The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  The parking area at the Hopi Cultural Center held about a dozen vehicles—more than usual, Chee guessed, because the upcoming ceremonials were beginning to draw tourists. Or was it that a missing cocaine shipment was beginning to draw in the hunters? Before he parked, Chee circled the motel, looking for the car Gaines had been driving. He didn't find it.

  In the restaurant he took a table beside one of the west windows, ordered a bowl of what the menu called Hopi Stew, and coffee. The Hopi girl who served it was maybe twenty, and pretty, with her hair cut in the short bangs that old-fashioned Hopis wore. She had dazzled the group of tourists at the next table with her smile. With Chee, she was strictly business. The Hopi dealing with the Navajo. Chee sipped his coffee, and studied the other dining room patrons, and thought of the nature of the drought, and where Ironfingers Musket might be, and of ethnic antagonisms. This one was part abstraction, built into the Hopi legends of warfare: The enemy killed by the Hopi Twin War Gods were Navajo, as the enemy killed by the Navajo Holy People were Utes, or Kiowas, or Taos Indians. But the long struggle over the Joint Use Reservation lands lent a sort of reality to the abstraction in the minds of some. Now, at last, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, and the Hopis had won, and 9,000 Navajos were losing the only homes their families could remember. And the anger lingered, even among the winners. The windowpane beside him reflected red. The sun had gone down behind the San Francisco Peaks and turned the bottom of the clouds that hung over it a luminous salmon-pink. The mountain, too, was contested territory. For the Hopis, it was Mount Sinai itself—the home of the kachina spirits from August until February, when they left this world and returned underground where the spirits live. For Chee's people it was also sacred. It was Evening Twilight Mountain, one of the four mountains First Man had built to mark the corners of Dinetah. It was the Mountain of the West, the home of the great yei spirit, Abalone Girl, and the place where the Sacred Bear of Navajo legend had been so critically wounded by the Bow People that the ritual songs described him as being "fuzzy with arrows"—verbal imagery which had caused Chee as a child to think of the spirit as looking like a gigantic porcupine. The mountain now was outlined blue-black against a gaudy red horizon and the beauty of it lifted Chee's mood.

  "Mr. Chee."

  Miss Pauling was standing beside his table.

  Chee stood.

  "No. Don't get up. I wanted to talk to you."

  "Why don't you join me?" Chee said.

  "Thank you," she said. She looked tired and worried. It would be better, Chee thought, if she looked frightened. She shouldn't be here. She should have gone home. He signaled for the waitress. "I can recommend the stew," he said.

  "Have you seen Mr. Gaines?" she asked.

  "No," Chee said. "I haven't tried his room, but I didn't see his car."

  "He's not here," she said. "He's been gone since yesterday morning."

  "Did he say where he was going?" Chee asked. "Or when he'd be back?"

  "Nothing," Miss Pauling said.

  The waitress came. Miss Pauling ordered stew. The reflection from the fiery sunset turned her face red, but it looked lined and old.

  "You should go home," Chee said. "Nothing you can do here."

  "I want to find out who killed him," she said.

  "You'll find out. Sooner or later the dea, or the fbi, they'll catch them."

  "Do you think so?" Miss Pauling asked. The tone suggested she doubted it.

  So did Chee. "Well, probably not," he said.

  "I want you to help me find out," she said. "Just whatever you can tell me. Like things that the police know that don't get into the newspapers. Do they have any suspects? Surely they must. Who do they suspect?"

  Chee shrugged. "At one time they suspected a man named Palanzer. Richard Palanzer. I think he was one of the people the dope was being delivered to."

  "Richard Palanzer," Miss Pauling said, as if she was memorizing it.

  "However," Chee said. He stopped. He'd been out of touch all day. Had Cowboy found the car? Was it known that Palanzer was no longer a suspect? Almost certainly.

  "He was flying in narcotics, then," Miss Pauling said. "Is that what they think?"

  "Seems to be," Chee said.

