He remembered Rhonda telling him—in the once-upon-a-time when she was still a teacher and life was simpler—that children and primitive artists—or very sophisticated ones—represented things symbolically rather than realistically. Which is why children’s drawings have such large heads and hands and small bodies. The figures in the sandpaintings seemed childlike, but were obviously abstractions. And in an abstraction, everything is removed that isn’t absolutely necessary to identify the thing. It jibed with what Caleb had said about an artist’s purpose—to manipulate perception. Thinnes tried to figure out the purpose of the sandpaintings but, beyond guessing they were symbolic, he was mystified.
When Hopewell finished with his customers, he came over to Thinnes. His knees must have been as arthritic as his hands; he moved very slowly. “May I be of assistance?”
Thinnes pointed to one of the sandpaintings and said, “What does it mean?” It showed four tall, thin cornstalks, with leaves and ears of corn, that had human hands, feet, and faces, and corn tassels for hair. Surrounding them on three sides was a thin rainbow, also with human features.
“I can only tell you what it is,” Hopewell said. “Corn yei—spirits. To understand all the implications would require a lifetime of study.”
“Somebody told me it was sacrilegious to glue sandpaintings down and sell them. That right?”
Hopewell sighed. “Yes and no.” Thinnes waited. “If these were the actual dry paintings used in the healing ceremonies, it would be unthinkable—some would say—even to photograph them, because when they’re correctly rendered, they have great power. But when they are not drawn correctly, or when details are omitted, they have no more power than any other work of art.”
Thinnes waited to see if he had anything to add, then asked, “Which one of these is a cougar?”
Hopewell pointed to the sandpainting of an animal that looked like a straight-bodied lizard with a trapezoidal head and the same humanlike hands as the yei. “You’ve come to ask more about the artist who died,” he said.
Thinnes nodded, resisting the urge to use Bisti’s name. Irene Yellow had made a big deal about not speaking the name of the dead. And Hopewell hadn’t mentioned his wife’s name when they interviewed him before. “Where did you meet him?”
“I met him in New Mexico. When he came out there. That’s when he met my daughter. He was a belagana but he wanted with all his heart to be one of the Diné.”
“I thought his father was Navajo.”
“Being one of the People is more than a matter of genetics.” Hopewell paused for a long time. “My wife was a teacher. She used to read about all kinds of things and tell me—because I never had time to read, but I like to know things…Funny. Since she died, I read all the time.” He shrugged and there was a long pause. Thinnes began to think his train of thought had derailed. Finally, he said, “One of the things she told me is that people have to be taught a language when they are very young—before the age of two—or something happens to the language part of their brains and they lose the ability to learn, or they can never be fluent.” He said the last word as if it were a foreign term and waited to see if Thinnes understood.
Thinnes had heard the theory. He nodded.
Hopewell continued. “I think that being of the Diné is like learning a language. It is very difficult to be fluent unless you were born to it. Not just the language, but everything. It’s a way of life, a way of looking at everything, from solitude—which is highly prized—to revenge, which traditional Navajos think is insane. They probably wouldn’t worry too much about catching a killer. They would say that anyone who’d do something so bad was sick—in need of healing, or a witch—someone to be avoided.”
Two women came into the store. Caucasians with blue eyes and pale faces. One was wearing a fringed buckskin dress under a coat patterned like an Indian blanket. When Hopewell moved away to wait on them, Thinnes studied the sandpaintings. He lifted one down from the wall for a closer look—two characteristic Navajo figures, tall and thin with headdresses and weapons. Blue and black triangles, in the background, formed stylized mountains pointing toward each other from the top and bottom of the picture. A card stuck to the back said:
The Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Born For Water. Sons of Changing Woman. They slew all of the Monsters but those helpful to the People—Hunger, Old Age, Poverty, and Dirt.
The last time he’d talked to Hopewell, the old man told him Navajo children were “born for” their father’s clan. That made Born For Water the son of water. He tried to remember where he’d seen something like it before.
When the woman left, Hopewell came back. Thinnes pointed to the Hero Twins and said, “What’s the meaning of the blue mountain?”
“It’s one of the four sacred mountains that mark the boundaries of the dinéhta. It was made of sand and turquoise.” He nodded toward the painting. “Some versions of the story have it that Born For Water didn’t kill any of the Monsters, that he only witnessed their extermination. According to Waters, he’s a passive god, the child of the benign, blue south.”
“How does that relate to—the artist who died?”
“He was a belagana,” Hopewell said, “because he thought in the language of the belagana. Like so many young people, he was caught between two cultures with very different values. It is hard to know how he would interpret anything.”
“That a problem for your daughter, too?”
“What my daughter needs is to go back to the dinéhta, and have a curing ceremony.”
So Hopewell knows about Dennison, Thinnes thought.
“She will not be happy until she does that. But she’s not mature enough to know yet.”
Or maybe she’d forgotten the language, Thinnes thought. It was a pretty good analogy. Maybe if she went back to New Mexico, it would come back to her.
