Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  Having thought of nothing he could do, he sat in his car waiting for Pete and Bistie to emerge. Maybe they would leave without Bistie's sack. Simply forget it. If that happened, he would go to the jail, tell Langer that Bistie had left his belongings behind, get Langer to make another, more complete inventory, which would include all the billfold's contents. But when Pete and Bistie emerged, Bistie had the sack clutched in his hand. They drove out of the jail lot, turning toward Farmington. Chee turned west, toward Shiprock.

  His mind worked on it as he drove. Reason told him that Bistie might not have been the shape in the darkness that had fired the shotgun into his trailer. Bistie had used the 30-30 on the rack across the back window of his pickup to shoot at Endocheeney. Or said he did. Not a shotgun. There had been no reason to search Bistie's place for a shotgun. Maybe he didn't have one. And the complex mythology of Navajo witchcraft, which Chee knew as well as any man, usually attached a motive to the malice of the skinwalkers. Bistie had no conceivable motive for wanting to kill Chee. Perhaps Bistie was not the one who had tried to kill him.

  But even as he thought this, he was aware that his spirit was light again. The dread had lifted. He was not afraid of Bistie, as he had been afraid of the unknown. He felt an urge to sing.

  The in-basket on his desk held two envelopes and one of the While You Were Out memos the tribal police used to record notes and telephone calls. One envelope, Chee noticed with instant delight, was the pale blue of Mary Landon's stationery. He put it in his shirt pocket and looked at the other one. It was addressed to Officer Chee, Police Station, Shiprock, in clumsy letters formed with a pencil. Chee glanced at the telephone memo, which said merely: "Call Lt. Leaphorn immediately," and tore open the envelope.

  The folded letter inside had been written on the pulpy lined tablet paper schoolchildren use, in the format students are taught in grade school.

  In the block where one is taught to put one's return address, the writer had printed:

  Alice Yazzie

  Sheep Springs Trading Post

  Navajo Nation

  Dear Nephew Jim Chee:

  I hope you are well. I am well. I write you this letter because your Uncle Frazier Denetsone is sick all this summer and worst sick about this month. We took him to the Crystal Gazer over at the Badwater Clinic and the Crystal Gazer said he should let the belagana doctor there give him some medicine. He is taking that green medicine now but he is still sick. The Crystal Gazer said he should take that medicine but that he needs a sing too. That will get him better faster, having the sing. And the sing should be a Blessing Way. I heard that you did the Blessing Way sing for the Niece of Old Grandmother Nez and everybody said it was good. Everybody said you got it all right and the dry paintings were right. They said the Niece of Old Grandmother Nez got better after that.

  We want you to talk about it. We want you to come to the place of Hildegarde Goldtooth and we will talk to you about having the sing. We have about $400 but maybe there could be more.

  Chee read with intense satisfaction. The Blessing Way he had conducted last spring had been his first job as a yataalii. And his last. The niece of Old Grandmother Nez was a niece by the broad Navajo definition-the daughter of a first cousin on the maternal side of Chee's family-and hiring him as singer had been family courtesy. In fact, the event had been a trial balloon-as much to inform the north central slice of the Big Reservation that Chee had begun his practice as to cure the girl of nothing more serious than the malaise of being sixteen.

  Now, finally, a summons had come. Alice Yazzie called him nephew, but the title here reflected good manners and not ties of either clan or family. Frazier Denetsone was probably some sort of uncle, as Navajos defined such things, through linkage with his father's paternal clan. But a call for a yataalii didn't come from the patient. It came from whoever in the patient's circle of family took responsibility for such things. Chee glanced at Alice Yazzie's signature, which included, in the custom of old-fashioned Navajos, her clan. Streams Come Together Dinee. Chee was born to the Slow Talking People, and for the Salt Clan. No connections with the Streams Clan. Thus her invitation was the first clue that Jim Chee was becoming accepted as a singer outside his own kinfolk.

  He finished the letter. Alice Yazzie wanted him to come to Hildegarde Goldtooth's place the next Sunday evening, when she and the patient's wife and mother could be there to work out a time for the ceremony. "We want to hold it as soon as we can because he is not good. He is not going to last long, I think."

  That pessimistic note diminished Chee's jubilation. It was much better for a yataalii to begin his career with a visible cure-with a ceremony that not only restored the patient to harmony with his universe but also returned him to health. But Chee would tolerate nothing negative today. It would be better still to effect a cure on a hopeless case. If-Frazier Denetsone's illness was indeed subject to correction by the powers evoked by the Blessing Way ritual, if Jim Chee was good enough to perform it precisely right, then all things were possible. Chee believed in penicillin and insulin and heart bypass surgery. But he also believed that something far beyond the understanding of modern medicine controlled life and death. He folded Alice Yazzie's letter into his shirt pocket. With his thumbnail he opened the letter from Mary Landon.

  Dearest Jim:

  I think of you every day (and even more every night). Miss you terribly. Can't you get some more leave and come back here for a while? I could tell you didn't enjoy yourself on your visit in May, but now we are having our annual two weeks of what passes for summer in Wisconsin. Everything is beautiful. It hasn't rained for two or three hours. You would like it now. In fact, I think you could learn to love it-to live somewhere away from the desert-if you would give it a chance.

