The Dark Wind jlajc-5

by Tony Hillerman

  "You know something about switchboards?"

  "I used to operate one. For about a year. Along with filing, a lot of other things."

  "You could operate this one?"

  "Anybody can operate a switchboard," she said. "If you're smart enough to dress yourself." She laughed. "It's certainly not skilled labor. Three minutes of instructions and…" She let it trail off.

  "And the switchboard operator can listen in on the calls?"

  "Sure," she said, frowning at him. "But they're not going to let…"

  "How much time do we have?" Chee said. "I'll cause some sort of distraction to get that Hopi away from there, and you handle the call."

  Later, several possibilities occurred to Chee that were much better than starting a fire. Less flamboyant, less risky, and the same effect. But at the moment he only had about twenty minutes. The only creative thought he had was fire.

  He handed Miss Pauling a ten-dollar bill. "Pay the check," he said. "Be near the switchboard. Two or three minutes before four, I come running in and get the clerk out of there."

  The raw material he needed was just where he remembered seeing it. A great pile of tumble-weeds had drifted into a corner behind the cultural center museum. Chee inspected the pile apprehensively. It was still a little damp from the previous night's shower but—being tumble-weed—it would burn with a furious red heat, damp or not. And the pile was slightly bigger than he remembered. Chee glanced around nervously. The weeds were piled into the junction of two of the cement-block walls which formed the back of the museum, conveniently out of sight. He hoped no one had seen him. He imagined the headline. navajo cop nailed for hopi arson. officer charged with torching cultural center. He imagined trying to explain this to Captain Largo. But there wasn't time to think of it. A quick look around, and he struck a match. He held it low under the prickly gray mass of weed stems. The tumbleweed, which always burned at a flash, merely caught, winked out, smoldered, caught again, smoldered, caught again, smoldered. Chee lit another match, tried a drier spot, looked nervously at his watch. Less than six minutes. The tumbleweed caught; flame flared through it, producing a sudden heat and smoggy white smoke. Chee stepped back and fanned it furiously with his uniform hat. (If anyone is watching this, he thought, I'll never get out of jail.) The fire was crackling now, producing the chain reaction of heat. Hat in hand, Chee sprinted for the motel office.

  He ran through the door, up to the desk. The clerk, a young man, was talking to an older Hopi woman.

  "Hate to interrupt," he said, "but something's burning out there!"

  The Hopis looked at him politely.

  "Burning?" the clerk said.

  "Burning," Chee said loudly. "There's smoke coming over the roof. I think the building's burning."

  "Burning!" the Hopi shouted. He came around the desk at a run. Miss Pauling was standing at the coffee shop entrance, watching tensely.

  The fire was eating furiously into the tumble-weeds when they rounded the corner. The clerk took it in at a glance.

  "Try to pull it away from the wall," he shouted at Chee. "I'll get water."

  Chee looked at his watch. Three minutes to four. Had he started it too early? He stomped at the weeds with his boots, kicking a section of the unburned pile aside to retard the spread. And then the Hopi was back, bringing two buckets of water and two other men. The tumbleweeds now were burning with the furious resinous heat common of desert plants. Chee fought fire with a will now, inhaling a lungful of acrid smoke, coughing, eyes watering. In what seemed like just a minute, it was over. The clerk was throwing a last bucketful of water over the last smoking holdout. One of the helpers was examining places where embers had produced burn holes in his jeans. Chee rubbed watering eyes.

  "I wonder what could have started it," Chee said. "You wouldn't think that stuff would burn like that after that rain."

  "Goddamn tumbleweeds," the Hopi said. "I wonder what did start it." He was looking at Chee. Chee thought he detected a trace of suspicion.

  "Maybe a cigaret," he said. He started poking through the blackened remains with his foot. The fire had lasted a little longer than it seemed. It was four minutes after four.

  "Blackened up the wall," the Hopi said, inspecting it. "Have to be repainted." He turned to walk back to the motel office.

  "Somebody ought to check the roof," Chee said. "The flames were going up over the parapet."

  The Hopi stopped and looked toward the flat roof. His expression was skeptical.

  "No smoke," he said. "It's all right. That roof would still be damp."

