Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] (18 page)

C
hee spent the night
beside his pickup truck in a sand-bottomed cul-de-sac off Moenkopi Wash. He'd stopped twice to make absolutely sure he hadn't been followed. Even so, he was nervous. He shaped the sand to fit hips and shoulders, rolled out his blanket, and lay looking up at a star-lit sky. Nothing remained of the afternoon's empty promise of rain except an occasional distant thunder from somewhere up around the Utah border. Why had the two men waited for him in his trailer? Obviously it hadn't been a friendly visit. Could he have been wrong about one of the men having been with Johnson in Wepo Wash? It would have made more sense for them to be members of the narcotics company. As Johnson had warned him, they might logically come looking for him. But why now? They would have learned by now that the dope was being sold back to them. Did they think that he was one of the hijackers doing the selling? He, and Musket, and Palanzer? But if the man had been the one he'd seen with Johnson in the wash, that meant something different. What would the
dea
want with Chee? And why would the
dea
wait for him in the dark, instead of calling him into Largo's office for a talk? Was it because, once again, the
dea
's intentions were not wholly orthodox? Because he hadn't returned Johnson's call? That line of speculation led Chee nowhere. He turned his thoughts to the telephone call to Gaines. Tomorrow night the exchange would be made—five hundred thousand dollars in currency for two suitcases filled with cocaine. But where? All he knew now, that he hadn't known, was that the caller might have been West, and that Musket might be dead. That didn't seem to help. Then, as he thought it through all the way, through from the east, the south, the west, and the north, and back to the east again, just as his uncle had taught him, he saw that it might help. Everything must have a reason. Nothing was done without a cause. Why delay the payoff more than necessary—as the caller had done? How would tomorrow night be different from tonight? Different for West? Probably, somehow or other, the nights would be different on the Hopi ceremonial calendar. And West would be aware of the difference. He had been married to a Hopi. In the Hopi tradition, he had moved into the matriarchy of his wife—into her village and into her home. Three or four years, Dashee had said. Certainly long enough to know something of the Hopi religious calendar.

Chee shifted into a more comfortable position. The nervous tension was draining away now, the sense of being hunted. He felt relaxed and drowsy. Tomorrow he would get in touch with Dashee and find out what would be going on tomorrow night in the Hopi world of kachina spirits and men who wore sacred masks to impersonate them.

Chee was thinking of kachinas when he drifted off into sleep, and he dreamed of them. He awoke feeling stiff and sore. Shaking the sand out of his blanket, he folded it behind the pickup seat. Whoever had been waiting in his trailer had probably long since left Tuba City, but Chee decided not to take any chances. He drove southward instead, to Cameron. He got to the roadside diner just at sunrise, ordered pancakes and sausage for breakfast, and called Dashee from the pay telephone booth.

"What time is it?" Dashee said.

"It's late," Chee said. "I need some information. What's going on tonight at Hopi?"

"My God," Dashee shouted. "It's only a little after six. I just got to bed. I'm on the night shift for the next week."

"Sorry," Chee said. "But tell me about tonight."

"Tonight? " Dashee said. "There's nothing to night. The Chu'tiwa—the Snake Dance ceremony—that's at Walpi day after tomorrow. Nothing tonight."

"Nowhere?" Chee asked. "Not in Walpi, or IIotevilla, or Bacobi, or anywhere?" He was disappointed and his voice showed it.

"Nothing much," Dashee said. "Just mostly stuff in the kivas. Getting ready for the Snake ceremonials. Private stuff."

"How about that village where West lived? His wife's village. Which one was it?"

"Sityatki," Dashee said.

"Anything going on there?"

There was a long pause.

"Cowboy? You still there?"

"Yeah," Cowboy said.

"Anything at Sityatki tonight?"

"Nothing much," Cowboy said.

"But something?"

"Nothing for tourists," Dashee said.

"What is it?"

"Well, it's something we call Astotokaya. It means Washing of the Hair. It's private. Sort of an initiation ceremony into the religious societies of the village."

It didn't sound to Chee like the sort of thing that would be useful to West.

"Does it draw a big crowd? I think that's what we're looking for."

Dashee laughed. "Just the opposite—they close the roads. Nobody is supposed to come in. Everybody is supposed to stay indoors, not even look out the windows. People who live in houses that look out on the kivas, they move out. Nobody stirs except the people working on the initiation in the kivas and the young people getting initiated. And they don't come out until dawn."

"Tell me about it," Chee said. The disappointment was gone. He thought he knew, now, where West would set up his rendezvous.

Cowboy was reluctant. "It's confidential," he said. "Some of that stuff we're not really supposed to talk about."

"I think it might be important," Chee said. "A funny thing happened yesterday. I was at the cultural center, and the clerk got called away from the desk, and the telephone was ringing, so Miss Pauling went over there and worked the switchboard and—"

"I heard about that fire," Dashee said. "You start that fire?"