  Dad and I drove down to Madison last week and talked to an adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences. I will be able to get my master's degree-with a little luck-in just two more semesters because of those two graduate courses I took when I was an undergraduate. Also found a cute efficiency apartment within walking distance of the university and picked up the application papers for graduate admission. I can start taking classes on nondegree status while they process the grad school admission. The adviser said there shouldn't be any problem.

  Classes will start the first week of September, which means that, if I enroll, I won't have time to come back out to see you until semester break, which I think is about Thanksgiving. I'm going to hate not seeing you until then, so try to find a way to come.

  Chee read the rest of it without much sense of what the words meant. Some chat about something that had happened when he'd visited her in Stevens Point, a couple of sentences about her mother. Her father (who had been painfully polite and had asked Chee endless questions about the Navajo religion and had looked at him as Chee thought Chee might look at a man from another planet) was well and thinking about retirement. She was excited about the thought of returning to school. Probably she would do it. There were more personal notes too, tender and nostalgic.

  He read the letter again, slowly this time. But that changed nothing. He felt a numbness-a lack of emotion that surprised him. What did surprise him, oddly, he thought, was that he wasn't surprised. At some subconscious level he seemed to have been expecting this. It had been inevitable since Mary had arranged the leave from the teaching job at Crownpoint. If he hadn't known it then, he must have learned it during that visit to her home-which had left him on the flight back to Albuquerque trying to analyze feelings that were a mixture of happiness and sorrow. He glanced at the opening salutation again. "Dearest Jim." The notes she'd sent him from Crown-point had opened with "Darling."

  He stuffed the letter into his pocket with the Yazzie letter and picked up the memo.

  It still said: "Call Lt. Leaphorn immediately."

  He called Lieutenant Leaphorn.

  Chapter 12

  the telephone on Joe Leaphorn's desk buzzed.

  "Who is it?"

  "Jim Chee from Shiprock," t
he switchboard said.

  "Tell him to hold it a minute," Leaphorn said. He knew what to learn from Chee, but he took a moment to reconsider exactly how he'd go about asking the questions. He held the receiver lightly in his palm, going over it.

  "Okay," he said. "Put him on."

  Something clicked.

  "This is Leaphorn," Leaphorn said.

  "Jim Chee. Returning your call."

  "Do you know any of the people who live out there around Chilchinbito Canyon. Out there where Wilson Sam lived?"

  "Let me think," Chee said. Silence. "No. I don't think so."

  "You ever worked anything out there? Enough to be familiar with the territory?"

  "Not really," Chee said. "Not my part of the reservation."

  "How about the country around Badwater Wash? Around where Endocheeney lived?"

  "A lot better," Chee said. "It's not what Captain Largo has me patrolling, but I spent some time out there trying to find a kid who got washed down the San Juan last year. Several days. And then I handled the Endocheeney business. Went out there twice on that."

  "I'm right that Bistie wouldn't say anything about whether he knew Endocheeney?"

  "Right. He wouldn't say anything. Except he was glad Endocheeney was dead. He made that plain. So you guess he knew the man."

  You do, Leaphorn thought. But maybe you guess wrong.

  "Did he say anything that would give you an idea whether he knew that Badwater country? Like about having trouble finding Endocheeney's place? Anything like that?"

  "You mean beyond stopping at the trading post to ask directions? He did that."

  "That was in Kennedy's report," Leaphorn said. "What I meant was did you hear anything from him, or from the people you talked to at Badwater, that would tell you he was totally strange to that country? Afraid of not finding the road? Getting lost? Anything like that?"

  "No." The word was said slowly, indicating the thought wasn't finished. Leaphorn waited. "But I didn't press it. We just got his description, and a make on his truck. Didn't look for that sort of information."

  Obviously it wouldn't have seemed to have any meaning at that stage of the game. Perhaps it didn't now. He waited for Chee to make unnecessary excuses. None materialized. Leaphorn began phrasing his next question, but Chee interrupted the thought.

  "You know," he said slowly, "I think the fellow who knifed Endocheeney was a stranger too. Didn't know the country."

  "Oh?" Leaphorn said. He'd heard Chee was smart. He'd heard right. Chee was saving him his question.

  "He came down out of the rocks," Chee said. "Have you seen that Endocheeney place? It's set back from the San Juan maybe a hundred yards. Cliffs to the south of it. The killer came down off of those. And went back the same way to get to where he'd left his car. I spent some time looking around. There were two or three easier ways to get down to Endocheeney. Easier than the way he took."

  "So," Leaphorn said, half to himself. "Two strangers show up the same day to kill the same man. What do you think of that?"

  There was silence. Through his window Leaphorn watched an unruly squadron of crows flying in from the cottonwoods along Window Rock Ridge toward the village. Lunchtime for crows in the garbage cans. But he wasn't thinking of crows. He was thinking of Chee's intelli gence. If he told Chee now that the man who killed Wilson Sam was also a stranger, and how he knew it, Chee would quickly detect the reason for his first question. They had established that Chee, too, was a stranger to Wilson Sam's landscape. They established Leaphorn's suspicions. But to hell with that. A cop who got himself shot at from ambush should expect to be under close scrutiny. Chee might as well. He would tell Chee what he'd learned.

