“Exactly. Has the trial started yet?”
“They’re picking the jury. Maybe they’ll start it tomorrow. Or the day after.”
“You’ll be one of the first witnesses, I’d say. That right?”
“I’m under subpoena. The prosecutor wants me to tell about the arrest. What I saw.”
“So you’ll be in Albuquerque,” Leaphorn said. “I know you’re on leave but I think you ought to go see the Ji kid. See what he’ll tell you. See if he saw anything.”
“I was planning to do that,” Chee said.
“Unofficially,” Leaphorn said. “Not our case, of course.” There was a pause. “And get that telephone fixed.” Chapter 21
THE ADDRESS LEAPHORN had given him for the Ha residence was in the opposite direction from the Tagert address. But Tagert’s house wasn’t far from the university campus and Chee made the detour. He had a hunch he wanted to check.
It was a single-story, brick-fronted house on the lower end of the middle class?the sort of house history professors can afford if they are frugal with their grocery buying. Chee parked on the street, walked up the empty driveway, and rang the bell. No answer. He rang it four times. Still no answer. Then he walked across the yard and peered through the garage window. It was dirty, but not too dirty for Chee to see a red Corvette parked inside and beyond it a white Oldsmobile sedan.
The Ha residence was neat, standing out for its tidiness in a weed-grown neighborhood which was on the upper end of the lower class. There was no car in the driveway, but as Chee parked his truck at the curb, an elderly blue Chevy sedan pulled up beside the carport. The boy sitting beside the young woman who was driving was Taka Ji.
They started their talking in the driveway, Chee leaning on the sedan door, the boy standing stiffly facing him, and Miss Janice Ha, the driver, standing beside Taka?a silent, disapproving observer.
“I was the officer who made the arrest out there that night,” Chee told the boy. “I saw you driving your father’s car. I was in the police car you met just before you turned off the pavement toward Ship Rock.”
Taka Ji simply looked at him.
“Now we know some more,” Chee said. “We know you’re the one who painted those rocks. It might help us catch the man who shot your father if you tell me what you saw.”
Janice Ha put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think we should go inside,” she said.
The front room of the house was almost as small as Chee’s own cramped lodgings?but there was space in it, between the two front windows, for a shrine. The shrine featured a foot-tall plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin in her traditional blue-and-white robes looking down serenely at two small candles and two small pots of chrysanthemums. A woman who reminded Chee of a smaller, slightly older, and female version of Colonel Ji was sitting on the sofa beside it.
She was Thuy Ha, and she bowed deeply to Chee when Janice Ha introduced him.
“Taka’s father was my mother’s younger brother,” Janice Ha explained. “Her English is not yet good. It was a long time before we could get her released by the Communists. She joined us only last year.”
“I hate to intrude at this bad time,” Chee said. He looked at Taka Ji. “But I think Mr. Ji here might be able to help us.”
Janice spoke to the woman?translating Chee presumed?and Thuy Ha said something in response. “She said he will help you any way he can,” Janice Ha said.
The older woman spoke again, a longer statement this time. The girl responded briefly and the older woman responded. Her voice sounded angry.
“Mrs. Ha asked me to tell you that the Communists killed Colonel Ji,” Janice Ha said. She looked embarrassed. “She said I should tell you Colonel Ji worked faithfully for the Americans, and made many enemies because of that, and the Communists sent someone all the way over here to America just to kill him.”
The woman was watching Chee intently.
“Would you ask her if she knows who might have done it?”
Janice Ha translated. Mrs. Ha spoke a single word.
“Communists,” Janice Ha said.
Taka Ji broke the brief silence that followed that.
“I didn’t see very much,” he said. “It was getting dark, and the storm was coming.”
“Just tell me what you saw,” Chee said.
First he had heard a car. He had climbed down from the ladder and was sitting on the sand beside it, looking at the blown-up photograph of the rocks, deciding exactly where he should add the next section of paint. He had heard the engine of a vehicle, revving up, driving in very low gear, coming in closer to this formation than vehicles usually come. He had folded up the ladder and put it out of sight. Then he had hidden himself. But after a while he heard voices, and he climbed up to where he could see what was going on.
“There were three people. They had left the truck, or whatever it was, parked back behind some of those junipers on the slope. I could just see the roof. And three of them were walking toward the formation. Not toward me, but more toward the west. At first I thought it was one man and two women because one was larger than the other two. But then I saw when they got a little closer that one of them was a real thin old man.”
“Ashie Pinto?”
“Yes,” Taka Ji said. “I saw his picture in the Farmington Times that Sunday, after he was arrested. It looked like the man who killed the policeman.”
