Coyote Waits (22 page)

He started with the horse thief tape. He’d listened to some of it already, with a lot of skipping around, and he’d read a copy of the transcript in Tagert’s office. Now as he listened to Pinto’s voice droning the same story into his earphones his sleepiness returned. But he fought it off, checking what he was hearing with the library’s copy of the transcript. When he came to a discrepancy, he stopped the tape and replayed it. The revisions tended to be minor corner-cuttings or sometimes eliminations of repetition. By one P.M. he’d found nothing that changed the meaning or left out anything significant.

Sleepiness was almost overpowering. His stomach grumbled with hunger. He put down the transcript, took off the earphones, yawned and stretched. The air around him had the deadness common to rooms without open windows, common to rooms where old things are stored. The silence was absolute, the place empty except for himself and the young woman who sat behind the desk at the entrance, working on files.

He would walk across the mall to the Union and get something to eat. No, he would walk across Central Avenue to the Frontier and have a green chile enchilada. But first he would skip ahead and see if the translator had cheated when the subject became witchcraft. When he’d read the transcript before, it had seemed that Pinto had said remarkably little about why the Ghostway cure had been needed for Delbito Willie. Perhaps he’d actually said more.

He ran the tape fast forward, listening to Pinto’s old voice quacking in his ears until he found the proper place.

“. . . And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there was a lava flow. It is dangerous to ride a horse in there, even in daylight, because, you know, he might get his hoof in one of those cracks — just a little slip, you know, and break his leg and throw you onto the rocks.”

Chee stopped the tape and checked the translation. Just as he remembered, the copy he’d read omitted the digression about the horse breaking its leg. He started the tape again.

“. . . The Yucca Fruit Clan men followed very slowly. The lava was rough there and they kept way back anyway because of the man with the yellow mustache. They say he was a very good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had tied up their horses and went up into the rocks. Right there, Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit Clan men they stopped, too, because they knew Yellow Mustache would be protecting his horses with his rifle and because they saw then where it was the white men had gone. It was up there in the place where the witches gather. It was up there in the cave where the evil ones come to make somebody into a skinwalker. Some of those Yucca Fruit Clan men knew about it. They lived over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains, but they had heard about this place. And you could tell it was this place because of the way the rocks were formed there. They say it looked like the ears of a mule sticking up. If you looked at it from the west, that’s the way it looked. Two sharp spires with a low saddle between them. They say it looked like a saddle, like one of those McClellan saddles, with the steep rise up the back side and the horn sticking up on the other side. Reminded people of a saddle.”

Chee stopped the tape. None of this, not a word of it, was in the transcript he’d read at Tagert’s office. He turned the pages of the library copy. None of it was here, either. Two pages were missing, cut out with a very sharp knife or a razor blade.

He ran the tape again, hearing how Delbito Willie wanted to go in after the white men, to see if they were dead. If they were he would take the rifle of Yellow Mustache — a very fine rifle. The argument had lasted two days, with all of the Yucca Fruit men against it until finally, when they all agreed the white men must be dead by now, one of the Yucca Fruit Clan agreed to go partway with Willie — but not as far as the witches’ cave. And Willie had gone in and had come out with the rifle of Yellow Mustache, and the word that both men were indeed dead.

He checked the tape and transcript in at the desk.

“Is there a way to find out who did the translating? Any record kept of that?”

“Just a minute,” the woman said. “I think so.”

She disappeared into a door marked STAFF ONLY.

Chee waited, rechecking his reasoning. He thought he knew who the translator would be.

He was right.

The woman reappeared, holding a file card.

“Someone named William Redd,” she said.

LEAPHORN WAS HAVING one of those frustrating mornings which cause all bureaucrats to wish the telephone had never been invented.

At first, he got nothing but a no answer at the number of Mr. Doan Van Ha, the Albuquerque uncle to whom Taka Ji had been sent for safekeeping. Finally, when someone did pick up the phone it proved to be an elderly woman who identified herself as Khanh Ha. Her command of English was barely rudimentary. After a few minutes of total failure to communicate, Khanh Ha said: “You stay. I get boy.”