  "It's possible," Chee was saying, slowly, "that there weren't two strangers coming to find Endocheeney. Maybe there was just one."

  "Ah," said Leaphorn, who had the very same thought.

  "It could be," Chee went on, "that Bistie knew he missed Endocheeney when he shot at him on the roof. So he drove away, parked up on the mesa, climbed down, and killed Endocheeney with the knife. And then-"

  "He confesses to shooting Endocheeney," Leaphorn concluded. "Pretty smart. Is that what happened?"

  Chee sighed. "I don't think so," he said.

  Neither did Leaphorn. It violated what he'd learned of people down the years. People who prefer guns don't use knives, and vice versa. Bistie had preferred a rifle. He still had the rifle. Why not use it on the second attempt?

  "Why not?" Leaphorn asked.

  "Different tracks. I don't think Bistie would have brought along a change of footwear, and what few tracks I found at Endocheeney's didn't match Bistie's boots. Anyway, why would he do that? And why not shoot him on the second attempt? Why use a knife? It gave him an alibi, sure. And fooled us. But think of the advance planning it would take to make it all work out like that. And the things that could go wrong. It doesn't match my impression of Bistie."

  "Okay," Leaphorn said. "Do you know anything from talking to Bistie, or from anything, that would suggest that Bistie might have known Wilson Sam?"

  "No, sir. Nothing."

  "Well, we seem to have another strange situation, then." He told Chee what he'd learned at Chilchinbito Canyon.

  "Doesn't make much sense," Chee said. "Does it?"

  "That bone bead in your trailer," Leaphorn said. "It turned out to be bovine. Made out of old cow bone."

  Chee made a noncommittal sound.

  "Anything else happened with you? Anything suspicious?"

  "No, sir."

  "You learning anything?"

  "Well." Chee hesitated. "Nothing much. I heard gossip at Badwater Trading Post. They say a bone was found in Endocheeney's corpse."

  Leaphorn exhaled, surprised. "Like he had been witched?"

  "Yeah," Chee said. "Or like he'd witched somebody else and they put it back into him."

  And this was, in Leaphorn's thinking, the very worst part of a sick tradition-this cruel business of killing a scapegoat when things went wrong. It was what Chee Dodge had railed against when he tried to stamp it out. It was what had made Joe Leaphorn, young then and new to the Navajo Tribal Police, responsible for the deaths of four people. Two men. Two women. Three witches and the man who killed them. He had heard the gossip. He had laughed at it. He had collected the bodies-three murders and a suicide. That was twenty years ago. It had converted Leaphorn's contempt for witchcraft into hatred.

  "Nothing about any foreign bone fragment showed up in the autopsy," Leaphorn said. But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't necessarily true. The pathologist might not list-probably wouldn't list-such odds and ends. When the cause of death was so obvious-a butcher knife blade driven repeatedly through clothing into the victim's abdomen and side-why list the threads and buttons, lint and gum wrappers, the blade might drive through the skin?

  "I thought it might be worth asking about," Chee said.

  "It is," Leaphorn said. "I will."

  "Also," Chee said. And then paused.

  Leaphorn waited.

  "Also, Bistie had a bone bead in his wallet. Just like the one I found in my trailer. Looked like it, anyway."

  Leaphorn exhaled again. "He did? What did he say about it?"

  "Well, nothing," Chee said. He explained what had happened at the jail. "So I just put it back where I found it."

  "I think we better go talk to Bistie again," Leaphorn said. "In fact, I think we better pick him up, and lock him up until we get this sorted out a little better." Leaphorn imagined trying to persuade Dilly to file the complaint. Dilly Streib would be hard to persuade. Dilly had been FBI too long not to care about his batting average. The Agency didn't like cases it didn't win. Still.

  Leaphorn swiveled in his chair and looked at his map. A line of bone beads now connected two of his dots. And Roosevelt Bistie must know how they connected. And why.

  "We can charge him with attempted murder, or attempted assault, or hold him as a material witness."

  "Umm," Chee said. A soun
d full of doubt.

  "I'll call the feds," Leaphorn said. He glanced at his watch. "Can you meet me in an hour at." He looked at the map again, picking the most practical halfway point between Window Rock and Shiprock for their drive into the Chuskas. "At Sanostee," he concluded. "Sanostee in an hour?"

  "Yes, sir," Chee said. "Sanostee in an hour."

  Chapter 13

  sanostee was hardly a halfway point, but it was convenient for where they were going. For Chee it was fast-twenty miles south on the worn pavement of U.S. 666 to Littlewater, and then nine miles westward, into the teeth of the gusting, dusty wind, up the long slope of the Chuska range to the trading post. For Leaphorn it was triple that distance-from Window Rock to Crystal and over Washington Pass to Sheep Springs, then north to the Littlewater intersection. When Leaphorn reached Sanostee it was sundown, the copper-colored twilight of one of those days when the desert sky is translucent with hanging dust.