Probably he wouldn't.
'Captain,' he said.
Largo looked up.
'Johnson had trouble with that lost fifty minutes at the airplane. Do you?'
'I don't think so,' Largo said. His expression was totally neutral. 'I know something Johnson doesn't.' He held up the folder. 'I know how slow you work.'
Chapter Six
Jake west was behind the counter explaining the ramifications of money orders to a teenaged Navajo girl who seemed to want to buy something out of the Sears catalog. West had acknowledged Chee's presence with a nod and a grin but had done nothing to hurry his dealings with his customer. Nor did Chee expect him to. He leaned against the metal of the frozen foods cabinet, and waited for West, and thought his thoughts, and listened to the three gossips who were talking about witches on the porch just outside the open door. The three were a middle- aged Navajo woman (a Gishi, Chee had deduced), an elderly Navajo woman, and an even older Navajo man, whom the younger woman had called Hosteen Yazzie. She was doing most of the talking, loudly for the benefit of a hard- of-hearing audience. The subject was witchcraft in the Black Mesa-Wepo Wash country. The witchcraft gossip sounded typical of what one expected to hear in a season of drought or hard times—and for the Joint Use Reservation Navajos this was indeed a season of hard times. The usual pattern. Somebody had been out at dusk hunting a ram and had seen a man lurking around, and the man had turned into an owl and flown away. One of the Gishi girls had heard her horses all excited and had gone out to see about it, and a dog had been bothering them, and she shot at the dog with her .22, and the dog had turned into a man and disappeared in the darkness. An old man back on the mesa had heard sounds on the roof of his hogan during the night, and had seen something coming down through the smoke hole. Maybe it was dislodged dirt. Maybe it was corpse powder dropped by the witch. Chee's attention wandered. He heard Hosteen Yazzie say, 'I guess the witch got the corpse powder from that man he killed,' and then Chee was listening again, intently now. The Gishi woman said, 'I guess so,' and the conversation drifted away, to another day and another subject. Chee shifted his weight against the refrigerator case and considered the witch who had killed a man. If he walked through the door and asked Hosteen Yazzie to explain himself, he would meet only blank silence. These Navajos didn't know him. They'd never talk of witchcraft to a person who might be the very witch who was worrying them.
From across the store, West's laugh boomed out. He was leaning over the teenager now, his bulk making her seem a scaled-down model of a girl. He'd weigh 275 pounds, Chee guessed, maybe 300—some of it fat and some of it muscle, built on a barrel-like frame which made him seem short until he stood close to you. The laughter showed a great row of teeth through a curly beard. Where the beard and mustache didn't hide it, Jake West's face was a moonscape of pits and pockmarks. Only his forehead, revealed by a central baldness, was smooth—a placid lake of pink skin surrounded by a mass of graying curls.
Jim Chee had first met West when Chee was brand new in the district—the day they'd recovered John Doe's body. And the day after they'd brought the body in, the dispatcher had relayed a message to drop in at the Burnt Water store because West had something to tell him. The something hadn't been much—a little information which suggested the location one of the area's bootleggers might be using to deliver to his customers. But it was that day that Chee had seen, actually seen, Joseph Musket. It isn't often that a cop gets to see the burglar the day before the burglary.
Chee had parked in front, come in, seen West in his office in conversation with a young man wearing a red shirt. West had shouted something like 'Be with you in a minute,' and in a minute the young man had walked out of West's office and past Chee and out the front door. West stood at the office door, glaring after him.
'That son of a bitch,' West had said. 'I fired him.'
'He didn't look like he cared much,' Chee had said.
'I guess he didn't,' West said. 'I give him a job so he can qualify for parole and the bastard shows up for work whenever it damn well pleases him. And that ain't often. And I think he was stealing from me.'
'Want to file a complaint?'
'Let it go,' West said. 'He used to be a friend of my son's. My boy wasn't ever good at picking friends.'
And the very next morning, there'd been another call. Somebody had unlocked the storage room where West kept jewelry pawned by his customers, and walked out with about forty of the best pieces. Only West and Joseph Musket had access to the key. Since then Chee had learned a little about West. He'd operated the Burnt Water store for twenty years. He'd come from Phoenix, or Los Angeles, depending on your source, and he'd once been married to a Hopi woman, but no longer was. He'd had a son, maybe two, by a previous marriage, and had established a fairly good reputation, as reputations go among trading post operators. He was not on Captain Largo's list of known bootleggers, had never been nailed fencing stolen property, paid relatively fair prices for the jewelry he took in pawn and charged relatively fair interest rates, and seemed to get along well with both Navajo and Hopi customers. The Hopis, Chee had been told, considered him a
He loomed down the counter toward Chee, teeth showing white through the beard in a huge grin.
'Officer Chee,' he said, offering his hand. It engulfed Chee's hand, but the handshake, like the voice, was surprisingly gentle. 'You're just a little bit late. I expected you five minutes ago.' The grin had been converted to sternness.
Chee had seen West's playfulness before. He wasn't fooled. But he played along.
'How'd you know when I was coming?'
'Mind power,' West said. 'And because you Navajos won't believe in powers like that, I planted a thought in your mind so I could prove it to you.' West stared down at Chee, his eyes fierce. 'You are thinking of a card.'
'Nope,' Chee said.
'Yes you are,' West insisted. 'It's subconscious. You don't even know it yourself, but I planted the thought. Now quit wasting our time and tell me the card.'
Chee found himself thinking of cards. A deck of cards spilled across a table. A bunch of spades. No particular card.
