The Wailing Wind

by Tony Hillerman

  It was just then that Leaphorn remembered both the pliers and the crowbar. McKay had used the pliers to cut the wire. As he looked at the metal locking bar in place across the door, he understood why McKay had bought the crowbar. He needed it as a “cheat bar,” to apply leverage to push the blocking bar up out of the slots that held it. But what had McKay done with it? He’d found the pliers in McKay’s car. Once the wire was cut, he had no more need for them here. But if he’d left Linda Denton locked in this bunker, he’d need the crowbar to get her out.

  Denton was standing right behind Leaphorn now, and he pressed the pistol against Leaphorn’s spine.

  “Back in the truck,” he said. “Now, or I kill you here.”

  As he heard that, Leaphorn saw the crowbar, lying in the weeds against the concrete wall.

  He pointed to it.

  “Marvin McKay bought that bar at a Gallup hardware store the day you killed him,” Leaphorn said. “Put that damned pistol back in your pocket, and we’ll pick up the crowbar and use it to find out what happened to your wife.”

  Again, the pressure of the pistol against Leaphorn’s back disappeared.

  “What are you talking about?” Denton said.

  “I’m getting the crowbar. I’ll show you.”

  Leaphorn picked up the heavy steel bar and examined the locking arrangement a moment. Using the flange as a fulcrum, he put the bar end under the locking bar and pulled down with his full weight. The locking bar slid upward.

  “Now, pull the door open.”

  Denton did.

  They stood engulfed in a rush of warm, stale air, and peered into a vast, empty darkness. Nothing but a clutter of cartons against the left wall, and two black barrel-like containers that once had probably held some sort of explosive. Denton was holding the pistol down by his side now.

  “You think she’s in there?”

  The only light in the bunker followed them through the doorway. It dimly illuminated a gray concrete floor, which stretched sixty empty feet to the great half circle of gray concrete that formed the back wall.

  Leaphorn walked in just a few steps before he noticed Denton wasn’t following. He was still standing, slumped, staring at the door post.

  “What’d you find?” Leaphorn said, and walked back toward the door.

  Denton pointed, but his eyes were closed.

  Words were scrawled on the concrete. Leaphorn turned on his flashlight and illuminated: BUMP I AM SO SORRY.

  “You know who this ‘Bump’ is?”

  “I’m Bump,” Denton said. “Because of my nose.” He touched a finger to the disfigurement.

  “Oh,” Leaphorn said.

  “She said she loved that bump on my nose. That it reminded her of the kind of man I was.” Denton tried to laugh at that, but couldn’t manage it. “Had to be Linda who wrote it,” he said. “Nobody else called me that.”

  Leaphorn touched the scrawl. “I think she must have written this with her lipstick,” he said.

  “I’ll go find her,” Denton said. “Linda,” he shouted, and rushed off into the gloom with the shout echoing and echoing in the huge empty tomb.

  They found Mrs. Linda Denton, née Linda Verbiscar, lying primly on a sheet of heavy corrugated cardboard behind the empty drums.

  She was facedown, with her head turned sideways. The cool, utterly dry, almost airless climate of the sealed bunker had converted her into a mummy.

  29

  What Hostiin Peshlakai had told Chee, he had recited in the presence of Ms. Knoblock, his court-appointed attorney, and Mr. Harjo, who seemed to be serving as her interpreter as well as Agent Osborne’s. And Peshlakai spoke, as seemed to be his habit, in general and ambiguous terms.

  “But what it all boiled down to, Bernie, when you read between the lines, and you went ahead and completed a few sentences for him, was that Wiley Denton murdered Doherty with our friend Peshlakai aiding and abetting—if not actually pulling the trigger.”

  Bernie looked very sad when she heard that. “Putting that old man in prison,” she said. “That would be awful. That would kill him.”

  “Probably,” Chee said. “But I don’t think Harjo actually understood a lot of it. Not from the way he was translating it to Ms. Knoblock.”

  Bernie gave him a sidelong glance. “And you didn’t butt in and explain things to them. Right? You seem to be implying something, well, something sneaky.”

  “I don’t know what I’m implying,” Chee said. “But I know for sure that Peshlakai had no idea he was getting himself involved in a murder.”

  “How did he get tied up with Denton anyway?”

  “Just by living where he did. He’d see Denton coming up the canyon, nosing around, digging out sand samples and that sort of thing. And he must have warned Denton that he shouldn’t go up to the headwaters area of Coyote Canyon because of the holy places there. He would be violating taboos, and that would make him sick. And so Denton was sympathetic, or seemed to be, and said he’d help Peshlakai guard the place. Denton gave Peshlakai a cellphone, showed him how to use it, and told him when he saw anyone prowling around up the canyon, he should call.”

