Being raised Navajo, Jim Chee understood how human nature affected storytellers and how they worked an audience. Now, at last, Redd would tell them something pertinent.
“He had nothing but that.” Redd looked at Chee. The dramatic pause. “Then Ashie Pinto picked up Butch Cassidy’s trail on the Big Reservation.” Chapter 10
JOE LEAPHORN?A practical man?handled it by telephone. He got Professor Tagert’s home number in Albuquerque from information. No one answered. He called the university switchboard for Tagert’s office number. There a woman answered. She said her name was Jean Jacobs, Tagert’s teaching assistant. From Jacobs, Leaphorn learned two interesting facts.
First, Tagert was two weeks overdue for his academic duties and?if Jacobs knew what she was talking about?no one seemed to know his whereabouts.
Second, the arresting officer in the Pinto case, Jim Chee, off duty and on convalescent leave, was performing as Chee performed all too often?a mile outside the rules. He had presented himself at Tagert’s office asking questions. How could Chee have come to know about Tagert?
Thinking of this, Leaphorn found himself violating one of his own rules. He was allowing his mind to shift back and forth between two problems?Tagert and Chee?and thus getting nowhere on either. Chee could wait. First he would see if he could fit Tagert’s absence from his university classrooms into this puzzle.
Leaphorn swiveled his chair to face the map that dominated his wall behind his desk. It was a magnified version of the “Indian Country” map produced by the Automobile Club of Southern California. Smaller versions were used throughout the Four Corners territory for its details and its accuracy. Leaphorn had hired a photographer to copy it and make him a double-sized print on a matte paper. Emma had pasted this to a sheet of corkboard. For years, he had sprinkled it with coded pins, using it, so he said, to reinforce his memory. Actually Leaphorn’s memory was remarkable, needing no reinforcement. He used the map in his endless hunt for patterns, sequences, order?something that would bring a semblance of Navajo hohzho to the chaos of crime and violence.
From his desk, Leaphorn extracted a box of pins, the sort mapping companies provide. He selected three with large yellow heads?yellow being Leaphorn’s code for problems with no priority beyond their inherent oddity. He stuck one in the map between Bekahatso Wash and Yon Dot Mountain, at about the place where Ashie Pinto’s hogan stood. Another he placed between Birdsprings Trading Post and Jadito Wash. There Nez had lived. He put the third south of Navajo Route 33 on a line between Ship Rock and Beautiful Mountain, the place where Pinto had shot Delbert Nez. Then he leaned back and inspected his work.
The triangle formed by the pins was huge. It emphasized two points in Leaphorn’s mind. The Nez home was at least 150 miles south of the Pinto place in a part of the Reservation where intercourse with both the Hopis and the busy world of the biligaana was easy if not inevitable. Pinto lived in a different world of the pure, traditional Navajo culture. Everything separated them. Distance. Age. Culture. And yet they had come together violently at the point of the triangle?two hundred miles from either one’s home. Duty had taken Nez to that rendezvous. But what had taken Pinto there?
That was the second point. The pins made it clear he could hardly have been there by chance. One could not get from pin A at Pinto’s hogan to pin C beside Navajo Route 33 without changing roads a half-dozen times. Pinto could not have simply happened past en route to somewhere else. He had gone there for a purpose. And Leaphorn’s reasoning said Pinto’s purpose must be linked to why the old man had killed Delbert Nez.
But three pins were not enough to tell him anything. So Leaphorn, being Leaphorn, studied the map to see if they would fit into any other pattern.
He noticed only one thing that interested him. While Leaphorn rejected traditional Navajo witchcraft beliefs and detested them, they were part of his job. Belief in witches, and fear of them, lay at the root of many of the troubles, many of the tragedies, that occupied him as a policeman.
Pin C, where Delbert Nez had died, was very close to a rugged volcanic outcropping, nameless on the map, but which local families called Tse A’Digash. Witchery Rock. Around this long irregular ridge were clustered a measles rash of red pins marked with the letter a. The a stood for A’Digash. Witchcraft. Each pin in the quarter-century accumulation marked some sort of disturbance, assault, threat, or misdemeanor in which fear of these so-called skinwalkers had played some part.
Leaphorn’s eyes were on the map but he was seeing Tse A’Digash in his memory?an ugly black ridge of old lichen-covered lava that ran for three or four miles south of Navajo 33. Now a yellow pin stuck out in the cluster of red ones. A coincidence? Perhaps. Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical of coincidences. Perhaps that pin, too, should be red with an a in its center.
In fact Leaphorn had learned to be skeptical in general. He took another yellow pin from the desk drawer and stuck it in just south of Flagstaff. Professor Bourebonette had said she lived south of town. Her motivation, so she said, was merely friendship. He had absolutely no way to calculate how she actually fit into this.
Then Leaphorn picked up his phone, dialed the records office downstairs, and asked for the file on the Delbert Nez homicide.
While he waited for it, he shuffled through the folders Bolack Travel had sent him on China. One concerned a tour sponsored by the Audubon Society, which would focus on visits to bird sanctuaries. He reread parts of that. Emma had been an amateur bird watcher?keeping three feeders stocked in their backyard. The others on the trip would be interesting people, probably. But he would have nothing to talk to them about. Nothing in common. Another tour simply involved visits to cities. That left him cold. His best alternative seemed to be going alone. He would see if any of his old professors were left on the anthropology faculty at Arizona State. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible. If not, maybe someone else there would help him. He’d explain he was an alum, with their master of science in anthropology degree from way back when, and he wanted to go into Asia and see if he could find any roots to his Athabaskan origins. He’d wanted to do that for years, ever since he’d become conscious as an anthropology student that his forebears had probably emerged from Mongolia. It had faded into the subconscious after he’d met Emma and married her. Emma was no traveler. Three days in Albuquerque made her vaguely uneasy, yearning for home. Three days in New York made her miserable. She would have gone with him without a murmur. But taking her would have been cruel.
When the Nez folder arrived, he was examining a picture of a Shanghai street scene, seeing himself there amid the stampede of bicycles. It depressed him.
He spent almost an hour rereading the file and jotting reminders in the slim notebook he always carried in his uniform pocket.
Chee met car. Was it the schoolteacher’s? What did he see?
Expensive whiskey? How? Where bought?
Pistol. Where did he get it?
