When he opened them, McGinnis was holding the mug out to him, expression quizzical.
Leaphorn took it, nodded.
“You had it about right,” McGinnis said. “He was in the store when the mail came, as I remember it. Tagert wanted to interview him about something. He wanted to know if he could come and get him on some date or other. He asked Ashie to let him know if that date was all right or to name another if it wasn’t.”
“Anything else?” Leaphorn asked. He sipped the coffee. Even by the relaxed standards of the Window Rock Tribal Police headquarters it was bad coffee. Made this morning, Leaphorn guessed, and reheated all day.
“Just a short letter,” McGinnis said. “That was it.”
“What was the date?”
“I don’t remember. Would have been early in August.”
“And Pinto agreed?”
“Yeah,” McGinnis said. He frowned, rememberingthe plump, round face Leaphorn remembered from a decade ago shrunken now into a wilderness of lines and creases. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, the upshot was he asked me to write Tagert back and tell him he’d be ready in the afternoon.”
Professor Bourebonette, either politer or more starved for caffeine than Leaphorn, was sipping her coffee with no apparent distaste. She put down the cup.
“So now we know how he got to Ship Rock,” she said. “Tagert came and got him.”
But Leaphorn was studying McGinnis. “Pinto said something about it, or something like that? He didn’t just immediately say write him back?”
“I’m trying to remember,” McGinnis said, impatiently. “I’m trying to get it all back in my mind. We was in this room, I remember that much. Ashie’s getting too damn old to amount to much but I’ve known him for years and when he comes in we usually come back here for a talk. Find out what’s going on over by the river, you know.”
He rocked forward in his chair, got up clumsily. He opened the cabinet above the stove and extracted a bottle. Old Crow.
“The lieutenant here don’t drink,” McGinnis said to Professor Bourebonette. He glanced at Leaphorn. “Unless he’s changed his ways. But I will offer you a sip of bourbon.”
“And I will accept it,” the professor said. She handed McGinnis her empty coffee cup and he poured the whiskey into it. Then he fumbled at the countertop, came up with a Coca-Cola glass and filled it carefully up to the trademark by the label. That done, he sat again, put the bottle on the floor beside him, and rocked.
“I didn’t offer Hosteen Pinto a drink. I remember that. Wouldn’t be the thing to do, him being alcoholic. But I poured myself one, and sat here and sipped at it.” McGinnis sipped his bourbon, thinking.
“I read the letter to him and he said something strong.” McGinnis examined his memory. “Strong. I think he called Tagert a coyote, and that’s about as strong as a Navajo will get. And at first he wasn’t going to work for him. I remember that. Then he said something like Tagert paid good. And that’s what had brought him in here in the first place. Money. You notice that belt out in the pawn case?”
McGinnis pushed himself out of the rocker and disappeared through the doorway into the store.
Leaphorn looked at Bourebonette. “I’ll tell the FBI about Tagert,” he said.
“You think they’ll do anything?”
“They should,” he said. But maybe they wouldn’t. Why would they? Their case was already made. And what difference did it make anyway?
McGinnis reappeared carrying a concha belt. The overhead light reflected dimly off the tarnished silver.
“This was always old Pinto’s fallback piece. The last thing he pawned when he was running low.” McGinnis’s gnarled hand stroked the silver disks. “It’s a dandy.”
He handed it to Professor Bourebonette.
Leaphorn could see it was indeed a dandy. An old, heavy one made of the turn-of-the-century silver Mexican five-peso pieces. Worth maybe two thousand dollars from a collector. Worth maybe four hundred in pawn credit.
“Trouble is he’d already pawned it,” McGinnis said. “Not only pawned it. He’d been in twice to bump up the loan. He wanted another fifty dollars in groceries on it and we was jawing about that when the mail truck came up.”