  “So he called him when Doherty showed up at the placer site?”

  “Exactly,” Chee said. “And Denton came. Whereupon one of them shot Doherty.”

  “With Peshlakai’s rifle?”

  “Unfortunately. Peshlakai didn’t say so, but Osborne’s crime scene crew finally recovered the slug with their metal detectors. It matched that old thirty-thirty, just like the bullet he fired to scare you away.”

  Bernie shuddered, remembering that. “And they put Doherty’s body back in his truck,” Bernie said. “And then one of them drove it up to where I found it, and the other one came along in Denton’s car, and then everybody went home. Everybody except Thomas Doherty.”

  “Peshlakai didn’t get into explaining that, or say who actually fired the shot.”

  Bernie sighed. “I don’t guess it matters much. Whether he’s killer or conspirator. He’s way too old to last long in prison.”

  “He wouldn’t want to,” Chee said.

  Bernie rubbed her hand across her face. “I hate this,” she said. “Just hate it. So many people get hurt.”

  “I know,” Chee said. A long silence followed. Chee broke it with what sounded a little like a laugh.

  “What?” Bernie said.

  “I sounded like I was agreeing with you, but I really wasn’t. You were feeling pity for the victims, and sometimes the ones we arrest are the worst victims of all. I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might have been killed in Coyote Canyon,” Chee said. “That’s been a nightmare ever since you told me.”

  “No one would have blamed you for it,” Bernie said.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Chee said.

  They turned into the fort entrance, showed their police credentials at the security gate, were assured that Leaphorn and another man had driven through a bit earlier, and were given some general instructions about how to find the D block of bunkers and bunker D2187.

  Bernie spotted Leaphorn’s pickup far ahead as they turned onto the worn asphalt lane, and they parked behind it.

  “The door’s open,” Bernie said.

  Chee took out his flashlight and stepped out of the car. Bernie was already out.

  “Bernie. Why don’t you wait here until I—“

  “Because I’m a cop, just as much as you are.”

  “But I’m the sergeant,” Chee said. “Stay back.”

  He walked to the open door, looked in, flicked on his flashlight.

  The beam illuminated the forms of two men, one seated on a barrel, the other standing. The man standing held a flashlight. The seated man held a pistol dangling from his right hand and what seemed to be a sheet of paper, illuminated by the flash, in the other. The seated man ignored the light from Chee’s flash. The standing man looked into the flashlight. Joe Leaphorn.r />
  “Wiley Denton,” Chee shouted. “Drop the pistol.”

  Denton seemed not to hear.

  “Police,” Chee shouted. “Drop that pistol.”

  Chee had his own pistol cocked. He was aware of Bernie standing beside him.

  Denton stood up, faced Chee, his pistol came up.

  Chee leaped against Bernie, knocked her out of the doorway. His momentum slammed him into the doorjamb, the flashlight fell from his numbed arm. He found himself on his knees, still gripping his own pistol.

  In the bunker he saw Denton standing, illuminated by Leaphorn’s flashlight. No pistol visible now.

  “He’s all right,” Leaphorn shouted. “Come on in.”

  Chee walked down the floor, pistol pointed. Bernie had recovered his flashlight and was walking with him, the light focused on Denton.

  “Wiley,” Leaphorn said. “Hand your pistol over to Sergeant Chee. You don’t need it now.”

  Denton pulled the pistol out of the waistband of his trousers. “Take it,” he said, and handed it to Chee.

  “And the letter,” Leaphorn said. “Let me keep that for you. You’ll always want it.”

  Denton handed Leaphorn the letter, turned away from Chee, and put his arms behind his back.

  “Mr. Denton,” Chee said. “I arrest you for the murder of Thomas Doherty. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you.”

  “Oh!” Bernie exclaimed. “What did you do to your arm? It’s bleeding.”

  “Banged it on the doorjamb,” Chee said. “I’ll take Mr. Denton out to the car and call this in.” He was looking at Linda on her cardboard resting place. “Send an ambulance, I guess.” He tugged at Denton’s sleeve.

  “Just a minute,” Denton said, and turned to Leaphorn. “Let me read that last part again.”

  Leaphorn looked at Denton’s hands, cuffed behind his back, said: “I’ll read it to you.”

  “No. You don’t need to do that,” Denton said. “I can remember every word of it.”

  In the reflected light of the flash, Leaphorn’s face looked old and exhausted. “Wiley,” he said, “remember something else, too. Remember you didn’t want this to happen. Remember this was because of a lot of misunderstanding.”

  “I’m remembering something else, too. That remark you made to me about Shakespeare. I asked the woman at the library about Othello, and she got me a copy. He was just about as stupid as me. But with me, I didn’t have someone egging me on. I did it to myself. Looking for a treasure when I already had one.”

