locked itself, another motor purred and the inside gate rolled down its track. Jim Chee was inside the fence, walking up the long, straight concrete walk through the great flat emptiness of the entrance yard. Nothing living was visible except for a flight of crows high to the north, between the prison and the mountains. But the long rows of cell block windows stared at him. Chee looked back, conscious of being watched. Above the second-floor windows of the second block to his right, the gray concrete was smudged with black. That would be cell block 3, Chee guessed, where more than thirty convicts were butchered and burned by their fellow prisoners in the ghastly riot of 1980. Had Joseph Musket been here then? If he'd been among the rioters, he'd concealed his role well enough to justify parole.
Another electronic lock let Chee through the door of the administration building, into the presence of a thin, middle-aged Chicano guard who manned the entrance desk. 'Navajo Tribal Police,' the guard said, eyeing Chee curiously. He glanced down at his clipboard. 'Mr. Armijo will handle you.' Another guard, also gray, also Chicano, led him wordlessly to Mr. Armijo's office.
Mr. Armijo was not wordless. He was plump, and perhaps forty, with coarse black hair razor-cut and blow-dried into this year's popular shape. His teeth were very, very white and he displayed them in a smile. 'Mr. Chee. You're not going to believe this, but I know this Joseph Musket personally.' Armijo's smile became a half inch broader. 'He was a trusty. Worked right here in our records section for a while. Have a seat. I guess we'll be getting him back now.' Armijo indicated a gray steel chair with a gray plastic cushion. 'Violated his parole, is that it?'
'Looks like it,' Chee said. 'I guess you could say he's a suspect in a burglary. Anyway, we need to know more about him.'
'Here he is.' Armijo handed Chee a brown cardboard accordion file. 'All about Joseph Musket.'
Chee put the file on his lap. He'd read through such files before. He knew what was in them, and what wasn't. 'You said you knew him,' Chee said. 'What was he like?'
'Like?' The question surprised Armijo. He looked puzzled. He shrugged. 'Well, you know. Quiet. Didn't say much. Did his work.' Armijo frowned. 'What do you mean, what was he like?'
A good question, Chee thought. What did he mean? What was he looking for? 'Did he tell jokes?' Chee asked. 'Was he the kind of guy who sort of takes over a job, or did you have to tell him everything? Have any friends? That sort of thing.'
'I don't know,' Armijo said. His expression said he wished he hadn't started the conversation. 'I'd tell him what to do and he'd do it. Didn't ever say much. Quiet. He was an Indian.' Armijo glanced at Chee to see if that explained it. Then he went on, explaining the job—how Musket would come in each afternoon, how he'd set up the files on the new prisoners received that day and then sort through the File basket and add whatever new material might have developed to the folders of other inmates. 'Not a very demanding job,' Armijo said. 'But he did it well enough. Didn't make mistakes. Got good reports.'
'How about friends?' Chee asked.
'Oh, he had friends,' Armijo said. 'In here, you got money, you got friends.'
'Musket had money? ' That surprised Chee.
'In his canteen account,' Armijo said. 'That's all you can have. No cash, of course. Just credit for smokes, candy, and stuff like that. All the little extras.'
'You mean more money than he could earn in here? Outside money?'
'He had connections,' Armijo said. 'Lots of narcotics dealers have connections. Some lawyer depositing money into their account.'
And that seemed to be all Armijo knew. He showed Chee into an adjoining room and left him with the file.
In the file there were first the photographs.
Joseph Musket stared out at Chee: an oval face, clean shaven, a line extending down the center of the forehead, the expression blank—the face a man puts on when he has cleared everything out of his mind except the need to endure. He hadn't changed a lot, Chee thought, beyond the change caused by the thin mustache, a few added pounds, and a few added years. But then maybe he had changed. Chee turned his eyes away from the stolid eyes of Musket and looked at his profile. That was all he had seen of Joseph Musket—a quick disinterested glance at a stranger walking past. The profile showed Chee a high, straight forehead—the look of intelligence. Nothing more.
He looked away from the face and noted the vital statistics. Musket today would be in his early thirties, he noticed, which was about what he had guessed. The rest checked out with what he had already learned from Musket's probation officer: born near Mexican Water, son of Simon Musket and Fannie Tsossie, educated at Teec Nos Pos boarding school and the high school at Cottonwood. As he'd remembered from what the probation officer had shown him at Flagstaff, Musket was doing three-to-five for possession of narcotics with intent to sell.
Chee read more carefully. Musket's police record was unremarkable. His first rap had been at eighteen in Gallup, drunk and disorderly. Then had come an arrest in Albuquerque for grand theft, dismissed, and another Albuquerque arrest for burglary, which had led to a two-year sentence and referral to a drug treatment program, suspended. Another burglary charge, this one in El Paso, had led to a one-to-three sentence in Huntsville; and then came what Chee had been (at least subconsciously) looking for—Joe Musket's graduation into the more lethal level of crime. It had been an armed robbery of a Seven-Eleven Store at Las Cruces, New Mexico. On this one, the grand jury hadn't indicted, and the charge had been dismissed. Chee sorted through the pages, looking for the investigating officer's report. It sounded typical. Two men, one outside in a car, the other inside looking at the magazines until the last customer leaves, then the gun shown to the clerk, money from the register stuffed into a grocery bag, the clerk locked in the storeroom, and two suspects arrested after abandoning the getaway car. Musket had been found hiding between garbage containers in an alley, but the clerk wasn't ready to swear he was the man he'd seen waiting in the car outside. At the bottom of the page, a Xerox out of the Las Cruces police files, was a handwritten note. It said: 'True bill on West—no bill on Musket.' Chee glanced quickly back up the page, found the suspect-identification line. The man who'd gone into the store with the gun while Joseph Musket waited in the car was identified as Thomas Rodney West, age 30, address, Ideal Motel, 2929 Railroad Avenue, El Paso.
It didn't really surprise Chee. West had said Musket was a friend of his son's. That was the reason he'd given Musket the job. And West had said his son had bad friends and had been in trouble, and had been killed. But how had he been killed? Chee hurried now. He found Thomas Rodney West once again in the investigation report which covered the drug bust that had sent Musket to the Santa Fe prison. He had been nailed along with Musket in the pickup truck carrying eight hundred pounds of marijuana. The pot had been unloaded off a light aircraft in the desert south of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The plane had eluded the dea trap, the pickup hadn't. Chee put down the Musket file and stared for a long moment at the gray concrete wall. Then he went into Armijo's office. Armijo looked up from his paperwork, teeth white.
