A Thief of Time

by Tony Hillerman

  He thought of Janet Pete, trying to work what little he knew of her character into the solution she would find to her own problem. Would she allow her lawyer to convert her into an Indian maiden? Not enough data to be sure, but he doubted if Janet Pete would ever buy that.

  Who killed Nails and Etcitty? Find the motive. There lies the answer. But there could be a dozen motives and he had no basis for guessing. Leaphorn, obviously, believed Slick Nakai somehow fit into that puzzle. But then Leaphorn knew a lot more about this business than Chee. All Chee knew was that Nakai bought pots from Etcitty—or perhaps was given them. That Etcitty was one of Nakai’s born-again Christians. That Leaphorn believed Nakai sold pots to the woman missing from Chaco Canyon. That was the focus of Chee’s assignment. Leaphorn’s voice on the telephone had sounded tired. “You want to stick with me a little longer on this Friedman-Bernal business?” he asked. “If you do, I can arrange it with Captain Largo.”

  Chee had hesitated, out of surprise. Leaphorn had identified the pause as indecision.

  “I should remind you again that I’m quitting the department,” Leaphorn had interjected. “I’m on terminal leave right now. I already told you that. I tell you now so if you’re doing me a favor, remember there’s no way I can return it.”

  Which, Chee had thought, was a nice way of saying the reverse—I can’t punish you for refusing.

  “I’d like to stay on it,” Chee had said. “I’d like to find out who killed those guys.”

  “That’s not what we’re working on,” Leaphorn had said. “They’re connected, I guess. They must be connected. But what I’m after is what happened to the woman missing from Chaco. The anthropologist.”

  “Okay,” Chee had said. It seemed an odd focus. Two murders, apparently premeditated assassinations. And Leaphorn was devoting his leave time, and Chee’s efforts, to a missing person case. Same case, probably, the way it looked now. But going at it totally backward. Well, Lieutenant Leaphorn was supposed to be smarter than Officer Chee. He had a reputation for doing things in weird ways. But he also had a reputation for guessing right.

  At Tsaya, Chee found he’d missed Slick Nakai, but not by much. Nakai had canceled his planned revival there and headed north.

  “Just canceled it?” Chee asked.

  He was asking a plump girl of about eighteen who seemed to be in charge of the Tsaya Chapter—since she was the only one present in the chapter house.

  “He sort of hurried in, and said who he was, and said he had to cancel a tent meeting that was supposed to be for to night,” she said. “It’s over there on the bulletin board.” She nodded toward the notices posted by the entrance.

  “NOTICE!” Nakai had scrawled at the top of a sheet of notepaper:

  Due to an unexpected emergency Reverend Nakai is forced to cancel his revival for here. It will be rescheduled later if God wills it.

  —Reverend Slick Nakai

  “Well, shit!” said Jim Chee, aloud and in English, since Navajo lends itself poorly to such emotional expletives. He glanced at his watch. Almost four-thirty. Where the devil could Nakai have gone? He walked back to the desk where the girl was sitting. She had been watching him curiously.

  “I need to find Nakai.” Chee smiled at her, happy that he hadn’t worn his uniform. A good many people her age looked upon Navajo Tribal Police as the adversary. “Did he say anything else? Like where he was going?”

  “To me? Nothing. Just borrowed a piece of paper for his note. You one of his Christians?”

  “No,” Chee said. “Matter of fact, I’m a hatathali. I do the Blessing Way.”

  “Really?” the girl said.

  Chee was embarrassed. “Just beginning,” he said. “Just did it once.” He didn’t explain that the one time had been for a member of his own family. He fished out his billfold, extracted a business card, and handed it to her.

  JIM CHEE

  HATATHALI

  SINGER OF THE BLESSING WAY

  AVAILABLE FOR OTHER CEREMONIALS

  FOR CONSULTATION CALL_____

  (P.O. BOX 112, SHIPROCK, N.M.)

