Chee.
“I went to school here, you know,” Chee said, simply to have something to say, to cover his disappointment.
They were walking under the sycamores that shaded the great brick expanse of the central mall. A squadron of teenaged skateboarders thundered past. Janet Pete glanced at him, curious about the change of subject and the sudden silence which had preceded it.
“After four years,” she said, “a campus starts to feel like home.”
“Seven for me,” Chee said. “You go a couple of semesters and then run out of money, and come back again when you’ve stacked some up again. That’s the average here, I think. About seven years to get a bachelor’s degree. But it never started to feel like home.”
“It was different at Stanford,” Janet said. “People either had money or they had the big scholarships. You lived around the campus, so you got acquainted, made friends. It’s more a community, I guess.” She glanced at him again. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
“Your mood changed. A cloud over the sun.”
“I shifted from the social mode into strictly business,” Chee said.
“Oh?” Puzzlement in her voice.
“You’re representing Ashie Pinto. Right?” The tone was a little bleaker than he’d intended.
They walked past the Student Union without an answer to that, toward the fountain formed of a great slab of natural stone. Chee remembered the local legend that the university architect, lacking funds for an intended sculpture, had scrounged the monolithic sheets of rough marble from a quarry and arranged them in something that might suggest Stonehenge, or raw nature, or whatever your imagination allowed.
It worked beautifully and usually it lifted Chee’s spirits.
“I came to see you because I like you,” Janet Pete said. “If you weren’t my friend, which you happen to be, I would have come looking for you because you’re the arresting officer and it’s my job.”
Chee thought about that.
“So I had two reasons,” she said. “Is that one too many reasons for you?”
“What did I say?” Chee asked. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Hell you didn’t. Then why am I feeling like I’m on the defensive?” Janet said. “And not exactly knowing why.” She hurried a little faster. “Boy,” she said. “Boy, I can see why that white girl of yours went back to Wisconsin.”
Chee caught up with her.
“What was her name? Mary?”
“Mary Landon,” Chee said. “Look, I’m sorry. I know how it is. Somebody has to represent Pinto and naturally it would be you. So what do you want to know?”
Janet Pete, still walking fast, was out of the trees now, angling across the parking lot past Popejoy Hall. Chee followed her out under a morning sky that was dark blue and sunny?with just enough of those puffy forenoon clouds to suggest autumn was not too far along to produce afternoon thunder-heads.
“FBI’s not cooperating, huh?” Chee said. “What do you want to know?”
“Nothing,” Janet said.
“Come on, Janet. I said I was sorry.”
“Well,” she said. And then she laughed up at him, squeezed his arm.
“I can be as touchy as you are,” she said. “I can be a real bitch.” She laughed again. “But notice how neatly I put you in the wrong. Did you appreciate that?”
“Not much,” Chee said. “Is that something you learn in law school?”
“It’s something you learn from your mother.”
Jim Chee’s taste for coffee had been brutalized by years of drinking the version he used to make for himself in his trailer under the cottonwood trees at Ship Rock?recently he’d taken to using little filter things that fit over his cups. The Frontier coffee tasted fresh but weak. Over a second refill they decided that he would cash in his return ticket on the Mesa Airlines flight and ride back to Ship Rock with Janet Pete. Tomorrow he’d show her the scene of the crime. By tomorrow, he thought, he would feel like talking about it.
“Did you know Hosteen Pinto still won’t say anything about what happened?” Janet asked. “He’ll talk to me about other things but not about the crime. He just shuts up.”
“What’s there to say?”
“Well, everything. Whether he did it, for one thing. Why he did it, if he did. What he was doing out there. Did you know he’s a shaman, a crystal gazer? He finds things for people. That seems to be his only income. That and getting fees as an informant. From scholars, I mean. He’s sort of an authority on old stories, legends, what happened when. So the history professors, and the mythologists, and the sociologists, and that sort of people are always having him remember things on tape for them. He has a car, but it doesn’t run, so how did he get there? I mean where he was when you arrested him. What was he doing about two hundred miles from home? That’s what I want him to tell me. And if he did it, why. Everything.”
“He did it because he was drunk,” Chee said. “Nez picked him up to get him out of the rain, tried to put him in the backseat of the patrol car, and Pinto got sore about it.”
“That seems to be the official ‘theory of the Coyote Walts crime.’ I know that’s what the U.S. attorney is going to trial with,” Janet said.
