Coyote Waits (20 page)

After he had thought about the meaning in that, Leaphorn had looked for order in everything. And he usually found it. Except in the events of insanity. Joe Leaphorn didn’t think a man — or a woman — who carried a ladder along with a paint gun into the hills would be insane.

There was a pattern there, and a motive, if he could only find them.

DEPUTY T. J. BIRDIE was on duty when Jim Chee arrived at the San Juan County jail at Aztec. T. J. said he was just too busy right now.

“We’re short-handed. I got the desk and the telephone switchboard, and the radio and everything all to myself. Just George back there in the jail and me. Come in tomorrow during regular hours and somebody will do it for you. It’s not as easy as you make it sound. All that sorting around. Putting stuff back where it was.”

“Come on, T. J.,” Chee said. “Don’t act like a horse’s ass. All you got to do is pull the file on booking Ashie Pinto and let me take a look at the inventory of what stuff he had.”

“Can’t leave the phone,” T. J. said. “Sheriff’d hang me up by the balls if he calls in here and I’m not on it.” Deputy Birdie was a stubby young man with his black hair cut short — half Apache. It was gossiped in political circles that the sheriff had hired him in the interest of attracting votes from the nearby Jicarilla Apache Reservation and still didn’t know Birdie was a Mescalero, whose numerous kinfolks and clansmen voted two hundred miles south and east in Otero County. Chee knew that Birdie was actually White Mountain Apache whose folks voted in Arizona and he was pretty sure the sheriff had hired him because he was smart. Unfortunately he was also lazy.

“Come on, damn it,” Chee said. He came around behind the counter. “Just get in there and pull out the Ashie Pinto file. I’ll answer the telephone for you.”

“Well, hell,” T. J. said. “What’s the big hurry?”

But he left, muttering. And when he returned five minutes later he handed Chee the folder.

The inventory of Hosteen Ashie Pinto’s impounded possessions was short:

wallet containing:
two fifty-dollar bills
photo of woman
photo of two men
one pocketknife
one comb
one tin chewing tobacco containing corn meal
one leather pouch (jish) containing:

two crystals
feathers
mineral stones
bull durham pouch of pollen
assorted small jish items

Chee handed the folder back to Birdie.

“That it?” Birdie said. “Can I get back to doing my duty for San Juan County now?”

“Thanks, T. J.,” Chee said.

“What were you looking for? Did you find it?”

“His
jish
. The old man is a crystal gazer,” Chee said. “I wanted to see if he was working. If he had his medicine bundle with him.”

“Well, hell,” Birdie said. “I was here the night they brought him in. I could have told you that. Saved me all that work if you’d just asked.”

It was late but Chee decided to make the four-hour drive to Albuquerque, turning the new information over in his mind. First, there was the fact that Tagert had hired Pinto. Presumably he’d picked up Pinto at his hogan and taken him to the vicinity of whatever he was hunting. Pinto had taken along his crystals — the tools of his profession as a finder of the lost and seer of the unseen. Some white men around the Reservation used crystal gazers but Tagert didn’t seem the sort. He guessed the historian was more interested in the old man’s memory than in his shamanistic powers. Memory of what? Logically it would be connected to Tagert’s interest in two white men who seemed to have died a long lifetime ago in a rock formation on the Navajo Reservation. Presumably Tagert would be hunting their bodies, for evidence that one of them was the notorious Butch Cassidy. Logic suggested that the rock formation would be somewhere fairly close to where he’d arrested Pinto. There were plenty of them around — the product of the same paroxysm of volcanic action that cracked the earth and formed the basaltic spires of Ship Rock. It might be the same formation into which he and Janet Pete had taken their stroll to study the work of Delbert Nez’s nutty vandal. If all else failed, he might search that formation again. Given a day or two to cover it better and more daylight he might find something. Or get snakebit. But Pinto’s old tale suggested witches were involved. First he would see where that could lead him.

And then there was the business of Colonel Ji. Who? Why? Probably Ji had lied to protect his son, Chee guessed. What had his son done? Or was it just a father’s concern that his kid might be involved in something dangerous?

