Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 05 - The Dark Wind

by The Dark Wind(lit)

  Lomatewa shrugged. "Behind the boot was the body of the Navajo." He pursed his lips and shrugged again. The recitation was ended.

  "What day was that, Grandfather?" Chee asked.

  "It was the fourth day before the Niman Kachina," Lomatewa said.

  "This Navajo," Chee said. "When we got the body, there wasn't much left. But the doctors said it was a man about thirty. A man who must have weighed about one hundred sixty pounds. Is that about right?"

  Lomatewa thought about it. "Maybe a little older," he said. "Maybe thirty-two or so."

  "Was it anyone you had seen before?" Cowboy asked.

  "All Navajos-" Lomatewa began. He stopped, glanced at Chee. "I don't think so," he said.

  "Grandfather," Cowboy said. "When you go for the sacred spruce, you use the same trail coming and going. That is what I have been taught. Could the body have been there under that brush the day before, when you went up to the spring?"

  "No," Lomatewa said. "It wasn't there. The witch put it there during the night."

  "Witch?" Cowboy Dashee asked. "Would it have been a Hopi powaqa or a Navajo witch?"

  Lomatewa looked at Chee, frowning. "You said that you and this Navajo policeman got the body. Didn't he see what had been done?"

  "When we got the body, Grandfather, the ravens had been there for days, and the coyotes, and the vultures," Cowboy said. "You could only tell it had been a man and that he had been dead a long time in the heat."

  "Ah," Lomatewa said. "Well, his hands had been skinned." Lomatewa threw out his hands, palms up, demonstrating. "Fingers, palms, all. And the bottoms of his feet." He noticed Cowboy's puzzled surprise and nodded toward Chee. "If this Navajo respects his people's old ways, he will understand."

  Chee understood, perfectly. "That's what the witch uses to make corpse powder," Chee explained to Cowboy. "They call it anti'l. You make it out of the skin that has the individual's soul stamped into it." Chee pointed to the fingerprint whorls on his fingertips and the pads of his hands. "Like on your palms, and fingers, and the soles of your feet, and the glans of your penis." As he explained, it occurred to Jim Chee that he could finally answer one of Captain Largo's questions. There was more than the usual witchcraft gossip on Black Mesa because there was a witch at work.

  Chapter Eleven

  By the time chee drove back to Tuba City, typed up his report, and left it on Captain Largo's desk, it was after 9:00 p.m. By the time he let himself into his trailer house and lowered himself on the edge of his bunk, he felt totally used up. He yawned, scrubbed his forearm against his face, and slumped, elbows on knees, reviewing the day and waiting for the energy to get himself ready for bed. He had tomorrow off, and the day after. He would go to Two Gray Hills, to the country of his relatives in the Chuska Mountains, far from the world of police, and narcotics, and murder. He would heat rocks and take a sweat bath with his uncle, and get back to the job of mastering the sand paintings for the Night Chant. Chee yawned again and bent to untie his boot laces, and found himself thinking of John Doe's hands as the old Hopi had described them.

  Bloody. Flayed. In his own mind the only memory he could recall was of bones, sinew, and bits of muscle ends which had resisted decay and the scavengers. Something about what the Hopi had said bothered him. He thought about it and couldn't place the incongruity, and yawned again, and removed his boots. John Doe had died on the fourth day before the Niman Kachina, and this year the ceremonial had been held on July 14. He'd confirmed that with Dashee. So John Doe's body had been dumped onto the path on July 10. Chee lay back on the bunk, reached out, and fished the Navajo-Hopi telephone book off the table. It was a thin book, much bent from being carried in Chee's hip pocket, and it contained all telephone numbers in a territory a little larger than New England. Chee found the Burnt Water Trading Post listed along with a dozen or so telephones on Second Mesa. He pushed himself up on one elbow and dialed it. It rang twice.

  "Hello."

  "Is Jake West there?"

  "This is West."

  "Jim Chee," Chee said. "How good is your memory?"

  "Fair."

  "Any chance you remembering if Musket was at work last July eleventh? That would have been four days before the Home Dances up on Second Mesa."

  "July eleventh," West said. "What's up?"

  "Probably nothing," Chee said. "Just running down dead ends on your burglary."

  "Just a minute. I don't remember, but I'll have it written down in my payroll book."

  Chee waited. He yawned again. This was wasting his time. He unbuckled his belt and slid out of his uniform pants and tossed them to the foot of the bed. He unbuttoned his shirt. Then West was back on the line.

  "July eleventh. Let's see. He didn't show up for work July tenth or the eleventh. He showed up on the twelfth."

  Chee felt slightly less sleepy.

  "Okay," he said. "Thanks."

  "That mean anything?"

  "Probably not," Chee said.

  It meant, he thought after he had removed the shirt and pulled the sheet over him, that Musket might have been the man who killed John Doe. It didn't mean he was the one-only that the possibility existed. Drowsily, Chee considered it. Musket possibly was a witch. The killing of John Doe possibly was the reason Musket had departed from the Burnt Water Trading Post. But Chee was too exhausted to pursue such a demanding exercise. He thought instead of Frank Sam Nakai, who was his maternal uncle and the most respected singer along the New Mexico-Arizona border. And thinking of this great shaman, this wise and kindly man, Jim Chee fell asleep.

