"They didn't?" Largo said, surprised. Then, "Oh, yeah." He laughed-which with Largo was a deep, rumbling sound. "From what I hear he's sort of an untouchable. Supposed to have worked for the CIA in Nam."
"I think somebody ought to talk to the man," Leaphorn said. "I think I'll come and do it."
"You want me to save you the drive?"
"No use you pissing off the Bureau," Leaphorn said. "I'll do it."
"That sounds like you're still thinking of retiring," Largo said, and laughed again.
"One of these days. Anyway, I'm at the point where if a yelling match started with the feds, anybody who decided to fire me would have to move fast."
Largo didn't comment on that. He said, "Let me know when you're coming, and if you need any help. Right now, I'll just look that address up for you."
"I'll probably come this afternoon," Leaphorn said. "Just as soon as I get my paperwork done."
But just as he was moving the penultimate report from in-basket to out-basket, the telephone rang.
"A woman down here to see you," the desk clerk said. "A Professor Bourebonette."
"Ah," Leaphorn said. He thought a moment. "Ask her to come on up."
He put down the telephone, pulled the ultimate report out of the basket, opened it on his desk, and then stared out the window at the sun and shadows on Window Rock Ridge. A question of motive again. What brought the professor here? A long drive from Flagstaff. Either she had risen in the predawn darkness or she had spent the night somewhere. At the Window Rock motel perhaps, or at Gallup. A strong motive. Friendship, she said. Friendship might well be part of it. But what else?
As she came through his door, Professor Bourebonette's words were apologetic. But her expression wasn't.
"I realize we're imposing on your time. Hosteen Pinto isn't your responsibility. But I wondered if you could bring me up to date. Have you learned anything?"
Leaphorn was standing. "Please," he said, motioning her to a chair. He sat, too, closed the waiting folder. "I haven't learned anything very useful."
"What did Professor Tagert say? I called his office and they told me he wasn't in. They didn't know when to expect him. That seems awfully odd. Their semester started two or three weeks ago. He'd have to be keeping office hours."
"Dr. Tagert seems to have jumped ship," Leaphorn said. "I got the same information you did."
"He's missing?" Dr. Bourebonette sounded incredulous. "Are the police looking for him?"
This was something that always had to be explained. Leaphorn did it, patiently.
"It doesn't work that way with adults. You have a right to be missing if you want to be. It's nobody's business but your own. The police 'look' only if there's some crime involved. Or some reason to suspect foul play."
Professor Bourebonette was frowning at him. "There's certainly a crime involved here. And isn't he what you call a material witness?"
"He might be," Leaphorn said. "If he is, nobody knows it. The crime is the Nez homicide. There's nothing to connect him to that. Absolutely nothing."
Bourebonette absorbed this statement, her eyes on Leaphorn but her thoughts, obviously, on something else. She nodded,
Coyote Waits agreeing with some inner notion. Leaphorn considered her. What was she thinking? It would be something intelligent, he was sure of that. He wished the thought, whatever it was, would provoke some remark that would give him a clue to what she was doing here.
"Have you considered that Tagert might be dead?" she asked. "Have you considered that whoever killed your officer also killed Tagert? Have you thought of that?"
Leaphorn nodded. "I have."
Bourebonette was silent again, thinking. Long silences didn't seem to bother her. Unusual in a white. From downstairs Leaphorn could hear a telephone ringing. He smelled coffee brewing. Professor Bourebonette was wearing a cologne of some sort. The aroma was very, very faint. So faint it might be his imagination.
"The trial should be postponed," Bourebonette said suddenly. "Until they can find Professor Tagert." She stared at Leaphorn, her eyes demanding. "How can we arrange that? Surely they can't try Mr. Pinto without knowing what's going on. Nobody knows what actually happened out there."
Leaphorn shrugged. But the shrug wasn't good enough.
"I think we have a right to expect some sort of effort toward simple justice," Bourebonette said. Her voice sounded stiff. "Mr. Pinto has a right to demand that."
"I'll admit I would have liked a little solider investigation," Leaphorn said. "But it's not my responsibility. It's a federal case and the federals have all they need to convince a jury beyond any reasonable doubt. The game is played a little-"
"Game!"
Leaphorn interrupted the interruption with an upraised palm. He, too, could be aggressive. "-a little differently when the defendant does not deny the crime," he continued. "In the first place, that reduces any worry that you have that you might have arrested the wrong person. In the second place, it leaves you without the defendant's story to check. So there's much less the arresting agency can do, even when it has the very best of intentions."
Bourebonette was studying him. "And you think they've done all that's necessary?"
He hesitated. "Well," he said, "I would want to talk to Tagert, and there's another loose end or two."
"Like what? Lack of a motive?"
Leaphorn closed his eyes. Memory has no temporal limits. When he opened them again two seconds later memory had shown him a score of bloody scenes.
"Whiskey is the perfect motive," he said.
"Then what?"
