The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  "How about friends?" Chee asked.

  "Oh, he had friends," Armijo said. "In here, you got money, you got friends."

  "Musket had money? " That surprised Chee.

  "In his canteen account," Armijo said. "That's all you can have. No cash, of course. Just credit for smokes, candy, and stuff like that. All the little extras."

  "You mean more money than he could earn in here? Outside money?"

  "He had connections," Armijo said. "Lots of narcotics dealers have connections. Some lawyer depositing money into their account."

  And that seemed to be all Armijo knew. He showed Chee into an adjoining room and left him with the file.

  In the file there were first the photographs.

  Joseph Musket stared out at Chee: an oval face, clean shaven, a line extending down the center of the forehead, the expression blank—the face a man puts on when he has cleared everything out of his mind except the need to endure. He hadn't changed a lot, Chee thought, beyond the change caused by the thin mustache, a few added pounds, and a few added years. But then maybe he had changed. Chee turned his eyes away from the stolid eyes of Musket and looked at his profile. That was all he had seen of Joseph Musket—a quick disinterested glance at a stranger walking past. The profile showed Chee a high, straight forehead—the look of intelligence. Nothing more.

  He looked away from the face and noted the vital statistics. Musket today would be in his early thirties, he noticed, which was about what he had guessed. The rest checked out with what he had already learned from Musket's probation officer: born near Mexican Water, son of Simon Musket and Fannie Tsossie, educated at Teec Nos Pos boarding school and the high school at Cottonwood. As he'd remembered from what the probation officer had shown him at Flagstaff, Musket was doing three-to-five for possession of narcotics with intent to sell.

  Chee read more carefully. Musket's police record was unremarkable. His first rap had been at eighteen in Gallup, drunk and disorderly. Then had come an arrest in Albuquerque for grand theft, dismissed, and another Albuquerque arrest for burglary, which had led to a two-year sentence and referral to a drug treatment program, suspended. Another burglary charge, this one in El Paso, had led to a one-to-three sentence in Huntsville; and then came what Chee had been (at least subconsciously) looking for—Joe Musket's graduation into the more lethal level of crime. It had been an armed robbery of a Seven-Eleven Store at Las Cruces, New Mexico. On this one, the grand jury hadn't indicted, and the charge had been dismissed. Chee sorted through the pages, looking for the investigating officer's report. It sounded typical. Two men, one outside in a car, the other inside looking at the magazines until the last customer leaves, then the gun shown to the clerk, money from the register stuffed into a grocery bag, the clerk locked in the storeroom, and two suspects arrested after abandoning the getaway car. Musket had been found hiding between garbage containers in an alley, but the clerk wasn't ready to swear he was the man he'd seen waiting in the car outside. At the bottom of the page, a Xerox out of the Las Cruces police files, was a handwritten note. It said: "True bill on West—no bill on Musket." Chee glanced quickly back up the page, found the suspect-identification line. The man who'd gone into the store with the gun while Joseph Musket waited in the car was identified as Thomas Rodney West, age 30, address, Ideal Motel, 2929 Railroad Avenue, El Paso.

  It didn't really surprise Chee. West had said Musket was a friend of his son's. That was the reason he'd given Musket the job. And West had said his son had bad friends and had been in trouble, and had been killed. But how had he been killed? Chee hurried now. He found Thomas Rodney West once again in the investigation report which covered the drug bust that had sent Musket to the Santa Fe prison. He had been nailed along with Musket in the pickup truck carrying eight hundred pounds of marijuana. The pot had been unloaded off a light aircraft in the desert south of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The plane had eluded the dea trap, the pickup hadn't. Chee put down the Musket file and stared for a long moment at the gray concrete wall. Then he went into Armijo's office. Armijo looked up from his paperwork, teeth white.

  "Do you keep files on inmates after they're dead?"

  "Sure." Armijo's smile widened. "In the dead file."

  "I'm not sure he was here," Chee said. "Fellow named Thomas Rodney West."

  Armijo's smile lost its luster. "He was here," he said. "Got killed."

  "In here?"

  "This year," Armijo said. "In the recreation yard." He got up and was stooping to pull open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. "Things like that happen now and then," he said.

