Coyote Waits jlajc-10

by Tony Hillerman

  He thought about Professor Bourebonette.

  He thought about Jim Chee. Unreliable perhaps. But a good mind.

  He noticed his wastebasket. The maintenance man who had been neglecting to wash his windows had also neglected to empty it. Leaphorn leaned over and fished out the brochure describing the wonders of the People’s Republic of China. He spread it on the desk and studied the pictures again.

  Then he threw it back in the wastebasket. Chapter 20

  ODELL REDD WAS not at home. Or if he was, he didn’t respond to Jim Chee’s persistent knocking. Chee gave up. He found a vacant parking place in a loading zone behind the Biology Building and walked over to the History Department.

  No, Jean Jacobs hadn’t seen him, either.

  “Not this morning. He came in yesterday. We went out to lunch.” Jean Jacobs’s expression made it clear that this was a happy event.

  “No idea where he is?”

  “He should be working on his dissertation. Maybe in the library.”

  The idea of hunting through the labyrinthine book stacks at Zimmerman held no appeal to Chee. He sat down.

  “How about your boss? Still missing?”

  “Nary a word,” Jacobs said. “I’m beginning to seriously think he died someplace. Maybe his wife killed him, or one of his graduate students.” She laughed. “They’d draw straws. Stand in line for it if they thought they had any chance of getting away with it.”

  “What kind of car does he drive?”

  “I don’t know.” She opened a drawer and extracted a file. “I’ve seen him driving a white four-door sedan, and sometimes a sexy sports car. Whorehouse red.”

  She extracted a card from the file.

  “I think that’s when his wife gave up on him, after he bought that red one. Let’s see, now. Oldsmobile Cutlass. Nineteen ninety. Corvette coupe. That’s a 1982 model. But cool, you know. Impresses the cute little coeds looking for a father figure to take them to bed.”

  Jean Jacobs laughed when she said it, but it didn’t sound like the thought amused her.

  “That’s his application for a parking permit?” ,

  “Right,” Jacobs said. “It covers both cars. You just hang it on the one you’re driving.”

  Chee looked down at his hand which was itching furiously. He resisted an impulse to rub it, adjusted the bandage instead. Jacobs was watching him.

  “Healing up okay?”

  Chee nodded. He was thinking about a low-slung Corvette, or a brand-new Oldsmobile, banging over those tracks south of Ship Rock.

  “Which car did he drive mostly? Which one was he driving that last day you saw him, that evening when he came in to pick up his mail? You have any way of knowing what he was driving?”

  “No,” Jacobs said. She hesitated. “He just came in and got his mail. And stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Well, he took some stuff he’d collected for a paper he was doing. It had been on his desk there. And a couple of letters that were in his out-basket.”

  “Was he all right? What did he say?”

  Jacobs sat looking out of the window. She glanced at him and back out the window again.

  “Were you here when he came in?”

  “No.”

  “Just the next day you noticed he’d been in and picked up stuff?”

  Jacobs nodded.

  They considered each other.

  “But he left me a note,” she said. She rummaged in her desk drawer, extracted a salmon-colored WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip, handed it to Chee.

  Scrawled across it was:

  “Jacobs—Call admissions. Get class lists on time for a change. Tell maintenance to clean up this pigpen, get windows washed.”

  “He doesn’t sign his notes?” Chee asked.

  Jacobs laughed. “No please. No thank you. That’s Tagert’s signature.”

  “But it’s his handwriting?”

  She glanced at the note. “Who else?”

  He used Tagert’s telephone to call the Federal Public Defender’s office for Janet Pete. The receptionist’s voice boomed in his ear, telling him that Miss Pete was still at the courthouse. He held the receiver away from his ear, frowning.

  Jean Jacobs was smiling about it. “The professor is hard of hearing,” she said. “He kept complaining to the telephone people about their equipment mumbling so they came in finally and put in that high-volume phone.”

  “Wow,” Chee said.

  “Just hold it a little way from your ear. It’s easy once you know how to handle it.”

  The receptionist was talking again, less painfully now that he was following Jacobs’s advice.

  “But there’s a message for you,” she was saying. “For her actually. She’s supposed to tell you to call Window Rock. ‘Please tell Mr. Chee to call Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn at his office.’”

  Chee called.

  “You in Albuquerque?” Leaphorn asked.

  Chee said he was.

  “We’ve got sort of a funny situation,” the lieutenant said. “It turns out that Taka Ji is the rock painter that Delbert Nez was after.”

  “Oh,” Chee said. He digested the thought. “How’d you find out?”

  Leaphorn told him.

  “Has anyone talked to him?”

  “I can hardly hear you,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds like you’re standing out in the hall.”

  Chee pulled the mouthpiece closer to his lips. “I said has anyone talked to him? He was out there the night Nez was killed. Maybe he saw something.”

  Leaphorn explained that the boy had been taken to Albuquerque to stay with relatives. He gave Chee the name and the number. “Nobody home when I called. But I think somebody should talk to him in person.”

  “Did you tell the FBI?”

  Chee’s question provoked an extended silence. Finally Leaphorn chuckled. “The Bureau was not particularly interested in a vandalism case at the moment.”