  "And Palanzer was supposed to pay for it, and instead he killed him. Was that the way it went? Who is this Palanzer? Where does he live? I know there are times when the police know who did something but they can't find the evidence to prove it. I'd just like to know who did it."

  "Why?" Chee asked. He wanted to know, too, because he was curious. But that wasn't her reason.

  "Because I loved him," she said. "That's the trouble. I really loved him."

  The stew arrived. Miss Pauling stirred it absently. "There was no reason for killing him," she said, watching the spoon. "They could have just pointed a gun at him and he would have given it to them with no trouble at all. He would have just thought it was funny."

  "I guess they didn't know that," Chee said.

  "He was always such a happy boy," she said.

  "Everything was fun for him. I'm five years older and when our mother left… You know how it is—I sort of took care of him until Dad remarried."

  Chee said nothing. He was wondering why it was so important for her to know who was to blame. There was a puzzle here to be solved, but after that, what did it matter?

  "There was no reason to kill him," she said. "And whoever did it is going to suffer for it." She said it with no particular emphasis, still moving the spoon mechanically through the well-stirred stew. "They're not going to kill him and just walk away from it."

  "But sometimes they do," Chee said. "That's the way it is."

  "No," she said. The tone was suddenly vehement. "They won't get away with it. You understand that?"

  "Not exactly," Chee said.

  "Do you understand 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'?"

  "I've heard it," Chee said.

  "Don't you believe in justice? Don't you believe that things need to be evened up?"

  Chee shrugged. "Why not?" he said. As a matter of fact, the concept seemed as strange to him as the idea that someone with money would steal had seemed to Mrs. Musket. Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition, "out of control." The "dark wind" had entered him and destroyed his judgment. One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to hozro. But to Chee's Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act. He understood it was a common attitude in the white culture, but he'd never before encountered it so directly.

  "That's really what I want to talk to you about," Miss Pauling said. "If this Palanzer did it, I want to know it and I want to know where to find him. If somebody else was responsible, I want to know that." She paused. "I can pay you."

  Chee looked doubtful.

  "I know you say you're not working on this. But you're the one who found out how he was killed. And you're the only one I know."

  "I tell you what I'll do," Chee said. "You go home. If I can find out whether Palanzer is the one, I'll call you and tell you. And then if I can find out where you could look for Palanzer, I'll let you know that, too."

  "That's all I can ask," she said.

  "Then you'll go home?"

  "Gaines has the tickets," she said. "It was all so sudden. He called me at work, and told me about the crash and arranged to meet me. And he said he was Robert's lawyer and we should fly right out and see about it. So he took me home and I put some things in a bag and we went right out to the airport and all the money I have is just what was in my purse."

  "You have a credit card?" Chee asked. She nodded. "Use that. I'll get you a ride to Flagstaff."

  Two men at a table near the cash register had been watching them. One was about thirty—a big man with long blond hair and small eyes under bushy blond eyebrows. The other, much older, had thin white hair and a suntanned face. His pin-striped thre
e-piece suit looked out of place on Second Mesa.

  "Do you know who Gaines is?" Chee asked.

  "You mean besides being my brother's attorney? Well, I guess from what I hear that he must be somebody involved in this drug business. I guess that's the real reason he wanted me along." She chuckled, without humor. "To make him legitimate in dealing with people. Is that right?"

  "So it would seem," Chee said.

  Cowboy Dashee came through the walkway, paused a moment by the cash register, spotted Chee, and came over.

  "Saw you parked out there," he said.

  "This is Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee," Chee said. "Miss Pauling is the sister of the pilot of that plane."

  Cowboy nodded. "Everybody calls me Cowboy," he said. He pulled a chair over from an adjoining table and sat down.

  "Why don't you pull up a chair and join us?" Chee asked.

  "You knpw this guy's a Navajo?" he asked Miss Pauling. "Sometimes he tries to pass himself off as one of us."

  Miss Pauling managed a smile.

  "What's new?" Chee asked.

  "You talked to your office this afternoon?"

  "No," Chee said.