McGinnis was rocking while he remembered, holding the Coca-Cola glass in left hand, tilting it back and forth in compensation for the rocking motion. Exactly as he’d seen him do it when Leaphorn was twenty years younger, coming in here to learn where families had moved, to collect gossip, just to talk. Leaphorn felt a dizzying sense of dislocation in time. Everything was the same. As if twenty years hadn’t ticked away. The cluttered old room, the musty smell, the yellow light, the old man grown older, as if in the blink of an eye. Suddenly he knew just what McGinnis would do next, and McGinnis did it.
He leaned, picked up the Old Crow bottle by the neck, and carefully recharged his glass, dripping the last of the recharge until it was exactly up to the trademark.
“I’ve seen Pinto poor before. Many times. But that day he was totally tapped out. Said he was out of coffee and cornmeal and lard and just about everything and Mary wasn’t in any shape to help him with her own bunch to feed.”
McGinnis fell silent, rocking, tasting the whiskey on his tongue.
“So he took the job,” Professor Bourebonette said.
“So he did,” McGinnis said. “Had me write Tagert right back.” He took another tiny sip, and savored it in a silence that made the creaking of his rocker seem loud.
A question hung in Leaphorn’s mind: Why had Pinto called Tagert a coyote? It was a hard, hard insult among the Navajosimplying not just bad conduct but the evil of malice. Mary Keeyani said Tagert had given him whiskey. Would that be the reason? Leaphorn noticed his interest in this affair growing.
“But I know he didn’t want to,” McGinnis added. “I said, What’s wrong with this fella? He looks all right to me. He pays you good money, don’t he? He’s just another one of them professors. And old Ashie said Tagert wants me to do something I don’t want to do. And I said what’s that, and he said he wants me to find something for him. And I said well hell, you do that all the time, and he was quiet a while. And then he said, you don’t have to go looking for Coyote. Coyote’s always out there waiting.”
Professor Bourebonette had offered to share driving on the way home and Leaphorn had explained to her that Tribal Police rules prohibited it. Now, about fifty miles east of Tuba City, Leaphorn began wishing he hadn’t. He was exhausted. Talking had helped keep sleep at bay for the first hour or so. They talked about McGinnis, about what Tagert might have wanted Hosteen Pinto to find, about Pinto’s reluctance. They discussed how Navajo mythology related to the origin story of the Old Testament, and to myths of the Plains Indians, and police techniques in criminal investigations, and civil rights, and academic politics. She had told him about the work she had done studying mythology in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, before the intensifying war made it impossible. And now Leaphorn was talking about his days as a graduate student at Arizona State, and specifically about a professor who was either weirdly absent-minded or over the hill into senility.
“Trouble is, I’m beginning to notice I’m forgetting things myself,” he concluded.
The center stripe had become double, waving off in two directions. Leaphorn shook his head, jarring himself awake. He glanced at Bourebonette to see if she’d noticed.
Professor Bourebonette’s chin was tilted slightly forward, her head leaned against the door. Her face was relaxed in sleep.
Leaphorn studied her. Emma had slept like that sometimes on late night returns. Relaxed. Trusting him. Chapter 6
THE BATTERED WHITE Jecpster proved remarkably easy to locate. It sat in space number seventeen in a weedy parking lot guarded by a sign that declared:
SHIP ROCK HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER/STAFF PARKING ONLY
Janet Pete parked her little Toyota two-door beside the jeep. She’d changed out of her go-see-a-sick-friend skirt into jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt.
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“There it is. Exactly as you planned,” she said. “You want to wait here for the owner?” She motioned to the cars streaming out of the teacher/staff parking lot, a surprising number it seemed to Chee. “It shouldn’t be long.”
“I want to know who I’m talking to,” Chee said, climbing out. “I’ll go ask.”
The secretary in the principal’s office looked at Jim Chee’s badge, and through the window to where he was pointing, and said “Which one?” and then said, “Oh.”
“That’s Mr. Ji’s,” she said. “Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice sounded hopeful.
“Gee,” Chee said. “How does he spell it?”
“It’s H-U-A-N J-I,” she said, “so I guess if you pronounced it the way we pronounce ‘na-va-ho’ it would be ‘Mr. Hee.’”