“What brought you to Chicago, sir?”
“I grew up here. I thought it would be as good a place to go as anywhere. And my daughter was in school here.”
Thinnes waited. He hadn’t said why he had to go.
“And to be truthful,” Hopewell continued, “I was fleeing my wife’s shade. The Diné fear ghosts—what they call chindi, which are residues of all of the evil in spirits of the dead. Only the very old—those who’ve earned a reputation for great wisdom and integrity—die without leaving such a residue. I’m sure my wife left no chindi. But I had to leave New Mexico when she died. Everything reminded me of her—every mesa, every cloud, every smiling woman was a reminder.”
As he drove north on Clark, Thinnes told himself that Rhonda would like the corn yeis, even if it was the strangest thing he’d ever given her. He thought about what Hopewell had told him. It was comforting to know there were still people on the planet with their heads on straight—even if you had to go to the other side of Bumblefuck to find them.
The Dellwood Pickle was on Balmoral. The restaurant consisted of two small storefronts connected by a double-arched opening in their common wall. The arches and the chair rail around the room were decorated for the season with green garlands lit with white Italian lights. Red bows brightened the newel posts on railings around tables set in the storefront windows. There were fewer than a dozen tables in the place. The decor consisted of local artists’s work and the do-it-yourself efforts of patrons, who were encouraged by small baskets of crayons nestled among the condiments on each table, and heavy white paper sheets over the cloths.
At Thinnes’s request, the waiter seated them against the back wall, where he could keep an eye on the door. Lifelong habit. For a cop, a lifesaving habit.
“The restaurant doesn’t serve alcohol,” Caleb said, “but customers are free to bring their own, and the waiters will serve it. Would you like something?”
With his mind’s eye, Thinnes could see a portable bar in the trunk of Caleb’s rental car. It wouldn’t have surprised him. “A beer?”
“Surely.”
Caleb handed his keys to the waiter who eventually b
rought glasses and two chilled bottles of Dos Equis. He started to open one for Thinnes, but he waved him away. Caleb opened his own and decanted it. They looked at the menu while they finished the round, and the waiter brought another when he came back to take their orders.
Then they shifted their chairs so they were on the same side of the table, and Thinnes pushed everything off the middle. He drew a grid on the paper with a black crayon and wrote “Means,” “Opportunity” and “Motive” down the left side. In the spaces across the top, he wrote in “Mrs. Bisti,” “Kent,” “Mrs. K,” “Yellow,” “Dennison,” and “Wingate.” “Anybody could’ve gotten hold of the murder weapon.” He put an X in the “Means” box under all the names.
“And based on our interviews and my personal gut feeling that half of them are lying, this is what we know about who could have been alone with him at the right moment.” He put an X under “Mrs. Bisti,” in the “Opportunity” line, and a question mark under all the other names. “That leaves us with motive.” Under “Mrs. Bisti,” he put a question mark.
“If she knew about his infidelity,” Caleb said, “she had a motive.”
Thinnes put an X under “Kent,” “Mrs. K,” and “Wingate.” “Bisti was fooling with Kent’s wife, probably planning to dump her, and he was giving Wingate headaches. He put a question mark under “Yellow” and “Dennison.” “These two, it hinges on whether we believe their story. Anything else?”
“That seems to summarize it.”
“Speaking of motives, what keeps you at this, even risking your life? Bisti wasn’t close or a client.”
“I’m outraged by the waste of life and talent.”
Someone had to be. Thinnes usually saved his anger for the most brutal cases—those involving torture or children. But even in the other cases, his rage went somewhere—if only into hunting down the killer.
As if mind reading, Caleb said, “This case is about rage or passion. Whose?”
Thinnes nodded. Lauren Bisti’s anger could be said to have been turned inward—if you bought that particular school of thought. Todd Kent’s anger seemed more for the inconvenience to himself. Wingate could be it. Or Irene Yellow. Money may have been involved, but it was a crime of passion—rage, jealousy, or greed. Thinnes nodded. The ME’d suggested someone strong or very angry. “Redbird’s sister said he had a thing for Lauren Bisti. If she was a widow…Think he could have done it?”
“Was he angry?”
Thinnes thought about the smiling photo and shook his head. “Not as far as I know. Maybe I need to know more about Bisti.”
“He was a paradox—essentially a white man who tried to be more Indian than an Indian, a narcissist who tried to shield his wife from knowledge of his affairs, a greedy individual who gave generously to certain causes.”
Thinnes told him what Hopewell had told him about Navajos and art, about the Hero Twins and the Blue Mountain. “I remember where I saw them before” Thinnes said. “Bisti had something like the animal figures in his studio.”
“The artist as a hunting animal,” Caleb said thoughtfully. “Or as observer.
“Active and passive. Yin and yang. Animus and anima. Art always boils down—in the end—to the most elementary themes and passions. I believe David rewrote his life to fit some epic outline in his head. He once asked me, during a conversation about the autobiographical nature of art, ‘Is it autobiography or artifice? People never know for sure unless you tell them. And I won’t.’ Life subservient to art is useful to an artist, not so helpful for a therapist.”
