“Now what?” Mary asked. “It occurs to me that Sergeant Chee of the Mounties has just wasted one afternoon, plus the afternoon of one Crownpoint schoolteacher, and isn’t going to have the slightest idea of what to do next. This is a dead end. Right?”
“No,” Chee said. They were climbing the stairway that spiraled upward through the four levels of the working end of the university library. An artist had used the stairwell walls to depict in paint and plaster the history of man’s efforts to record his communication with his fellows. Here, below the ground floor, they climbed past pictographs and petroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was far overhead, and the symbolic language of computers even higher. “Maybe it doesn’t lead anywhere, but I’d like to talk to some of those men who got warned away from that explosion. I’d like to find out what Dillon Charley told them.”
They emerged on the ground-floor level. Through the glass south wall of the library, the Humanities Building loomed above the sycamores of the central mall, a monolithic sculpture against a dark-blue autumn sky. Usually Chee liked the building. Today it reminded him of tombstones.
“Why?” Mary said. “What can they possibly tell you that has anything to do with this?”
“Maybe nothing,” Chee said. “But the killings grew out of the keepsake box, and stealing the keepsake box seems to have something to do somehow with Dillon Charley’s peyote religion, and everything seems to lead back to what happened at the oil well.”
“Or maybe you’re just curious,” Mary said. “Anyway, you won’t be able to find them. It’s been thirty years.”
“It won’t be so hard,” Chee said. “They’ll probably all be kinfolks of Dillon Charley. He hired them, so they’ll be kinfolks. Cousins, or uncles, or in-laws at least. The Navajos not only invented nepotism. We perfected it.”
“But thirty years,” Mary said. “They’ll be dead. Or half of them will be.”
“One or two, probably,” Chee said. “We know Dillon Charley is. But the odds are about four of them are still around.” They were outside now, walking across the bricked mall south of the library with the brittle sycamore leaves underfoot and the heatless light of the setting sun throwing their shadows a hundred yards ahead and turning the craggy east face of the Sandia Mountains the color of diluted blood. Chee thought of that, and of Hunt walking fifty feet behind them, and of the target they would make for someone standing at any of the walkways or balconies that overlooked the mall.
“And what can they remember about thirty years? Probably not much.”
“Who knows?” Chee said. He thought. Probably nothing with any real accuracy. But there was no other lead to follow. And if nothing else, hunting survivors of the People of Darkness would take him out on the reservation. He would take Mary with him. On the reservation, the blond man would never know where to look for them.
22
A DAY LATER, Chee had taken a fruitless shot in the dark and added a few details to his list of names of Dillon Charley’s People of Dankness.
The shot in the dark had taken him to the university’s Geology Department library. With some help from a cooperative graduate student, he had found a copy of the geologist’s log of the oil well. “It looks fairly typical of that area,” the student told him. “There’s been some shallow production from the Galisteo formation.” He checked through it quickly. “Looks like they found the formation but not the oil.”
“You see anything unusual about it?” Chee asked. The log was totally incomprehensible to him. He stared at the sheet of symbols and notations, feeling foolish.
“I’m no authority on Valencia County petroleum geology,” the young man said. “But it looks like what I’d expect. What are you looking for?”
“That’s the trouble,” Chee said. “I don’t know.”
His luck in hunting Charley’s roustabout crew had been only a little better. He and Mary had driven to the reservation and spent the remaining hours of daylight jolting over the washboard back roads and wagon trails of the Checkerboard, hunting information to go with the names extracted from the
Roscoe Sam, Ojo Encino or Standing Rock. Mud Clan. Dead. Confirmed.
Joseph Sam, Ojo Encino or maybe Pueblo Pintado area. Mud Clan and married into Salt Clan. One report he died in the 1950s. Others say no.
Windy Tsossie. Mud Clan. Married into Standing Rock Clan. Used to live around Heart Butte? May be dead?
Rudolph Becenti. Mud Clan. Coyote Canyon? Married?
Woody Begay. Mud Clan. Sister lives at Borrego Pass?
It had been generally frustrating, except for Roscoe Sam who had got sick at Tuba City and died in the BIA hospital there, and was remembered as being dead. Joseph Sam was another matter. A distant cousin on the paternal side of the family thought, rather vaguely, that he, too, was dead. Another even more distant paternal- side cousin said he’d moved his wife’s sheep and his own belongings over to the Cononcito Reservation and probably still lived there. Dead or alive, no one had seen Joseph Sam for years. It was the same for the rest of them. An in-law remembered that Rudolph Becenti had moved to Los Angeles but had heard he’d come back again. Windy Tsossie was recalled dimly and unfavorably by a few of his contemporaries around Ambrosia Lakes as one of the Tsossie “outfit” which had lived at Coyote Canyon but had moved away a long time ago. Except for Roscoe Sam, definitely and specifically dead and buried, the day had produced nothing concrete. As for Woody Begay, there was only an old woman’s memory that his sister lived north of the Borrego Pass chapter house, and his sister’s name was Fannie Kinlicheenie.
The vagueness of it had puzzled Chee. It was almost as if these People of Darkness existed only in shadowy rumors and not as flesh and blood. Even the site of the oil well explosion eluded them. The hunt for Roscoe Sam had taken them near the place where Chee’s notes said it had been. They found only the immense dusty hole that was the Red Deuce – a dozen gigantic power shovels eating the earth in a pit that was already two hundred yards deep and a half mile across. The oil well site, too, seemed part of a memory of something that never was.
But Fannie Kinlicheenie was definitely flesh and blood. She had looked out the doorway of her house at them when they drove up. Chee parked his patrol car a polite thirty yards from the residence, thereby respecting a modest people’s tradition of privacy. When Fannie Kinlicheenie was ready to receive guests she would let them know. Meanwhile they would wait. Chee offered a cigaret to Mary, and she took it.
“I shouldn’t smoke these things,” she said, as he lit it for her.
“Neither should I,” Chee said.
“This guy’s going to be dead, too,” Mary said. “Either that or moved way off somewhere.”
Chee had a feeling she was right. Otherwise, someone would have remembered him.
“You’re too pessimistic,” Chee said.
“No. I’m a realist. There’s four of them left. After thirty years, you’d have a mortality rate of about twenty-five percent. I think Woody Begay’s the one.”
Chee considered this logic. He exhaled a cloud of cigaret smoke.
“You started with six,” he said. “We got Dillon Charley dead, and Roscoe Sam dead. That’s already a thirty- three percent mortality.”
Mary didn’t comment for a moment.
Then she said, “If you think like that you should avoid poker games. What happened in the past doesn’t affect the mathematics. It doesn’t affect the probabilities. Forget the other two. Now we have the names of four men who were alive thirty years ago. Chances are, one of the four is dead now and three of them are alive.”
“Okay,” Chee said. “I’ll buy that. Now tell me how you figure the dead one will be Woody Begay.”
