Coyote Waits (23 page)

“Exactly. Has the trial started yet?”

“They’re picking the jury. Maybe they’ll start it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“You’ll be one of the first witnesses, I’d say. That right?”

“I’m under subpoena. The prosecutor wants me to tell about the arrest. What I saw.”

“So you’ll be in Albuquerque,” Leaphorn said. “I know you’re on leave but I think you ought to go see the Ji kid. See what he’ll tell you. See if he saw anything.”

“I was planning to do that,” Chee said.

“Unofficially,” Leaphorn said. “Not our case, of course.” There was a pause. “And get that telephone fixed.”

THE ADDRESS LEAPHORN had given him for the Ha residence was in the opposite direction from the Tagert address. But Tagert’s house wasn’t far from the university campus and Chee made the detour. He had a hunch he wanted to check.

It was a single-story, brick-fronted house on the lower end of the middle class — the sort of house history professors can afford if they are frugal with their grocery buying. Chee parked on the street, walked up the empty driveway, and rang the bell. No answer. He rang it four times. Still no answer. Then he walked across the yard and peered through the garage window. It was dirty, but not too dirty for Chee to see a red Corvette parked inside and beyond it a white Oldsmobile sedan.

The Ha residence was neat, standing out for its tidiness in a weed-grown neighborhood which was on the upper end of the lower class. There was no car in the driveway, but as Chee parked his truck at the curb, an elderly blue Chevy sedan pulled up beside the carport. The boy sitting beside the young woman who was driving was Taka Ji.

They started their talking in the driveway, Chee leaning on the sedan door, the boy standing stiffly facing him, and Miss Janice Ha, the driver, standing beside Taka — a silent, disapproving observer.

“I was the officer who made the arrest out there that night,” Chee told the boy. “I saw you driving your father’s car. I was in the police car you met just before you turned off the pavement toward Ship Rock.”

Taka Ji simply looked at him.

“Now we know some more,” Chee said. “We know you’re the one who painted those rocks. It might help us catch the man who shot your father if you tell me what you saw.”

Janice Ha put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think we should go inside,” she said.

The front room of the house was almost as small as Chee’s own cramped lodgings — but there was space in it, between the two front windows, for a shrine. The shrine featured a foot-tall plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin in her traditional blue-and-white robes looking down serenely at two small candles and two small pots of chrysanthemums. A woman who reminded Chee of a smaller, slightly older, and female version of Colonel Ji was sitting on the sofa beside it.

She was Thuy Ha, and she bowed deeply to Chee when Janice Ha introduced him.

“Taka’s father was my mother’s younger brother,” Janice Ha explained. “Her English is not yet good. It was a long time before we could get her released by the Communists. She joined us only last year.”

“I hate to intrude at this bad time,” Chee said. He looked at Taka Ji. “But I think Mr. Ji here might be able to help us.”

Janice spoke to the woman — translating Chee presumed — and Thuy Ha said something in response. “She said he will help you any way he can,” Janice Ha said.

The older woman spoke again, a longer statement this time. The girl responded briefly and the older woman responded. Her voice sounded angry.

“Mrs. Ha asked me to tell you that the Communists killed Colonel Ji,” Janice Ha said. She looked embarrassed. “She said I should tell you Colonel Ji worked faithfully for the Americans, and made many enemies because of that, and the Communists sent someone all the way over here to America just to kill him.”

The woman was watching Chee intently.

“Would you ask her if she knows who might have done it?”

Janice Ha translated. Mrs. Ha spoke a single word.

“Communists,” Janice Ha said.

Taka Ji broke the brief silence that followed that.

“I didn’t see very much,” he said. “It was getting dark, and the storm was coming.”

“Just tell me what you saw,” Chee said.

First he had heard a car. He had climbed down from the ladder and was sitting on the sand beside it, looking at the blown-up photograph of the rocks, deciding exactly where he should add the next section of paint. He had heard the engine of a vehicle, revving up, driving in very low gear, coming in closer to this formation than vehicles usually come. He had folded up the ladder and put it out of sight. Then he had hidden himself. But after a while he heard voices, and he climbed up to where he could see what was going on.

