The Wailing Wind

Joe leaphorn had been slow to learn how to cope with retirement, but he had learned. And one of the lessons had been to prepare himself when he tagged along with Professor Louisa Bourbonette on one of her excursions. These tended to be out to the less acculturated districts of the Navajo reservations to collect memories of elders on her 'oral history' tapes. That usually left him sitting in an oven-hot hogan or lolling in her car and had caused him to buy himself a comfortable folding chair to relax upon in the shade of hogan brush arbors.

He was relaxing in it now under a tree beside the hay barn of the Two Grey Hills Trading Post. The breeze was blowing out of cumulus clouds forming a towering line over the ridge of the Lukachukai and producing an occasional promising rumble of thunder. Louisa was selecting a rug from the famous stock of the Two Grey Hills store—a wedding gift for one of Louisa's various nieces. Since the professor took even grocery shopping seriously, and this was a very special gift, Leaphorn knew he had plenty of quiet thinking time. He had been thinking of Louisa's quest for perfection amid the Two Grey Hills rug stock as sort of a race with the thunder-head climbing over the mountain. Would the rain come before the purchase? Would both purchase and cloud fizzle without success—the cloud drifting away to disappointing dissipation in dry air over the buffalo plains and Louisa emerging from the T.P. without a rug? Or would the cloud climb higher, higher, higher, its bottom turning blue-black and its top glittering with ice crystals, and the blessed rain begin speckling the packed dirt of the Two Grey Hills parking lot, and Louisa, happily holding the perfect collectors' quality rug, signaling him to drive over to the porch to keep the raindrops from hitting it.

A dazzling lightning bolt connected the slope of the mountain with the cloud, producing an explosive crack of thunder and suggesting the cloud might be winning. Just then a Chevy sedan rolled into the parking lot, with sheriff painted on its side. The driver slowed to park near the porch, then aborted that move and rolled his car over to Leaphorn's tree.

'Lieutenant Leaphorn,' said the driver, 'you oughtn't be sitting under a tree in a lightning storm.'

A face from the past. Deputy Sheriff Delo Bellman.

Leaphorn raised his hand in greeting, considered saying: 'Hello, Delo,' but said: 'Delo, ya eeh teh.'

'You been listening to the news?' Delo asked.

'Some of it,' Leaphorn said. Bellman didn't need a radio to collect the news. He was widely known as the premier gossip of the Four Corners Country law enforcement fraternity.

'Hear about the killing?' Bellman said. 'That man your guys found dead near Cove the other day. It turns out he was old Bart Hegarty's nephew. Fellow named Thomas Doherty.'

Leaphorn produced the facial expression appropriate for such sad news. His experiences with Bart Hegarty had been neither frequent nor particularly pleasant. He hadn't been among the mourners when the sheriff hadn't survived sliding his car into an icy bridge's abutment a few winters back. 'Died of what?' Leaphorn asked. 'If he was the sheriff's nephew he must have been fairly young.'

'Late twenties, I guess. Bullet in the back,' said Bellman, with the somber pleasure gossips feel when passing along the unpleasant. 'Rifle bullet.'

That surprised Leaphorn, pretty well saying the Doherty boy hadn't been shot in the car. But he didn't ask for details. He nodded, trying not to give Bellman an interested audience. Maybe he would go about his business. Leaphorn had heard on the TV news last night that neither cause of death nor identity of the victim had been released by the fbi. But the mere fact the Federals had taken the case away from the ntp had told Leaphorn that either it was a homicide or the victim was a fugitive felon.

Bellman chuckled. 'Funny, don't you think? A woman named Hegarty would marry a man named Doherty.' He glanced at Leaphorn, awaiting a response. Getting none, he said: 'You know, an 'arty marrying an 'erty.'

'Yeah,' Leaphorn said.

'Probably a hunting rifle,' Bellman added, and waited for a comment from Leaphorn. 'Looked like who ever done it was quite a ways behind Doherty. Just took a bead on him and went bang.' Leaphorn nodded. So the crime scene crew had concluded the victim had been shot, and then put in the vehicle where he was found. Interesting.

'That's probably why your officer had it pegged as natural causes, no sign of violence.'

'Did he?'

'She,' Bellman said. 'It was the Manuelito girl.'

Bernadette Manuelito, Leaphorn was thinking. Smart young woman, from the impression he'd had of her last year when he'd gotten involved with Jim Chee in investigating that casino robbery business. Smart, but she'd still be a greenhorn. 'Well,' he said. 'Things like that are hard to see sometimes, and I think she's new at patrolling. I can understand how she could miss it.'

Easy to understand, he thought. Bernie was the daughter of a traditional Navajo family, taught to respect the dead and to fear death's contamination—the chindi spirit that would have lingered with the body. She wouldn't have wanted to handle it. Or even be around it more than she could help. Just turn the body over to the ambulance crew and keep her distance.

'I hear the Feds aren't so understanding. Heard they bitched to Captain Largo about the way she handled it.' Bellman chuckled. 'Or didn't handle it.'

'What brings you to Two Grey Hills?' Leaphorn asked, wanting to change the subject and maybe get Bellman moving. It didn't work.

'Just touching bases,' Bellman said. 'Finding out what's going on.' He restarted his engine, then leaned out the window again.

'I'll bet the fbi is going to give Jim Chee a ration of paperwork out of this. You think?'

'Who knows?' Leaphorn said, even though he knew all too well.

Bellman grinned, knowing Leaphorn knew the answer, and recited it anyway. It had three parts. The first was the friction between Sergeant Chee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, widely known and happily celebrated in the Four Corners Country law enforcement fraternity; the second being a general belief by the same fraternity that Captain Largo, where the buck stopped in the Shiprock district of the Navajo police, detested paperwork and would pass it down where Sergeant Chee would be stuck with it; the third being gossip that Chee and Officer Manuelito had romantic inclinations—which meant Chee would strain himself to defend her from any allegations of mishandling evidence in a homicide.