The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  Bernie considered that, looking for a connection and seeing none. Hostiin Yellow was studying her.

  “Are you hearing what I say?”

  Bernie nodded again. “Yes,” she said. But she really wasn’t. “You mean like the Israelis and the Palestinians? And the people in the Balkans, and . . .”

  Hostiin Yellow’s expression told her he was disappointed.

  “Like people in Ganado or Shiprock or Burnt Water or Albuquerque or Alabama or anywhere,” he said. “When the wind inside turns dark and tells them it must be done.”

  Bernie tried for an expression that would suggest she understood. It didn’t seem to work.

  “You have seen what the coal mining has done to our Earth Mother on Black Mesa. And other places. Have you seen what these modern placer mines do? Great jets of water washing away everything. The beauty is gone. Our sisters the plants, our brothers the animals, they’re all dead or washed away. Only the ugly mud is left.”

  “I saw a documentary about that high water-pressure placer mining. On public television. It made me sad. And then it made me angry,” Bernie said.

  “Think and consider,” Hostiin Yellow said. “If it makes you angry, it might make some people angry enough to kill. Think about it. What if those are the people you are looking for? What do they do if you find them?”

  5

  Leaphorn stopped his pickup beside a patrol car bearing the decal of the Apache County Sheriff’s Department, which told him the scene of the Doherty homicide was officially decided to be in Arizona and not in San Juan County, New Mexico, a few feet to the east. The car was empty. Fifty feet beyond it, fenced off behind a yellow crime scene tape, was Doherty’s blue king-cab truck with a burly fellow in a deputy uniform sitting on its tailgate looking at Leaphorn.

  Who did he know in the Apache County department? The sheriff, of course, an old-timer, and the undersheriff, but neither of those would be out here. Once Leaphorn had known all the deputies, but deputies come and go, changing jobs, getting married, moving away. Now he knew fewer than half of them. But he could see he knew this one, who was walking toward him. It was Albert Dashee, a Hopi Indian better know as Cowboy. And he was grinning at Leaphorn.

  “Lieutenant,” Deputy Dashee said. “What brings you up here to the scene of our crime? I hope you’re going to tell me that New Mexico admitted the Arizona border is actually over there”—Dashee pointed to the west side of the arroyo—“and San Juan County has to do the baby-sitting for the Federals instead of me.”

  “No,” Leaphorn said. “I was just feeling curious about this homicide. I thought I’d come up and see if I could take a look.”

  “I can think of two reasons you might be curious,” Dashee said, still grinning.

  “Two?”

  “One is the Bureau blaming Jim Chee’s girlfriend for messing up the scene. And one is the Bureau looking for a way to connect this with Wiley Denton killing that con man. Killing McKay. You were always interested in that one.”

  “Let’s just say I’m like an old retired fireman who can’t stay away when something’s burning.” He was thinking how impossible it was to keep a secret, maintain even a shred of privacy, in the small world of police work. “You’re looking well, Cowboy,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since that Ute Mountain casino robbery business.”

  Their chat lasted maybe five minutes, and then Leaphorn walked to the tape, looked at the truck, and said: “Found the body in the front seat. That right?”

  “Curled up on the seat cushion,” Dashee said. “Head against the driver-side door, feet the other way. Like sleeping. Hell, I’d have figured it just like Bernie did. Another drunk.” He held the tape down so Leaphorn could step easily over it. “In case anybody asks, I said you can’t come in without permission from the agent in charge.”

  Leaphorn peered through the window, touching nothing. He looked in the truck bed, through the small side window into the passenger cab. Crouched to examine the tire treads and to look under the vehicle with Cowboy trailing along, watching him and talking.

  “Oops,” Cowboy said. “I hear my radio,” and he was trotting away to his car.

  Leaphorn slipped the tobacco tin from its sack and pushed it into a secluded and weedy corner. That done, he circled the truck, examining the maze of tracks left by ambulance people and the swarm of investigators who followed.

  Then Cowboy was back.

