The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  "Pahos," West said. "You call 'em prayer plumes, but for the Hopis they're pahos."

  "Whatever," Chee said. "You know anything about it?"

  Through the open front door came the sound of a car, moving fast, jolting into the trading post yard. Over the noise, West said he didn't know anything about the shrine. "Never heard of that one," he said. There was the sound of a car door slamming. The smell of aroused dust drifted to their nostrils.

  "That Cowboy?" Chee asked.

  "Hope so," West said. "Hope there's not somebody else that parks like that. You'd think they'd teach the sons-a-bitches how to park without raising a cloud of dust. Ought to teach that before they let 'em into a car."

  At the door a bulky young man in a khaki uniform paused to exchange remarks with a cluster of old men passing the afternoon in the shade. Whatever he said provoked an elderly chuckle.

  "Come on in, Cowboy," West said. "Chee here needs some information."

  "As usual," Cowboy said. He grinned at Chee. "You caught your windmill vandal yet?"

  "Our windmill vandal," Chee corrected. "You solved the great airplane mystery?"

  "Not quite," Cowboy said. "But progress has been made." He extracted an eight-by-ten glossy photograph from a folder he was carrying and displayed it. "Here's the dude we're looking for. You guys see him, promptly inform either Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee or call your friendly Coconino County Sheriff's Department."

  "Who is he?" West said. The photograph obviously had been blown up from a standard police mug identification shot. It showed a man in his middle forties, with gray hair, close-set eyes, and a high, narrow forehead dominating a long, narrow face.

  "Name's Richard Palanzer, also known as Dick Palanzer. What the feds call a 'known associate of the narcotics traffic.' All they told me is he was indicted a couple of years ago in Los Angeles County for conspiracy, narcotics. They want us looking for him around here."

  "Where'd the picture come from?" Chee asked. He turned it over and looked at the back, which turned out to be bare.

  "Sheriff," Cowboy said. "He got it from the dea people. This is the bird they think drove off with the dope after the plane crash." Cowboy accepted the photograph back from Chee. "That is if Chee didn't do the driving. I understand the feds can't decide whether Chee rode shotgun or drove."

  West looked puzzled. He raised his eyebrows, looked from Dashee to Chee and back.

  Dashee laughed. "Just a joke," he said. "Chee was out there when it happened, so the dea was suspicious. They're suspicious of everybody. Including me, and you, and that fellow over there." Dashee indicated a geriatric Hopi who was easing himself out of the front door with the help of an aluminum walker and a solicitous middle-aged woman. "What was it Chee wanted to know?"

  "There's a little shrine in that arroyo by the windmill," Chee said. "By a dried-up spring. Lots of pahos in it. Looks like somebody's taking care of it. You know anything about it?"

  At the word "shrine," Cowboy's expression changed from joviality to neutrality. Cowboy was listed on the payroll of the Coconino County, Arizona, Sheriffs Department as Albert Dashee, Jr. He'd accumulated sixty hours credit at Northern Arizona University before saying to hell with it. But he was Angushtiyo, or "Crow Boy," to his family, a member of the Side Corn Clan, and a valuable man in the Kachina Society of his village of Shipaulovi. Chee was becoming a friend, but Crow Boy was Hopi and Chee Navajo, and shrines, any shrines, involved the Hopi religion.

  "What do you want to know?" Cowboy asked.

  "From where it is, you can see the windmill," Chee said. "Whoever tends it might have seen something." He shrugged. "Long shot. But I've got nothing else."

  "The pahos," Cowboy said. "Some of them new? Like somebody is taking care of it now?"

  "I didn't look at them real close," Chee said. "I didn't want to touch anything." He wanted Cowboy to know that. "But I'd say some were old and some were new and somebody is taking care of it."

  Cowboy thought. "It wouldn't be one of ours. I mean not Shipaulovi village. That's not our village land. I think that land down there belongs either to Walpi or to one of the kiva societies. I'll have to see what I can find out."

  As the Navajos saw it, the land down there was Navajo land, allotted to the family of Patricia Gishi. But this wasn't the time for renewing the old Joint Use arguments.

  "Just a long shot," Chee said. "But who knows?"

  "I'll ask around," Cowboy repeated. "Did you know they're fixing that windmill again today?" He grinned. "You ready for that?"