“I heard he was a Vietnamese. Or Cambodian,” Chee said.
“Vietnamese,” the secretary said. “I think he was a colonel in their army. He commanded a Ranger battalion.”
“Where could I find him?”
“His algebra class is down in room nineteen,” she said, gesturing down the hallway. “School’s over but he usually keeps part of them overtime.” She laughed. “Mr. Ji and the kids have a permanent disagreement over how much math they are going to learn.”
Chee paused at the open door of room nineteen. Four boys and a girl were scattered at desks, heads down, working on notebooks. The girl was pretty, her hair cut unusually short for a young Navajo woman. The boys were two Navajos, a burly, sulkylooking white, and a slender Hispano. But Chee’s interest was in the teacher.
Mr. Huan Ji stood beside his desk, his back to the class and his profile to Chee, staring out the classroom window. He was a small man, and thin, rigidly erect, with short-cropped black hair and a short-cropped mustache showing gray. He wore gray slacks, a blue jacket, and a white shirt with a tie neatly in place and looked, therefore, totally misplaced in Ship Rock High School. His unblinking eyes studied something about level with the horizon. Seeing what? Chee wondered. He would be looking across the tops of the cottonwoods lining the San Juan and southwestward toward the sagebrush foothills of the Chuskas. He would be seeing the towering black shape of Ship Rock on the horizon, and perhaps Rol-Hai Rock, and Mitten Rock. No. Those landmarks would be beyond the horizon from Mr. Ji’s viewpoint at the window. Chee was creating them by looking into his own memory.
Mr. Ji’s expression seemed sad. What was Huan Ji seeing in his own memory? Perhaps he was converting the gray-blue desert mountains of Dinetah into the wet green mountains of his homeland.
Chee cleared his throat.
“Mr. Ji,” he said.
Five students looked up from their work, staring at Chee. Mr. Ji’s gaze out the window didn’t waver.
Chee stepped into the classroom. “Mr. Ji,” he said.
Mr. Ji jerked around, his expression startled.
“Ah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”
“I wonder when I might talk to you,” Chee said. “Just for a moment.”
“We’re about finished here,” Ji said. He looked at the five students, who looked back at him. He looked at his watch. “You can go now,” he said. “If you have finished, give me your papers. If not, bring them in tomorrowfinished and corrected.” He turned to Chee. “You are a parent?”
“No sir,” Chee said. “I’m Officer Chee. With the Navajo Tribal Police.” As he said it, he was conscious of Mr. Ji noticing the thick bandage on his hand, his denims, his short-sleeved sport shirt. “Off duty,” he added.
“Ah,” Mr. Ji said. “What can I tell you?”
Chee heard hurrying footstepsJanet Pete coming down the hallway toward them. Hosteen Pinto would be legally represented in this conversation, he thought. Well, why not? But it bothered him. Where does friend end and lawyer start?
“Mr. Ji?” Janet asked, slightly breathless.
“This is Janet Pete,” Chee said. “An attorney.”
Mr. Ji bowed slightly. If Mr. Ji ever allowed confusion to show, it would have shown now. “Is this about one of my students?” he said.
The last of Mr. Ji’s students hurried past them, the urge to be away overcoming curiosity.
“Miss Pete represents Ashie Pinto,” Chee said.
It seemed to Jim Chee that Mr. Ji momentarily stopped breathing. He looked at Janet Pete, his face showing no emotion at all.
“Is there a place we could talk?” Chee asked.
Someone was in the teachers’ lounge. They walked out to where Janet’s Toyota was parked.
“Is this your car?” Chee pointed to the Jeepster.
“Yes,” Ji said.
“It was seen out on Navajo 33 the night Officer Delbert Nez was killed.”
Ji said nothing. Chee waited.
Ji’s face was blank. (The inscrutable Oriental, Chee thought. Where had he heard that? Mary Landon had used it once to describe him. “You are, you know. You guys came over the icecap from the steppes of Mongolia or Tibet or someplace like that. We came out of the dark forests of Norway.”)
“What was the date?” Ji asked.