  Since he had no telephone at his trailer, he’d left the number blank. His plan had been to list the Shiprock police station number, gambling that by the time Largo got wind of it and blew the whistle, he’d have a reputation and a following established. But the dispatcher had balked. “Besides, Jim,” she’d argued, “what will the people think? They call for a singer to do a ceremonial and when the phone rings somebody says, ‘Navajo Tribal Police.’”

  “Give me some more,” the girl said. “I’ll stick one up on the board, too. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Chee said. “And give them to people. Especially if you hear of anybody sick.”

  She took the cards. “But what’s a hatathali doing looking for a Christian preacher?”

  “A minute ago, when I asked you if Nakai said anything about where he was headed, you said not to you. Did he tell somebody else?”

  “He made a phone call,” she said. “Asked if he could borrow the phone here”—she tapped the telephone on her desk—“and called somebody.” She stopped, eyeing Chee doubtfully.

  “And you overheard some of it?”

  “I don’t eavesdrop,” she said.

  “’Course not,” Chee said. “But the man’s talking right there at your desk. How can you help it? Did he say where he was going?”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t say that.”

  Chee was smart enough to realize he was being teased. He smiled at her. “After a while you are going to tell me what he said,” Chee said. “But not yet.”

  “I just might not tell you at all,” she said, grinning a delighted grin.

  “What if I tell you a scary story? That I’m not really a medicine man. I’m a cop and I’m looking for a missing woman, and Nakai is not really a preacher. He’s a gangster, and he’s already killed a couple of people, and I’m on his trail, and you are my only chance of catching him before he shoots everybody else.”

  She laughed. “That would fit right in with what he said on the phone. Very mysterious.”

  Chee managed to keep grinning. Just barely.

  “Like what?”

  She made herself comfortable. “Oh,” she said. “He said, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Then he listened. Then he said something like, it made him nervous. And to be careful. And then he said somebody-else-or-other was who he worried about and the only way to warn him was to go out to his hogan and find him. He said he was going to cancel his revival here and go up there. And then he listened a long time, and then he said he didn’t know how far. It was over into Utah.” She shrugged. “That’s about it.”

  “About it isn’t good enough.”

  “Well, that’s all I remember.”

  Apparently it was. She was blank on both so-and-so and somebody-else-or-other. Chee left, thinking “over into Utah” was over into the country Leaphorn wanted Nakai cross-examined about—the source of Friedman-Bernal’s pot obsession. He was also thinking that heading into the Four Corners would take him past Shiprock. Maybe he would take the night off, if he was tired when he got there. Maybe he would run Slick Nakai to earth tomorrow. But why had Nakai changed his plans and headed for the Utah border? Who knows? “So-and-so” was probably Etcitty. “Somebody-else-or-other” probably another of Nakai’s converts who stole pots on the side. To Chee, Nakai was seeming increasingly odd.

  He was driving through the Bisti Badlands, headed north toward Farmington, when the five o’clock news began. A woman reporting from the Durango, Colorado, station on the letting of a contract for range improvement on the Ute Mountain Reservation, and a controversy over the environmental impact of an additional ski run at Purgatory, and a recall petition being circulated to unseat a councilman at Aztec, New Mexico. Chee reached up to change the channel. He’d get more New Mexico news from a Farmington station. “In other news of the Four Corners country,” the woman said, “a prominent and sometimes controversial Southeast Utah ra
ncher and political figure has been shot to death at his ranch near Bluff.”

  Chee stopped, hand on the dial.

  “A spokesman for the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office at Blanding said the victim has been identified as Harrison Houk, a former Utah state senator and one of southern Utah’s biggest ranch operators. The body of Houk was found in his barn last night. The sheriff’s office said he had been shot twice.

  “Some twenty years ago, Houk’s family was the victim of one of the Four Corners’ worst tragedies. Houk’s wife and a son and daughter were shot to death, apparently by a mentally disturbed younger son who then drowned himself in the San Juan.