He turned it over, and over, and over. And the thinking kept him awake while he drove the endless miles of N.M. 44 toward Albuquerque. He had relied on a translator’s transcript of Hosteen Pinto’s tale of horse theft and homicide. He wanted to hear it for himself in the old man’s own voice.

THE YELLOW TAPE used to isolate the scene of a crime dangled loosely across Colonel Ji’s front gate. Leaphorn detached it, ushered Professor Bourebonette through, and reconnected it behind them.

“You’re sure this is all right?”

“The people from the Bureau are all finished in here,” Leaphorn said. “But keeping your hands in your pockets, not moving anything — that’s a good idea.”

Actually, it wasn’t exactly all right. It would be better if Bourebonette waited in the car. Better still if he had made this recheck of the colonel’s darkroom before he picked her up at the library. But he hadn’t thought of it until too late for that. And then the idea pressed on him. A feeling of urgency that he couldn’t really understand.

He unlocked the door, felt the little sigh of cold air that empty houses release when he opened it. It was a familiar sensation to Leaphorn — one he felt each evening when he unlocked his own house in Window Rock.

Nothing had changed in the front room, except it was silent now and the sills and surfaces bore the faint gray stains of fingerprint powder. He noticed Professor Bourebonette looking at the chalk lines that marked where the colonel’s body had been. He noticed the colonel’s messages were still on the wall, looking blacker now under the artificial yellow glare of the ceiling bulb. He noticed the professor’s expression. Strained? Sad? Mournful? Obviously this is unpleasant for her. Why was she here?

Everything in the darkroom was as he remembered it — a cramped, airless space, musty, nostrils filled with the acid smell of print-developing fluids. The prints were where he had seen them but now they also wore traces of gray powder. Would an FBI lab technician be sorting out Joe Leaphorn’s fingerprints? He checked his memory. No, he had handled everything carefully, by the edges.

Now he spread the prints on the cabinet top in two neat rows and examined them methodically. They were all the standard eight by ten inches on black-and-white glossy paper. All seemed to be exposures of parts of the same dark basaltic outcrop. They seemed to have been shot from a considerable distance through a telescopic lens. Or perhaps they had been magnified in the enlarger. The same negative had been used to make several of the prints, each blown up to a different magnification. But the angle in all was almost exactly the same — as if all the negatives had been exposed from the same location, but had been made by using lenses of different focal lengths and by shifting the camera on the tripod. All included the same segment of that outcrop. Some more of it, some less, depending on the lens. But in all, the same features were near the center of the print.

Leaphorn showed them to Bourebonette and explained what he was thinking.

“Why telescopic?” she asked.

“Notice this juniper in the foreground here in this one? Here it is in this other one. Notice how the relationship in size has changed. A telescopic lens compresses the distance like that.”

Bourebonette nodded. “Sure,” she said. “That’s the way the optics would work.”

“You know the Reservation pretty well. Does this look familiar?”

She studied the prints. “They’re all the same place, obviously. But we don’t get enough of it to put it in the landscape.”

“Have you seen it?”

She laughed. “Probably. Or something like it. It could be about forty places in the malpais down around Grants. Or maybe out in the Bisti badlands, or in the Zuni Mountains, or on the Black Mesa side of Monument Valley, or down around the Hopi Buttes, or out here beyond Ship Rock toward Littlewater or Sanostee. Or one of those volcanic throats east of Mount Taylor, or—” She shook her head, and handed the prints to Leaphorn. “Hard to tell. Any place that lava bubbled up through the cracks during a volcanic period. And that happened a lot out here.”

“It would be near here someplace, I think,” Leaphorn said. “We can presume Ji or his son shot them. Do you have any idea why either one would do that? Or make all these prints?”

“No idea,” she said. “But they certainly weren’t taken for the beauty of the landscape. Could you call the boy and ask him? Didn’t you say he was staying with some friends here?”

“They decided against that. They’re taking him to Albuquerque to stay with some relatives instead. He won’t be there yet. But let’s see if we can locate the negatives. Maybe they’ll include enough background to tell us where this is.”

They spent almost thirty minutes sorting negative files without finding anything useful.

