He’d never seen coffee made that way before. Chee had arrayed three mugs beside the sink, put a little black cone-shaped gadget atop one of them, inserted a paper filter into it, dumped a spoonful of Folger’s into that, and poured the water through. Then he replaced the grounds and repeated the process in the other cups. Wasteful, Leaphorn thought, and time-consuming. But when he tasted the results, he was impressed. Downright fine. As good as any he’d ever tasted. He studied Chee over the rim of the cup. Odd young man. Good-looking in a way, with the sort of long, sensitive face women seemed to like. A fairly good cop, excellent in some categories, weak in others. He remembered that Largo had tried him out as an acting sergeant once. It hadn’t lasted long for some reason he had forgotten or, more likely, had never known. But he could guess the reason. Chee wasn’t an organization man. He was a loner. Liked to freelance. A man who worked inside the system only until the system interfered. One of those who marched to his private drummer. This business of trying to be a hataalii and a policeman at the same time, for example. It wasn’t just impractical. How the hell could a cop get time off at the drop of a hat for a nine- day sing? It was incongruous. It was like being an investment banker and a Catholic priest at the same time. Or a rabbi and a clown. People wouldn’t accept it. They expect a shaman or a priest to be different from ordinary humans, expect him to live in the shadow on the dangerous mystical fringe of the supernatural. Now Chee was refilling the pot, the heavy bandage on his left hand making it a clumsy project. The fruit of freelancing, Leaphorn thought. But in fairness he should say a dead policeman was the result of the rules-bending, the burned hand the product of Chee’s bravery. He wondered if he would have walked into that fire, gripped that red-hot door handle, to save another man’s life. He wasn’t sure he would have. He might have stood there, calculating the odds of success?trying to do what was rational.
“Is it still painful?” Leaphorn asked. “The hand?”
“Not much.” Chee sat on the bunk again. “Not if I’m careful.”
“You mentioned one thing Ji lied about when you talked to him. Do you think that’s what the message was about?”
Chee was tucking a stray end of the gauze back into the bandage?concentrating on that.
“No,” he said. “I doubt it.”
Smart, Leaphorn thought. Of course it wasn’t that. “What do you think it was?”
Chee hesitated. “This is new to me,” he said. “I need a minute to get it together.”
Leaphorn sipped, enjoyed it. Wonderful coffee.
“Take your time,” he said.
Chee looked up from the bandage. His face was full of anger.
“I have a question for you. What pulled you into this? Into the Delbert Nez homicide?”
Leaphorn considered Chee’s expression, the anger in his voice. “Somebody shot Huan Ji,” he said. “That pulled me into it.”
“No,” Chee said, shaking his head. “Last week you were looking for a professor named Tagert. What’s up? You think I arrested the wrong man? You think I screwed that up, too?”
Captain Largo shifted in his chair. “Take it easy,” he said.
Chee’s emotion was interesting. What motivated it? Leaphorn turned his cup in his hands.
“I wondered how Pinto got where you found him,” he said. “The FBI didn’t check it out. They didn’t see any reason to, I guess, since you gave them the man with the smoking gun.” Leaphorn was silent a moment, looking into Chee’s anger. There was absolutely no reason for him to tell this young man anything. No reason except the bandaged hand and what it represented.
“I wondered about that,” Leaphorn continued, “and then Pinto’s niece came to see me. She’s Turning Mountain Clan. A relative of my late wife. She wanted to hire a private detective to find out who gave the old man the ride. I decided to do it for her.”
Chee nodded, unmollified.
“You wondered, too, I noticed,” Leaphorn said. “You went to the trouble of finding out about Tagert hiring him, too.”
“Did he hire him?” Chee said. “All I knew was that Tagert had used him in the past. As a source for old legends. That sort of thing. Had Tagert hired him this time?”
“Yes,” Leaphorn said. He told Chee about the letter Old Man McGinnis had written, about the vehicle seen driving away from Pinto’s place. “How did you make the Tagert connection?”
Chee told him about Janet Pete, about climbing into the formation where the crazy painter Nez hoped to catch had been defacing the rocks. He told him what they had seen there, that the painter had carried a ladder into the formation, painting high places, ignoring low ones, painting part of the surface of one formation, skipping the next one. He told him about the car with the REDDNEK plate, about going to the library at UNM to listen to Pinto’s tapes, noting who had taped them. He told Leaphorn about what he had learned from Jean Jacobs and Odell Redd.
“You think Tagert is chasing down something about Butch Cassidy then?” Leaphorn asked.
“They think so,” Chee said. “That seems to be his connection with Pinto. That old story about the horse thieves and the two whites.”
“So what do you think Ji lied to you about?”
The abrupt change of subject didn’t seem to bother Chee.
“I don’t think Ji was driving the car,” Chee said. “I think he lied about that.”
“Why?” Leaphorn asked. “Why do you think that?”
“He didn’t see my car. He didn’t see the fire. He was very cautious about the way he answered questions. He didn’t volunteer anything that would catch him out. He just waited for a question and then gave a very careful, limited answer.”
“Why would he lie about that? You have any theories?”