  When he awakened, there was Johnson standing beside his bunk, looking down at him.

  "Time to wake up," Johnson said.

  Chee sat up. Behind Johnson another man was standing, his back to Chee, sorting through the things Chee kept stored in one of the trailer's overhead compartments. The light of the rising sun was streaming through the open door.

  "What the hell?" Chee said. "What are you doing to my trailer?"

  "Some checking," Johnson said.

  "Nothing here either," the man said.

  "This is Officer Larry Collins," Johnson said, still looking at Chee. "He's my partner on this case." Officer Collins turned and looked at Chee. He grinned. He was perhaps twenty-five. Big. Unkempt blond hair dangled from under a dirty cowboy hat. His face was a mass of freckles, his eyes reckless. "Howdy," he said. "If you got any dope hidden around here, I haven't come up with it. Not yet."

  Chee couldn't think of anything to say. Disbelief mixed with anger. This was incredible. He reached for his shirt, put it on, stood up in his shorts.

  "Get the hell out of here," he said to Johnson.

  "Not yet," Johnson said. "We're here on business."

  "We'll do any business we have over at the office," Chee said. "Get out."

  Collins was behind him now and it happened too quickly for Chee to ever know exactly how he did it. He found himself face down on the bunk, with his wrists twisted high behind his shoulders. He felt Johnson's hand pinning him while Collins snapped handcuffs on his wrists. It must have been something the two of them practiced, Chee thought.

  They released him. Chee sat up on the bunk. His hands were cuffed behind him.

  "We need to get something straight," Johnson said. "I'm the cop and you're the suspect. That Indian badge don't mean a damn thing to me."

  Chee said nothing.

  "Keep on looking," Johnson said to Collins. "It's got to be bulky and there can't be many places it could hide in here. Make sure you don't miss any of them."

  "I haven't." Collins said. But he moved into the kitchen area and began opening drawers.

  "You had a little meeting yesterday with Gaines," Johnson said. "I want to know all about that."

  "Go screw yourself," Chee said.

  "You and Gaines arranged a little deal, I guess. He told you what they'd be willing to pay to buy their coke back. And he told you what would happen to you if you didn't cough it up. That about right?"

  Ch
ee said nothing. Collins was looking in the oven, checking under the sink. He poured a little detergent into his palm, examined it, and rinsed it off under the tap. "I already looked everyplace once," Collins said.

  "Maybe we're not going to find that coke stashed here," Johnson said. "Maybe we're not going to find the money here either. It don't look like you were that stupid. But by God you're going to tell me where to find it."

  Johnson struck Chee across the face, a stinging, back-handed blow.

  "The best way to do it would be unofficial," Johnson said. "You just tell me right now, and I forget where I heard it, and you can just go on being a Navajo cop. No going to jail. No nothing. We do a lot of unofficial business." He grinned at Chee, a wolfish show of big, even white teeth in a sunburned red face. "Get more work done that way."

  Chee's nose hurt. He felt a trickle of blood start from it, moving down his lip. His face stung and his eyes were watering. But the real effect of the blow was psychological. His mind seemed detached from all this, working at several levels. At one, it was trying to remember the last time anyone had struck him. He had been a boy when that happened, fighting with a cousin. At another level his intelligence considered what he should do, what he should say, why this was happening.

  And at still another, he felt simple animal rage-an instinct to kill.

  He and Johnson stared at each other, neither blinking. Collins finished in the kitchen and disappeared in the tiny bath. There was the noise of him taking something apart.

  "Where is it?" Johnson asked. "The plane had the stuff on it, and the people who came to get it haven't got it. We know that. We know who took it, and we know he had to have some help, and we know you were it. Where'd you take it?"

  Chee tested the handcuffs behind him, hurting his wrists. The muscles in his left shoulder were cramping where Collins had strained it. "You son of a bitch," Chee said. "You're crazy."

  Johnson slapped him again. Same backhand. Same place.

  "You were out there," Johnson said. "We don't know how you got onto the deal, but that doesn't matter. We just want the stuff."

  Chee said nothing at all.

  Johnson removed his pistol from its shoulder holster. It was a revolver with a short barrel. He jammed the barrel against Chee's forehead.

  "You're going to tell me," Johnson said. He cocked the pistol. "Now."

  The metal of the gun barrel pressed into the skin, hard against the bone. "If I knew where that stuff was, I'd tell you," Chee said. He was ashamed of it, but it was the truth. Johnson seemed to read it in his face. He grunted, removed the pistol, lowered the hammer, and stuck the gun back in the holster.