  “Across the line in Arizona, a suit has been filed in federal district court at…”

  Chee clicked off the radio. He wanted to think. Houk was the man to whom Nakai had sold pots. Houk lived at Bluff, on the San Juan. Maybe Etcitty was Nakai’s “so-and-so.” More likely it would be Houk. Could Nakai have heard of Houk’s murder en route to Tsaya? Probably, on an earlier newscast. That would explain the abrupt change in plans. Or maybe Houk was “somebody-else-or-other”—the man Nakai wanted to warn. Too late for that now. Either way, it seemed clear that Nakai would be headed to somewhere very close to Bluff, to where Houk, his customer for pots, had been killed.

  Chee decided he would work overtime. If he could find the elusive Nakai tonight, he would.

  It proved to be surprisingly easy. On the road north toward Bluff, far enough north of Mexican Water so he was sure he’d crossed the Arizona border into Utah, Chee saw Nakai’s tent trailer. It was parked maybe a quarter-mile up an old oil field road that wanders off U.S. 191 into the rocky barrens south of Caso del Eco Mesa.

  Chee made an abrupt left turn, parked by the trailer, and inspected it. The tie-down ropes were in place, all four tires were aired, everything in perfect order. It had simply been unhooked and abandoned.

  Chee jolted down the old road, past a silent oil pump, down into the bare stoniness of Gothic Creek, and out of that into a flatland of scattered sage and dwarf juniper. The road divided into two trails—access routes, Chee guessed, to the only two Navajo families who survived in these barrens. It was almost dark now, the western horizon a glowing, luminous copper. Which route to take? Far down the one that led straight ahead he saw Nakai’s car.

  He drove the five hundred yards toward it cautiously, feeling uneasy. He’d been joking with the girl at Tsaya when he cast Nakai in the role of gangster. But how did he know? He knew almost nothing. That Nakai had been preaching on the reservation for years. That he encouraged his converts to collect pots for him to sell to help finance his operation. Did he have a pistol? A criminal record? Leaphorn probably knew such things, but he hadn’t confided in Chee. He slowed even more, nervous.

  Nakai was sitting on the trunk of the massive old Cadillac, legs straight out, leaning against the rear window, watching him, looking utterly harmless. Chee parked behind the car, climbed out, stretched.

  “Ya te’eh,” Nakai said. And then he recognized Chee, and looked surprised. “We meet again—but a long way from Nageezi.”

  “Ya te,” Chee said. “You are hard to find. I heard you were supposed to be”—he gestured southward—“first at Tsaya and then way down beyond the Hopi Country. Down at Lower Greasewood.”

  “Ran outta gas,” Nakai said, ignoring the implied question. “This thing burns gas like a tank.” He jumped down from the trunk, with the small man’s natural agility. “Were you looking for me?”

  “More or less,” Chee said. “What brings you up here into Utah? So far from Lower Greasewood?”

  “The Lord’s business takes me many places,” Nakai said.

  “You planning a revival out here?”

  “Sure,” Nakai said. “When I can arrange it.”

  “But you left your tent,” Chee said. And you’re lying, he thought. Not enough people out here.

  “I was on empty,” Nakai said. “Thought I could save enough gas to get where I was going. Then come back and get it.” He laughed. “Waited too long to unhook. Burned too much gasoline.”

  “You forget to look at your gauge?”

  “It was already broke when I bought this thing.” Nakai laughed again. “Blessed are the poor,” he said. “Didn’t do no good to look at it. Before I got outta gas, I was outta money.”

  Chee didn’t comment on that. He thought about how he could learn what Nakai was doing out here. Who he came to warn.

  “Have a brother lives down there,” Nakai explained. “Christian, so he’s my brother in the Lord. And he’s Paiute. My ‘born to’ clan. So he’s a brother that way, too. I was going to walk. And then I saw you coming.”

  “So you just got here?”

  “Five minutes, maybe. Look, could you give me a ride? Maybe eight miles or so. I could walk it, but I’m in a hurry.”

  Nakai was looking down the trail, westward. Chee studied his face. The copper light gave it the look of sculpture. Metal. But Nakai wasn’t metal. He was worried. Chee could think of no clever way to get him to talk about what he was doing here.

