'But were they friends up until then?'
Archer looked thoughtful. Chee guessed he was looking for traps. Apparently he found none.
'They were friends,' Archer said. He shook his head, and his face relaxed. 'Really,' he said, 'Tom was a great guy. He had a lot of respect in here. People didn't screw with him. The bad ones, you know, they'd walk around him. He looked after Musket some, I think.' Then Archer's expression changed. 'Maybe I said that wrong. Tom was Musket's friend, but I don't know if it really worked both ways. I didn't never trust Musket. He was one of them guys, you know, who you never know about.' Archer got up. 'Just too damn smart. Just too damn clever. You know what I mean?'
On his way out, Chee stopped at Armijo's office a final time to use the telephone. He dialed the deputy warden's number.
'I wonder if I could get you to check and see if a dea agent named T. L. Johnson asked permission to take Thomas West out of the prison,' Chee asked. 'Was that arranged?'
The deputy warden didn't have to look it up. 'Yeah,' he said. 'He did that. Sometimes we let that happen when there's a good reason for privacy.'
Chapter Twenty
Chee took the roundabout way home—circling north through Santa Fe and Chama instead of southward down the Rio Grande valley through Albuquerque. He took the northern route because it led through beautiful country. He planned to play the tapes he had made of Frank Sam Nakai singing the Night Chant and thereby memorize another section of that complicated eight-day ritual. Beauty helped put him in the mood for the sort of concentration required. Now it didn't work. His mind kept turning to the distraction of unresolved questions. Ironfingers? 'Too damn clever,' Archer had called him, but not too smart to give stolen jewelry to a girl. Had Johnson, as it seemed, deliberately set up Thomas Rodney West for a prison yard killing? And if he had, why? Who had taken the body of Palanzer from the carryall? And why had the body been left there, in its cocoon of Lysol mist, in the first place? The moon rose over the jagged ridge of the Sangre de Cristo range as he drove up the Chama valley. It hung in the clear, dark sky like a great luminous rock, flooding the landscape with light. When he reached Abiquiu village, he pulled off at the Standard station, bought gas, and used the pay phone. He called Cowboy Dashee's home number. The phone rang six times before Cowboy answered. Dashee had been asleep.
'I didn't think bachelors went to bed so early,' Chee said. 'Sorry about that. But I need to know something. Did they find the dope?'
'Hell,' Dashee said. 'We didn't find nothing. That's why I'm trying to get some sleep. The sheriff wanted us out there at daylight. Everybody figured they'd hauled that stuff up the arroyo in that carryall and then hid it someplace around there. If they did, we sure as hell couldn't find it.'
'Does anybody really know what you're looking for?' Chee asked. 'Any idea how big it is, or what it weighs, or how big a hole it would take to bury it?'
'Seem to,' Cowboy said. 'They were talking about a hundred pounds or so and something as bulky as maybe three forty-pound sacks of flour. Or maybe a bunch of smaller packages.'
'So they do know what they're after,' Chee said. 'The dea was there?'
'Johnson was. And a couple of fbi agents from Flagstaff.'
'And you didn't find anything interesting? No dope, no machine guns, no tape-recorded messages on how to ransom the cargo, no dead bodies, no maps. Absolutely nothing?'
'Found a few tracks,' Cowboy said. 'Nothing useful. There just flat wasn't any big cache of dope hidden up there. If they hauled it up there in that gmc in the first place, then they just hauled it off again, and we didn't see any sign of that. Wouldn't make sense anyway. Think about it. No sense to it.'
Chee did think about it. He thought about it intermittently all the way north to Chama and then on the long westward drive across the sprawling Jicarilla Apache reservation. As Cowboy said, there was no sense to it. Another apparently irrational knot to be unraveled. Chee could think of only one possible place to find an end to the string. Whoever was vandalizing Windmill Sub-unit 6 had been a hidden witness at the crash. He must have seen something. It was merely a matter of finding him.
It was afternoon when Chee returned to the windmill. He stood looking at it, realizing that any sensible, sensitive human could come to detest it. It was an awkward discordant shape. It clashed with the gentle slope on which it stood.
The sun reflected painfully bright from the zinc coating which armored it against softening rust. It made ugly clanking, groaning noises in the breeze. The last time he'd been here his mood had been cheerful as the morning, and then the mill had seemed merely neutral—a harmless object. But today heat shimmered off the drought- stricken landscape and dust moved in the arid wind, and his mood was as negative as the weather. This ugly object represented injustice to thousands of Navajos. Any one of them might be vandalizing it, or all of them, or any member of their multitudinous families. Or maybe they were taking turns vandalizing it. Whatever, he didn't blame them and he'd never solve the mystery. Maybe it wasn't a Navajo at all. Maybe it was some artistic Hopi whose sense of aesthetics was offended.
Chee walked past the steel storage tank and peered into it. Bone dry. A reservoir for dust. Leaning against the hot metal, Chee took inventory of what he knew. It was all negative. The vandal always used some simple means —no dynamite, cutting torches, or machinery. In other words, nothing to trace down. He apparently arrived on foot or by horse, since Chee had never found any wheel tracks which he couldn't account for. And Jake West had guessed it wasn't a local Navajo, for what that was worth. West could be misleading him deliberately to protect a friend, or West could be wrong. West had not, however, been wrong about bia efficiency. The bia crew had apparently brought the wrong parts, or done something wrong. The gearbox was still not operating and the mill's creaks and groans were as impotent as they'd been for most of the summer.
Chee repeated his methodical examination of the grounds, working in widening circles. He found no off-brand cigarets smeared with odd-colored lipstick, no discarded screwdrivers with handles which still might retain fingerprints, no lost billfolds containing driver's licenses with color photographs of the windmill vandal, no footprints, no tire tracks, nothing. He hadn't expected to. He sat down on the slope, cupped his hand against the dusty wind, and managed to get a cigaret lit. He stared down toward the mill, frowning. He hadn't found anything specific, but something in his subconscious was teasing him. Had he found something without realizing it? Exactly what had he found? Almost nothing. Even the rabbit droppings and the trails of the kangaroo rats were old. The little desert rodents which congregate wherever there is water had moved away. Last year the inevitable leakage around the windmill had provided for them. But now the thick growth of sunflowers, tumbleweeds, and desert asters which had flourished around the storage tank were just dead stalks. The plants were dead and the rodents were gone because the vandal had dried up their chance of living here. Desert ecology had clicked back into balance on this hillside. The