“There were three people. They had left the truck, or whatever it was, parked back behind some of those junipers on the slope. I could just see the roof. And three of them were walking toward the formation. Not toward me, but more toward the west. At first I thought it was one man and two women because one was larger than the other two. But then I saw when they got a little closer that one of them was a real thin old man.”

“Ashie Pinto?”

“Yes,” Taka Ji said. “I saw his picture in the Farmington
Times
that Sunday, after he was arrested. It looked like the man who killed the policeman.”

“The other two? Did you recognize them?”

The boy shook his head.

“Could you, if you saw them again?”

“One of them, I think. The bigger one. I got a better look at him. The other one, I don’t know.”

“But the other one was a woman?”

“I don’t know. I think I thought that just because of the size. They had on a dark-colored felt hat, and a big jacket, and jeans.” Taka stopped, looking doubtful. His aunt said something terse in Vietnamese.

“Okay,” Taka said. “After that, they disappeared up into the rocks. I just stayed there awhile, where I was. I was thinking I should go, because I didn’t want anybody to know what I was doing.” He stopped, glanced at his Mrs. Ha, said something haltingly in Vietnamese.

She nodded, smiled at him, reached over and patted his knee.

“He said he was afraid people would think what he was doing was silly,” Janice Ha said. Her expression said she agreed with her cousin. They would think it was silly.

“I thought if I left now, they would maybe see me driving away. I always left the car down in the arroyo where nobody could see it, but they would see me driving away. So I decided I would wait until they left.” He stopped again.

“Go on,” Janice said. “Tell us what happened.” She looked at Chee. “We didn’t know anything about this either. He should have told the police.”

Taka flushed. “My father told me not to tell anybody. He said it sounded like something I should not be mixed up in. He said to just be quiet about it.”

“Well, better late than never,” Janice said. “Tell us.”

“I wondered what was happening over there, so I decided to get closer so I could see. I know that place real well by now, or the part of it where I was working anyway. It’s full of snakes. They come in there when the weather starts getting cold because those black rocks stay warm even in the winter and the field mice move in there too. And, normally, those snakes hunt at night because that’s when the kangaroo rats and the little mice come out to eat, but in the winter it’s cold at night and the snakes are cold-blooded reptiles so they stay in their holes after . . .”

Taka had noticed Janice’s expression — impatient with this digression into natural science.

“Anyway,” he said hurriedly, “I know where to walk and how not to get snakebit. So I went over in the direction I had seen the three people go and in a little while I could hear voices. Talking up there in the rocks. So I moved around there — it was just beginning to get dark now and there was lightning up in the mountains. And then I saw the one who killed the policeman. He hadn’t gone up in there with the other two. He was sitting out by a piñon tree on the ground. I watched him awhile, and he didn’t do anything except once in a while he would drink out of a bottle he had with him.

“I thought about that for a while and I decided that if that one was drunk, then when it got just a little darker, I could get down to the arroyo and get my car and slip away without being seen. I just sat there and waited a little while. I heard the two who went up into the rocks yelling. It sounded like they were really excited. I thought they had stirred up some of the snakes back in there.”

Taka Ji stopped, looked at his aunt, and at Janice, and finally at Chee. He cleared his throat.

“Then I heard a shot,” he said. “And I got out of there and got the car and went home.”

The boy looked around him again. Finished. Waiting for questions.

Janice Ha was looking startled. “A shot! Did you tell your dad? You should have told the police.”

Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese to Janice, got an explanation, responded to that. Then Janice said to her mother: “Well, I don’t care. We’re living in America now.”

“Where did the sound of the shot come from?” Chee asked.

“It sounded like from back in the rocks. Back in there where they had been yelling. I thought maybe they had shot at a snake.”

“Just one shot?”

“One,” Taka said.

“Were you still there when Officer Nez came?”

“I heard the car. I heard it coming. There’s a track that runs along there west of that rocky ridge where we were. It was coming along that. Toward us.”

“Did he have his siren going? His red light on?”

