“No,” Jacobs said. She hesitated. “He just came in and got his mail. And stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Well, he took some stuff he’d collected for a paper he was doing. It had been on his desk there. And a couple of letters that were in his out-basket.”
“Was he all right? What did he say?”
Jacobs sat looking out of the window. She glanced at him and back out the window again.
“Were you here when he came in?”
“No.”
“Just the next day you noticed he’d been in and picked up stuff?”
Jacobs nodded.
They considered each other.
“But he left me a note,” she said. She rummaged in her desk drawer, extracted a salmon-colored WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip, handed it to Chee.
Scrawled across it was:
“Jacobs?Call admissions. Get class lists on time for a change. Tell maintenance to clean up this pigpen, get windows washed.”
“He doesn’t sign his notes?” Chee asked.
Jacobs laughed. “No please. No thank you. That’s Tagert’s signature.”
“But it’s his handwriting?”
She glanced at the note. “Who else?”
He used Tagert’s telephone to call the Federal Public Defender’s office for Janet Pete. The receptionist’s voice boomed in his ear, telling him that Miss Pete was still at the courthouse. He held the receiver away from his ear, frowning.
Jean Jacobs was smiling about it. “The professor is hard of hearing,” she said. “He kept complaining to the telephone people about their equipment mumbling so they came in finally and put in that high-volume phone.”
“Wow,” Chee said.
“Just hold it a little way from your ear. It’s easy once you know how to handle it.”
The receptionist was talking again, less painfully now that he was following Jacobs’s advice.
“But there’s a message for you,” she was saying. “For her actually. She’s supposed to tell you to call Window Rock. ‘Please tell Mr. Chee to call Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn at his office.’”
Chee called.
“You in Albuquerque?” Leaphorn asked.
Chee said he was.
“We’ve got sort of a funny situation,” the lieutenant said. “It turns out that Taka Ji is the rock painter that Delbert Nez was after.”
“Oh,” Chee said. He digested the thought. “How’d you find out?”
Leaphorn told him.
“Has anyone talked to him?”
“I can hardly hear you,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds like you’re standing out in the hall.”
Chee pulled the mouthpiece closer to his lips. “I said has anyone talked to him? He was out there the night Nez was killed. Maybe he saw something.”
Leaphorn explained that the boy had been taken to Albuquerque to stay with relatives. He gave Chee the name and the number. “Nobody home when I called. But I think somebody should talk to him in person.”
“Did you tell the FBI?”
Chee’s question provoked an extended silence. Finally Leaphorn chuckled. “The Bureau was not particularly interested in a vandalism case at the moment.”
“They don’t see the connection?”
“With what? The agent handling the Ji killing is new out here, and pretty new in the business for that matter. I got the impression that he’ll talk to the boy one of these days but I don’t think he could see how painting his romantic message on rocks had anything to do with somebody shooting the colonel. I think they see some sort of link back to Vietnam. And what he did there.”
“How about with somebody shooting Officer Delbert Nez?” Chee asked.
Another pause. Then Leaphorn said: “Yeah. That’s what troubles me, too. I think that’s the key to it. Have you got it figured out?”
Chee found, to his surprise, that being asked that question by Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn pleased him. The question was clearly serious. The famous Joe Leaphorn, asking him that. Unfortunately he didn’t have an answer. Not a good one.
“Not really,” he said. “But I think once we understand it, we’re going to find there was more to the Nez homicide than we know about.”