Leaphorn pulled the wastebasket from under the sink, sorted through it, and extracted a crumpled sheet of photographic paper. It was part of the same scene, blown up larger on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet. The print was much darker. Overexposed in the enlarger, Leaphorn guessed, and thrown away. He spread it on the cabinet, looked at Bourebonette, raised his eyebrows in a question.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe big enough to work with.” She looked at Leaphorn and grinned. “But work on what?”

“I think maybe we’re just wasting our time,” he said and put the picture back in the wastebasket.

“I’m thinking you’re in a strange business,” she said.

“Oh, not usually,” he said. “All this is an oddity.”

“A single-minded photographer,” she said. “Rocks and this girl.” She touched the portrait of the teenager Leaphorn had noticed earlier. “Several of these. Probably the boy’s girlfriend, I’d guess.”

“It looks like it’s a photocopy,” Leaphorn said. “Not very good.”

“Out of this, maybe,” she said. The Ship Rock High School yearbook was on the shelf behind the enlarger.

They found the girl’s portrait among the cheerleaders. She was a junior. Jenifer Dineyahze.

“I think we should go find Jenifer Dineyahze,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe she can tell us something useful.” But even as he said it, he doubted it.

Jenifer Dineyahze proved to be a rider of the Ship Rock school bus.

“It’s a little tough to tell you exactly where the Dineyahzes live,” the acting assistant principal told them, and he dug a map out of his desk drawer and showed them which school bus she rode and just about where the bus picked her up. “Back in here,” he said, putting the tip of his pencil on the slope of Beautiful Mountain. “Or here, maybe.” And he moved it a little toward Sanostee. “You’ll see the place where the track takes off to the left.”

Before they left Ship Rock, Leaphorn filled the tank of his patrol car — as he always did on junkets that would take him onto the back roads. But at least this errand took them south and west, toward Window Rock and home. And it would take them past the place where Jim Chee had arrested Ashie Pinto. It would give him a look at the rock formation where the painter had done his vandalism.

“What do you think you’re going to learn?” Bourebonette asked.

“Frankly, nothing,” Leaphorn said. “I think tomorrow I’ll get on the telephone and try to get hold of the boy in Albuquerque and I’ll ask him about the pictures. But it’s sort of on the way home — or back to your car. And you never know.”

They turned west off Route 666 toward Red Rock on Navajo 33.

Bourebonette pointed south toward Rol Hai Rock and then toward Barber Peak across the highway. “Those pictures,” she said. “It could be a little piece of either one of those.”

“Or even of some of those rays that run out from Ship Rock,” he said. “Any new ideas by now of why he took them?”

“No. Not even an old idea. How about you?”

“I have an old idea,” Leaphorn said. “I’m thinking that when we get to that rock formation Nez’s vandal was painting, maybe it will turn out to be the same formation Ji, or Ji’s boy, was photographing.”

Bourebonette thought about this. “Why?”

Leaphorn chuckled. “I was afraid you’d ask me that,” he said. “I think it’s because since my wife died I’ve started watching television. That’s the way the plot ought to work out.”

Bourebonette didn’t comment for a while. And then she said: “Well, there had to be some reason for somebody to shoot Colonel Ji. He was up around where the painter was working the night Mr. Nez was killed. At least his car was. And he took pictures of the rocks. So maybe there’s a connection.”

Leaphorn glanced at her, caught her looking at him. She shrugged. “Sounds silly, but the same rocks—” she said, “ — that would be some connection.”

Leaphorn made a left turn off the asphalt onto a dirt road which hadn’t been on this year’s road grading schedule. They bumped down it, raising dust. “Well,” he said. “We’ll soon know.”

Leaphorn parked at the place the car of Officer Nez had burned. It had been hauled away — an unusual fate for a derelict vehicle on a reservation where they commonly rusted away where they died — but the place was marked by the skeletons of partially burned junipers and scorched cactus.

“There it is,” Bourebonette said, pointing. “See the painted places?”

The formation rose to the southeast, one of many old volcanic extrusions scattered along the flanks of the great upthrusts that form the multitude of mountain ridges of the southern Rockies. “Where?” Leaphorn asked and, as he said it, saw a stripe of white, and another, and another, where no white should be.

“Ah,” he said, and reached behind the seat of his car for his binoculars. But before he used them, he studied the formation, looking for the same pattern of shapes he memorized from the photographs. He didn’t see it.