  “They’re sending a tow for the truck,” Cowboy said, moving back toward the tape. “You finished here? Seen anything interesting?”

  “Not much,” Leaphorn said. “I guess you noticed that tobacco tin over there by the brush.” He pointed. “I thought maybe it might have fallen out of the truck when the medics were taking the body out. Then it could have got kicked over there.”

  Dashee examined Leaphorn a moment. “Where?”

  Leaphorn walked over. Pointed.

  Dashee squatted, peered, looked up at Leaphorn, nodded, and straightened up.

  “Funny the crime scene crew didn’t notice that,” he said, looking at Leaphorn. “Don’t you think?”

  Leaphorn shrugged. “City boys, those agents,” Leaphorn said. “Lawyers, accountants. Very good at what they’re good at. How good would we be working a mail fraud case in Washington?”

  Dashee was rewarding Leaphorn with a broad grin tinged with skepticism and directing him back over the crime scene tape, back toward Leaphorn’s pickup, opening the door for him.

  Leaphorn got in, started the engine, then turned it off.

  “You said the Bureau was connecting this case with Wiley Denton killing the con man. Do they think Doherty was trying to work some sort of swindle like McKay?”

  “The Federals don’t confide much in us sheriff deputies,” Dashee said.

  “But they talk to the deputy’s boss when they have to and sheriffs like to share the information.”

  Dashee grinned. “I’ve heard a couple of agents were at Fort Wingate following Doherty’s tracks, and they found out he was very interested in the archives out there. And they found Wiley Denton’s telephone number in Doherty’s notebook.”

  Denton’s number. Leaphorn’s eyebrows raised.

  “Really? If my memory is good from five years ago, Denton had an unlisted number.”

  “He still does,” Dashee said.

  Leaphorn let this new information digest for a moment.

  “And those archives he was looking into. The Navajo Nation’s?” The Navajo Nation had been using one of the multitude of explosives bunkers at the old fort to store its old records and documents. But why would Doherty have an interest in those? None Leaphorn could think of.

  “No,” Cowboy said. “He was checking into the old fort archives. Especially records going back to the 1860s. When the prospectors were making all those fabulous gold discoveries, and coming in wanting the fort to protect them from us savage and hostile redskins.”

  Interesting, Leaphorn thought. “I guess you have to sign in to get access. Is that how they knew he was looking?”

  “Better than that,” Dashee said. “They even knew what pages he looked at. Found his fingerprints.”

  “On old paper?”

  “I didn’t believe it either. But Osborne—“ Dashee stopped. “I didn’t say his name. He ain’t supposed to be telling stuff like this to a civilian cop. But anyway Special Agent John Doe was telling me about a technique they use now that picks up the fingerprint oil off of all sorts of rough surfaces. On smooth surfaces, like glass or metal, it evaporates after a day or two. On cloth or paper it absorbs. He said they even recovered the fingerprints off cloth wrappings of one of those Egyptian mummies.”

  Leaphorn was checking his memory relative to the Prince Albert can. Had he been careful enough? Probably. But how about Chee? And how about Officer Bernie Manuelito?

  He heard the diesel sound of the tow truck coming to haul Doherty’s king cab off to where it could be given the fine-tooth-comb laboratory treatment. He restarted his engine, w
aved at Dashee, and headed home. Fort Wingate, he was thinking. So Doherty’s path toward sudden death had taken him there. Had McKay’s fatal journey also involved a stop at the obsolete old fort? His own futile hunt for the young and beautiful Mrs. Wiley Denton had taken him there. He would pull out his old file and see if the notes he’d made on that frustrating visit to the fort would tell him anything.

  6

  As always, Leaphorn awoke at middawn before the edge of the sun rose over the horizon. It was a Navajo hogan habit, dying out now, he presumed, as fewer and fewer of the Dineh slept in their bedrolls on hogan floors, went to bed early because of lack of electric lighting, and rose with the sun not only for the pious custom of greeting Dawn Boy with a prayer but because hogans were crowded and tradition made stepping over a sleeping form very bad manners.

