “Take it easy,” he said.

Chee’s emotion was interesting. What motivated it? Leaphorn turned his cup in his hands.

“I wondered how Pinto got where you found him,” he said. “The FBI didn’t check it out. They didn’t see any reason to, I guess, since you gave them the man with the smoking gun.” Leaphorn was silent a moment, looking into Chee’s anger. There was absolutely no reason for him to tell this young man anything. No reason except the bandaged hand and what it represented.

“I wondered about that,” Leaphorn continued, “and then Pinto’s niece came to see me. She’s Turning Mountain Clan. A relative of my late wife. She wanted to hire a private detective to find out who gave the old man the ride. I decided to do it for her.”

Chee nodded, unmollified.

“You wondered, too, I noticed,” Leaphorn said. “You went to the trouble of finding out about Tagert hiring him, too.”

“Did he hire him?” Chee said. “All I knew was that Tagert had used him in the past. As a source for old legends. That sort of thing. Had Tagert hired him this time?”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. He told Chee about the letter Old Man McGinnis had written, about the vehicle seen driving away from Pinto’s place. “How did you make the Tagert connection?”

Chee told him about Janet Pete, about climbing into the formation where the crazy painter Nez hoped to catch had been defacing the rocks. He told him what they had seen there, that the painter had carried a ladder into the formation, painting high places, ignoring low ones, painting part of the surface of one formation, skipping the next one. He told him about the car with the REDDNEK plate, about going to the library at UNM to listen to Pinto’s tapes, noting who had taped them. He told Leaphorn about what he had learned from Jean Jacobs and Odell Redd.

“You think Tagert is chasing down something about Butch Cassidy then?” Leaphorn asked.

“They think so,” Chee said. “That seems to be his connection with Pinto. That old story about the horse thieves and the two whites.”

“So what do you think Ji lied to you about?”

The abrupt change of subject didn’t seem to bother Chee.

“I don’t think Ji was driving the car,” Chee said. “I think he lied about that.”

“Why?” Leaphorn asked. “Why do you think that?”

“He didn’t see my car. He didn’t see the fire. He was very cautious about the way he answered questions. He didn’t volunteer anything that would catch him out. He just waited for a question and then gave a very careful, limited answer.”

“Why would he lie about that? You have any theories?”

“What else did you say he wrote on the wall?” Chee asked.

Captain Largo answered that: “’Take care of Taka.’”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “It was ‘Save Taka.’”

“That’s his kid?” Chee asked. “Right?”

Leaphorn smiled slightly, approving of the way Chee’s mind was working. “So you’re thinking that Taka was driving the car? I think that’s not a bad guess. He was driving it after school today. He drives it a lot, I think. He told me he even has his own key to it.”

“I suspect he didn’t want the boy pulled into a police investigation,” Chee said. “I don’t know why.”

“He seems to have been a special friend of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back from his days in Vietnam,” Leaphorn said. He explained what Kennedy had told him.

“So maybe Colonel Ji was just the nervous sort. Is that what you’re thinking?” Chee asked.

Leaphorn shrugged. “A man makes a career out of playing hard games, it would be difficult to get over that sort of thinking. A policeman gets killed. You don’t want your child touched by something like that.” He shrugged again. “Good a guess as any. We just don’t know enough.”

“No,” Largo said. “We don’t know a damned thing. Except homicide is a felony and we don’t have jurisdiction in any of this. Nez nor Colonel Ji.”

“We have jurisdiction in a vandalism case,” Leaphorn said. “Tell me about that?”

Largo looked puzzled. “What vandalism?”

Chee said, “You mean the painting on the rocks? You know what was in the report. Well, Delbert noticed this maybe two or three weeks earlier. Somebody putting white paint here and there in a rock formation out there between Ship Rock and the Chuska Range. He got interested in it and he started swinging past there whenever his patrol would allow it. He was hoping to catch the guy. But he never did.”

“And he thought he saw him that night?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And it sounded like he was going after him?”

“That’s how it sounded.”

Leaphorn put down his coffee cup. He glanced at the stove. Steam was jetting from Chee’s pot, but this wasn’t the time to break this chain of thought.

“What do you think?” Leaphorn asked. “You see any connection? Was Ashie Pinto painting rocks? That seems totally unlikely. Did Pinto being there have something to do with the painting? Anything at all to do with it? Or was it just that Nez, thinking he was chasing his painter, turned out to be chasing Pinto? And he catches himself a homicidal drunk. Or what? What do you think?”

Silence.

Largo got up and turned down the burner under the coffeepot. He picked up the funnel that held the grounds. “How do you make this stuff?” he asked. “And as far as the painter and Ashie Pinto are concerned, I pick number two. Nez thought he was chasing his nut and he catches Pinto.”

Chee scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “that sounds the most probable.”

“No connection otherwise, then?” Leaphorn said. “Neither of you can think of any?”

Chee got up, collected the cups, lined them beside the sink, and picked out a fresh filter.

Another cup of coffee would be fine, Leaphorn thought. And then he would go and pick up Professor Bourebonette and be on his way. She had come up with a graceful way to get out of his way when he’d come out of Ji’s house and returned to the car.

“You’re going to be busy for a while,” she had said. “Just drop me off at the community college. I have a friend in the library there I’d like to see.”

Nothing more was going to come out of this conversation. He would drink his coffee, drop by the library to pick up the professor, and then head back to Window Rock. Neither Chee nor Largo seemed to be able to think of any connection between a rock painter and a policeman’s murder. But there must be one. Because Leaphorn’s logic told him that somehow Colonel Ji had tried to tell them that with his blood-smeared finger. The man must have known he was dying. Protect his son, he’d told them, and then that he had lied to Chee. There must be a connection, and the connection — as Chee thought, too — must be that the boy had been driving his car that night. Driving it out where an old drunk was killing a policeman and a madman was painting random patterns on an outcrop of lava.

Random, Leaphorn thought. Random. When he was a young man, a junior at Arizona State, running around, drinking, chasing the girls, he had gone to a sing-dance once over between Kinlichee and Cross Canyon. It had rained that night, and he and Haskie Jim, his father’s older brother, had watched the first drops pattering into the dust. He had been full of the mathematics he was studying, and of his own wisdom, and he had talked to his old uncle of probabilities and of randomness. He had always remembered the scene.

“You think these raindrops are random?” his uncle had asked. And Leaphorn had been surprised. He’d said of course they were random. Didn’t his uncle think they were random?

“The stars,” Haskie Jim said. “We have a legend about how First Man and First Woman, over by Huerfano Mesa, had the stars in their blanket and were placing them carefully in the sky. And then Coyote grabbed the blanket and whirled it around and flung them into the darkness and that is how the Milky Way was formed. Thus order in the sky became chaos. Random. But even then . . . Even then, what Coyote did was evil, but was there not a pattern, too, in the evil deed?”

That had not been the time in Leaphorn’s life when he had patience for the old metaphysics. He remembered telling Haskie Jim about modern astronomy and the cosmic mechanics of gravity and velocity. Leaphorn had said something like “Even so, you couldn’t expect to find anything except randomness in the way the rain fell.” And Haskie Jim had watched the rain awhile, silently. And then he had said, and Joe Leaphorn still remembered not just the words but the old man’s face when he said them: “I think from where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”