"Why would I start a fire?" Chee asked. "What I'm trying to tell you is Miss Pauling overheard this guy telling Gaines that the people who owned the cocaine could buy it back for five hundred thousand dollars. He said they should have the money available in two briefcases by nine o'clock Friday night. And he said he'd be back in touch to say where the trade-off would be made."

"How'd you know when to start the fire?" Dashee said. "How'd you know when that call was coming? You son of a bitch, you almost burned down the cultural center."

"The point is why hold off until nine o'clock Friday night? That's the question; and I think the answer is because they want to make the switch in a place where the buyers will figure there's going to be a bunch of curious people standing around watching, when actually it will be private."

"Sityatki," Cowboy said.

"Right. It makes sense."

Long pause, while Cowboy thought about it. "Not much," he said. "Why go to all that trouble if they're just going to swap money for cocaine?"

"Safety," Chee said. "They need to be someplace where the guys buying the dope back won't just shoot them and keep the money and everything."

"No safer there than anyplace else," Dashee argued.

Maybe it wasn't, Chee thought. But why else wait until nine Friday night? "Well," he said, "I think the swap's going to be made in Sityatki, and if you'd tell me more about what goes on, maybe I'll know why."

So Cowboy told him, reluctantly and haltingly enough so that Chee's pancakes and sausages were cold by the time he had prodded it all out, and it added nothing much. The crux of the matter was the village was sealed from darkness until dawn, people were supposed to remain in doors and not be looking out to spy on the spirits who visited the kivas during the night, and the place was periodically patrolled by priests of the kiva—but more ceremonially than seriously, Cowboy thought.

Chee took his time over breakfast, killing some of the minutes that had to pass before he could call Captain Largo at his office. Largo would be just a little bit late, and Chee wanted his call to be hanging there waiting for the captain when he walked in. Sometimes little psychological edges like that helped, and Chee was sure he'd need some.

"He's not in yet," the girl on the switchboard reported.

"You're sure?" Chee asked. "Usually he gets in about eight-oh-five."

"Just a minute," she amended. "He's driving into the parking lot."

Which was exactly how Chee had planned it.

"Largo," Largo said.

"This is Chee. There's a couple of things I have to report."

"On the telephone?"

"When I came in last night, there were two men waiting for me in my trailer. With the lights off. With a gun. One of them, anyway."

"Last night?" Largo said.

"About ten, maybe."

"And now you're reporting it?"

"I think one of them was Drug Enforcement. At least, I think I've seen him with Johnson. And if one was, I guess they both were. Anyway, I wasn't sure what to do, so I took off."

"Any violence?"

"No. I figured they were in there, so I headed back to my truck. They heard me and came running out. One of them had a gun, but no shooting."

"How'd you know they were there?"

"Smelled coffee," Chee said.

Largo didn't comment on that. "Those sons-a-bitches," he said.

"The other thing is that Miss Pauling told me she overheard a telephone call from some man to Gaines. He told Gaines he could have the cocaine back for five hundred thousand dollars and to be ready with the money at nine
p.m.
Friday and—"

"Where?"

"He didn't say. This isn't our case, so I didn't ask too many questions. I told Cowboy Dashee and I guess they'll go out and talk to her."

"Heard they had a little fire out there," Largo said. "You know anything about that?"

"I'm the one who reported it," Chee said. "Bunch of tumbleweeds caught on fire."

"Listen," Largo said. "I'm going to do some seeing about the way the
dea
is behaving. We're not going to put up with any more of that. And when I talk to people I'm going to tell them that I gave you strict orders to stay away from this drug case. I'm going to tell people I'm going to kick your ass right out of the Navajo Police if I hear just one little hint that you're screwing around in federal territory. I'm going to tell people you understand that perfectly. That you know I'll do it. No question about it. You know that if you get anywhere near that drug case, or anybody involved with it, you are instantly and permanently suspended. Fired. Out of work."

Largo paused, allowing time for the speech to penetrate. "Now," he continued. "You do understand that, don't you? You understand that when I hang up this telephone I am going to write a memo for the files which will show that for the third and final time Jim Chee was officially and formally notified that any involvement on his part in this investigation would result in his immediate termination, said memo also showing that Chee did understand and agree to these instructions. Now, you got all that?"

"I got it," Chee said. "Just one thing, though. Would you put in the memo what I'm supposed to be doing? Put down that you've assigned me to working on that windmill, and solving the Burnt Water burglary, and finding Joseph Musket, and identifying that John Doe case up on Black Mesa. Would you put all that down, too?"

Another long pause. Chee guessed that Largo had never intended to write any memo for the record. Now he was examining Chee's motives.

"Why?" Largo asked.

"Just to get it all in, all in one place on the record."

"Okay," Largo said.

"And I think we should ask the medical examiner's office in Flagstaff to check the New Mexico State Penitentiary and see if they can come up with any dental x-rays on Joseph Musket, and then check them against the x-rays they took of John Doe's teeth."

"Wait a minute," Largo said. "You saw Musket alive after Doe's body was found."

"I saw somebody," Chee said. "West said it was Musket."

Another silence. "Ah," Largo said. "Yes, indeed."