  “They don’t see the connection?”

  “With what? The agent handling the Ji killing is new out here, and pretty new in the business for that matter. I got the impression that he’ll talk to the boy one of these days but I don’t think he could see how painting his romantic message on rocks had anything to do with somebody shooting the colonel. I think they see some sort of link back to Vietnam. And what he did there.”

  “How about with somebody shooting Officer Delbert Nez?” Chee asked.

  Another pause. Then Leaphorn said: “Yeah. That’s what troubles me, too. I think that’s the key to it. Have you got it figured out?”

  Chee found, to his surprise, that being asked that question by Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn pleased him. The question was clearly serious. The famous Joe Leaphorn, asking him that. Unfortunately he didn’t have an answer. Not a good one.

  “Not really,” he said. “But I think once we understand it, we’re going to find there was more to the Nez homicide than we know about.”

  “Exactly. Has the trial started yet?”

  “They’re picking the jury. Maybe they’ll start it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

  “You’ll be one of the first witnesses, I’d say. That right?”

  “I’m under subpoena. The prosecutor wants me to tell about the arrest. What I saw.”

  “So you’ll be in Albuquerque,” Leaphorn said. “I know you’re on leave but I think you ought to go see the Ji kid. See what he’ll tell you. See if he saw anything.”

  “I was planning to do that,” Chee said.

  “Unofficially,” Leaphorn said. “Not our case, of course.” There was a pause. “And get that telephone fixed.” Chapter 21

  THE ADDRESS LEAPHORN had given him for the Ha residence was in the opposite direction from the Tagert address. But Tagert’s house wasn’t far from the university campus and Chee made the detour. He had a hunch he wanted to check.

  It was a single-story, brick-fronted house on the lower end of the middle class—the sort of house history professors can afford if they are frugal with their gr
ocery buying. Chee parked on the street, walked up the empty driveway, and rang the bell. No answer. He rang it four times. Still no answer. Then he walked across the yard and peered through the garage window. It was dirty, but not too dirty for Chee to see a red Corvette parked inside and beyond it a white Oldsmobile sedan.

  The Ha residence was neat, standing out for its tidiness in a weed-grown neighborhood which was on the upper end of the lower class. There was no car in the driveway, but as Chee parked his truck at the curb, an elderly blue Chevy sedan pulled up beside the carport. The boy sitting beside the young woman who was driving was Taka Ji.

  They started their talking in the driveway, Chee leaning on the sedan door, the boy standing stiffly facing him, and Miss Janice Ha, the driver, standing beside Taka—a silent, disapproving observer.

  “I was the officer who made the arrest out there that night,” Chee told the boy. “I saw you driving your father’s car. I was in the police car you met just before you turned off the pavement toward Ship Rock.”

  Taka Ji simply looked at him.

  “Now we know some more,” Chee said. “We know you’re the one who painted those rocks. It might help us catch the man who shot your father if you tell me what you saw.”

  Janice Ha put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think we should go inside,” she said.

  The front room of the house was almost as small as Chee’s own cramped lodgings—but there was space in it, between the two front windows, for a shrine. The shrine featured a foot-tall plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin in her traditional blue-and-white robes looking down serenely at two small candles and two small pots of chrysanthemums. A woman who reminded Chee of a smaller, slightly older, and female version of Colonel Ji was sitting on the sofa beside it.

  She was Thuy Ha, and she bowed deeply to Chee when Janice Ha introduced him.

  “Taka’s father was my mother’s younger brother,” Janice Ha explained. “Her English is not yet good. It was a long time before we could get her released by the Communists. She joined us only last year.”

  “I hate to intrude at this bad time,” Chee said. He looked at Taka Ji. “But I think Mr. Ji here might be able to help us.”

  Janice spoke to the woman—translating Chee presumed—and Thuy Ha said something in response. “She said he will help you any way he can,” Janice Ha said.

  The older woman spoke again, a longer statement this time. The girl responded briefly and the older woman responded. Her voice sounded angry.

  “Mrs. Ha asked me to tell you that the Communists killed Colonel Ji,” Janice Ha said. She looked embarrassed. “She said I should tell you Colonel Ji worked faithfully for the Americans, and made many enemies because of that, and the Communists sent someone all the way over here to America just to kill him.”

  The woman was watching Chee intently.

  “Would you ask her if she knows who might have done it?”

  Janice Ha translated. Mrs. Ha spoke a single word.

  “Communists,” Janice Ha said.

  Taka Ji broke the brief silence that followed that.

  “I didn’t see very much,” he said. “It was getting dark, and the storm was coming.”

  “Just tell me what you saw,” Chee said.

  First he had heard a car. He had climbed down from the ladder and was sitting on the sand beside it, looking at the blown-up photograph of the rocks, deciding exactly where he should add the next section of paint. He had heard the engine of a vehicle, revving up, driving in very low gear, coming in closer to this formation than vehicles usually come. He had folded up the ladder and put it out of sight. Then he had hidden himself. But after a while he heard voices, and he climbed up to where he could see what was going on.

