went from Chee’s hand to his face. “Chee,” she said, recognition dawning. “You’re the one who arrested Mr. Pinto. You got yourself burned trying to pull that other policeman out of the car.”
Clearly Jean Jacobs was impressed.
“I’m on leave,” Chee said, indicating the hand and feeling embarrassed. “But I’m trying to find out what Pinto was doing out there. Where the crime was committed. How he got there. So forth. And Pinto won’t talk about it.”
Jean Jacobs had another question. “Why did he kill the policeman?”
“He was drunk,” Chee said. It irritated him that it didn’t sound like a convincing motive. “Very drunk.”
Jean Jacobs was looking at Chee. Smiling. Approving.
“I thought maybe Professor Tagert could tell me something helpful. Maybe he was doing something for Tagert. Working with him on something.”
“It might show in his calendar,” Jean Jacobs said. “Let’s look.”
Tagert’s desk calendar was open to the second week in August. The spaces under Monday through Thursday were mostly filled with jottings?Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were blank except for a diagonal line drawn across them and the legend “Go hunting.” Just above the Wednesday space the words “pick up Oldfart” were written in a neat, precise hand.
Chee indicated it with his finger.
“I don’t know who that means,” Jacobs said. “I’m not his TA because I like him,” she explained. “He’s chairman of my dissertation committee. I’m trying to get a doctorate in history. Doing it on the impact of the trading post system on the Western tribes. That falls into Doctor Tagert’s field so he’s chairman of my committee?like it or not.”
“He was here when I was a student,” Chee said. “I remember now. One of my friends told me to avoid Professor Tagert.”
“Good thinking,” Jacobs said. “Sound advice.”
“Except now. Now it looks like he had himself scheduled to pick up somebody, maybe Mr. Pinto, the day before Mr. Pinto shot a policeman. Now I think Tagert could tell me a lot.”
“Well,” Jean Jacobs said, “I wish I could help you find him.” She sorted aimlessly through the papers on the desktop, as if some clue to Tagert’s whereabouts might be among them. Chee flipped forward in the desk calendar. The next week was blank. The following page was cluttered with notations of committee meetings, luncheon engagements, numbers to be called. “Looks like he intended to get back before classes started,” Chee said.
“I noticed that.”
He flipped the pages backward, reentering August, moving out of the time when Nez was dead, to the day Nez died because Chee hadn’t done his job. That page was blank.
Jean Jacobs must have been watching his face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Chee said. “Just remembering.”
He turned the pages back to the date where Tagert had left it, and back another page to a week when Chee had been a happy man. That week, too, was cluttered with the busy Tagert’s notations.
Among them, near the bottom, in the space left for Friday, Tagert had written: “Find out what Redd wants.” That and a telephone number. Chapter 9
REDD ANSWERED THE telephone.
“Jim Chee?” he said. “Chee. Are you the cop who arrested Old Man Pinto?”
“Right,” Chee said. He was surprised. But after all, there had been a lot in the paper about it. And Redd seemed to be involved, somehow, in this odd affair. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. What you know about Pinto.”
“Damn little,” Redd said. “But go ahead and ask. What do you want to know?”
“How about me coming over? I hate to talk on the telephone.”
“Sure,” Redd said, and he gave Chee his address.
Janet Pete was waiting in the lot behind Zimmerman Library, with the unhappy, nervous look of people who are parked in loading zones.
“You’re late,” she said. “You said an hour. The cops already made me move twice.”
“It was you who said, and you said an hour and a half or so,” Chee said. “By Navajo time it is now just a tiny bit past the so.”
Janet snorted. “Get in,” she said. “You’re sure getting a lot of mileage out of that sore hand.”
Redd’s address was in Albuquerque’s student ghetto?a neighborhood of small frame-stucco bungalows left over from the 1940s with weedy yards and sagging fences. Redd’s residence was behind such a bungalow in what had once been a double garage. The rusty Bronco II with the REDDNEK plate was parked beside it, and Redd himself was standing in the door watching them as Janet Pete pulled up.
He was a tall man with athlete’s shoulders, but the first thing Chee noticed was red hair, a red mustache, and a long, narrow face sprinkled with freckles.
“Yaa eh t’eeh,” he said, handling the Navajo glottal sounds perfectly. “William Odell Redd,” the man said, holding out his hand to Janet Pete, “but people call me Odell. And you’d be?”
“Janet Pete,” she said, “and this is Jim Chee.”