  Chee was not ready for that. It depressed him. The windmill would be vandalized again—as certain as fate. Chee knew it in his bones, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening. Not until he understood what was happening. When the new vandalism happened it would be Cowboy's fault as much as his own, but Cowboy didn't seem to mind. Cowboy wouldn't have to stand in Captain Largo's office, and hear Captain Largo reading the indignant memo from the pertinent bureaucrat in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and have Largo's mild eyes examining him, with the unspoken question in them relative to his competence to keep a windmill safe.

  "With the bia doing it, I thought it would be Christmas before they got it done," Chee said. "What the hell happened?"

  "Something must have gone wrong," West said.

  "The bia got efficient. It happens every eight or ten years," Cowboy said. "Anyway, I saw a truck going in there. They said they had all the parts and they was fixing it today."

  "I think you can relax," West said. "They probably got the wrong parts."

  "You going to stake it out again?" Cowboy asked.

  "I don't think that will work now," Chee said. "The plane crash screwed that up. Whoever it was learned I was out there. They'll make damn sure next time nobody's watching."

  "The vandal was out there the night the plane crashed?" West asked.

  "Somebody was," Chee said. "I heard somebody climbing out of the wash. And then while I was busy with the crash, somebody screwed up the windmill again."

  "I didn't know that," West said. "You mean the vandal was right down there by the wreck? After it happened?"

  "That's right," Chee said. "I'm surprised everybody didn't know that by now. They're handing the report around for everybody to read." Chee told West and Cowboy about the lawyer and the sister of the pilot.

  "They was in here yesterday morning, asking for directions," West said. "They wanted to find the airplane, and they wanted to find you." West was frowning. "You mean to tell me that fellow had read the police report?"

  "That's not so unusual," Cowboy said. "Not if he is the lawyer for somebody involved. Lawyers do that all the time if there's something they want to know."

  "So he said he was the pilot's lawyer," West said. "What was his name?"

  "Gaines," Chee said.

  "What did he want to know?" West asked.

  "He wanted to know what happened."

  "Hell," West said. "Easy enough to see what happened. Fellow ran his airplane into a rock."

  Chee shrugged.

  "He wanted to know more than that?" West persisted.

  "He wanted to find the car. The one that drove away after the crash."

  "He figured it was still out there somewhere, then?"

  "Seemed to," Chee said. He wanted to change the subject. "Either one of you heard any gossip about a witch killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?"

  Cowboy laughed. "Sure," he said. "You remember that body was picked up last July—the one that was far gone?" Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.

  "John Doe?" Chee asked. "A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?"

  "And it was one of your Navajo witches," Dashee said. "Not one of our powaqa."

  Chapter Ten

  Cowboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run
the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.

  "Struck gold," Cowboy said. "We go to Shi-paulovi."

  "Find where the report started?" Chee asked.

  "Better than that," Cowboy said. "We found the man who found the body."

  Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. "There's been a lot of gossip about this man," Dashee said, speaking in English, "but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts."

  Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, "It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore." Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. "They all acted just like bahanas," Lomatewa said. "Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people." Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.

  "We weren't told to do it that way," Lomatewa said. "The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The kikmongwi, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a bahana idea."

  Chee allowed the pause to stretch a respectful few moments. Cowboy leaned forward, raised a hand, opened his mouth.

  Chee cut him off. "That's like what my uncle taught me," Chee said. "He said we must always respect the old ways. That we must stay with them."

  Lomatewa looked at him. He smiled his skeptical smile. "You're a policeman for the bahanas," he said. "Have you listened to your uncle?"

  "I am a policeman for my own people," Chee said. "And I am studying with my uncle to be a yataalii." He saw the Navajo word meant nothing to Lomatewa. "I am studying to be a singer, a medicine man. I know the Blessing Way, and the Night Chant, and someday I will know some of the other ceremonials."

  Lomatewa examined Chee, and Cowboy Dashee, and Chee again. He took the cane in his right hand and made a mark with its tip in the dust. "This place is the spruce shrine," he said. He glanced at Cowboy. "Do you know where that is?"

  "It is Kisigi Spring, Grandfather," said Cowboy, passing the test.

  Lomatewa nodded. He drew a crooked line in the dust. "We came down from the spring at the dawn," he said. "Everything was right. But about midmorning we saw this boot standing there in the path. This boy who was with us said somebody had lost a boot, but you could see it wasn't that. If the boot had just fallen there, it would fall over on its side." He looked at Chee for agreement. Chee nodded.

  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."

  "J
im 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."