  Normally Leaphorn spent a few minutes waking up slowly, watching the sunlight turn the high clouds over the mountains their various shades of pink, rose, and red, and remembering Emma—who had suggested in her gentle way that their first view of the day should be of the sun’s arrival just as Changing Woman had taught. This was another Leaphorn habit—awakening with Emma on his mind. Before her death he’d always reached over to touch her.

  For months after her funeral, he continued that. But touching only her pillow—reaching for the woman he loved and feeling only the cold vacuum her absence had left—always started his day with grief. He’d finally dealt with that by switching to her side of the bed so this habitual exploration would take his hand to the windowsill. But he still came awake with Emma on his mind, and this morning he was thinking that Emma would approve of what he intended to do today. He intended to see if he could find some way to get a handle on what had happened to pretty little Linda Denton.

  He was in the kitchen, having toast and his first cup of coffee, when Professor Louisa Bourbonette emerged from the guest bedroom wrapped in her bulky terry-cloth bathrobe, said, “Good morning, Joe,” and walked past him to the coffeepot.

  “Way past midnight when I got in,” she added, sup-pressing a yawn. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No,” Leaphorn said. “I’m glad you made it. Wanted to ask you if you know anything about a spooky Hispanic legend about La Llorana. Which I probably mispronounced.”

  “You did,” said Professor Bourbonette. She was eyeing the file folder open beside his plate. “It’s a tale told about a lost woman, or about a lost woman with a lost child whose sorrowful cries can be heard at night. There are several versions, but the authorities pretty well agree they all originated in the Valley of Mexico and then spread north into this part of the world.”

  She nodded toward the file. “That looks official,” she said. “I hope it’s not.”

  “It’s just some personal notes I kept on that old McKay homicide. The case was closed right away. You may remember it. Wiley Denton confessed he shot the man. Claimed self-defense. McKay had a criminal record as a swindler, and Denton got a short term.”

  Louisa sat across the table from him and sipped her coffee.

  “That the one in which the shooter’s wife sort of simultaneously disappeared? Did she ever come back?”

  Leaphorn shook his head.

  “You surprise me,” she said. “I’ve been reading about that Doherty homicide in the Flagstaff paper. I thought you might be getting interested in that.”

  “Well, there might be a connection.”

  Louisa had looked very sleepy while pouring her coffee. Now she looked very interested. She was a small, sturdy woman with her gray hair cut short, holding a tenured position on the Northern Arizona University anthropology faculty with, to her credit, a long list of publications on the legends and oral histories of Southwestern Indian tribes and the old settlers who invaded their territory. And now she was smiling at Leaphorn, expectantly.

  “A connection,” she said. “Does it connect to the Legend of the Wailing Woman or just to Gallup’s richest man shooting his swindler?”

  “Probably neither,” Leaphorn said. “It’s very shaky, very foggy.” But as he said that he knew he would tell her about it, discuss it with this white woman. With that knowledge came the familiar guilty feeling. This had been one of the ten thousand reasons he’d loved Emma—this business of laying the problems and troubles of his work before her and finding as he talked, as he measured her reactions, the fog tended to lift and new ideas emerge.

  He shouldn’t share with another woman this special link he’d had with Emma. But he had done it before with Louisa—a sign of his weakness. And so he turned his notebook to a blank page, got out his pen, and began drawing.

  Louisa laughed. “A map,” she said. “Why did I know there would be a map.”

  Leaphorn found himself grinning. It was a habit he was often kidded about. The dominant feature on the wall in his Criminal Investigation Division office at Navajo Tribal Police headquarters had been an enlarged version of the Indian Country map of the American Automobile Association—a map defaced with hundreds of pinheads, their colors identifying incidents, events, or individuals whom Leaphorn considered significant. The black pins represented places where Navajo Wolves had been reported being seen or where complaints of other witchcraft activities of these mythical “skinwalkers” had been registered. The red ones marked homes of known bootleggers, blue ones dope dealers, white ones cattle thieves, and so forth. Some were footnoted in the precise and tiny script he used, others coded with symbols only Lieutenant Leaphorn understood. Everyone in the law-and-order community seemed to know of this map, and of the smaller versions Leaphorn kept in his vehicle—mapping out whatever case he happened to be working on at the time.

