She put down the glass and looked directly at Chee. 'That's when he told me about being sick. It was easy enough to see anyway, with the way he looked. But anyway, he said the white man couldn't give him any more trouble than he already had, because he had cancer in his liver.' She used the Navajo phrase for it—'the sore that never heals.'
'That's what his daughter told me,' Chee said. 'Cancer of the liver.'
Janet Pete was studying Chee's face. It was a habit that Chee had learned slowly, and come to tolerate slowly, and that still sometimes made him uneasy. Another of those cultural differences that Mary found odd and exotic.
('That first month or two in class I was always saying: 'Look at me when I talk to you,' and the kids simply wouldn't do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive, deceptive.'
And Chee had said something about it not seeming odd or evasive to him. It seemed merely polite. Only the rude peered into one's face during a conversation. And Mary Landon had asked him how this worked for a policeman. Surely, she'd said, they must be trained to look for all those signals facial expressions reveal while the speaker is lying, or evading, or telling less than the truth. And he had said… )
'You needed to know who called me,' Janet Pete was saying, 'because you suspect that whoever called is the one who killed Roosevelt Bistie. Isn't that it?'
Like police academy, Chee thought, law schools teach interrogators a different conversational technique than Navajo mothers. The white way. The way of looking for what the handbook on interrogation called 'nonverbal signals.' Chee found himself trying to keep his face blank, to send no such signals. 'That's possible,' he said. 'It may have happened that way.'
'In fact,' Janet Pete said, slowly and thoughtfully, 'you think this man used me. Used me to get Mr. Bistie out of jail and home…' Her voice trailed off.
Chee had been looking out past the window's painted lettering. The wind had changed direction just a little— enough to pull loose the leaves and twigs and bits of paper it had pinned against the sheep fence across the highway. Now the gusts were pulling these away, sending them skittering along the pavement. Changing winds meant changing weather. Maybe, finally, it would rain. But the new tone in Janet Pete's voice drew his attention back to her.
'Used me to get him out where he could be killed.'
She looked at Chee for confirmation.
'He would have gotten out, anyway,' Chee said. 'The FBI had him, and the FBI didn't charge him with anything. We couldn't have—'
'But I think that man wanted Mr. Bistie out before he would talk to anyone. Doesn't that make sense?'
It was exactly the thought that had brought him looking for Janet Pete.
'Doubtful,' Chee said. 'Probably no connection at all.'
Janet Pete was reading his nonverbal signals. Rude, Chee thought. No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual's privacy.
'It's not doubtful at all,' she said. 'You are lying to me now.' But she smiled. 'That's kind of you. But I can't help but feel responsible.' She looked very glum. 'I am responsible. Somebody wants to kill my client, so they call me and have me get him out where they can shoot him.' She picked up her glass, noticed it was empty, put it down again. 'He didn't even particularly want to be my client. The guy who wanted to shut him up just put me on the job.'
'It probably wasn't that way,' Chee said. 'Different people, probably. Some friend called you, not knowing that this madman was coming along.'
'I'm getting to be a jinx,' Janet Pete said. 'Typhoid Mary. A sort of curse.'
Chee waited for the explanation. Janet Pete offered none. She sat, her square shoulders slumped a little, and looked sadly at her hands.
'Why jinx?' Chee said.
'This is the second time this happened,' Janet Pete said, without looking at Chee. 'Last time it was Irma. Irma Onesalt.'
'The woman who got killed over by… You knew her?'
'Not very well,' Janet said. She produced a humorless laugh. 'A client.'
'I want to hear about it,' Chee said. Leaphorn seemed to think there might be some connection between the Onesalt killing and the Sam and Endocheeney cases. The lieutenant had been very interested when Chee had told him about the letter Endocheeney received from Onesalt's office. It didn't seem likely, but maybe there was some sort of link.
'That's how I heard about Officer Jim Chee,' Janet Pete said, studying him. 'Irma Onesalt said you did her a favor, but she didn't like you.'
'I don't understand,' Chee said. And he didn't. He felt foolish. The only time he'd met Onesalt, the only time he could remember, had been that business about picking up the patient at the clinic—the wrong Begay business.
'She told me you were supposed to deliver a witness to a chapter meeting and you showed up with the wrong man and screwed everything all up. But she said she owed you something. That you'd done her a favor.'
'What?'
'She didn't say. I think it must have been some sort of accident. I remember she said you helped her out and you didn't even know it.'
'I sure didn't,' Chee said. 'And don't.' He waved at the man behind the counter, signaling a need for refills. 'How was she your client?'
