She shrugged. “That’s what people thought.”
“Was Eugene Ahkeah his boyfriend?”
Mrs. Montoya looked shocked. “Of course not,” she said.
“You sound like you know,” Streib said.
“Well, Gene had a wife.” She laughed. “Once, anyway. And maybe a couple of girlfriends, too. I know Eugene isn’t gay.”
Leaphorn became aware that he was tired. Streib had occupied the only visitor chair. Leaphorn leaned a hip against Mrs. Montoya’s filing cabinet. It had been a long day. He cleared his throat.
“Do you know if Mr. Dorsey had a boyfriend?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not here, anyway. Maybe back where he came from.”
Back where he came from, if the report Streib had showed him was correct, was Fort Worth, Texas. Eric Dorsey, laboratory equipment maintenance technician, Texas Christian University, single, next of kin: Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dorsey, Springfield, Illinois. Cause of death: Blow to base of the skull.
“Maybe you could help with something that puzzled me,” Leaphorn said. “The investigating officer’s report showed he had an envelope full of gasoline credit card receipts in his room. Several hundred gallons. All bought at the station here at Thoreau, so he wasn’t going very far. You have any ideas where he was going?”
Mrs. Montoya looked surprised. “No,” she said. “He was usually around here. He had an old Chevy but…” A sudden thought interrupted the sentence. “Oh,” she said. “You know what I’ll bet? I’ll bet he paid for the gas for the water truck. He drove that on weekends. That’s when we did the deliveries. That would be just like him. Father Haines would know.”
“Water truck?” Streib asked.
“He taught during the weekdays, and drove the bus. But on weekends and some evenings he drove the water truck. Took water and food out to the hogans. Hard to get water a lot of places out here so people haul it in. But people get old, or they get sick, or their pickup breaks down and they don’t have any way.”
“That sure made for a long work week,” Streib said.
Mrs. Montoya thought she detected skepticism. Her smile went away.
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t leave your job and come out here and live in an old mobile home for that three hundred dollars a month Father pays you if you don’t want to work.”
“Is that what Dorsey was making?” Leaphorn asked. “Three hundred a month?”
“And he brought his own truck. And you have to pay for your own food out of it, of course.” She stared at Streib. “And he paid for the gas, too, I guess. Out of his own pocket.”
“Sounds like a rich guy,” Streib said. “You know anything about his family?”
“I don’t think he was rich. He told me once that his dad had retired from the fire department.”
“Couple more questions,” Streib said. “The first one is, Why do you think he was homosexual if he didn’t have any boyfriends?”
“I think he told Father Haines he was,” she said. “Ask Father.”
Streib frowned. “I want to come back to that, but the second question is, Why don’t you think he had a boyfriend?”
Mrs. Montoya shrugged her plump shoulders. “How big is Thoreau?” she asked. “If anybody has a boyfriend on Tuesday, or a girlfriend, or anything else, then everybody knows it by Wednesday.”
Streib nodded. “If Father Haines knew, wouldn’t he have a problem having a homosexual teaching these kids?”
Mrs. Montoya’s expression, which had shifted from friendly to bleak a few moments earlier, now turned wintry.
“I can’t speak for the Father,” she said. “But I know him pretty well. I’d say he’d have exactly the same problem with a gay fooling around with the students as he’d have with a heterosexual fooling with the students. He keeps an eye on that sort of thing.”
“It wasn’t happening?” Streib asked.
“It was not,” she said.
Back in the car, Streib summed up their progress for the day. “Nothing,” he said. “
Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He was thinking that Francis Sayesva, in his role as a koshare for his people, was also a sacred clown.
Chapter 6
JANET WAS WEARING a blue skirt, a white shirt that looked to Jim Chee’s unpracticed eye like some sort of silk, and a little jacket that matched the skirt. The total effect was to make Miss Pete look chic, sophisticated, and beautiful. All of this caused in Chee strong but ambiguous feelings – on the one hand a soaring joy at the beauty of this young woman, and on the other a leaden sense of doubt that she would ever, ever, ever settle for him. She slid into the booth with the autumn sunlight reflecting through her glossy black hair.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, dazzling him with a rueful smile. She looked at her watch. So did Chee. It looked expensive. A gift, he guessed, from the lawyer she had worked with in Washington. And lived with and, presumably, loved. Being the token redskin, as she had told him herself, in the Washington, D.C., firm of Dalman, MacArthur, White, and Hertzog.
“Eight minutes late,” she said. “In Washington, I could blame it on the traffic. In Window Rock, no traffic to blame it on, so that won’t work.”
“Eight minutes you don’t mention,” Chee said. “You have to be a lot later than that to claim you’re working on Navajo time.” He noticed that his voice sounded perfectly natural.
“I have an excuse, though. The phone rang just as I was leaving. It was Roger Applebee. He’s staying at the inn here. You remember me telling you about him.”
“Sure,” Chee said. “The Nature First guy. I’d like to talk to him. We got a glimpse of him there at Tano. What’s he doing in Window Rock?”
“What everybody’s doing in Window Rock,” she said. “He’s lobbying.” She gestured around the room. The tables in the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation Inn were crowded with Navajos in their best boots and silver and with white men in dark business suits. “When the Tribal Council’s in session it draws the lawyers like, like-” She searched for the proper simile.
“I’d say like a dead sheep draws crows,” Chee said. “But since you’re a lawyer yourself, I guess I won’t.”
“How about like honey draws bears,” she said. “That sounds nicer. By the way, Roger told me he saw your letter in the
Chee found himself reacting as he did too often to praise from Janet Pete. Embarrassment. “Did you do some of that when you worked in Washington? Lobby, I mean.”
“Not much,” Janet said. “One branch of the firm sort of specialized in representing tribes, and fights over tribal water rights. That sort of thing. All sorts of disagreements involving Indian affairs.” She laughed. “Need I say we were on whatever side of the affair had the money to spend. But mostly I just did research and paperwork. They only sent me over to lobby for something when they needed a real Indian to look good for a liberal congressman.”
“You would have looked good to me,” Chee said. “I like real Indian ladies.”
She smiled at him. “I try to look good,” she said. “How do you like this new shirt?”
Chee inspected it, trying not to stare at the curve of her breasts too obviously and to think of exactly the right thing to say. He rejected two ideas as inappropriate, and decided on “wonderful.” But before he could say it, a big voice just behind him said:
“Hey, Janet. I wondered if I’d run into you. Someone said you’d come back out here.”
“Hello, Ed,” Janet said, in a carefully neutral voice. “How are you?”
Ed was standing beside their table now, looking down at them. “Just fine,” he said. “Maybe getting a little old for all this traveling. How about you, though? You’re looking good.”