  "You haven't heard about finding the car, or turning up the necklace?"

  "Necklace?"

  "From the Burnt Water burglary. Big squash blossom job. Girl over at Mexican Water pawned it."

  "Where'd she get it?"

  "Who else?" Cowboy said. "Joseph Musket. Old Ironfingers playing Romeo." Cowboy turned to Miss Pauling. "Shop talk," he said. "Mr. Chee and I have been worrying about this burglary and now a piece of the loot finally turned up."

  "When?" Chee asked. "How'd it happen?"

  "She just pawned it yesterday," Cowboy said. "Said she met this guy at a squaw dance over there somewhere, and he wanted to…" Cowboy flushed slightly, glanced at Miss Pauling. "Anyway, he got romantic and he gave her the necklace."

  "And it was Ironfingers."

  "That's what she said his name was." Cowboy grinned at Chee. "I notice with intense surprise that you're not interested in the car."

  "You said you found it?"

  "That's right," Cowboy said. "Just followed a sort of hunch I had. Followed up an arroyo out there and believe it or not, there it was—hidden up under some bushes."

  "Good for you," Chee said.

  "I'll tell you what's good for me," Cowboy said. "I jimmied my way into it through the vent on the right front window, pried it right open."

  "That's the best way to get in," Chee said.

  "I thought you'd say that," Cowboy said.

  Miss Pauling was watching them curiously.

  Chee turned to her.

  "You remember me telling you that the plane crash and the narcotics case wasn't my business? Well, it's in the jurisdiction of Mr. Dashee's sheriff's department. Coconino County. And now Cowboy has found that car that everyone's been wondering about. The one that drove away from the plane crash."

  "Oh," she said. "Can you tell us about it?"

  Cowboy looked slightly doubtful. He glanced at Chee again. "Well," he said. "I guess so. Not much to tell, really. Green gmc carryall. Somebody drove it way up that arroyo and jammed it under the brush where it couldn't be seen. Been rented at Phoenix to that guy Jansen—the one that was found out there by the plane crash. Bloodstains on the back seat. Nothing in it. I think the fbi's out there now, checking it for fingerprints and so forth."

  "Nothing in it?" Chee said. He hoped he'd kept the surprise out of his voice. Cowboy looked at him.

  "Few butts in the ashtray. Rental papers in the glove box. Owner's manual. No big bundles labeled cocaine. Nothing like that. I guess we'll be hunting around there tomorrow."

  Chee became aware that Miss Pauling was staring at him.

  "You all right?" she asked.

  "I'm fine," Chee said.

  "Funny thing," Cowboy said. "The inside had a funny smell. Like disinfectant. I wonder why that would be."

  "Beats me," Chee said.

  Chee considered it as he drove back to Tuba City. Obviously the body had been gone when Cowboy found the vehicle. Obviously someone had come and taken it. Why? Perhaps because whoever had seen him parked at the arroyo mouth had become nervous and decided the body might be found. But why preserve it in the first place? And who had moved it? Joseph Musket, it would seem. But tonight he felt very disappointed in Ironfingers. Disillusioned. Musket should be smarter than the run-of-the-mill thief. In his mind Chee had built him up to be much too clever to do the same thing that always trips up small-time thieves. And the facts as Chee knew them seemed to make him too smart to give a girl that stolen necklace. Someone seemed to have thought so. Someone had given him something close to seven hundred dollars—probably, Chee guessed, an even thousand—to do something when he left the prison at Santa Fe. And whatever it was, it involved working until the end of summer at Burnt Water. Doing what? Setting up and watching the landing strip for a multimillion-dollar narcotics delivery. That seemed to be the answer. But if he had seven hundred dollars in his pocket, if he had coming a payoff big enough to buy a wealth in sheep, why would he steal the pawn jewelry? Chee had been over all of that before, and the only motive he could think of was to provide what would seem to be a logical reason for disappearing from the trading post. Something which might put off the hunters if he intended to steal the shipment. And that meant he was too damn smart to give an instantly identifiable piece of squash blossom jewelry to some girl he'd picked up.