  “There were three people. They had left the truck, or whatever it was, parked back behind some of those junipers on the slope. I could just see the roof. And three of them were walking toward the formation. Not toward me, but more toward the west. At first I thought it was one man and two women because one was larger than the other two. But then I saw when they got a little closer that one of them was a real thin old man.”

  “Ashie Pinto?”

  “Yes,” Taka Ji said. “I saw his picture in the Farmington Times that Sunday, after he was arrested. It looked like the man who killed the policeman.”

  “The other two? Did you recognize them?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Could you, if you saw them again?”

  “One of them, I think. The bigger one. I got a better look at him. The other one, I don’t know.”

  “But the other one was a woman?”

  “I don’t know. I think I thought that just because of the size. They had on a dark-colored felt hat, and a big jacket, and jeans.” Taka stopped, looking doubtful. His aunt said something terse in Vietnamese.

  “Okay,” Taka said. “After that, they disappeared up into the rocks. I just stayed there awhile, where I was. I was thinking I should go, because I didn’t want anybody to know what I was doing.” He stopped, glanced at his Mrs. Ha, said something haltingly in Vietnamese.

  She nodded, smiled at him, reached over and patted his knee.

  “He said he was afraid people would think what he was doing was silly,” Janice Ha said. Her expression said she agreed with her cousin. They would think it was silly.

  “I thought if I left now, they would maybe see me driving away. I always left the car down in the arroyo where nobody could see it, but they would see me driving away. So I decided I would wait until they left.” He stopped again.

  “Go on,” Janice said. “Tell us what happened.” She looked at Chee. “We didn’t know anything about this either. He should have told the police.”

  Taka flushed. “My father told me not to tell anybody. He said it sounded like something I should not be mixed up in. He said to just be quiet about it.”

  “Well, better late than never,” Janice said. “Tell us.”

  “I wondered what was happening over there, so I decided to get closer so I could see. I know that place real well by now, or the part of it where I was working anyway. It’s full of snakes. They come in there when the weather starts getting cold because those black rocks stay warm even in the winter and the field mice move in there too. And, normally, those snakes hunt at night because that’s when the kangaroo rats and the little mice come out to eat, but in the winter it’s cold at night and the snakes are coldblooded reptiles so they stay in their holes after

  “

  Taka had noticed Janice’s expression—impatient with this digression into natural science.

  “Anyway,” he said hurriedly, “I know where to walk and how not to get snakebit. So I went over in the direction I had seen the three people go and in a little while I could hear voices. Talking up there in the rocks. So I moved around there—it was just beginning to get dark now and there was lightning up in the mountains. And then I saw the one who killed the policeman. He hadn’t gone up in there with the other two. He was sitting out by a pinon tree on the ground. I watched him awhile, and he didn’t do anything except once in a while he would drink out of a bottle he had with him.

  I thought about that for a while and I decided that if that one was drunk, then when it got just a little darker, I could get down to the arroyo and get my car and slip away without being seen. I just sat there and waited a little while. I heard the two who went up into the rocks yelling. It sounded like they were really excited. I thought they had stirred up some of the snakes back in there.”

  Taka Ji stopped, looked at his aunt, and at Janice, and finally at Chee. He cleared his throat.

  “Then I heard a shot,” he said. “And I got out of there and got the car and went home.”

  The boy looked around him again. Finished. Waiting for questions.

  Janice Ha was looking startled. “A shot! Did you tell your dad? You should have told the police.”

  Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese to Janice, got an explanation, responded to that. The
n Janice said to her mother: “Well, I don’t care. We’re living in America now.”

  “Where did the sound of the shot come from?” Chee asked.

  “It sounded like from back in the rocks. Back in there where they had been yelling. I thought maybe they had shot at a snake.”

  “Just one shot?”

  “One,” Taka said.

  “Were you still there when Officer Nez came?”

  “I heard the car. I heard it coming. There’s a track that runs along there west of that rocky ridge where we were. It was coming along that. Toward us.”

  “Did he have his siren going? His red light on?”

  “No, but when I saw it, I saw it was a Navajo Tribal Police car. I decided I better go. Right away. I got away from there and went to the arroyo and got the car and went home.”

  “Do you remember meeting me?”

  “It scared me,” Taka said. “I saw your police car, coming fast, toward me.” He paused. “I should have stopped. I should have told you I heard the shot.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Chee said. But he was thinking that it might have saved Colonel Ji’s life.

  Mrs. Ha was watching them, listening to every word. Chee thought that she must know a little English.

  “I want you to give me some directions,” Chee said. “I have a big-scale map out in my truck. I want to show you that and have you mark on it exactly where those people were in that rock formation.”

  Taka Ji nodded.

  Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese, said it directly to Jim Chee and then glanced at her daughter, awaiting the translation.

  “She said: ‘We have a saying in Vietnam -” Janice Ha hesitated. “I’m not sure of the word for that animal in English. Oh, yes. The saying is that fate is as gentle with men as the mongoose is with mice.”

  Chee shook his head, nodded to the woman. “Would you tell your mother that Navajos say the same thing in different words. We say: ‘Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.’”