'That must have been while I was looking for Old Lady George,' Chee said. He explained, hurrying through the last stages because of Largo's expression.
'Get to work,' Largo said, 'and leave this alone. Sergeant Benally will be chasing the backhoe. Don't mess with it.'
That was Tuesday morning and should have been the very bottom of the week. The pits. It would have been, perhaps, had not Chee driven past the Texaco station on 550 and seen Delbert Tsosie stacking tires. Benally was handling it, but Chee sometimes bought gasoline from Tsosie. No harm in stopping to talk.
'No,' Tsosie said. 'Didn't see either one of them well enough to recognize `em. But you could see one was Dineh -- tall, skinny Navajo. Had on a cowboy hat. I know a lot of 'em that works at the motor pool. They come over here and use the Coke machine and buy candy.
Wasn't none I knew and I was thinking it was a funny time to be coming to work. But I thought they must have forgotten something and was coming for it. And when I saw the backhoe I figured some pipe broke somewhere. Emergency, you know.' Tsosie shrugged.
'You didn't recognize anybody?'
'Bad light.'
'Guy in the truck. You see him at all?'
'Not in the truck,' Tsosie said. 'The skinny Navajo was driving the truck. This guy was following in a sedan. Plymouth two-door. About a `70, '71 maybe. Dark blue but they was doing some bodywork on it. Had an off-color right front fender. Looked white or gray. Maybe primer coat. And lots of patches here and there, like they was getting ready to paint it.'
'Driver not a Navajo?'
'Navajo driving the truck. Belagana driving the Plymouth. And the white guy, I just barely got a look at him. They all sort of look alike anyway. All I notice is freckles and sunburn.'
'Big or little?'
Tsosie thought. 'About average. Maybe sort of short and stocky.'
'What color hair?'
'Had a cap on. Baseball cap. With a bill.'
None of which would have mattered since Benally was handling it, and Tsosie had already told Benally all of this, and probably more. But Saturday morning Chee saw the Plymouth two-door.
It was dark blue, about a 70 model. When it passed him going in the other direction -- Shiprock-bound on 550 -- he saw the mismatched front fender and the patches of primer paint on its doors and the baseball cap on the head of the white man driving it. Without a thought, Chee did a U-turn across the bumpy divider.
He was driving Janet Pete's car. Not exactly Janet Pete's car. Janet had put down earnest money on a Buick Riviera at Quality Pre-owned Cars in Farmington and had asked Chee to test-drive it for her. She had to go to Phoenix Friday and when she got back Monday she wanted to close the deal.
'I guess I've already decided,' Janet had told him. 'It has everything I need and only fourteen thousand miles on it and the price seems reasonable and he's giving me a thousand dollars on my old Datsun and that seems fair.'
To Chee the thousand for the Datsun seemed enough more than fair to arouse suspicion. Janet's Datsun was a junker. But it was clear that Janet was not going to be receptive to discouraging words. She described the Buick as 'absolutely beautiful.' As she described it, the lawyer in Janet Pete fell away. The girl emerged through the delight and enthusiasm, and Janet Pete became absolutely beautiful herself.
'It has the prettiest blue plush upholstery. Lovely color. Dark blue outside with a real delicate pinstripe down the side, and the chrome is just right.' She looked slightly guilty at this. 'I don't usually like chrome,' she said. 'But thisa?S' She performed a gesture with shoulder and face that depreciated this lapse from taste. 'a?S But thisa?S well, I just love it.'
She paused, examining Chee and transforming herself from girl to lawyer. 'I thought maybe you would check it out for me. You drive all the time and you know all about mechanical things. If you don't mind doing it, and there's something seriously wrong with the engine, or something like that, then I coulda?S'
She had left the awful statement unfinished. And Chee had accepted the keys and said sure, he'd be glad to do it. Which wasn't exactly the case. If there was something seriously wrong with the engine, telling her about it wasn't going to make him popular with Janet Pete. And Chee wanted to be popular. He wondered about her. He wondered about a woman lawyer. To be more precise, he wondered if Janet Pete, or any woman, could fill the gap Mary Landon seemed to be leaving in his life.
That was Friday evening. Saturday morning he drove the Buick down to Bernie Tso's garage and put it on the rack. Bernie was not impressed.
'Fourteen thousand miles, my ass,' Bernie said. 'Look at the tread on those tires. And here.' Bernie rattled the universal joint. 'Arizona don't have a law about running back the odometer, but New Mexico does,' he said. 'And she got this junker over in New Mexico. I'd say they fudged the first number a little. Turned her back from forty-four thousand, or maybe seventy-four.'
He finished his inspection of the running gear and lowered the hoist. 'Steering's slack, too,' he said. 'Want me to pull the head and take a look there?'
'Maybe later,' Chee said. 'I'll take it out and see what I can find and then I'll let her decide if she wants to spend any money on it.'
And so he had driven Janet Pete's blue Buick out Highway 550 toward Farmington, glumly noting its deficiencies. Slow response to the gas pedal. Probably easy to fix with an adjustment. Tendency to choke on acceleration. Also fixable. Tendency to steer to the right on braking. Suspension far too soft for Chee, who was conditioned to the cast-iron springing of police cars and pickup trucks. Maybe she liked soft suspension, but this one was also uneven--suggesting a bad shock absorber. And, as Bernie had mentioned, slack steering.
He was measuring this slack, swaying down the Farmington-bound lanes of 550, when he saw the Backhoe Bandit. And it was the slack steering, eventually, that did him in.