Leaphorn stayed, telephone receiver held to his ear, listening to the silence in the home of the Ha family. Minutes ticked away. He noticed his windows were dusty. Through them he noticed that one of the crows that used the cottonwoods across the road from the Justice Building had lost some wing feathers and flew out of balance. He noticed that the high clouds he had seen when he came to work had thickened and spread from the northern horizon across most of the sky. Maybe it would snow. They needed it. It was late. He thought of Emma, of how she gloried in these days when time hung stalled between the seasons, urging winter on, then cheering for spring, then happily announcing that tomorrow it would be summer and thunderstorm season. Then pleased to see the summer die, anxious for the peaceful gold of autumn. Emma. Happiness was always on her side of the horizon, safely in Dinetah, safely between the Sacred Mountains. She never felt any need to learn what lay beyond them.

A door slammed faintly in distant Albuquerque. Then came the sound of footsteps on a hard floor, and a boyish voice said: “Hello?”

“This is Lieutenant Leaphorn, Taka,” Leaphorn said. “Remember? We talked at your house in Ship Rock.”

“You have the wrong number,” the boy said. “I think so.”

“I am calling for Taka Ji,” Leaphorn said.

“This is Jimmy Ha,” the boy said. “I think they took Taka to my aunt’s house. Down in the South Valley.”

“Do you have that number?”

Jimmy Ha had it, but it took another five minutes to find it. Then, when Leaphorn dialed it, he got another no answer.

He fiddled ineffectively with his paperwork, passing enough time to make another try sensible. Again, no answer. He hung up, dialed the Federal Public Defender’s office in Albuquerque.

No, Jim Chee wasn’t there. He had been in this morning but he’d left.

“To go where?” Leaphorn asked.

To the federal courthouse.

“How about Janet Pete? Is she in?”

Janet Pete was at the courthouse, too. A jury was being selected.

“When she comes in would you tell her that I have to get a message to Jim Chee. Tell her to get word to him that I have to talk to him. Tell her it’s important.”

When he hung up, he made no pretense of doing paperwork. He simply sat and thought. Why had Colonel Ji been killed? He swiveled in his chair and stared at his map. It told him nothing. Nothing except that everything seemed to focus on a rock formation south of Ship Rock. Nothing made any sense. And that, he knew, was because he was seeing it all from the wrong perspective.

He thought about Professor Bourebonette.

He thought about Jim Chee. Unreliable perhaps. But a good mind.

He noticed his wastebasket. The maintenance man who had been neglecting to wash his windows had also neglected to empty it. Leaphorn leaned over and fished out the brochure describing the wonders of the People’s Republic of China. He spread it on the desk and studied the pictures again.

Then he threw it back in the wastebasket.

ODELL REDD WAS not at home. Or if he was, he didn’t respond to Jim Chee’s persistent knocking. Chee gave up. He found a vacant parking place in a loading zone behind the Biology Building and walked over to the History Department.

No, Jean Jacobs hadn’t seen him, either.

“Not this morning. He came in yesterday. We went out to lunch.” Jean Jacobs’s expression made it clear that this was a happy event.

“No idea where he is?”

“He should be working on his dissertation. Maybe in the library.”

The idea of hunting through the labyrinthine book stacks at Zimmerman held no appeal to Chee. He sat down.

“How about your boss? Still missing?”

“Nary a word,” Jacobs said. “I’m beginning to seriously think he died someplace. Maybe his wife killed him, or one of his graduate students.” She laughed. “They’d draw straws. Stand in line for it if they thought they had any chance of getting away with it.”

“What kind of car does he drive?”

“I don’t know.” She opened a drawer and extracted a file. “I’ve seen him driving a white four-door sedan, and sometimes a sexy sports car. Whorehouse red.”

She extracted a card from the file.

“I think that’s when his wife gave up on him, after he bought that red one. Let’s see, now. Oldsmobile Cutlass. Nineteen ninety. Corvette coupe. That’s a 1982 model. But cool, you know. Impresses the cute little coeds looking for a father figure to take them to bed.”

