her.
JIM CHEE
HATATHALI
Singer of The Blessing Way Available for other ceremonials, For consultation call
(P.O. Box 112, Shiprock, N.M.)
Since he had no telephone at his trailer, he'd left the number blank. His plan had been to list the Shiprock police station number, gambling that by the time Largo got wind of it and blew the whistle, he'd have a reputation and a following established. But the dispatcher had balked. 'Besides, Jim,' she'd argued, 'what will the people think? They call for a singer to do a ceremonial and when the phone rings somebody says, `Navajo Tribal Police.''
'Give me some more,' the girl said. 'I'll stick one up on the board, too. Okay?'
'Sure,' Chee said. 'And give them to people. Especially if you hear of anybody sick.'
She took the cards. 'But what's a hatathali doing looking for a Christian preacher?'
'A minute ago, when I asked you if Nakai said anything about where he was headed, you said not to you. Did he tell somebody else?'
'He made a phone call,' she said. 'Asked if he could borrow the phone here'--she tapped the telephone on her desk--'and called somebody.' She stopped, eyeing Chee doubtfully.
'And you overheard some of it?'
'I don't eavesdrop,' she said.
' `Course not,' Chee said. 'But the man's talking right there at your desk. How can you help it? Did he say where he was going?'
'No,' she said. 'He didn't say that.'
Chee was smart enough to realize he was being teased. He smiled at her. 'After a while you are going to tell me what he said,' Chee said. 'But not yet.'
'I just might not tell you at all,' she said, grinning a delighted grin.
'What if I tell you a scary story? That I'm not really a medicine man. I'm a cop and I'm looking for a missing woman, and Nakai is not really a preacher. He's a gangster, and he's already killed a couple of people, and I'm on his trail, and you are my only chance of catching him before he shoots everybody else.'
She laughed. 'That would fit right in with what he said on the phone. Very mysterious.'
Chee managed to keep grinning. Just barely.
'Like what?'
She made herself comfortable. 'Oh,' she said. 'He said, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Then he listened. Then he said something like, it made him nervous. And to be careful. And then he said somebody-else-or- other was who he worried about and the only way to warn him was to go out to his hogan and find him. He said he was going to cancel his revival here and go up there. And then he listened a long time, and then he said he didn't know how far. It was over into Utah.' She shrugged. 'That's about it.'
'About it isn't good enough.'
'Well, that's all I remember.'
Apparently it was. She was blank on both so-and-so and somebody-else-or-other. Chee left, thinking 'over into Utah' was over into the country Leaphorn wanted Nakai cross-examined about--the source of Friedman-Bernal's pot obsession. He was also thinking that heading into the Four Corners would take him past Shiprock. Maybe he would take the night off, if he was tired when he got there. Maybe he would run Slick Nakai to earth tomorrow. But why had Nakai changed his plans and headed for the Utah border? Who knows? 'So-and-so' was probably Etcitty. 'Somebody-else-or-other' probably another of Nakai's converts who stole pots on the side. To Chee, Nakai was seeming increasingly odd.
He was driving through the Bisti Badlands, headed north toward Farmington, when the five o'clock news began. A woman reporting from the Durango, Colorado, station on the letting of a contract for range improvement on the Ute Mountain Reservation, and a controversy over the environmental impact of an additional ski run at Purgatory, and a recall petition being circulated to unseat a councilman at Aztec, New Mexico. Chee reached up to change the channel. He'd get more New Mexico news from a Farmington station. 'In other news of the Four Corners country,' the woman said, 'a prominent and sometimes controversial Southeast Utah rancher and political figure has been shot to death at his ranch near Bluff.'
Chee stopped, hand on the dial.
'A spokesman for the Garfield County Sheriffs Office at Blanding said the victim has been identified as Harrison Houk, a former Utah state senator and one of southern Utah's biggest ranch operators. The body of Houk was found in his barn last night. The sheriffs office said he had been shot twice.
'Some twenty years ago, Houk's family was the victim of one of the Four Corners' worst tragedies. Houk's wife and a son and daughter were shot to death, apparently by a mentally disturbed younger son who then drowned himself in the San Juan.
'Across the line in Arizona, a suit has been filed in federal district court ata?S'
Chee clicked off the radio. He wanted to think. Houk was the man to whom Nakai had sold pots. Houk lived at Bluff, on the San Juan. Maybe Etcitty was Nakai's 'so-and-so.' More likely it would be Houk. Could Nakai have heard of Houk's murder en route to Tsaya? Probably, on an earlier newscast. That would explain the abrupt change in plans. Or maybe Houk was 'somebody-else-or-other' -- the man Nakai wanted to warn. Too late for that now. Either way, it seemed clear that Nakai would be headed to somewhere very close to Bluff, to where Houk, his customer for pots, had been killed.
Chee decided he would work overtime. If he could find the elusive Nakai tonight, he would.