  "I thought I saw smoke," Chee said. "Be hell if that tarred roof caught on fire. Is there a way to get up there?"

  "I guess I better check," the clerk said. He headed off in the other direction at a fast walk.

  To get a ladder, Chee guessed. He hoped the ladder was a long ways off.

  Miss Pauling was coming, hurried and nervous, from behind the counter when Chee pushed through the door. Her face was white. She looked flustered.

  Chee rushed her outside to his patrol car. The clerk was hurrying across the patio, carrying an aluminum ladder.

  "Call come?"

  She nodded, still speechless.

  "Anybody see you?"

  "Just a couple of customers," she said. "They wanted to pay their lunch tickets. I told them to just leave the money on the counter. Was that all right?"

  "All right with me," Chee said. He held the car door for her, let himself in on the driver's side. Neither of them said anything until he pulled out of the parking lot and was on the highway.

  Then Miss Pauling laughed. "Isn't that funny," she said. "I haven't been so terrified since I was a girl."

  "It is funny," Chee said. "I'm still nervous."

  Miss Pauling laughed again. "I think you're terrified of how embarrassed you're going to be. What are you going to say if that man comes back and there you are behind his counter playing switchboard operator?"

  "Exactly," Chee said. "What are you going to say if he says, 'Hey, there, what are you doing burning down my cultural center?'"

  Miss Pauling got her nerves under control. "But the call did come through," she said.

  "It must have been short," Chee said.

  "Thank God," she said fervently.

  "What'd you learn?"

  "It was a man," Miss Pauling said. "He asked for Gaines, and Gaines answered the phone on the first ring, and the man asked him if he wanted the suitcases back, and—"

  "He said suitcases?"

  "Suitcases," Miss Pauling confirmed. "And Gaines said yes, they did, and the man said that could be arranged. And then he said it would cost five hundred thousand dollars, and they would have to be in tens and twenties and not in consecutive order, in two briefcases, and he said they would have to be delivered by The Boss himself. And Gaines said that would be a problem, and the man said either The Boss or no deal, and Gaines said it would take some time. He said it would take at least twenty-four hours. And the man said they would have more than that. He said the trade would be made at nine p.m. two nights after tonight."

  "Friday night," Chee said.

  "Friday night," Miss Pauling agreed. "Then the man said to be ready for nine p.m. Friday night, and he hung up."

  "That's all of it?"

  "Oh, the man said he'd be back in touch to tell Gaines where they'd meet. And then he hung up."

  "But he didn't name the place?"

  "He didn't."

  "Say anything else?"

  "That's the substance of it."

  "He explain why the boss had to deliver the money?"

  "He said he didn't trust anybody else. He said if the boss was there himself, nobody would risk trying anything funny."

  "Any names mentioned?"

  "Oh, yes," Miss Pauling said. "The man called Gaines Gaines and once Gaines said something like Palanzer.' He said something like: 'I don't see why you're doing this, Palanzer. You would have made almost that much.' That was after the man—Palanzer,
I guess—said he wanted the five hundred thousand."

  "What did the man say to that?"

  "He just laughed. Or it sounded like a laugh. His voice sounded muffled all through the conversation—like he was talking with something in his mouth."

  "Or with something over his mouth." Chee paused. "He specified nine p.m.?"

  Miss Pauling nodded. "He said, 'Exactly nine p.m.'"

  Chee pulled off the asphalt, made a backing turn, and headed back toward the motel. He smelled of smoke.

  "Well," Miss Pauling said. "Now we know who has it, and when they're going to make the switch."

  "But not where," Chee said. Why the muffled voice, he was asking himself. Because the caller would have been good old Ironfingers, and because Ironfingers would want Gaines to believe the caller was Palanzer. Joseph Musket, despite his years of living among whites, would not have lost his breathy Navajo pronunciation.

  "How do we find out where?"

  "That's going to take some thinking," Chee said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Thinking didn't seem to help. Chee went to sleep that night thinking. He got up the next morning and went over to his office, still deep in thought. His only conclusion was that he must be thinking the wrong way. There was nothing much in his In basket except a note that Johnson of the dea was trying to reach him and a carbon of the report on the Burnt Water necklace turning up. It simply repeated what Dashee had told him, with the details filled in.