  "Somebody?" Chee said. "It wasn't solved?"

  "No," Armijo said. "Five hundred men all around him and nobody saw a thing. That's the way it works, usually."

  The accordion file of Thomas Rodney West was identical to that of Joseph Musket (a.k.a. Ironfingers Musket), except that the string which secured its flap was tied with a knot, giving it the finality of death, instead of a bow, which suggested the impermanence of parole. Chee carried it back into the waiting room, put it beside the Musket file, and worked the knot loose with his fingernails.

  Here there was no question of recognizing the mug shots that looked glumly out from the identification sheet. Thomas Rodney West, convict, looked just like Tom West, schoolboy, and Tom West, Marine, whose face Chee had studied in the photographs in the Burnt Water Trading Post. He also looked a lot like his father. The expression had the suffering blankness that police photographers and the circumstances impose on such shots. But behind that, there was the heavy strength and the same forcefulness that marked the face of the older West. Chee noticed that West had been born the same month as Musket, West was nine days younger. Chee corrected the thought. The knife in the recreation yard had changed that, sparing young West the aging process. Now Musket was a month or so older.

  Chee worked through the pages, wondering what he was looking for. He noticed that West had come out of the armed robbery with a plea bargain deal: Guilty with a four-year sentence, suspended into probation. He'd still been on probation when the narcotics arrest happened. And he was carrying a gun when arrested. (Musket hadn't been, Chee recalled. Had he been smart enough to ditch it when he saw what was happening?) Those two factors had netted West a stiffer, five-to-seven-year rap.

  It was warm in the room, and airless. Chee flipped to the last page and read the data on the death of Thomas Rodney West. It was as Armijo had reported. At 11:17 A.M., July 6, the guard in tower 7 had noticed a body in the dust of the recreation yard. No inmate was near it. He called down to the guard in the yard. West was found to be unconscious, dying from three deep puncture wounds. Subsequent interrogation of inmates revealed no one who had seen what had happened. Subsequent search of the yard had produced a sharpened screwdriver and a wood rasp which had been converted into makeshift daggers. Both were stained with blood that matched West's blood type. Next of kin, Jacob West, Burnt Water, Arizona, had been notified and had claimed the body on July 8. The carbon copy of an autopsy report was the final page in the file. It showed that Thomas Rodney West, his first name mutilated by a typographical error, had died of a slashed aortal artery and two wounds to his abdominal cavity.

  Chee flipped back a page and looked at the date. A busy month, July. West had been stabbed to death July 6. John Doe had been killed July 10, almost certainly, since his body was found early on the morning of July 11. On July 28 Joseph Musket disappeared after burglarizing the Burnt Water store. Any connection? Chee could think of none. But there might be, if he could identify Doe. He yawned. Up early this morning, and little sleep during the night. He lit a cigaret.

  He'd read quickly again through everything in the West file, and then return to the Musket file and finish it, and get out of there. The place oppressed him. Made him uneasy. Made him feel an odd, unusual sense of sorrow.

  There was nothing unusual in West's commissary credit account, or in his health check reports, or in his correspondence log, which included only his father, a woman
in El Paso, and an El Paso attorney. Then Chee turned to the log of visitors.

  On July 2, four days before he'd been stabbed to death, Thomas Rodney West had been visited by T. L. Johnson, agent, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Purpose: Official business. Chee stared at the entry, and then at the ones which preceded it. West had been visited five times since his arrival at the prison. By his father, and once by the woman from El Paso, and twice by someone who had identified himself as Jerald R. Jansen, attorney at law, Petroleum Towers Bldg., Houston, Texas.

  "Ah." Chee said it aloud. He sat back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. Jansen. Attorney. Houston. He'd met Jansen. Jansen dead. Sitting cold and silent beside the basalt, holding the Hopi Cultural Center message between thumb and finger. Chee blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling, rocked the chair forward, and checked the dates. Jansen had visited West on February 17, and again on May 2. Long before the parole of Joseph Musket, and then after it. Then West had been visited by the dea's freckled, red-haired T. L. Johnson four days before he'd been stabbed. Chee thought about that for a moment, looking for meaning. He found nothing but a take-your-choice set of contradictory possibilities.