He wanted to turn the question around, to ask this woman to tell him why this drunken shooting was worth so much of her time. It was probably the book. Friendship and the book. She needed Pinto free to finish it. But maybe there was something deeper. If he asked her, she would simply repeat that Pinto was innocent, that Pinto was a friend.
"Well, Officer Chee met a car when he was driving toward the crime scene. This car might have driven past the scene. Perhaps not, but most likely it did. Maybe the driver saw something. Probably not, but I would have found him and asked."
"Of course," Bourebonette said. "You mean nobody did."
"I hear they didn't."
"But why not?"
"Why not? Because they had their case. Smoking gun. Motive. No denial. They have other work to do, stacked on their desks." He made an illustrative gesture at his own desk. Except for the single folder it was uncharacteristically, point-defeatingly clean.
"Too much trouble running him down. Too much trouble finding the car. When an old man is being tried for murder." Her voice was bitter.
"We found the car," Leaphorn said. "It belongs to a schoolteacher at Ship Rock. I'm going to talk to him today."
"I'll go with you," Bourebonette said.
"I'm afraid that-" Then he stopped. Why not? No damage to be done. It wasn't his case anyway. If the Bureau got mad, it would get no madder because this woman was along. And he wanted to know what she was after. This business was interesting him more and more.
They took the road that wanders over Washington Pass via Red Lake, Crystal, and Sheep Springs. Winding down the east slope of the Chuskas, Leaphorn stopped at an overlook. He pointed east and swept his hand northward, encompassing an immensity of rolling tan and gray grasslands. Zuni Mountains to the south, Jemez Mountains to the east, and far to the north the snowy San Juans in Colorado.
"Dinetah," he said. She would know the meaning of the word. "Among the People." The heartland of the Navajos. The place of their mythology, the Holy Land of the Dinee. How would she react?
Professor Bourebonette said nothing at all for a moment. Then: "I won a bet with myself," she said. "Or part of a bet. I bet you would stop here and enjoy the view. And I bet you'd say something about naming this pass after Washington."
This wasn't what Leaphorn had expected.
"And what would I have said?"
"I wasn't sure. Maybe something angry. I would be bitter
if I was a Navajo to have anything in my territory named after Colonel John Macrae Washington. It's like naming a mountain pass in Israel after Adolf Hitler."
"The colonel was a scoundrel," Leaphorn agreed. "But I don't let the nineteenth century worry me."
Bourebonette laughed. "If you don't mind my saying so, that's typically Navajo. You stay in harmony with reality. Being bitter about the past isn't healthy."
"No," Leaphorn said. "It's not."
He thought: Professor Bourebonette is flattering me. Why? What will she want from this?
"I would be thinking of the insult," Bourebonette said. "Every time I took this route it would rankle. I would think, why does the white man do this? Why does he honor the man who was our worst enemy and rub our noses in it? The colonel who murdered Narbona, that honorable and peaceable man. The colonel who broke treaty after treaty, and protected the people who captured your children and sold them into slavery in New Mexico and argued for a policy of simply exterminating your tribe, and did everything he could to carry it out. Why take such a bastard and name a mountain pass right in the middle of your country after him? Is that just the product of ignorance? Or is it done as a gesture of contempt?"
There was anger in Bourebonette's voice and in her face. This wasn't what Leaphorn had expected, either.
"I would say ignorance," Leaphorn said. "There's no malice in it." He laughed. "One of my nephews was a Boy Scout. In the Kit Carson Council. Carson was worse in a way, because he pretended to be a friend of the Navajos." He paused and looked at her. "Washington didn't pretend," he said. "He was an honest enemy."
Professor Louisa Bourebonette showed absolutely no sign that she sensed the subtle irony Leaphorn intended in that.
The sun was halfway down the sky when they started down the long slope that drops into the San Juan River basin and Ship Rock town. They had discussed Arizona State University, where Leaphorn had been a student long ago, whether the disease of alcoholism had racial/genetic roots, the biography-memoir-autobiography of Hosteen Ashie Pinto the professor had been accumulating for twenty years, drought cycles, and law enforcement. Leaphorn had listened carefully as they talked about the Pinto book, guiding the conversation, confirming his thought that the Pinto effort was the top priority in this woman's life but learning nothing more. He had noticed that she was alert to what he was noticing and that she had no problem with long silences. They were enjoying such a silence now, rolling down the ten-mile grade toward the town. The cottonwoods along the river formed a crooked line of dazzling gold across a vast landscape of grays and tans. And beyond, the dark blue mountains formed the horizon, the Abajos, Sleeping Ute, and the San Juans, already capped with early snow. It was one of those still, golden days of high desert autumn.
Then Leaphorn broke the mood.
"I told the captain in charge of the Ship Rock subagency I'd let him know when I got here," he said, and picked up the mike.
The dispatcher said Captain Largo wasn't in.
"You expect him soon?"
"I don't know. We had a shooting. He went out on that about an hour ago. I think he'll be back pretty quick."
"A homicide?"
