After he had thought about the meaning in that, Leaphorn had looked for order in everything. And he usually found it. Except in the events of insanity. Joe Leaphorn didn’t think a man?or a woman?who carried a ladder along with a paint gun into the hills would be insane.
There was a pattern there, and a motive, if he could only find them. Chapter 16
DEPUTY T. J. BIRDIE was on duty when Jim Chee arrived at the San Juan County jail at Aztec. T. J. said he was just too busy right now.
“We’re short-handed. I got the desk and the telephone switchboard, and the radio and everything all to myself. Just George back there in the jail and me. Come in tomorrow during regular hours and somebody will do it for you. It’s not as easy as you make it sound. All that sorting around. Putting stuff back where it was.”
“Come on, T. J.,” Chee said. “Don’t act like a horse’s ass. All you got to do is pull the file on booking Ashie Pinto and let me take a look at the inventory of what stuff he had.”
“Can’t leave the phone,” T. J. said. “Sheriff’d hang me up by the balls if he calls in here and I’m not on it.” Deputy Birdie was a stubby young man with his black hair cut short?half Apache. It was gossiped in political circles that the sheriff had hired him in the interest of attracting votes from the nearby Jicarilla Apache Reservation and still didn’t know Birdie was a Mescalero, whose numerous kinfolks and clansmen voted two hundred miles south and east in Otero County. Chee knew that Birdie was actually White Mountain Apache whose folks voted in Arizona and he was pretty sure the sheriff had hired him because he was smart. Unfortunately he was also lazy.
“Come on, damn it,” Chee said. He came around behind the counter. “Just get in there and pull out the Ashie Pinto file. I’ll answer the telephone for you.”
“Well, hell,” T. J. said. “What’s the big hurry?”
But he left, muttering. And when he returned five minutes later he handed Chee the folder.
The inventory of Hosteen Ashie Pinto’s impounded possessions was short:
wallet containing: two fifty-dollar bills -photo of woman - photo of two men - one pocketknife - one comb - one tin chewing tobacco containing corn meal - one leather pouch (jish) containing: two crystals feathers mineral stones - bull durham pouch of pollen - assorted small jish items
Chee handed the folder back to Birdie.
“That it?” Birdie said. “Can I get back to doing my duty for San Juan County now?”
“Thanks, T. J.,” Chee said.
“What were you looking for? Did you find it?”
“His jish. The old man is a crystal gazer,” Chee said. “I wanted to see if he was working. If he had his medicine bundle with him.”
“Well, hell,” Birdie said. “I was here the night they brought him in. I could have told you that. Saved me all that work if you’d just asked.”
It was late but Chee decided to make the four-hour drive to Albuquerque, turning the new information over in his mind. First, there was the fact that Tagert had hired Pinto. Presumably he’d picked up Pinto at his hogan and taken him to the vicinity of whatever he was hunting. Pinto had taken along his crystals?the tools of his profession as a finder of the lost and seer of the unseen. Some white men around the Reservation used crystal gazers but Tagert didn’t seem the sort. He guessed the historian was more interested in the old man’s memory than in his shamanistic powers. Memory of what? Logically it would be connected to Tagert’s interest in two white men who seemed to have died a long lifetime ago in a rock formation on the Navajo Reservation. Presumably Tagert would be hunting their bodies, for evidence that one of them was the notorious Butch Cassidy. Logic suggested that the rock formation would be somewhere fairly close to where he’d arrested Pinto. There were plenty of them around?the product of the same paroxysm of volcanic action that cracked the earth and formed the basaltic spires of Ship Rock. It might be the same formation into which he and Janet Pete had taken their stroll to study the work of Delbert Nez’s nutty vandal. If all else failed, he might search that formation again. Given a day or two to cover it better and more daylight he might find something.
Or get snakebit. But Pinto’s old tale suggested witches were involved. First he would see where that could lead him.
And then there was the business of Colonel Ji. Who? Why? Probably Ji had lied to protect his son, Chee guessed. What had his son done? Or was it just a father’s concern that his kid might be involved in something dangerous?
He turned it over, and over, and over. And the thinking kept him awake while he drove the endless miles of N.M. 44 toward Albuquerque. He had relied on a translator’s transcript of Hosteen Pinto’s tale of horse theft and homicide. He wanted to hear it for himself in the old man’s own voice. Chapter 17
THE YELLOW TAPE used to isolate the scene of a crime dangled loosely across Colonel Ji’s front gate. Leaphorn detached it, ushered Professor Bourebonette through, and reconnected it behind them.
“You’re sure this is all right?”
“The people from the Bureau are all finished in here,” Leaphorn said. “But keeping your hands in your pockets, not moving anything?that’s a good idea.”
Actually, it wasn’t exactly all right. It would be better if Bourebonette waited in the car. Better still if he had made this recheck of the colonel’s darkroom before he picked her up at the library. But he hadn’t thought of it until too late for that. And then the idea pressed on him. A feeling of urgency that he couldn’t really understand.
He unlocked the door, felt the little sigh of cold air that empty houses release when he opened it. It was a familiar sensation to Leaphorn?one he felt each evening when he unlocked his own house in Window Rock.
Nothing had changed in the front room, except it was silent now and the sills and surfaces bore the faint gray stains of fingerprint powder. He noticed Professor Bourebonette looking at the chalk lines that marked where the colonel’s body had been. He noticed the colonel’s messages were still on the wall, looking blacker now under the artificial yellow glare of the ceiling bulb. He noticed the professor’s expression. Strained? Sad? Mournful? Obviously this is unpleasant for her. Why was she here?
Everything in the darkroom was as he remembered it?a cramped, airless space, musty, nostrils filled with the acid smell of print-developing fluids. The prints were where he had seen them but now they also wore traces of