“I hate to admit it,” Thinnes said, “but the wife looks like our best bet. Tell me more about amnesia. Could she fake it?”
“Possibly, but from what I saw, I doubt it.”
Thinnes thought about what the resident had told him—she hadn’t faked being in shock. “If she’s not faking it, what’re the chances she’ll remember?”
“Some amnesias are caused by brain injury—the memories are literally destroyed. Others occur when the brain fails to convert short-term memories to permanent ones. And in the occasional case, emotional trauma causes the mind to block shocking information, sometimes things as basic as the victim’s own identity. This form can often be reversed by time and therapy. Without knowing more about Lauren Bisti, I wouldn’t even guess at a prognosis. If she did kill David, she might have blanked it out. Or she may have just seen him killed by someone she can’t accept as his killer.”
“In which case, if she remembers, she’s in deep shit.”
“It’s also possible she was just overcome by the shock of finding him dead.”
“We may never know. When we questioned her the first time, she seemed pretty zonked. When we tried to question her again, her lawyer insisted on being there. He’s threatening a harassment suit if we don’t leave her alone till she gets her memory back.” Thinnes shrugged. “People get away with murder all the time, and if she killed him, she just might, too. All she’s got to do is just not remember. And if I was her lawyer, I’d tell her to just forget everything.”
Sixty-Eight
“Jack!” Anita sounded worried. “Lauren Bisti was just here.”
“And?”
“She left suddenly. She said she was Christmas shopping and she started browsing. The next thing I knew she was gone.”
Caleb waited.
“She dropped her packages where she was standing and took off. Mark told me she sounded scared. She said, ‘David,’ and he thought she was crying as she ran out.”
“Any chance he saw which way she went?”
“No, but she hailed a cab.”
“Right out front?”
“Yes. And he got the number.”
“Thanks.” As he wrote the information down, he said, “I’ll get on it immediately.” He disconnected and rang up Area Three. “Detective Thinnes, please.”
“Sorry, he’s not here. Somethin’ I can help with?”
“Please ask him to call Dr. Caleb. It’s urgent.”
“He got the number?”
Caleb gave it to him, in case he didn’t, then disconnected and dialed Thinnes’s pager. While he waited for Thinnes to return the call, he rescheduled his afternoon appointments.
“What’s up, Doc?” Thinnes was feeling pretty good about things in general, but he had a lot of paperwork to do, and he would’ve preferred to talk to Caleb another time.
“Lauren Bisti may have just remembered. And if she did, she may be in danger.”
“Where is she?”
“That’s where I need your help. She took a cab. I might be able to talk them into telling me where, but not in time.”
“Let me have the details…”
Caleb got as far as Diversey before a radar cop pulled him over.
“Fifty in a thirty-five, sir. You got an excuse?”
Caleb explained the problem and stood impatiently next to the squad, with its blue lights blazing, while the officer checked his story via radio. He willed himself to be patient. When the patrolman finished his transmission, he handed Caleb’s license back and said, “Follow me, Doctor.”
Thinnes didn’t have as far to drive. He got to the address ten minutes after the cab-company dispatcher gave it to him, twenty minutes after the cabby dropped her there. If Caleb was right, twenty minutes could be a lifetime. Thinnes floored it going through the gates, then realized he didn’t know which way to go. The cemetery was a huge place. He wasted precious minutes stopping at the office to ask.
She was standing over David’s grave, looking just as she did the first time he’d seen her. In shock once again. With blood on her hands. Only this time, she had the knife in them.
He wished he’d had more training for this kind of thing or that the doctor would hurry. He got out of the car slowly. He was about fifteen yards away before she noticed him.
She said, “Stop!”
He stopped. And kept his voice low. “Where’d you get the knife, Lauren?”
Her camel-hair coat was open.
Her long hair hung loose, and there was a slackness to her face that made him think of a performance he’d seen in school of Hamlet. Ophelia. Only the lines were changed. Wasn’t it something like “Out, out, damned blood?” He could smell the blood.
“Where did you get the knife, Lauren?”
It took her moments to remember, or maybe to come back from wherever her mind was. The vacancy faded momentarily. “Hammacher Schlemmer. The cab driver waited for me. I gave him a tip.”
Did she ever! A hundred dollars. The driver’d remembered her instantly.
“Not a very good knife,” she added, looking at her mutilated wrists. “Should have done the job by now. Not like David’s knife.”
Blood dripped from her wrists and soaked into the frozen dirt. Her eyes dropped to the grave. Beneath the Blue Mountain Cat logo on the headstone, the inscription read, DAVID BISTI 1964–1993 VITA BREVIS EST, ARS DURA. Latin. It seemed as inconsistent as the two cultures of Bisti’s origin.
Lauren said, “David’s dead.”
The Death of Blue Mountain Cat Page 28