'Leaf People,' the thinner one said. 'Born for Mud.' His face was sullen.
Chee's efficient nose picked up a whiff of alcohol. Beer. The Leaf Clan man let his eyes drift from Chee to study the police car. He gestured vaguely toward the other man. 'My brother,' he said.
'What's happening over your way?' Iron Woman asked. 'I heard on the radio they had a knifing at a wedding over at Teec Nos Pos. One of the Gorman outfit got cut. Anything to that?'
Chee knew very little about that one—just what he'd overheard before the morning patrol meeting. Normally he worked east and south out of Shiprock—not this mostly empty northwestern area. He put the beer (possession illegal on the reservation) out of his mind and tried to remember what he had heard.
'Didn't amount to much,' Chee said. 'Fella was fooling with a girl and she had a knife. Stuck him in the arm. I think she was a Standing Rock girl. Not much to it.'
Iron Woman looked disappointed. 'It got on the radio, though,' she said. 'Lot of people around here related to the Gorman outfit.'
Chee had gone to the battered red pop cooler just inside the front door, inserted two quarters, and tried to open the lid.
'Takes three,' Iron Woman said. 'Costs too much to get that stuff hauled way out here. And icing it down. Now everybody wants it cold.'
'No more change,' Chee said. He fished out a dollar and handed it to Iron Woman. It was dark inside the store and much cooler. At the cash register, Iron Woman handed him four quarters.
'Last time you were with that FBI man—asking about the one that got killed,' she said, respecting the Navajo taboo of not speaking the name of the dead. 'You find out who killed that man?'
Chee shook his head.
'That fellow that came through here looking for him the day he was killed. Sounded to me like he did it.'
'That's a crazy thing,' Chee said. 'We found that man at his hogan over in the Chuskas. A man they call Roosevelt Bistie. Bistie told us he came over here to kill that man who got killed. And the man Bistie was after was up on his roof fixing something, and Bistie shot at him and he fell off. But whoever killed the man did it with a butcher knife.'
'That's right,' Iron Woman said. 'Sure as hell, it was a knife. I remember his daughter telling me that.' She shook her head, peered at Chee again. 'Why would that fellow tell you he shot him?'
'We can't figure that out, either,' Chee said. 'Bistie said he wanted to kill the man, but he won't say why.'
Iron Woman frowned. 'Roosevelt Bistie,' she said. 'Never heard of him. I remember when he stopped in here asking directions, I never had seen him before. The man's kinfolks, do they know this Bistie?'
'None of them we've talked to,' Chee said. He was thinking of how disapproving Kennedy would be if he could hear Chee discussing this case with a layman. Captain Largo too, for that matter, Largo having been a cop long enough to start acting secretive. But Kennedy was FBI to the bone, and the first law of the Agency was, Say nothing to nobody. If Kennedy were here, listening to this Navajo talk, he'd be waiting impatiently for a translation —knowing that Chee must be telling this woman more than she needed to know. However, Kennedy wasn't here, and Chee had his own operating theory. The more you tell people, the more people tell you. Nobody, certainly no Navajo, wants to be second in the business of telling things.
Chee dropped in quarters and selected a Nehi Orange. Cold and wonderful. Iron Woman talked. Chee sipped. Outside, noonday heat radiated from the packed earth of the yard, causing the light to shimmer. Chee finished his soda pop. The four-by-four drove away with a roar, dust spurting from its wheels. Beer in the four-by-four, Chee guessed. Unless the boys had bought it here. But if Iron Woman was a bootlegger, he hadn't heard it, and he hadn't remembered seeing this place on the map Largo kept of liquor sources in his subagency territory. Beer in the morning, and an expensive rig to drive. Iron Woman had said the two were part of the Kayonnie outfit, which ran goats down along the San Juan to the north and sometimes worked in the oil fields. But Iron Woman obviously did not want to discuss the Kayonnie boys, her neighbors, with a stranger. The local murder victim was another matter. She couldn't understand who would do it. He was a harmless old man. He stayed at home. Since his wife had died, he rarely came even as far as the trading post. Maybe two or three times a year, sometimes riding in on a horse, sometimes coming with a relative when a relative came to see him. No Endocheeney daughters to bring home their husbands, so the old man had lived alone. Only thing important she could remember happening involving him was a Red Ant Way sing done for him six or seven years ago to cure him of something or other after his woman died. In all the years she'd been at Badwater, which was all her life, she couldn't remember him getting into any kind of trouble, or being involved in bad problems. 'Like getting your wood on somebody else's wood-gathering place, or getting into some other family's water, or running his sheep where they shouldn't be, or not helping out somebody that needed it. Never heard anything bad about him. Never been in any trouble. Always helping out at sheep dippings, always tried to take care of his kinfolks, always there when somebody was having a sing.'
'I don't know if I ever told you that I have studied to be a
The next lines provided his address and telephone number at the Shiprock Police Station. He had mentioned this to the dispatcher, thinking he would square it with Captain Largo if the captain ever learned about it. So far, the risk seemed small. There had been no calls, and no letters.
Iron Woman seemed to share the general lack of enthusiasm. She glanced at the card and laid it on the counter.
'Everybody liked him,' Iron Woman said, getting back on the subject. 'But now he's dead, some people are saying he was a skinwalker.' Her face reflected distaste. 'Sons-a-bitches,' she added, clarifying that the distaste was not for skinwalkers but for the gossips. 'When you live by yourself, people say things like that.'
Or when you get stabbed to death, Chee thought. Violent death always seemed to provoke witch talk.
'If everybody around here liked him,' Chee said, 'then whoever killed him must have come from someplace else. Like Bistie. Did he know anybody anywhere else?'