Chee told him. “That was the night of the rain. Good hard rain. It would have been between seven-thirty and eight. But getting dark because the storm was coming.”
“Yes,” Ji said. “I remember it. I was there.”
“Did you see anyone? Anything?” Janet Pete asked.
“Where?” Ji asked.
Chee suppressed a frown. It seemed a stupid question.
“Where you were. Out beyond Ship Rock,” he said. “East of Red Rock on Route 33.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything,” Ji said.
“How about after you turned north on Route 63?”
“Route 63?” Ji looked genuinely puzzled. Not too surprising. Not many people, including those who routinely drove that dusty, bumpy route, would know its map number.
“The gravel road close to Red Rock that goes north toward Biklabito and Ship Rock.”
“Oh,” Ji said, nodding. “No. I saw nothing. Not that I remember.”
“You didn’t see the fire, Nez’s car burning?”
“I think I saw a glow. I thought it was the lights of a car. I really don’t remember much about that now.”
“Do you remember what you were doing out there?”
Ji smiled and nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “It looked like it might rain. Rain clouds back over the mountains. It rains a lot in my country and I miss it out here. I thought I would drive out and enjoy it.”
“How did you go?” Chee asked.
Ji thought. “I drove south on U.S. 666 toward Gallup, and then I turned west on that paved road over to Red Rock, and then circled back on the gravel road.”
“Did you see a Tribal Police car?”
“Ah, yes,” Ji said. “One passed me.”
“Where?”
“On the Red Rock road.”
That would have been Delbert’s Unit 44. “Did you see it again?”
“No.”
“You would have passed it,” Chee said. “It had pulled off the left side of the road and driven down a dirt track.”
“I didn’t notice it,” Ji said. “I think I would have remembered that.”
“Did you meet anyone, I mean on your way home?”
Mr. Ji thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “But I don’t remember.”
And that was exactly all they learned.
From the parking lot, they drove southward down 666, across the San Juan bridge.
“You want to go see where it happened?” he asked Janet.
She looked at him, surprised. “Do you?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “But yes, I guess I do.”
“You haven’t been back?”
“I was in the hospital in Albuquerque for weeks,” Chee said. “And then, I don’t know, there just wasn’t any reason.”
“Okay,” Janet said. “I think I should see it.”
“Y
ou have a better reason than I do,” Chee said. “I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. It’s FBI business. I’ll just testify as the arresting officer.”
Janet nodded. She saw no reason to comment on any of this. Chee knew she already knew it.
“I didn’t do any of the investigating,” he added, knowing she would have known that, too.
“Do you think the FBI took a statement from Mr. Ji?”
Chee shook his head. “He would have mentioned it.”
“Doesn’t it surprise you that they didn’t?”
He shook his head. “Not now. Remember? You explained it to me. They have all they need for a conviction. Why waste their time?”
She was frowning. “I know I said that. But they’d seen your statement. They knew you’d met that car driving away from the scene. You described it as a white Jeepster, said who owned it. I’d think just simple curiosity
“ She let it trail off.
“They had their man, and their evidence,” Chee said. “Why make things complicated?”
Janet thought about that. “Justice,” she said.
Chee let it pass. Justice, he thought, wasn’t a concept that fit very well in this affair. Besides, the sun was just dipping behind the Chuskas now. On the vast, rolling prairie that led away from the highway toward the black shape of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadowan infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful. Chee’s spirit lifted. No time to think of justice. Or of the duty he had left undone.
Janet’s Toyota topped the long climb out of the San Juan Basin and earth sloped away to the southempty, rolling gray-tan grassland with the black line of the highway receding toward the horizon like the mark of a ruling pen. Miles to the south, the sun reflected from the windshield of a northbound vehicle, a blink of brightness. Ship Rock rose like an oversized, free-form Gothic cathedral just to their right, miles away but looking close. Ten miles ahead Table Mesa sailed through its sea of buffalo grass, reminding Chee of the ultimate aircraft carrier. Across the highway from it, slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged black form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore.
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