gave it to me some other times. Before, when I worked for him. He knew how it was for me. This whiskey. He knew that when I drank it I would do wrong things. I would tell him what I didn’t want to tell him. He knew it made my tongue loose and he knew that when it was in me it took over my mind. It made the wind that blows inside me blow as dark as night.”
The interpreter was tugging at Pinto’s sleeve.
“Going too fast,” he said, and Pinto stopped.
Pinto had gone too fast. The interpreter missed a little of it, cut some corners.
Pinto told them Redd was a good young man, that Redd had signaled him to get the man’s pistol, and when they were all three getting into his car to drive away, he had gotten it.
“So I shot him,” Pinto said. “By the car. Then I shot him again.”
The interpreter translated.
“Then Mr. Redd he carried the body of that man away. I think he didn’t want the police to find it. The man I shot is a very little man and Mr. Redd is big and he carried him back up into the rocks where nobody would find him. And I was waiting there by the car when the policeman came. He was talking to me about painting things. I didn’t know what he was talking about but he acted like he wanted to arrest me so I shot him, too.”
The interpreter translated but Chee didn’t wait to hear it. He still wondered why Pinto had set the car on fire. Maybe the old man would explain that, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Not now. He hurried out the door and down the elevator.
He’d taken a taxi from the airport. This lack of wheels was an oddity he had little experience dealing with. He stopped in the main-floor coffee shop, ordered a cup, and thought about it. He had a headache, which was as unusual as the lack of transportation. Probably the product of lack of sleep last night. Or maybe lack of breakfast. He wasn’t really hungry but he ordered a hamburger.
Redd would be arrested by now, probably.
Or dead. If he hadn’t checked into a hospital fast to have that venom dealt with it had probably killed him. Chee considered that. That and the value of three or four hundred thousand dollar’s worth of old stamps. What would Redd have bought with it that he didn’t now have? A better car? A better house? Then he faced the fact that he was thinking of this because he didn’t want to think of the note he’d sent to Janet. To Dendahl, too, for that matter, but to hell with Dendahl.
“Ask for a recess,” he’d told them both. “I don’t think Pinto did it. Redd was there. He killed Colonel Ji. I think he killed Tagert and Nez. I think we can prove all of it.”
Wrong again. Redd had killed Colonel Ji because he thought Ji had seen too much. Ji would find the bodies, and the stamps.
Wrong about it all. Looking foolish. Feeling foolish.
He ate his hamburger slowly, thinking of Janet hugging him in the elevator. Was that before or after Pinto had told her? Something about his memory of the moment made him think it was after. That she already knew Pinto was guilty. But why, then, the hug? Quite a hug it was, with her pressing against him like that. The hug was about the only bright spot of this whole business. Then Janet came hurrying up. “I saw you in here,” she said, and sat beside him in the booth. “How much of that did you hear before you left?”
“Up to where he said he shot Delbert,” Chee said. “I left then. Did I miss anything?”
“You missed part of Mr. Pinto’s speech about whiskey. How it destroys everything it touches. He asked the jury to have all whiskey everywhere poured out on the ground. That’s what he was waiting for. Why he wouldn’t say anything before. He remembered the time he was tried before, and sent to prison. He thought that this would be the time to warn the world about whiskey.”
“Good as any, I guess,” Chee said. “Anyway, it’s just about what you’d expect from a nutty old Navajo shaman. The spoken word has great power, you know.” He sounded bitter.
She was grinning at him. “Don’t be sarcastic. It does have power. Did you notice the press was here? He wasn’t so nutty.”
The grin disappeared. “I got your note. I want to hear all about that. About Odell Redd.”
“All right,” Chee said. “You want something to eat?”
“Maybe some coffee.” She signaled the waitress. “How did you figure Redd out?”
“You mean about him shooting Delbert Nez? How did I get that wrong, too?”
She noticed his tone. She was serious now.
“You didn’t get it wrong. You arrested Ashie Pinto. Hurt as you were, you arrested him. It was me. I thought he didn’t do it.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. “Okay.”
“I was wrong about something else, too,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like about you,” she said. “You made me think for a while that all you cared about was proving you were right.”
“What do you mean?” Chee asked.
“Oh, forget it,” she said. And to his amazement Janet Pete hugged him again, even harder this time. Chapter 24
LEAPHORN HAD SPENT all morning in his office. By a little after ten, he’d leaned back in his chair and spent a long moment just enjoying the scene?his in-basket was empty, his out-basket full but neat, the surface of the desk bare. Wood visible. Nothing cluttering the blotter except a ballpoint pen.
He picked up the pen, dropped it in the top drawer, and looked at the desk again. Even better.