"Maybe. We sent an ambulance. You want me to call the captain?"
"Don't interrupt him," Leaphorn said. "When he comes in, tell him I went directly out to the Huan Ji residence. Tell him I'll fill him in if I learn anything."
"Huan Ji," the dispatcher said. "That's where the shooting was reported. That's where we sent the ambulance."
Chapter 13
They met the ambulance returning to the Ship Rock Public Health Service Hospital as they turned off onto Huan Ji's street. The emergency lights were flashing and the siren growling. Leaphorn had been around violence too long to be deceived by that. The driver was in no hurry. He recognized Leaphorn as they passed, and raised a hand in salute. Whoever had been shot at Huan Ji's place was either in no danger or he was already dead.
Ji's house was a rectangular frame-and-stucco bungalow in a block of such structures. They had been designed long ago by a Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat to house Bureau of Indian Affairs employees. As they had weathered and sagged, they had passed from that existence and become tribal property-occupied now by schoolteachers, hospital clerks, road-grader operators, and similar folk. Ji's house was instantly recognizable. It had attracted a cluster of police cars and a scattering of neighbors watching from their yards. Even without the magnet of this temporary tragedy, it would have stood out.
It was surrounded by a neat chain-link fence and flanked by a tidy gravel driveway that led to an empty carport. Inside the fence was a flower bed, precisely bordered by a perfectly aligned row of bricks. Six rose bushes were spaced on each side of the concrete sidewalk. Autumn had turned the Bermuda-grass lawn gray, but it was trimmed and ready for spring.
The house itself was a clone of its neighbors and as alien as a Martian. In a row of houses frayed, faded, and weary, its fresh white paint and fresh blue trim seemed a reproach to the dusty street.
Captain Largo, as neat as the house but somewhat smaller, was standing on the porch. He was talking to a skinny tribal policeman and a neat young man in a felt hat and a dark gray business suit-which meant in Four Corners country that he was either an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a young man making his mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Largo's bulk made them both look unnaturally small. He recognized Leaphorn and waved.
Leaphorn glanced at Bourebonette, thinking of how to phrase his request.
She anticipated it.
"I'll wait in the car," she said.
"I won't be long," Leaphorn said.
On the porch, Largo introduced him. The skinny policeman was Eldon Roanhorse, who Leaphorn vaguely remembered from some affair out of the past, and Gray Suit was Theodore Rostik of the Farmington office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"Mr. Rostik just transferred in this summer," Largo said. "Lieutenant Leaphorn is with our criminal investigation division. Out of Window Rock."
If Rostik was impressed by Leaphorn or his title, he concealed it. He nodded to Leaphorn, turned back to Largo.
"Window Rock," he said. "How'd he know about this? How did he get here so quick?"
Once this rudeness would have irritated Leaphorn. That was a long time ago. He said, "I just happened to be up here on another matter. What do you have?"
"Homicide," Largo said. "Somebody shot the owner here. Twice. No witnesses. Mailman heard him moaning. Looked in and saw him on the floor and turned it in."
"Any suspects?"
"We're talking to neighbors but nobody much seems to have been around when it happened," Largo said.
"This will be a federal case," Rostik said. "Felony on a federal reservation."
"Of course," Leaphorn said. "We'll help any way we can. Interpreting, things like that. Where's his wife?"
"Neighbors say he's a widower," Roan-horse said. "He was a teacher down at the high school. He lived here with his boy. Teenaged kid."
"If we need help-" Rostik began, but Leaphorn held up his hand.
"Just a second," he said. "Where's his car?"
"Car?" Rostik said.
"We've got a call out on it," Largo said, looking solemnly at Leaphorn. "I understand it's an old white Jeepster."
"The son wasn't here?"
"Not unless he did it," Rostik said. "When the mailman got here there was just Mr. Ji."
"Mr. Rostik," Leaphorn said, "if you don't have any objection, I'd like to look around inside. Nothing will be touched."
"Well, now," Rostik said. He cleared his throat. "I don't see what-"
Captain Largo, who almost never interrupted, interrupted now. "The lieutenant is usually our liaison with the Bureau in cases like this. He'd better see what you have here," he said, and led the way inside.
The homicide team had drawn a chalk outline of where Colonel Huan Ji's body had fallen against the front room's wall. A great splotch of bl
ood drying on the polished hardwood floor made the chalk redundant. Except for that, and a scrabble of reddish marks on the tan wallpaper, the room was as neat as the yard. Immaculate. And cool as the autumn afternoon outside.
Leaphorn avoided the blood and squatted beside the defaced wallpaper.
"He left a message?"
"He left two," Rostik said.
"'Save Taka,'" Leaphorn read. "Is that what it says?"
"His son's name is Taka," Rostik said. "According to the neighbors."
Leaphorn was far more interested by the other message. Ji apparently had written them in his own blood by moving a shaky finger across the wall. SAVE TAKA above, and below it: LIED TO CHEE.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 10 - Coyote Waits Page 13