Chee took off the headset and pushed the rewind button. He was wasting his time. All he had accomplished by coming here was to confirm what Janet Pete had told him. Ashie Pinto had been discovered long ago by the academic world as a source of what academics treasure. He knew the old tales that contain the history of the Dinee. And he knew the story of how the Holy People had created the humans who were to become the Navajo clans. Wonderful. But what did it have to do with the murder of Delbert Nez? Chee shifted his weight in the hard chair, stretched his legs and thought about that?reexamining the thinking that had led him here. The question that troubled him most wasn’t motive for murder. He knew the motive. Whiskey. Todilhil, the Navajos had named it. Water of Darkness if you translated that word into biligaana language. But Navajos sometimes mispronounced it. Todilhaal, they’d say. Making it mean “sucking in darkness,” and enjoying the wry irony of the pun. The savagery of whiskey erased the need for a motive. No Navajo policeman?or any policeman?had to relearn that message. Death slept in the bottle, only waiting to be released, and every policeman knew it. The question that nagged at Chee was a different one. What motivated the old man to come halfway across Arizona into New Mexico to an empty place beside a lonely road? There had to be a reason for that. And how the devil did he get there? Pinto made tapes for the scholars. Maybe he had been working for a scholar that day. Maybe a check of scholars who harvested Ashie Pinto’s vast memory would provide a list of names. Leads. Maybe listening to the tapes these harvesters of memory collected would tell him what attracted Pinto to the Ship Rock country. Maybe not. Whatever the truth of that, Chee now had his list of who had made these tapes.
He looked at the notebook.
Professor Christopher Tagert, University of New Mexico, Department of History.
Professor Roger Davenport, University of Utah, Department of Anthropology.
Professor Louisa Bourebonette, Northern Arizona University, Department of American Studies.
Professor Alfonso Villareal, University of New Mexico, Language and Linguistics.
Perhaps there were others. These names simply represented tapes of Pinto’s recollections available in this library. If others existed in any library they could be found, copied, and sent here. The very pleasant woman at the Special Collections desk had assured him of that. Chee decided not to bother. The only thing that seemed even vaguely promising was one of the Tagert tapes. In it, Pinto was remembering what his grandfather had told him about two white men being killed somewhere south of the San Juan and east of the Chuska. Tagert’s cross- examination focused on where the two had come from, when it had happened, and where they had died. Pinto’s answers had seemed vague but Tagert hadn’t pursued it.
Perhaps there was a later tape. He’d look Tagert up in the faculty directory, call him, and ask about it.
He checked in the tapes and the tape player at the desk.
“I noticed you didn’t sign the register,” the woman at the desk told him. “We ask people to do that.” She pointed to the ledger open on the table beside the door.
Chee filled in his name and address, left the space for “academic department” blank, and jotted “Ashie Pinto tapes” in the “material required” space, and then noted the date and the hour checked out and in. The name on the line above was John Todman. He noticed the old pictures Todman was examining were listed as “Golightly mining camp photographs.”
Who else, he wondered, would be interested in Ashie Pinto’s old tapes? Probably no one. He turned the page, scanned it. Turned it again. And again. And again. Six pages back, on a page where the first dates were mid-July, he found the legend “Navajo language tapes?Pinto.”
The person who signed for them was William Redd.
Chee pursed his lips. He turned the page again. William Redd had also required the same tapes the previous day, and the day before, and the day before that. He jotted the name and address in his notebook and glanced at his watch.
It was still early. He would drive past that address and see if an old green Bronco II was parked there, with REDDNEK vanity plates. Chapter 8
JIM CHEE IN Albuquerque was Jim Chee separated from his vehicle?a duck out of water. He had left his pickup at the Farmington airport yesterday, flown Mesa to Albuquerque, and taken a taxi to his motel. This morning he’d called a cab again to get to the University Medical Center for his appointment at the Burn and Trauma Center. His medical insurance would pay for all that. But taxis were expensive and, like all cities of the trans-Mississippi West, Albuquerque had grown on the presumption that humans over fourteen were driving themselves around in their own cars. There was some bus service if you understood how to use it. Chee didn’t, and taxicabs made Chee uneasy. Now, afoot at the university library, Chee did a typical Western thing. He called a friend to ask for a ride.
“I’m supposed to be working,” Janet Pete said.
“This will be working. Pick me up in the parking lot behind Zimmerman Library and we’ll go work some more on the Ashie Pinto business.”
“Like what?” Janet sounded suspicious.
“Remember you noticed that REDDNEK vanity plate on the Bronco parked out by the lava? Well, I was in the Reserve Room listening to Ashie Pinto tapes and I noticed a guy named Redd had been checking them out. R-E-D- D. Like on the plate. He’d checked them out for four consecutive days just about a week before the murder.”
As Chee said it, it sounded monumentally trivial. He expected Janet to say something like “So what?” Instead she said nothing at all.
“Well?” Chee said. “Is that a good enough excuse?”
“I can’t right now, Jim. I’m right in the middle of finishing something. With people waiting. Can I pick you up in an hour? Hour and a half?”
“Good enough,” Chee said, trying to keep from feeling disgruntled, thinking that Janet was doing something important while he was killing idle time, wondering what she was thinking. “I’ll walk over to the Union and drink coffee.”
Walking across the brick-paved mall he had another idea. Since he couldn’t check on Redd now, he’d go find Professor Tagert, while he was waiting, and see if Tagert could tell him anything.
The Department of History had moved since Chee’s days on the campus. He found it in a handsome old building he remembered as a dormitory.