  "You know something," Johnson said, as if to himself. He looked around at Collins, who had stopped his hunt to watch, and then stared at Chee again, thinking. "When you know a little more, there's a smart way for you to handle it. Just see to it that I get the word. An anonymous note would do it. Or call me. That way, if you don't trust the dea not to hammer you, you'd know we couldn't prove you tried to steal the stuff. And I couldn't turn you in for killing Jerry Jansen."

  Chee had his mind working again. He remembered Jansen was the body left at the plane. But how much would Johnson tell him?

  "Who's Jansen?" he asked.

  Johnson laughed. "Little late to ask," he said. "He's the brother of the big man himself, the one who put this all together. And the one killed on the airplane, he was big medicine, too. Relative of the people buying the shipment."

  "Pauling?"

  "Pauling was nothing," Johnson said. "The taxi driver. You worry about the other one."

  There was the sound of breaking glass in the shower. Collins had dropped something.

  "So you see, I haven't got much time to work with you," Johnson said. He was smiling. "You've got two sets of hard people stirred up. They're going to make the connection right away and they're going to be coming after you. They're going to twist that dope out of you and if you can't deliver it, they'll just keep twisting."

  Chee could think of nothing helpful to say to that.

  "The only way to go is the easy way," Johnson said. "You tell me where you and Palanzer put it. I find it. Nobody is any wiser. Any other way we handle it, you're dead. Or if you're lucky you get ten to twenty in the federal pen. And with those two people killed, you wouldn't last long in federal pen."

  "I don't know where it is," Chee said. "I'm not even sure what it is."

  Johnson looked at him, mildly and without comment. A smell of cologne seeped into Chee's nostrils. Collins had broken his aftershave lotion. "What did Gaines want?" Johnson said. He pulled Gaines's card out of his shirt pocket and looked at it. It had been in Chee's billfold.

  "He wanted to know what happened to the car. The one I heard driving off."

  "How'd he know about that?"

  "He read my report. At the station. He told 'em he was the pilot's lawyer."

  "Why'd he give you the card?"

  "He wanted me to find the car for him. I said I'd let him know."

  "Can you find it?"

  "I don't see how," Chee said. "Hell, it's probably in Chicago by now, or Denver, or God knows where. Why would it stay around? From what I hear, you're circulating the picture of the guy that's supposed to be driving it. This Palanzer. Why would he stick around?"

  "I'll ask the questions," Johnson said.

  "But don't you think Palanzer got off with the stuff? Why else are you looking for him?"

  "Maybe Palanzer got it and maybe he didn't, and maybe he had a lot of help if he did. Like a Navajo tribal cop who knows this country and knows a hole they can hide it in until things cool off some."

  "But-"

  "Shut up," Johnson said. "This is wasting time. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to wait just a little while. Give you some time to think it over. I figure you've got a day or two before the people who own that dope decide to come after you. You give some thought to what they'll do to you and then you get in touch with me and we'll deal."

  "One thing," Collins said from just behind Chee. "It damn sure ain't hid in here."

  "But don't wait too long," Johnson said. "You haven't got much time."

  Chapter Twelve

  When captain largo worried, his round, bland face resolved itself into a pattern of little wrinkles-something like a brown honeydew melon too long off the vine. Largo was worried now. He sat ramrod straight behind his desk, an unusual position for the captain's plump body, and listened intently to what Jim Chee was saying. What Chee was saying was angry and directly to the point, and when he finished saying it, Largo got up from his chair and walked over to the window and looked out at the sunny morning.

  "They pull a gun on you?" he asked.

  "Right."

  "Hit you? That right?"

  "Right," Chee said.

  "When they took off the cuffs, they told you that if you filed a complaint, their story would be you invited them in, invited them to search, they didn't lay a hand on you. That right?"

  "That's it," Chee said.

  Largo looked out the window some more. Chee waited. From where he stood he could see through the glass past the captain's broad back. He could see the expanse of bunch grass, bare earth, rocks, scattered cactus, which separated the police building from the straggling row of old buildings called Tuba City. The sky had the dusty look of a droughty summer. Far across the field a cloud of blue smoke emerged from the sheet-metal garage of the Navajo Road Department-a diesel engine being test run. Largo seemed to be watching the smoke.

  "Two days, they said, before the people who owned the dope figured you had it. Right?"

  "That's what Johnson said," Chee agreed.

  "He sound like he was guessing, or like he knew?" Largo was still looking out the window, his face away from Chee.

  "Of course he was guessing," Chee said. "How would he know?"

  Largo came back and sat at the desk again. He fiddled with whatever odds and ends he kept in the top drawer.

&n
bsp; "Here's what I want you to do," he said. "Write all this down and sign it, and date it, and give it to me. Then you take some time off. You got two days coming. Take a whole week. Get the hell away from here for a while."

  "Write it down? What good will that do?"

  "Good to have it," Largo said. "Just in case."

  "Shit," Chee said.

  "These white men got you screwed," Largo said. "Face it. You file a complaint. What happens? Two belacani cops. One Navajo. The judge is belacani, too. And the Navajo cop is already under suspicion of getting off with the dope. What good does it do you? Go back in the Chuskas. Visit your folks. Get away from here."