Coyote Waits jlajc-10

by Tony Hillerman

  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,” Roanhorse 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 blood 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.

  “Any theories about this bottom one?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Not yet,” Rostik said.

  Leaphorn pushed himself erect, grunting. He was getting old for the squatting position. He looked at Captain Largo. Largo looked back, expressionless.

  “Unfortunately, Chee is a common name among Navajos,” Largo said. “Like Smith in Chicago, or Martinez in Albuquerque.”

  Leaphorn drifted into the kitchen, looking at tidiness, touching nothing. Huan Ji’s bedroom was fairly large, but suggested a monastery cell—a narrow bed tightly made, a chair, a small desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers with what seemed to be a camera bag on top of it. Everything tidy. Nothing to suggest someone lived here. He stood at the desk, looking down at the blotter, the little cup holding paper clips, the pen in its holder.

  Behind him, Rostik cleared his throat. “Don’t touch anything. We’ll go through all of this later,” Rostik said. “Everything in here. Everything in the house. With trained people.”

  “Of course,” Leaphorn said.

  Taka’s room was tidy by Leaphorn’s standards, if not by Huan Ji’s. An identical narrow bed, covers tight. Similar furniture. But the boy’s desk was cluttered with books and papers and his dresser was a gallery of photographs. Leaphorn, hands in his jacket pockets, examined these pictures. Most of them were of a girl, a moderately pretty Navajo of perhaps sixteen. One of these seemed to be a school yearbook portrait, re-photographed and blown up to eleven-by-fourteen-inch size. The others were candid shots, apparently taken when the subject wasn’t looking. Some included two or three other youngsters, but always with the girl. Many of them had been taken, judging from the compressed background, with a telescopic lens.

  The back porch was screened, a repository for stored items. A door opened from it into a side room which Leaphorn guessed had been tacked on as a third be
droom. The door bore the stenciled legend: DARKROOM. KNOCK BEFORE OPENING. He glanced at Rostik, nodded at him, turned the knob. It was dark inside, the windows covered with opaque plastic, the air heavy with the smell of acids. Leaphorn switched on the overhead light. It was a small room, sparsely furnished. Along one side, a table bore a small enlarger, a set of developing tanks, and an array of the inevitable chemical containers. Beside that was another table and on it an open-faced cabinet held boxes which Leaphorn presumed held photographic paper. His gaze wandered over all of this and returned to the developing trays and the electric print dryer beside them. Eight-by-ten prints were stacked in the basket below the dryer.

  Leaphorn picked up the top one by the edges. It was a black-and-white photograph of what seemed to be a rugged, irregular outcropping of rock. He replaced the print and picked up the one below it. At first he thought it was identical. Then he saw it was apparently another segment of the same outcropping, with some overlapping. He replaced it and reached for a third print.

  Rostik touched his elbow.

  “I don’t want anything touched,” he said. “The experts may want to go over this room.”

  “Then I will leave it for the experts,” Leaphorn said.

  On the porch again, he suddenly remembered the professor waiting in the car. He wanted to talk to Largo about Officer Jim Chee, but he didn’t want to wash any Tribal Police laundry in front of Agent Rostik of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First he would explain things to Bourebonette. He’d tell her to start the engine and turn on the heater. He’d tell her that he wouldn’t be much longer.

  As he started across the street, he saw the old white Jeepster turn the corner. It rolled halfway down the block, stopped, began backing away from the cluster of police cars at the Huan Ji house. Then it stopped again, remaining motionless on the street. Guilt, Leaphorn thought. Or perhaps fear struggling with curiosity. Whatever the driver’s motivations, the Jeepster rolled forward again. Leaphorn trotted across the street in front of it to his own car. Bourebonette had rolled down the window. She was watching him.

  “It was about what we thought,” he said. “Someone shot Mr. Ji twice. Fatally. No one saw it or heard anything. No suspects. And this—” he nodded toward the Jeepster now pulling into the gravel driveway at the Ji residence “—will probably be Taka, who is Mr. Ji’s son.”

  Professor Bourebonette was looking past him at the car. “Does he know?”

  “Probably not. Not unless he did it.”

  Bourebonette looked down. “How sad.” she said. “How terrible. Is his mother home? Do you think this could—” She stopped.

  “Be connected with the Nez homicide?” Leaphorn finished. “Who knows. You don’t see anything on the surface, but—” He shrugged.

  Across the street, Rostik and Largo were talking to a slender boy in jeans and a black leather jacket. Largo had his large hand on the boy’s shoulder. They moved through the front door and disappeared into the house.

  “I think I’ll go back over there,” Leaphorn said.

  “Do they need your help?”

  Leaphorn chuckled. “The man in charge is the young man in the gray suit,” he said. “If he wants my help he has shown absolutely no sign of it. I’ll be quick this time.”

  Roanhorse was waiting on the porch.

  “Was that Ji’s son?”

  “Right,” Roanhorse said. “Name’s Taka. Something like that.”

  “He okay?”

  “Looked like somebody hit him with a club when Rostik told him,” Roanhorse said.

  Taka Ji was sitting stiffly on the edge of a recliner chair. Rostik was facing him, perched on the arm of the sofa. Largo leaned against the wall, his round, dark face devoid of expression. Leaphorn stopped just inside the door. Rostik glanced at him, looked irritated, chose to ignore him, continued his questioning.

