“I didn’t offer Hosteen Pinto a drink. I remember that. Wouldn’t be the thing to do, him being alcoholic. But I poured myself one, and sat here and sipped at it.” McGinnis sipped his bourbon, thinking.
“I read the letter to him and he said something strong.” McGinnis examined his memory. “Strong. I think he called Tagert a coyote, and that’s about as strong as a Navajo will get. And at first he wasn’t going to work for him. I remember that. Then he said something like Tagert paid good. And that’s what had brought him in here in the first place. Money. You notice that belt out in the pawn case?”
McGinnis pushed himself out of the rocker and disappeared through the doorway into the store.
Leaphorn looked at Bourebonette. “I’ll tell the FBI about Tagert,” he said.
“You think they’ll do anything?”
“They should,” he said. But maybe they wouldn’t. Why would they? Their case was already made. And what difference did it make anyway?
McGinnis reappeared carrying a concha belt. The overhead light reflected dimly off the tarnished silver.
“This was always old Pinto’s fallback piece. The last thing he pawned when he was running low.” McGinnis’s gnarled hand stroked the silver disks. “It’s a dandy.”
He handed it to Professor Bourebonette.
Leaphorn could see it was indeed a dandy. An old, heavy one made of the turn-of-the-century silver Mexican five-peso pieces. Worth maybe two thousand dollars from a collector. Worth maybe four hundred in pawn credit.
“Trouble is he’d already pawned it,” McGinnis said. “Not only pawned it. He’d been in twice to bump up the loan. He wanted another fifty dollars in groceries on it and we was jawing about that when the mail truck came up.”
McGinnis was rocking while he remembered, holding the Coca-Cola glass in left hand, tilting it back and forth in compensation for the rocking motion. Exactly as he’d seen him do it when Leaphorn was twenty years younger, coming in here to learn where families had moved, to collect gossip, just to talk. Leaphorn felt a dizzying sense of dislocation in time. Everything was the same. As if twenty years hadn’t ticked away. The cluttered old room, the musty smell, the yellow light, the old man grown older, as if in the blink of an eye. Suddenly he knew just what McGinnis would do next, and McGinnis did it.
He leaned, picked up the Old Crow bottle by the neck, and carefully recharged his glass, dripping the last of the recharge until it was exactly up to the trademark.
“I’ve seen Pinto poor before. Many times. But that day he was totally tapped out. Said he was out of coffee and cornmeal and lard and just about everything and Mary wasn’t in any shape to help him with her own bunch to feed.”
McGinnis fell silent, rocking, tasting the whiskey on his tongue.
“So he took the job,” Professor Bourebonette said.
“So he did,” McGinnis said. “Had me write Tagert right back.” He took another tiny sip, and savored it in a silence that made the creaking of his rocker seem loud.
A question hung in Leaphorn’s mind: Why had Pinto called Tagert a coyote? It was a hard, hard insult among the Navajos?implying not just bad conduct but the evil of malice. Mary Keeyani said Tagert had given him whiskey. Would that be the reason? Leaphorn noticed his interest in this affair growing.
“But I know he didn’t want to,” McGinnis added. “I said, What’s wrong with this fella? He looks all right to me. He pays you good money, don’t he? He’s just another one of them professors. And old Ashie said Tagert wants me to do something I don’t want to do. And I said what’s that, and he said he wants me to find something for him. And I said well hell, you do that all the time, and he was quiet a while. And then he said, you don’t have to go looking for Coyote. Coyote’s always out there waiting.”
Professor Bourebonette had offered to share driving on the way home and Leaphorn had explained to her that Tribal Police rules prohibited it. Now, about fifty miles east of Tuba City, Leaphorn began wishing he hadn’t. He was exhausted. Talking had helped keep sleep at bay for the first hour or so. They talked about McGinnis, about what Tagert might have wanted Hosteen Pinto to find, about Pinto’s reluctance. They discussed how Navajo mythology related to the origin story of the Old Testament, and to myths of the Plains Indians, and police techniques in criminal investigations, and civil rights, and academic politics. She had told him about the work she had done studying mythology in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam, before the intensifying war made it impossible. And now Leaphorn was talking about his days as a graduate student at Arizona State, and specifically about a professor who was either weirdly absent-minded or over the hill into senility.
“Trouble is, I’m beginning to notice I’m forgetting things myself,” he concluded.
The center stripe had become double, waving off in two directions. Leaphorn shook his head, jarring himself awake. He glanced at Bourebonette to see if she’d noticed.
Professor Bourebonette’s chin was tilted slightly forward, her head leaned against the door. Her face was relaxed in sleep.
Leaphorn studied her. Emma had slept like that sometimes on late night returns. Relaxed. Trusting him. Chapter 6
THE BATTERED WHITE Jecpster proved remarkably easy to locate. It sat in space number seventeen in a weedy parking lot guarded by a sign that declared:
SHIP ROCK HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER/STAFF PARKING ONLY
Janet Pete parked her little Toyota two-door beside the jeep. She’d changed out of her go-see-a-sick-friend skirt into jeans and a long-sleeved blue shirt.
“There it is. Exactly as you planned,” she said. “You want to wait here for the owner?” She motioned to the cars streaming out of the teacher/staff parking lot, a surprising number it seemed to Chee. “It shouldn’t be long.”
“I want to know who I’m talking to,” Chee said, climbing out. “I’ll go ask.”
The secretary in the principal’s office looked at Jim Chee’s badge, and through the window to where he was