  “Come on,” Chee said, and he and Wiley walked through the darkness toward the brilliant sunlight of the open door.

  Bernie had been staring down at the body. She shook her head and turned away. “It’s hard to believe this,” she said. “She starved to death here in the dark. It’s just too awful. What was McKay doing? Using her as a hostage, I guess. But why didn’t Mr. Denton come and get her? What happened?”

  “Denton shot McKay before he had time to tell him where he was holding Linda. Denton said he didn’t believe any of it,” Leaphorn said. “Don’t you think we should get out of here?”

  “What did Linda say?” Bernie asked, pointing to the paper in Leaphorn’s hand. “Could I read it?”

  Leaphorn didn’t answer that.

  “I guess not,” she said. “But could you tell me whether she was angry?”

  “I guess you would say it was a love letter,” Leaphorn said. “She apologized for introducing McKay to Denton, said she didn’t know McKay was an evil man. She said that since Denton hadn’t come for her, she was afraid McKay had killed him, and he would never then be able to read her letter. But she would slip off into dreams now and then, and she would dream of Denton being in a hospital, recovering. If he did, she knew he would come and she would try to stay alive until then. And if she failed him again, she wanted him to know that she always loved him and that she was sorry.”

  Leaphorn turned off the flashlight. He didn’t want to see Bernie’s face.

  “She was sorry,” Bernie said in a choked voice. “She said she was sorry?”

  The reflected light from the doorway showed Leaphorn that Bernie’s eyes were wet. Time to change the subject.

  “What happened to Jim’s arm?”

  “Oh,” she said. “When he saw Denton holding that pistol, he jumped into me. He knocked me out of the doorway.”

  “Hurt you?”

  “No, it didn’t hurt me,” Bernie said, her tone indignant. “He was trying to protect me.”

  “I think we need to get out into the sunshine,” Leaphorn said.

  “I should stay,” Bernie said. “I’m on duty. Stay with the body until the crime scene crew gets here.”

  “I’ll stay with you then,” Leaphorn said. “Aren’t you concerned about the chindi? Linda’s ghost would have been locked in here with no way out.”

  “Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Bernie said. “Haven’t you forgotten? When one dies, their good goes with them. Only the bad is left behind to form the ghost. I doubt if Linda Denton left much of a chindi.”

  They stood beside the body for a while, with nothing to say. Bernie focused her flash on a little black plastic case partly obscured by Linda Denton’s skirt and glanced at Leaphorn—a questioning look.

  “That’s some sort of miniature disk player,” Leaphorn said. “She loved music, and Denton had just given it to her. Birthday present, I think he said.”

  “I guess that was the source of the music those kids heard. If it hadn’t been for the wind wailing that night—“ With that Bernie found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her eyes. “Hadn’t been for the wind they would have known they were hearing Linda and not a ghost.”

  Leaphorn nodded. “We have that story of our own, you know, about the Hard Flint boys twisting the good air into evil.”

  “Right now I’m thinking my mother was right,” she said. “There’s just too much evil in this business for me. Too much sorrow.”

  “You wouldn’t have any trouble getting another job,” Leaphorn said. “Something where you help people instead of arresting them.”

  “I know,” Bernie said. “I’m thinking about it. I’m going to quit this. I’d like to make people happy.”

  Leaphorn pointed toward the bunker door. Through it, they could see Sergeant Jim Chee putting Wiley Denton in his patrol car. “You know, Bernie, you could start that ‘making people happy’ career right now. Tell that young man out there what you’ve just told me.”

  Bernie looked out into the sunlight, at Chee talking to Denton through the car window. She looked back at Leaphorn, shrugged, spread her hands in that gesture of defeated frustration.

  Leaphorn nodded. “I know,” he said. “When I was a lot younger, an old Zuñi told me their legend about that. Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, ‘So you shall be.’ But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world.”

  On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening.

  “So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman,” Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.

  “I’m retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but I’m still commissioned as a McKinley County deputy sheriff,” he said. “I can stay here with the body.”

  Then he watched her walk toward the open door. Toward the dazzling sunlight. Toward Jim Chee.

  HarperCollins e-Book Exclusive Extras

  Leaphorn, Chee,

  and the Navajo Way

  I thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters — Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

  Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, T
exas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green “crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers — my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

  When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in The Blessing Way (1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper & Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I — having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn — gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.

  Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of People of Darkness (1980) make sense — and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.

  I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes. I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give those who read them at least some insight into the culture of a people who deserve to be much better understood.

  —Tony Hillerman

  The Novels,

  As Annotated by T.H.

  Leaphorn novels: The Blessing Way; Dance Hall of the Dead; Listening Woman

  Chee novels: People of Darkness; The Dark Wind; The Ghostway