  “You found out Harrison Houk was killed,” Chee said. “And you headed out here. Why?”

  Nakai turned, his face shadowed now. “Who’s Houk?”

  “The man you sold pots to,” Chee said. “Remember? You told Lieutenant Leaphorn about it.”

  “Okay,” Nakai said. “I know about him.”

  “Etcitty dealt with you, and with Houk, and with these pots, and he’s dead. And now Houk. Both shot. And Nails, too, for that matter. Did you know him?”

  “Just met him,” Nakai said. “Twice, I think.”

  “Look,” Chee said. “Leaphorn sent me to find you because of something else. He wants to locate this Eleanor Friedman-Bernal woman—find out what happened to her. He talked to you about her already. But now he wants more information. He wants to know what she said to you about looking for pots right out here in this part of the country. Along the San Juan. Up around Bluff. Around Mexican Hat.”

  “Just what I told him. She wanted those smooth polychrome pots. Those pinkish ones with the patterns and the wavy lines and the serration, or whatever you call it. Pots or the broken pieces. Didn’t matter. And she told me she was particularly interested in anything that turned up around this part of the reservation.” Nakai shrugged. “That was it.”

  Chee put his hands on hips and bent backward, eliminating a kink in his back. He’d spent ten hours in that pickup today. Maybe more. Too many. “If Joe Leaphorn were here,” he said, “he’d say no, that wasn’t quite it. She said more than that. You are trying to save time. Summarizing. Tell me everything she said. Let me do the summarizing.”

  Nakai looked thoughtful. An ugly little man, Chee decided, but smart.

  “You’re thinking that I am a cop, and that these pots came off the Navajo Reservation where they are mucho, mucho illegal. Felony stuff. You’re thinking you are going to be careful about what you say.” Chee slouched against the pickup door. “Forget it. We are doing one thing at a time and the one thing is finding this woman. Not figuring out who shot Etcitty. Not catching somebody for looting ruins on Navajo land. Just one single, simple thing. Just find Eleanor Friedman. Leaphorn seems to think she went looking for these pots. At least that’s what I think he thinks. He thinks she told you where to find them. Therefore, I’d appreciate it, you’d win my gratitude and a ride to wherever you want to go, if you’ll just tell me all of it. Whether or not you think it matters.”

  Nakai waited awhile, making sure Chee’s outburst was finished.

  “What matters isn’t much,” he said. “Let me remember a minute or two.”

  Behind Nakai the sunset had darkened from glowing pale copper to dark copper. Against that gaudy backdrop, two streaks of clouds were painted, blue-black and ragged. To the left, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a carved white rock.

  “You want her words,” Nakai said. “What she said, what he said, what she said. I don’t remember th
at well. But I remember some impressions. One. She was thinking about very specific ruins. She’d been there. She knew what it looked like. Two. It was illegal. Better than that, it was on the Navajo Reservation. She good as said that. I remember I said something about it being illegal, and she said maybe it shouldn’t be. I was a Navajo and it was Navajo land.”

  Nakai stopped. “How about the ride?”

  “What else?”

  “That’s all I know, really. Did I say it was in a canyon? I’m sure it was. She said she’d been told about it. Didn’t say who told her. Somebody she’d bought a pot from, I guess. Anyway, the way she described the place it had to be a canyon. Three ruins, she said. One down by the streambed in the talus, one on the shelf above it, and a third one out of sight in the cliff above the shelf. So that would have to be in a canyon. And that’s all I know.”

  “Not the name of the canyon.”

  “She didn’t know it. Said she didn’t think it had one. Canyon sin nombre.” Nakai laughed. “She didn’t tell me much, really. Just that she was very, very interested in pots, or potsherds, even little fragments, but only if they had this pinkish glaze with the wavy light lines and the serration. Said she’d triple her price for them. That she wanted to know exactly where they came from. I wondered why she didn’t go try to find the place herself. I guess she didn’t want to risk getting caught at it.”