"And about the windmill. I think I know who has been doing it, but it's nothing we're ever going to prove." He told Largo about the spring, and the shrine, and about how old Taylor Sawkatewa had tacitly admitted being there the night the plane had crashed, when Deputy Sheriff Dashee and Chee had talked to him.

"Wait a minute," Largo said. "When was this visit? It was after I ordered you to stay away from that drug case."

"I was working on the windmill," Chee said. "Sometimes you get more than you go after."

"I notice you do," Largo said grimly. "I've got to have the paperwork done on all this."

"Is tomorrow soon enough?"

"Just barely," Largo said. "What's wrong with coming in to work and doing it now?"

"I'm way down at Cameron," Chee said. "And I thought I'd spend the day seeing if I can catch us that Burnt Water burglar."

T
he first step
toward what Chee called catching the Burnt Water burglar was ceremonial. In effect, Chee was going hunting. From their very beginnings, the Navajos had been a society of hunters. Like all hunting cultures, they approached the bloody, dangerous, and psychologically wounding business of killing one's fellow beings with elaborate care. Everything was done to minimize damage. The system had been devised in the dim, cold past, when the Dinees preyed with the wolves on the moose and caribou of the Arctic. And the first step of this system was the purification of the hunter.

There was no place anywhere near his trailer lot where Chee could build a sweat house. So he had found a place on the ridge behind Tuba City. He'd built it in a little arroyo, using one of the banks for a wall and erecting a sort of lean-to of rocks and juniper limbs. There was plenty of dead wood all around to fuel its fire pit. The necessary water Chee carried in from his truck in two collapsible plastic containers. By midmorning, the rocks were hot enough. Chee stripped to his Jockey shorts. He stood, facing east, and sang the first of the four sweat lodge songs:

He sang all the verses, dropped to his hands and knees, and ducked through the sweat house entrance into the hot darkness inside. He poured water from one of the plastic containers onto the sizzling boulders and pulled the heavy canvas cover down over the entrance. In the steamy blackness he sang three other songs, recounting how Talking God and the other
yei
figures of this legend had caught Black God in his guise as a crow, and how Black God had removed his suit of black feathers, and how Black God had been tricked, finally, into releasing all the game animals which he had held captive.

With that ritual finished, Chee was not certain how he should proceed. It was not the sort of question he would have ever thought to ask Frank Sam Nakai. "How, Uncle, does one prepare himself for a hunt which will take him into a Hopi village on a Holy Night when the kachina spirits are out? How does one prepare himself to trap another man?" Had he ever asked, he knew Frank Sam Nakai would have had an answer. He would have lit a cigaret, and smoked it, and finally he would have had an answer. Chee, his sweat bath songs finished, sat in the choking wet heat and thought about it in the Navajo Way—from east through north. The purpose of the hunting ceremony—the Stalking Way—was to put hunter and prey in harmony. If one was to hunt deer, the Stalking Way repeated the ancient formula by which man regained his ability to be one with the deer. One changed the formula only slightly to fit the animal. The animal, now, was man. An Anglo-American, ex-husband of a Hopi woman, trader with the Navajos, magician, wise, shrewd, dangerous. Chee felt the sweat pouring out of him, dripping from his chin and eyebrows and arms, and thought how to change the song to fit it to West. He sang:

Verse after verse he sang, adopting the ancient ceremonial songs to meet this new need. The songs invoked Talking God, and Begochidi, and Calling God, and Black God himself, and the Predator People: First Wolf, First Puma, First Badger; recounting the role of Game Maker, and all the other Holy People of the Great Navajo myth of how hunting began and how man became himself a predator. Through it all, verse by verse, the purpose was the same as it had been since his ancestors hunted along the glaciers: to cross the prehuman flux and once again be as one with the hunted animal, sharing his spirit, his ways, thoughts, his very being.

Chee simply substituted "the man West" for "the fine buck" and sang on.

There should be a final ceremony, and a final verse. In the old, traditional days, the bow of the hunter would have been blessed. These days, sometimes it was done to the rifle before a deer hunt. Chee unsnapped his holster and extracted his pistol. It was a medium-barrel Ruger .38. He was not particularly good with it, making his qualifying score each year with very little to spare. He had never shot at any living thing with it, and had never really decided what he would do if the situation demanded that some fellow human be fired upon. Given proper need, or proper provocation, Chee presumed he would shoot, but it wasn't the sort of decision to be made in the abstract. Now Chee stared at the pistol, trying to imagine himself shooting West. It didn't work. He put the pistol back in the holster. As he did, it occurred to him that the final verse of the usual sweat bath ceremonial could not be done now. The prescribed verse was the Blessing Song from the Blessing Way. But Jim Chee, a shaman of the Slow Talking People, could sing no blessing songs now. Not until this hunt was finished and he had returned to this sweat bath to purify himself again. Until then, Jim Chee had turned himself into a predator, dedicated by the Stalking Way songs to the hunt. The Blessing Song would have to wait. It put one in harmony with beauty. The Stalking Way put one in harmony with death.