  "Ironfingers, where are you?" Chee asked the night.

  And oddly, just as he said it, aloud, to himself, another little mystery solved itself in his mind. He knew suddenly what had caused the clicking sound he'd heard in the darkness on the other side of the chamiso bushes. To make certain, he slid his .38 out of its holster. With his thumb he moved the hammer back and forth—off safety, to full cock, and back to safety. Click. Click. Click. He glanced at the pistol and back at the highway again. It was the kind of nervous thing a man might do if he was tensely ready to shoot something. Or someone.

  The thought of Musket, pistol cocked, hunting him in the dark aroused a surprising anger in Chee. It made the abstraction intensely personal. Well, Largo wanted him away from Tuba City. He'd quit postponing that trip to the prison in New Mexico. He'd take another step down the trail of Ironfingers.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The drive from tuba city to the New Mexico State Penitentiary on the Santa Fe plateau is about four hundred miles. Chee, who had risen even earlier than usual and cheated a little on the speed limit, got there in the early afternoon. He identified himself through the microphone at the entrance tower and waited while the tower checked with someone in the administration building. Then the exterior gate slid open. When it had closed behind him, and locked itself, another motor purred and the inside gate rolled down its track. Jim Chee was inside the fence, walking up the long, straight concrete walk through the great flat emptiness of the entrance yard. Nothing living was visible except for a flight of crows high to the north, between the prison and the mountains. But the long rows of cell block windows stared at him. Chee looked back, conscious of being watched. Above the second-floor windows of the second block to his right, the gray concrete was smudged with black. That would be cell block 3, Chee guessed, where more than thirty convicts were butchered and burned by their fellow prisoners in the ghastly riot of 1980. Had Joseph Musket been here then? If he'd been among the rioters, he'd concealed his role well enough to justify parole.

  Another electronic lock let Chee through the door of the administration building, into the presence of a thin, middle-aged Chicano guard who manned the entrance desk. "Navajo Tribal Police," the guard said, eyeing Chee curiously. He glanced down at his clipboard. "Mr. Armijo will handle you." Another guard, also gray, also Chicano, led him wordlessly to Mr. Armijo's office.

  Mr. Armijo was not wordless. He was plump, and perhaps forty, with coarse black hair razor-cut and blow-dried into this year's popular shape. His teeth were v
ery, very white and he displayed them in a smile. "Mr. Chee. You're not going to believe this, but I know this Joseph Musket personally." Armijo's smile became a half inch broader. "He was a trusty. Worked right here in our records section for a while. Have a seat. I guess we'll be getting him back now." Armijo indicated a gray steel chair with a gray plastic cushion. "Violated his parole, is that it?"

  "Looks like it," Chee said. "I guess you could say he's a suspect in a burglary. Anyway, we need to know more about him."

  "Here he is." Armijo handed Chee a brown cardboard accordion file. "All about Joseph Musket."

  Chee put the file on his lap. He'd read through such files before. He knew what was in them, and what wasn't. "You said you knew him," Chee said. "What was he like?"

  "Like?" The question surprised Armijo. He looked puzzled. He shrugged. "Well, you know. Quiet. Didn't say much. Did his work." Armijo frowned. "What do you mean, what was he like?"

  A good question, Chee thought. What did he mean? What was he looking for? "Did he tell jokes?" Chee asked. "Was he the kind of guy who sort of takes over a job, or did you have to tell him everything? Have any friends? That sort of thing."

  "I don't know," Armijo said. His expression said he wished he hadn't started the conversation. "I'd tell him what to do and he'd do it. Didn't ever say much. Quiet. He was an Indian." Armijo glanced at Chee to see if that explained it. Then he went on, explaining the job—how Musket would come in each afternoon, how he'd set up the files on the new prisoners received that day and then sort through the File basket and add whatever new material might have developed to the folders of other inmates. "Not a very demanding job," Armijo said. "But he did it well enough. Didn't make mistakes. Got good reports."