Odell Redd was grinning broadly at Chee. “That’s the hand you got burned,” Redd said. “I read about that. But come on in. You want a drink?”
The interior of Redd’s apartment was jammed but orderly. Except for books. Most of them concerned linguistics. Dictionaries were everywhere, English and foreign, ranging from French to Quechua. There was a Cherokee dictionary and beside it Navajo Tonal Syntax. Books were stacked on all flat surfaces. There was even a dictionary on the battered table in the center of what served as both Redd’s living room and bedroom. But that was an incongruous Dictionary of Stamps. Other books cluttering the tabletop involved coins. The Macmillan Encyclopedic Dictionary of Numismatics was open, surrounded by tidy rows of pennies. More pennies were piled into three cigar boxes.
“Take that there,” Redd told Janet, pointing to an overstuffed chair in the corner. The burden of books it had once held now stood in a tidy stack on the linoleum floor beside it?cleared away, Chee guessed, to make room for his coming. “I’ll fix a place here for Mr. Chee to sit.”
Redd lifted a huge Spanish-English dictionary and two smaller ones from a kitchen.
Coyote Waits chair and pushed aside enough pennies to make room for them on the table. Then he sat down himself, reversed on a kitchen chair, leaning across its wooden back, looking first at Janet Pete and then at Chee.
“Didn’t I see you two out there south of Ship Rock the other evening? Out there south of Highway 33?”
“That’s right,” Chee said.
“Interesting country,” Redd said. “You probably know more about it than I do?being Navajos. All those lava flow ridges and outcrops and things. There’s supposed to be a place out there somewhere where witches get together. Initiate people as skinwalkers. That sort of thing.”
“You have any idea what Pinto was doing out there?” Janet asked.
Redd smiled at her. “I’ll bet you’re his kinfolks,” he said. “Pinto, he’s Mud Clan. Are you related?”
“I’m his lawyer,” Janet said.
“Won’t he tell you, then? I mean what he was doing out there that night. When he shot the policeman.”
Janet hesitated. She glanced at Chee, uncertain. Chee said: “Pinto won’t talk about it.”
“I sort of got that impression from the papers,” Redd said. “It said he was drunk. Said double the legal level. Maybe he just doesn’t remember.”
“Maybe not,” Chee said. “Any idea how he could have gotten out there?”
Redd denied it with a shake of his head. “But the old man had to get there some way or other. Two hundred miles, more or less, is too far to walk. Even for a Navajo. You wouldn’t think somebody would just drop him off way out there and leave him. And otherwise, you’d think the cops would have seen somebody driving away.”
“Nobody saw anything as far as we know,” Janet said. “Jim got there just after it happened and he didn’t see anybody. And Mr. Ji came by just about before that, and he didn’t either.”
Redd looked puzzled. “Mr. Gee?”
“Mr. Ji,” Janet said. “J-I but it sounds like ‘Gee.’ It’s Vietnamese. He’s a teacher at Ship Rock.”
“Oh,” Redd said. “Anyway, the best I can do about what Pinto was doing out there is guess at it. I think he was working for Professor Tagert.”
Chee waited for some expansion of that. None came.
“Like how?” he asked. He held up his hand. “But first answer me another one. What were you doing out there when you saw Janet and me?”
Redd laughed. “I was exercising my curiosity. I kept thinking there’d be more in the papers. You know, after the police finished their investigation, explaining what the hell was going on. There wasn’t, and I kept thinking about it and I came up with a theory. So I went out to take a look and it didn’t pay off.”
“What’s the theory?”
“I had the notion that Pinto had found Butch Cassidy for Tagert,” Redd said.
He smiled at them, waiting.
Finally, Janet said: “Butch Cassidy?”
Redd nodded. “What do you know about Western history?” he asked. “I mean about the academic politics of Western history.”
“Little bit of the history. No politics,” Chee said.
“Well, the guru for years in that field was Frederick Jackson Turner. He died back in the thirties, I think. Taught at Harvard and way back at the end of the nineteenth century he came up with this theory that the wide open western frontier had free land, gold, silver, grazing for anybody who could take it?” Redd paused, looking slightly abashed “?take it away from the Indians, I mean. Anyway, he thought this changed European immigrants into a new kind of people. Made democracy work. Turner and his followers dominated academic Western history down through this century. The Anglo white man was the hero and there wasn’t much attention paid to the Spanish, or the French, or the Indians. But now there’s a new wave. Donald Worster at the University of Kansas, Patricia Limerick at Colorado University, Tagert here, a guy named Henderson at UC Berkeley, and a few others are the leaders. Or, at least Tagert would like to be one.”
Redd paused, looking from one to the other. “This takes a little time to explain.”
“No rush,” Janet said.
“Well, the way I understand this feud started, this Dr. Henderson wrote a textbook, and Tagert did a paper criticizing part of it, and then Henderson took a whack in Western History Quarterly at a paper Tagert had done about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.” Redd paused again. “I should have explained that Tagert and Henderson both specialize in law and order?or the lack of it?on the frontier. To get to the point, they hate each other’s guts. And Tagert thinks he’s onto something that will put Henderson down. It involves something he learned from Pinto.”