  He was good at it, Leaphorn noticed. Young, obviously. Probably inexperienced. But well trained in the job, and smart. Some of the questions replowed old ground from new angles. Some were new. Huan Ji’s son, still looking as if he had been hit by a club, answered them tersely.

  He had not seen his father since he’d driven to school with him in the Jeepster. Right?

  Taka nodded. “Yes,” he said. His voice was so small that Leaphorn could barely hear him.

  And how had he gotten the Jeepster?

  “My father, he said I could use it after school. He would walk home. He liked to walk. So after my biology class, I got it from the parking lot.”

  “The key was left in it?”

  “I have a key. My father has a key. I have one.”

  “And where did you go?”

  “I drove out toward Ship Rock. I am taking pictures out there. Photographs.”

  “Pictures of who?”

  Taka was looking straight ahead, seeing something in the wallpaper across the room. His face was pale. He closed his eyes. “I take pictures of landscapes,” he said.

  “Who was with you?”

  Leaphorn thought Taka hadn’t heard the question. But he had. Finally he said: “No one. I go alone.”

  A Vietnamese in a Navajo school. A long time ago Leaphorn had been a Navajo in white Arizona State University. He understood what Taka had not quite said. What was it that Colonel Ji had written on the wall in his own blood? “Help Taka.” Something like that.

  Rostik changed the subject.

  “Did your father have enemies?”

  Taka shrugged. “He was a man,” he said. “A long time ago he was a colonel in the army.” He looked up at Rostik. “The Army of the Republic of Vietnam.”

  “But do you know of any enemies? Had he received any threats?”

  Again it seemed Taka wouldn’t answer. Then he tilted his head, frowned. “I don’t think he would have told me.” This knowledge seemed to surprise him.

  “No threat you know of then?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anyone named Chee?”

  “Like I told you, there is a boy on the basketball team. There is a girl in my history class.”

  “Does your father have any friends named Chee? Any enemies?”

  “I don’t know,” Taka said. “There is a teacher. In junior high school. Her name I think is Miss Dolores Chee.”

  “A friend of your father’s?”

  “I don’t think so,” Taka said. “There are lots of Chees.”

  Leaphorn glanced at Captain Largo and found Captain Largo glancing at him. Largo made a wry face.

  And so it went. Leaphorn listened and watched. He assessed Rostik, and reassessed him. A smart young man. He assessed Taka as best he could. This was not the normal Taka. This was a stunned teenager. The death of his father was still unreal, an incredible but abstract fact. Rostik now was covering yesterday. How had Taka’s father behaved? What had he said? Leaphorn noticed the boy was shivering.

  Leaphorn interrupted.

  “Mr. Rostik,” he said. “Just a moment, if you don’t mind.” And he turned to Taka.

  “Son. Do you have any relatives here? Anybody to go to?”

  “Not here,” the boy said. “Not here at Ship Rock.”

  A stranger alone in a strange land, Leaphorn thought. He asked: “Where?”

  “My aunt and uncle. They live in Albuquerque.”

  “Are they the ones you are closest to?” As he asked it, Leaphorn thought how different this would be for a Navajo boy. He would be smothered by family. But maybe it would have been that way for Taka Ji, too, if his people had not been uprooted by war. Perhaps the Vietnamese had not, like the biligaana, lost the value of the family.

  Taka was nodding. “They are all there is,” he said.

  “We’ll call them when you are finished here,” Leaphorn said, glancing at Rostik.

  “I’m finished,” Rostik said to Taka. “I’ll just need to know where we can reach you if we need to know something else.”

  “How about a friend here? Somebody you can stay with tonight?”

  Tak
a thought. He gave Leaphorn a name, the son of another of the high school teachers.

  Rostik left. They made the calls on the colonel’s telephone and Roanhorse took Taka in hand. He’d deliver him to the house of the friend.

  “I’ll lock the place up,” Captain Largo said. “We’ll keep an eye on it until the feds go over it.”

  “One last look at the darkroom,” Leaphorn said. “No one will ever know.”

  With Largo peering over his shoulder, he went through the stack of prints in the dryer basket—eleven photographs of segments of the same outcropping of what seemed to be part of a long basaltic ridge. They were taken—or seemed to be—from the same viewpoint, as if the camera with a telescopic lens had been shifted slightly on a tripod for each exposure.

  “Landscapes,” Largo said. “If those are his landscapes he’s not going to get rich with them.”

  “No,” Leaphorn said, and placed them back in the dryer basket. “You recognize the place?”

  “They could have been taken any of a hundred places,” Largo said. “It just looked like a big bunch of extruded lava. Fairly old.

  Could be out there around Ship Rock. Could be down in the malpais south of Grants. Could be over east of Black Mesa. Could be lots of places.”

  On the porch, Largo paused to lock the front door.

  “Can you think of any reason those pictures might have been taken?” Leaphorn asked.

  “None,” Largo said. “No idea why any teenage kid does anything.”

  “They might have been taken by the colonel,” Leaphorn said. “He was a photographer, too.”

  Largo nodded. “True,” he said. But he wasn’t particularly interested.