Jean Jacobs laughed when she said it, but it didn’t sound like the thought amused her.

“That’s his application for a parking permit?”

“Right,” Jacobs said. “It covers both cars. You just hang it on the one you’re driving.”

Chee looked down at his hand which was itching furiously. He resisted an impulse to rub it, adjusted the bandage instead. Jacobs was watching him.

“Healing up okay?”

Chee nodded. He was thinking about a low-slung Corvette, or a brand-new Oldsmobile, banging over those tracks south of Ship Rock.

“Which car did he drive mostly? Which one was he driving that last day you saw him, that evening when he came in to pick up his mail? You have any way of knowing what he was driving?”

“No,” Jacobs said. She hesitated. “He just came in and got his mail. And stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Well, he took some stuff he’d collected for a paper he was doing. It had been on his desk there. And a couple of letters that were in his out-basket.”

“Was he all right? What did he say?”

Jacobs sat looking out of the window. She glanced at him and back out the window again.

“Were you here when he came in?”

“No.”

“Just the next day you noticed he’d been in and picked up stuff?”

Jacobs nodded.

They considered each other.

“But he left me a note,” she said. She rummaged in her desk drawer, extracted a salmon-colored WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip, handed it to Chee.

Scrawled across it was:

“Jacobs — Call admissions. Get class lists on time for a change. Tell maintenance to clean up this pigpen, get windows washed.”

“He doesn’t sign his notes?” Chee asked.

Jacobs laughed. “No please. No thank you. That’s Tagert’s signature.”

“But it’s his handwriting?”

She glanced at the note. “Who else?”

He used Tagert’s telephone to call the Federal Public Defender’s office for Janet Pete. The receptionist’s voice boomed in his ear, telling him that Miss Pete was still at the courthouse. He held the receiver away from his ear, frowning.

Jean Jacobs was smiling about it. “The professor is hard of hearing,” she said. “He kept complaining to the telephone people about their equipment mumbling so they came in finally and put in that high-volume phone.”

“Wow,” Chee said.

“Just hold it a little way from your ear. It’s easy once you know how to handle it.”

The receptionist was talking again, less painfully now that he was following Jacobs’s advice.

“But there’s a message for you,” she was saying. “For her actually. She’s supposed to tell you to call Window Rock. ‘Please tell Mr. Chee to call Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn at his office.’”

Chee called.

“You in Albuquerque?” Leaphorn asked.

Chee said he was.

“We’ve got sort of a funny situation,” the lieutenant said. “It turns out that Taka Ji is the rock painter that Delbert Nez was after.”

“Oh,” Chee said. He digested the thought. “How’d you find out?”

Leaphorn told him.

“Has anyone talked to him?”

“I can hardly hear you,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds like you’re standing out in the hail.”

Chee pulled the mouthpiece closer to his lips. “I said has anyone talked to him? He was out there the night Nez was killed. Maybe he saw something.”

Leaphorn explained that the boy had been taken to Albuquerque to stay with relatives. He gave Chee the name and the number. “Nobody home when I called. But I think somebody should talk to him in person.”

“Did you tell the FBI?”

Chee’s question provoked an extended silence. Finally Leaphorn chuckled. “The Bureau was not particularly interested in a vandalism case at the moment.”

“They don’t see the connection?”

“With what? The agent handling the Ji killing is new out here, and pretty new in the business for that matter. I got the impression that he’ll talk to the boy one of these days but I don’t think he could see how painting his romantic message on rocks had anything to do with somebody shooting the colonel. I think they see some sort of link back to Vietnam. And what he did there.”

“How about with somebody shooting Officer Delbert Nez?” Chee asked.

Another pause. Then Leaphorn said: “Yeah. That’s what troubles me, too. I think that’s the key to it. Have you got it figured out?”

Chee found, to his surprise, that being asked that question by Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn pleased him. The question was clearly serious. The famous Joe Leaphorn, asking him that. Unfortunately he didn’t have an answer. Not a good one.

“Not really,” he said. “But I think once we understand it, we’re going to find there was more to the Nez homicide than we know about.”