  Then he checked Joseph Musket's log of visitors. He'd had none. Not one visitor in more than two years in prison. He checked Musket's log of correspondence. None. No letters in. No letters out. The isolated man. Chee closed the Musket file and put it atop the West file.

  Armijo was no longer alone. Two convicts were at work in his office now—a burr-haired young blond who glanced up from his typewriter as Chee brought the files in and then looked quickly back at his work, and a middle-aged black man with a gauze bandage on the back of his neck. The black man seemed to be Musket's replacement as file clerk. He was sifting papers into files, eyeing Chee curiously.

  "If West had any close friends in here, I'd sure like to talk to one of them," Chee said. "What do you think?"

  "I don't know," Armijo said. "I don't know anything about friends."

  How would he know? Chee thought. Such things as friendships were not the stuff that filled accordion files.

  "Any way of finding out?" Chee asked. "Down the grapevine, or whatever you do?"

  Armijo looked doubtful.

  "Who's in charge of inside security?" Chee asked.

  "That would be the deputy warden," Armijo said. "I'll call him."

  While Armijo dialed, the sound of the burr head's typewriter resumed. Typing makes it hard for him to listen, Chee thought.

  The deputy warden for security wanted to talk to Chee directly, and then he wanted to know what Chee was doing in the prison, and why, specifically, he wanted to talk to a friend of West.

  "Nothing to do with anything in here," Chee assured him. "We've got an unsolved burglary on the reservation, and we're looking for a parole violator named Musket. Musket got sent up with West. They were friends from way back. Did an armed robbery or so together before going into drugs. I just need to know if West and Musket stayed friendly in prison. Things like that."

  The deputy warden said nothing for several seconds. Then he told Chee to wait, he'd call back.

  Chee waited almost an hour. Burr head typed, eyeing him now and then. The black man with the bandaged neck finished emptying the Out basket into the proper accordion files and left. Armijo had explained that he was working on his annual report, which was late. He used a pocket calculator, comparing figures and compiling some sort of list. Chee sat in his gray metal chair, thinking now and then, and now and then listening to the sounds that came through the door beside his right ear. Footsteps, approaching and receding, an occasional distant metallic sound, once an echoing clang, once a whistle, shrill and brief. Never a voice, never a spoken word. Why did Johnson visit Thomas Rodney West? Had West heard of the impending drug delivery near Burnt Water and summoned the agent to trade information for a parole recommendation? West must have been connected to the group involved in the transfer. Why else had Jansen visited him twice? Johnson could have known that. Probably would have. Almost certainly did. Obviously did. Had he visited, hoping to pry out of West some information about the impending shipment? That seemed the best bet.

  The sound now was the telephone shrilling. Armijo spoke into it, listened. Handed it to Chee.

  "Fellow will talk to you," the deputy warden said. "Name's Archer. Good friend of West. Very good." The deputy warden laughed. "If you know what I mean."

  "Girl friend?" Chee asked.

  "I think it was boy friend," the D.W. said.

  The same middle-aged Chicano appeared, to guide Chee, taking him down a long, blank corridor. The two convicts they met on the journey walked against the walls, giving them the middle of the aisle. The interview room was windowless and the fluorescent tubes which lit it gave its dirty white paint a grayish tinge. The man named Archer was big, perhaps forty years old, with the body of a man who worked on the weights. His nose had been broken a long time ago and broken again more recently and the scars from one of the breaks glistened white against the pallor of his skin. Archer was sitting behind the counter that split the small room, looking curiously at Chee through a pane of glass. A guard leaned against the wall behind him, smoking.

  "My name's Jim Chee," Chee said to Archer. "I know Tom West's father. I need a little information. Just a little."

  "This can be a short conversation," Archer said. "I wasn't in the yard when it happened. I don't know a damned thing."

  "That's not what I'm asking about," Chee said. "I want to know why he wanted to talk to T. L. Johnson."

  Archer looked blank.

  "Why he wanted to talk to Johnson the narcotics agent."