  Subject named Edna Nezzie, twenty-three, unmarried, of the Graywoman Nezzie camp, north of Teec Nos Pos, had pawned the necklace at Mexican Water. It had been recognized from the description left with the post manager by Tribal Police. Subsequently, subject Nezzie had told investigating officer Eddie Begay that she had been given the necklace by a male subject she had met two nights earlier at a squaw dance next to Mexican Water. She identified the subject as a Navajo male about thirty, who had identified himself as Joseph Musket. The two had gone to a white Ford pickup Musket was driving. There they had engaged in sexual intercourse. Musket then had given the subject the necklace and they had returned to the dance. She had seen no more of him.

  Chee frowned at the paper, trying to identify why something was wrong about it. Still staring at the report, he fumbled for the telephone, and dailed the operator, and asked for the number of the trading post at Teec Nos Pos. It rang five times before he got an answer.

  Chee identified himself. "Just need some information. What clan is Graywoman Nezzie?"

  "Nezzie," the voice said. "She's born to Standing Rock and born for Bitter Water."

  "You're sure?"

  "I'm one of the old lady's sons-in-law," the voice said. "Married into 'em. The father is Water Runs Together and Many Poles."

  "Thanks," Chee said, and hung up. He remembered Mrs. Musket identifying herself. Born to Standing Rock Dinee, she had said, and born for the Mud Clan. So the man who had identified himself as Joseph Musket at the Mexican Water squaw dance could not possibly have been Joseph Musket. For a Navajo male to dance with a Navajo female of the same maternal clan violated the most stringent of taboos. And the intra-clan intercourse that followed was the most heinous form of incest—sure to cause sickness, sure to cause insanity, likely to bring death. If it was Musket, it could only mean that he had lied to the girl about his clan. Otherwise she would never have danced with him, gone to the truck with him, even talked to him except in the most formal fashion. And no Navajo male would engage in such a ghastly deception.

  Unless, Chee thought, he was a witch.

  Chee left a note to tell Largo where to find him and headed for Cameron. En route he remembered what Mrs. Musket had told him about the homecoming of Ironfingers, his urgent need for the traditional Navajo purification ceremonial, his stated intentions to rejoin the People as a herder of sheep. Such behavior was incongruous with deliberate incest—an act which any traditional Navajo knew endangered the health of the entire clan. Chee narrowed it down to two choices. Either someone had imitated Iron-fingers at the squaw dance, or Ironfingers was a madman. Or in other words, a witch.

  In Cameron he bought a sack of cement at the lumberyard, and a tub at the hardware store, and a flexible plastic funnel at the drugstore. Then he made the long, lonely drive back to the Hopi Reservation, still thinking. At the windmill he left the sack of cement beside the well shaft, put the funnel beside it, and covered both with the tub, just in case the rain clouds building up again in the west produced some moisture.

  He drove back down Wepo Wash to Burnt Water Trading Post and parked in the shade of the cottonwood beside West's battered and rusty jeep. By then he had-come up with only a single idea. He could stake out the cache of suitcases and nail Musket when he came to dig them up. It wasn't a very good idea. Chee didn't think he could count on Musket coming for the suitcases. More likely, Ironfingers would collect his money and tell the buyers where to pick up the goods. Chee was not interested in the buyers. He was officially, formally, and by explicit orders not interested. But Ironfingers was his business. He had been told to solve the burglary at Burnt Water. He had been told to unravel the business of witchcraft on Black Mesa. Ironfingers was the answer to the first. Ironfingers might have some answers to the second.

  Chee sat. He watched the thunderheads boiling up in the west. He went through it all again. The conclusion was the same. Musket would have to come to whatever meeting place he established to get his money. He would not be likely to go dig up the suitcases. The crash scene must seem dangerous to him. Musket couldn't tell Gaines where to meet him until the last moment—to do so could give the buyers a chance to set up a trap. Chee could think of no possible way he could intercept the information. He had thought of digging up the suitcases himself, rehiding them somewhere, and leaving a note to force Musket to come to him. But more likely it would be the buyers who would find the note and come to him. That was the sort of trouble Chee didn't intend to invite. In fact, it was the sort of trouble that had been at the back of his mind ever since Johnson had warned him that the drug dealers would be looking for him. Johnson's prediction hadn't proved true—but still might. The people for whom Gaines worked might well guess that Palanzer would have needed a local helper. There was no way for Chee to know for sure that they knew about Ironfingers.