“No, but when I saw it, I saw it was a Navajo Tribal Police car. I decided I better go. Right away. I got away from there and went to the arroyo and got the car and went home.”

“Do you remember meeting me?”

“It scared me,” Taka said. “I saw your police car, coming fast, toward me.” He paused. “I should have stopped. I should have told you I heard the shot.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Chee said. But he was thinking that it might have saved Colonel Ji’s life.

Mrs. Ha was watching them, listening to every word. Chee thought that she must know a little English.

“I want you to give me some directions,” Chee said. “I have a big-scale map out in my truck. I want to show you that and have you mark on it exactly where those people were in that rock formation.”

Taka Ji nodded.

Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese, said it directly to Jim Chee and then glanced at her daughter, awaiting the translation.

“She said: ‘We have a saying in Vietnam — ‘” Janice Ha hesitated. “I’m not sure of the word for that animal in English. Oh, yes. The saying is that fate is as gentle with men as the mongoose is with mice.”

Chee shook his head, nodded to the woman. “Would you tell your mother that Navajos say the same thing in different words. We say: ‘Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.’”

It was obvious when the elevator doors opened that federal district court was recessing for lunch. People were milling in the hallway. Janet Pete was hurrying for the elevator, directly toward him. He let her in, along with twenty or thirty other citizens.

“I found Colonel Ji’s boy,” Chee told her. “I just came from talking with him.” He explained what Leaphorn had learned — that Taka Ji was the elusive painter of stone, that Taka Ji had been out on the basalt ridge the evening Delbert Nez was killed.

“You’re going to tell me that you have your witness now. That that boy saw Ashie Pinto shoot Delbert Nez.”

She was pressed against him, sideways, in the jam-packed elevator. All Chee could see was the top of her head and part of her cheek. But if he could see her face, the expression would be disappointed. He could tell that from her tone.

“No,” Chee said. “As a matter of—” The fat man with the briefcase and the Old Spice cologne leaned against his hand, causing Chee to suck in his breath. He raised the hand gingerly and held it above his head, preferring looking silly to risking the pain.

“As a matter of fact, I wanted to tell you I may have arrested the wrong man. Could you get the trial postponed a little? Maybe a few days?”

“What?” Janet said, so loudly that the buzz of competing conversations surrounding them hushed. “We shouldn’t be talking about the case in here,” she said. But then she whispered, “What did he see?”

“Before Nez got there, there were three people out there. Pinto and two other people. Maybe two other men, maybe a man and a woman.”

Janet had managed to turn herself in the crush of people about forty-five degrees — a maneuver which Chee found most pleasant — and looked up at him. Her face was full of questions. He went on, “He said Pinto sat down by a tree on the grass and was drinking from a bottle. The others climbed up in the rocks. He heard them yelling up in there, and then he heard a shot. He thought they’d killed a rattlesnake. Remember those?”

Janet’s face expressed distaste. She remembered them all too well.

“Then he heard Nez’s police car. And he left.”

Chee had his chin tucked against his chest, looking down at her. He was conscious of her faint perfume, of her hip pressed against him, of hair which smelled of high country air and sunshine. He could see her face now. But he couldn’t read her expression. It baffled him.

“You think that helps prove you caught the wrong man? Helps Hosteen Pinto?”

“Helps Hosteen Pinto? Well, sure it does. Somebody else had the pistol, or at least a gun of some kind, before Nez was shot. All Pinto had, as far as the boy could see, was the bottle. Sure it helps. It creates a reasonable doubt. Don’t you think so?”

Janet Pete had put her arms around his waist and hugged him fiercely.

“Ah, Jim,” she said. “Jim.”

And it took Chee, bandaged hand held high over his head, several seconds to realize that everyone on the elevator who faced the right way must be staring at them. And when he realized it he didn’t care.

TAKA JI PROVED to be as efficient at marking Jim Chee’s map as he had been plotting out his romantic signal to Jenifer Dineyahze. Chee drove almost directly to the site and found the place in the adjoining arroyo where Taka had hidden his father’s vehicle. He climbed out of his pickup and stood beside it for a moment, stretching cramped muscles and plotting the most efficient way to climb into the outcrop.