  Archer's face flushed. "T. L. Johnson," he said slowly, memorizing the name. "Was that who it was? Tom didn't want to talk to that son of a bitch. He didn't know nothing to tell him. He was scared to death of it." Archer snorted. "For a damn good reason. The son of a bitch set him up."

  "It wasn't West's idea, then?"

  "Hell, no, it wasn't. Nobody in here is going to volunteer to talk to a narc. Not in here, they're not. The bastard set him up. You know what he did? He arranged to take him out of here. Right down the front walk, right out the front gate, right into his car, and drive away. Just drove down toward Cerrillos, out of sight of the prison, and sat there. No way for West to prove he hadn't snitched." Archer glared at Chee, his pallid face still flushed. "Dirty son of a bitch," he said.

  "How do you know about this?" Chee asked.

  "When they brought him back, Tom told me." Archer shook his head. "He was mad and he was scared. He said the narc wanted to know about when a shipment was going to come in, and where, and all about it, and when Tom told him he didn't know nothing,.Johnson laughed at him and just parked out there and said he was going to stay parked until all the cons figured he had time to spill his guts."

  "Scared," Chee asked. "Was he? He didn't ask to get put in segregation, where he'd be safe. Or if he did ask, it wasn't in the files."

  "He talked about it," Archer said. "But once you go in there you got to stay. That's rat country. Everybody in there is a snitch. You go in there you can't come out."

  "So he decided to risk it?"

  "Yeah," Archer said. "He had a lot of respect in here. So do I." He looked at Chee, his expression strained. "It seemed like we could risk it," he said. "It seemed like a good gamble."

  Archer had argued for the gamble, Chee guessed. Now he wanted Chee to understand it.

  "Can you tell me anything about who killed him, or why, or anything?"

  Archer's face assumed the same expression Chee had always noticed in official police identification photographs.

  "I don't have no ideas about that," he said. "Look, I've got to get out of here. Work to do."

  "One more thing," Chee said. "He got sent up here with a man named Joseph Musket. Friends from way back. Did they stay friends?"

  "Musket's out," Archer said. "Paroled."

  "But were they friends up until then?"

  Archer looke
d thoughtful. Chee guessed he was looking for traps. Apparently he found none.

  "They were friends," Archer said. He shook his head, and his face relaxed. "Really," he said, "Tom was a great guy. He had a lot of respect in here. People didn't screw with him. The bad ones, you know, they'd walk around him. He looked after Musket some, I think." Then Archer's expression changed. "Maybe I said that wrong. Tom was Musket's friend, but I don't know if it really worked both ways. I didn't never trust Musket. He was one of them guys, you know, who you never know about." Archer got up. "Just too damn smart. Just too damn clever. You know what I mean?"

  On his way out, Chee stopped at Armijo's office a final time to use the telephone. He dialed the deputy warden's number.

  "I wonder if I could get you to check and see if a dea agent named T. L. Johnson asked permission to take Thomas West out of the prison," Chee asked. "Was that arranged?"

  The deputy warden didn't have to look it up. "Yeah," he said. "He did that. Sometimes we let that happen when there's a good reason for privacy."

  Chapter Twenty

  Chee took the roundabout way home—circling north through Santa Fe and Chama instead of southward down the Rio Grande valley through Albuquerque. He took the northern route because it led through beautiful country. He planned to play the tapes he had made of Frank Sam Nakai singing the Night Chant and thereby memorize another section of that complicated eight-day ritual. Beauty helped put him in the mood for the sort of concentration required. Now it didn't work. His mind kept turning to the distraction of unresolved questions. Ironfingers? "Too damn clever," Archer had called him, but not too smart to give stolen jewelry to a girl. Had Johnson, as it seemed, deliberately set up Thomas Rodney West for a prison yard killing? And if he had, why? Who had taken the body of Palanzer from the carryall? And why had the body been left there, in its cocoon of Lysol mist, in the first place? The moon rose over the jagged ridge of the Sangre de Cristo range as he drove up the Chama valley. It hung in the clear, dark sky like a great luminous rock, flooding the landscape with light. When he reached Abiquiu village, he pulled off at the Standard station, bought gas, and used the pay phone. He called Cowboy Dashee's home number. The phone rang six times before Cowboy answered. Dashee had been asleep.