  “I can’t deny it,” Leaphorn said. “I admit I like maps. They help me sort out my thinking. And on this map, here’s Wiley Denton’s mansion, where he shot McKay. The straight line is Interstate Forty and the railroad running into Gallup. And over here . . .” He drew a large rectangle. “Here is Fort Wingate.” He created more squares, circles, and symbols and used the pen as a pointer, identifying them.

  “Gallup,” he said. “And over here’s where Doherty’s body was found, and this is McGaffey School.”

  Louisa examined the sketch. “Lots of big empty blank spaces,” she said. “And you haven’t told me what McGaffey School has to do with any of this. And where’s your mark for the Wailing Woman?”

  Leaphorn tapped a spot on the edge of his Fort Wingate square closest to the McGaffey square. “I think that should be about here,” he said.

  Louisa looked surprised. “Really? I hope you’re going to explain this now.”

  “Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. “I’m afraid you might take it seriously.”

  “I won’t,” she said, but her expression denied that.

  “Think of it in terms of connections,” Leaphorn said. “There seem to be three, with one of them very fuzzy.” He held up one finger. “Two shooting victims. Both had collected information on that legendary lost Golden Calf mine. McKay seemed to have claimed he’d found it. Doherty seemed to be looking for it. McKay goes to meet Denton and Denton shoots him. Doherty had Denton’s unlisted telephone number written in his notebook.”

  Leaphorn paused.

  Louisa nodded, held up one finger, said: “One connection.”

  Leaphorn held up two fingers.

  “Doherty did some of his research out at the Fort Wingate archives. Probably McKay did, too. Natural enough, because in those days when prospecting was booming, the fort was the only military base out here. It was supposed to provide them protection from us Indians.”

  Louisa frowned. “Yes. Seems natural they would. But that doesn’t seem to mean much. What are you looking for?”

  Leaphorn then held up three fingers—one of them bent.

  “Now we come to the vague and foggy one. When Denton shot McKay it was Halloween evening.” He stopped, shook his head. “I’m sort of embarrassed to even mention this.”

  “Go ahead. Halloween gets my attention.” />
  “The McKinley County sheriff’s department had two calls that evening. One was the Denton shooting McKay business out here.” Leaphorn pointed to Denton’s house on the map. “And the other was a call from McGaffey reporting a woman screaming and wailing out on the east side of Fort Wingate.”

  “Oh,” said Louisa. “The Wailing Woman legend comes into play at last. Right?”

  “Not quite yet.” Leaphorn said. “And maybe we should call it the Wailing Wind legend. Question of what, or who, was doing the wailing. Anyway the sheriff sent a deputy out and called Fort Wingate security people. They scouted around and couldn’t find anything and decided it was just some sort of Halloween prank.”

  “So how do we get to the Wailing Woman legend?”

  “Months later,” Leaphorn said. “Denton had started doing his time in that federal white-collar prison in Texas and he began running ads in the Gallup Independent, Farmington Times, and so forth. Personal ads, addressed to Linda, and signed Wiley, saying he loved her and asking her to come home. I asked around, learned that Linda Denton hadn’t been around since the killing. That seemed odd. I checked. Never reported missing, except her parents had talked to the sheriff about it—thinking something must have happened to her.”

  “No wonder,” Louisa said. “What happened next?”

  “Nothing,” Leaphorn said. “She was a mature married woman. No mystery to the killing. Denton did it. Confessed he did it. Worked out a plea bargain. Dead case. The official theory was that Mrs. Denton had been working with McKay and when the deal went sour and he got shot, she just took off. No crime. No reason to look for her.”

  “But you did.”

  “Well, not exactly. I was just curious.”

  “So am I,” Louisa said. “About when you’re going to tell me about how this old Hispanic legend of the tragedy of a lost lady got involved in this gold mine swindle.”