  Chee fished out his notebook and reexamined what he had written while waiting for Cowboy Dashee. "Where is J. Musket?" He stared at the question. And then at another. "Why the burglary?" And then at "Who is John Doe?" He thought about the dates. Doe had died July 10, young West had died July 6. Musket had walked out of this trading post two weeks later and vanished—apparently after coming back the same night to haul off a load of pawn jewelry. Then, weeks later, he carelessly gives away a single piece. Or someone gives it away in Musket's name.

  Chee climbed out of his truck and walked into the trading post. If West wasn't occupied, he'd go over the whole burglary business with him again.

  West was putting an order of groceries and odds and ends into a box for a middle-aged Navajo woman. The purchase included a coil of that light, flexible rope which Navajos used to tie sheep, horses, loads on pickup trucks, and all those thousands of things which must be tied. West had left the coil for last. Now he dropped it into the box, said something to the woman, and took it out again. He measured out fifteen or twenty feet of it with quick outthrusts of his arms, and then collected this in a tangle of loops in his right hand, talking to the woman all the time. Still standing at the doorway, Chee couldn't overhear what he was saying. Whatever it was, it attracted two men who had been standing down the counter. West handed the woman the rope. All three Navajos inspected it. They were grinning. West the sorcerer was about to perform. He took the rope back, folded it into a half-dozen dangling loops in his huge right hand. His left hand extracted a knife from his coveralls pocket. He slashed through the loops, and held up eight cut ends. Then he disposed of the knife, extracted a bandanna from his pocket, covered the severed ends with the handkerchief
. He was talking steadily. Chee guessed he was explaining the curing quality of his magic handkerchief. A moment later West pulled the bandanna away and with the same motion dropped the rope. It fell to the floor, a single piece again. West whipped it up, snapped it between his outstretched hands. He handed it to the woman. She inspected it, and was impressed. The two male watchers were grinning appreciatively. Chee grinned, too. A good trick, well done. He'd seen it before—a magic show done for donations on the Union Mall at the University of New Mexico. It had taken him most of the day to narrow down the only possible way the trick could be done. And that night he'd gone to the library, and found a book of magic tricks in the stacks, and confirmed that he'd been right. The trick was in creating the illusion with the gathered loops that the cord had been cut into fragments when actually only short bits had been sliced from one end—and those disposed of in a pocket when the bandanna was whipped away.

  Chee stood by the doorway, remembering the three of diamonds trick, which also depended on creating an illusion—the distracting thought that it mattered which card the victim named. West was a master of this business of controlling how one thought. A master of illusion.

  Chee's smile faded. His face fell into that slack, mindless appearance of totally concentrated thought. Slowly the smile appeared again, and broadened, and converted itself into a great, exultant laugh. It was loud enough to attract West's attention. He was looking at Chee, surprised. His audience was also staring.

  "You want to see me?" West asked.

  "Later," Chee said. He hurried out, the grin fading as his thoughts took better shape, and climbed into his pickup truck. The notebook was on the seat. He opened it, flipped to the proper page.

  Across from "Why the burglary?" he wrote: "Was there a burglary?" Then he studied the other questions. Across from "Did Musket kill John Doe?" he wrote: "Was John Doe Iron-fingers?" Then he closed the notebook, started the engine, and pulled the truck out of the trading post parking lot. He would talk to West later. First, he wanted time to think this through. Had West, the magician, the sorcerer, used Jim Chee to create one of his illusions? He wanted time to answer that. But now, as he drove down the bumpy road beside Wepo Wash, toward the reddish sunset, and the towering thunderclouds which promised rain and delivered nothing, he was fairly sure that when he had thought it through he would know the answer. The answer would be yes. Yes, for all these weeks Ironfingers had been hidden behind Jim Chee's stupidity.