“What else did you say he wrote on the wall?” Chee asked.
Captain Largo answered that: ” Take care of Taka.’”
“No,” Leaphorn said. “It was ‘Save Taka.’”
“That’s his kid?” Chee asked. “Right?”
Leaphorn smiled slightly, approving of the way Chee’s mind was working. “So you’re thinking that Taka was driving the car? I think that’s not a bad guess. He was driving it after school today. He drives it a lot, I think. He told me he even has his own key to it.”
“I suspect he didn’t want the boy pulled into a police investigation,” Chee said. “I don’t know why.”
“He seems to have been a special friend of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back from his days in Vietnam,” Leaphorn said. He explained what Kennedy had told him.
“So maybe Colonel Ji was just the nervous sort. Is that what you’re thinking?” Chee asked.
Leaphorn shrugged. “A man makes a career out of playing hard games, it would be difficult to get over that sort of thinking. A policeman gets killed. You don’t want your child touched by something like that.” He shrugged again. “Good a guess as any. We just don’t know enough.”
“No,” Largo said. “We don’t know a damned thing. Except homicide is a felony and we don’t have jurisdiction in any of this. Nez nor Colonel Ji.”
“We have jurisdiction in a vandalism case,” Leaphorn said. “Tell me about that?”
Largo looked puzzled. “What vandalism?”
Chee said, “You mean the painting on the rocks? You know what was in the report. Well, Delbert noticed this maybe two or three weeks earlier. Somebody putting white paint here and there in a rock formation out there between Ship Rock and the Chuska Range. He got interested in it and he started swinging past there whenever his patrol would allow it. He was hoping to catch the guy. But he never did.”
“And he thought he saw him that night?”
“That’s what he said.”
“And it sounded like he was going after him?”
“That’s how it sounded.”
Leaphorn put down his coffee cup. He glanced at the stove. Steam was jetting from Chee’s pot, but this wasn’t the time to break this chain of thought.
“What do you think?” Leaphorn asked. “You see any connection? Was Ashie Pinto painting rocks? That seems totally unlikely. Did Pinto being there have something to do with the painting? Anything at all to do with it? Or was it just that Nez, thinking he was chasing his painter, turned out to be chasing Pinto? And he catches himself a homicidal drunk. Or what? What do you think?”
Silence.
Largo got up and turned down the burner under the coffeepot. He picked up the funnel that held the grounds. “How do you make this stuff?” he asked. “And as far as the painter and Ashie Pinto are concerned, I pick number two. Nez thought he was chasing his nut and he catches Pinto.”
Chee scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “that sounds the most probable.”
“No connection otherwise, then?” Leaphorn said. “Neither of you can think of any?”
Chee got up, collected the cups, lined them beside the sink, and picked out a fresh filter.
Another cup of coffee would be fine, Leaphorn thought. And then he would go and pick up Professor Bourebonette and be on his way. She had come up with a graceful way to get out of his way when he’d come out of Ji’s house and returned to the car.
“You’re going to be busy for a while,” she had said. “Just drop me off at the community college. I have a friend in the library there I’d like to see.”
Nothing more was going to come out of this conversation. He would drink his coffee, drop by the library to pick up the professor, and then head back to Window Rock. Neither Chee nor Largo seemed to be able to think of any connection between a rock painter and a policeman’s murder. But there must be one. Because Leaphorn’s logic told him that somehow Colonel Ji had tried to tell them that with his blood-smeared finger. The man must have known he was dying. Protect his son, he’d told them, and then that he had lied to Chee. There must be a connection, and the connection?as Chee thought, too?must be that the boy had been driving his car that night. Driving it out where an old drunk was killing a policeman and a madman was painting random patterns on an outcrop of lava.
Random, Leaphorn thought. Random. When he was a young man, a junior at Arizona State, running around, drinking, chasing the girls, he had gone to a sing-dance once over between Kinlichee and Cross Canyon. It had rained that night, and he and Haskie Jim, his father’s older brother, had watched the first drops pattering into the dust. He had been full of the mathematics he was studying, and of his own wisdom, and he had talked to his old uncle of probabilities and of randomness. He had always remembered the scene.
“You think these raindrops are random?” his uncle had asked. And Leaphorn had been surprised. He’d said of course they were random. Didn’t his uncle think they were random?
“The stars,” Haskie Jim said. “We have a legend about how First Man and First Woman, over by Huerfano Mesa, had the stars in their blanket and were placing them carefully in the sky. And then Coyote grabbed the blanket and whirled it around and flung them into the darkness and that is how the Milky Way was formed. Thus order in the sky became chaos. Random. But even then … Even then, what Coyote did was evil, but was there not a pattern, too, in the evil deed?”
That had not been the time in Leaphorn’s life when he had patience for the old metaphysics. He remembered telling Haskie Jim about modern astronomy and the cosmic mechanics of gravity and velocity. Leaphorn had said something like “Even so, you couldn’t expect to find anything except randomness in the way the rain fell.” And Haskie Jim had watched the rain awhile, silently. And then he had said, and Joe Leaphorn still remembered not just the words but the old man’s face when he said them: “I think from where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”
