Coyote Waits (2 page)

It was raining hard again, the cold drops splashing against his face. Then he was engulfed in the sickening black smoke of burning rubber, burning oil, burning upholstery. The driver’s-side window had been shattered. Chee fired the extinguisher through it, seeing the white foam stream through the smoke, and seeing through the smoke the dark shape of Nez slumped over the steering wheel.

“Del!”

Chee snatched at the door handle, barely conscious of the searing pain. He jerked the door open and found himself engulfed in a gust of flames. He jumped back, whacking at the fire burning his uniform shirt. “Del,” he shouted again. He sprayed the extinguisher foam into the car again, dropped the extinguisher, reached through the open door, clutched the arm of Officer Delbert Nez and pulled.

Nez was wearing his seat belt.

Chee fumbled for the catch, released it, pulled with all his strength, aware as he did that his palm was hurting in a way he had never experienced before. He tumbled backward into the driving rain, he and Delbert Nez. He lay for a moment, gasping, lungs full of smoke, conscious that something was wrong with the hand, and of the weight of Delbert Nez partly across him. Then he was aware of heat. His shirt sleeve burning. He put it out, struggled out from under the weight of Nez.

Nez lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled. Chee looked at him and looked away. He picked up the extinguisher, sprayed the burning places on the officer’s trousers. He used what was left in the tank to put out the fire. “Running on fumes,” Nez had said. That was lucky. Chee had seen enough car fires to know what a full tank would do. Lucky? Fumes had provided enough fire to kill Delbert Nez.

He was on the radio, calling this in to Ship Rock, asking for help, before he was fully aware of the pain of his own burns.

“There was blood, too,” Chee was saying. “He might have been shot. I think blood on the back of his shirt, and blood on the front, too.”

Captain Largo happened to be in, doing his perpetual paperwork. While Chee was saying that, Largo took over the radio in the Ship Rock dispatcher’s office.

“We’ll send all we have from here,” Largo was saying. “And from Window Rock, and we’ll see if anybody from Crownpoint is patrolling out your direction. Blood still fresh?”

Chee looked at his hand and grimaced. “It’s still sticky,” he said. “Somewhere between slick and sticky.” A chunk of skin had flapped off the palm of his hand. The door handle, he thought. That had done it. It felt like it had burned all the way to the bone.

“You saw no other car lights?”

“One car. Just as I was leaving Red Rock a white Jeepster was turning off 33 onto the road toward Biklabito. One man in it. I think it was that Vietnamese math teacher at Ship Rock High School. I think that’s his car, anyway.” Chee’s throat hurt. So did his lungs. So did his eyes. And his face. He felt with numb fingers. No eyebrows.

“We’ll handle that part then,” Largo said. “Save any looking for tracks for daylight. Do not mess anything up around the car. You got that?” Largo paused. “Do not,” he repeated.

“Okay,” Chee said. He wanted to end this.

He wanted to go find whoever had killed Delbert Nez. He should have been with Nez. He should have gone to help him.

“You came down 33 from the west? From Red Rock? Get back on 33 and head east. All the way to 666. See if you can pick up anything that way. If the guy had a vehicle that’s the only way he could have gone.” Largo paused. “Unless he was your Vietnamese schoolteacher.”

Chee didn’t get all the way to U.S. Highway 666. Three miles east of the intersection, the high beams of his headlights reflected from the back of a man walking down the asphalt. Chee braked and stared. The man was walking erratically down the center of the westbound lane. He was bareheaded, his gray hair tied in a bun, his rain-soaked shirt plastered to his back. He seemed totally oblivious of Chee’s headlights, now just a few yards behind him. Without a backward glance, with no effort to move to the side of the road, he walked steadily onward, swinging something in his right hand, zigzagging a little, but with the steady, unhurried pace of a man who has walked great distances, who will walk great distances more.

Chee pulled up beside him, rolled down his window. The object the man was swinging was a squat bottle, held by the neck. “
Yaa’ eh t’eeh
!” Chee shouted, the standard Navajo greeting. The man ignored him, plodding steadily down the asphalt. As he moved past the police car and back into the glare of the headlights Chee saw he had something bulky stuck under his belt in the back of his trousers. It looked like the butt of a pistol.

Chee unsnapped his own pistol, took it out of its holster, and laid it on the seat beside him. He touched the siren button, producing a sudden howling. The gray-haired man seemed not to hear it.

Chee picked up the mike, raised Ship Rock, gave his location. “I have a male, about five feet eight inches tall, elderly, gray-haired, walking down the westbound lane away from the Nez site. He has what appears to be a pistol stuck under his belt and what appears to be a whiskey bottle in his right hand and is acting in a peculiar manner.”

“Peculiar manner,” the dispatcher said.

“I think he’s drunk,” Chee said. “He acts like he doesn’t hear me or see me.”

“Subject is drunk,” the dispatcher said.

“Maybe,” Chee said. “I will apprehend him now.”

Which might be easier said than done, he thought. He pulled the patrol car past the walker and spun it around so its lights shone directly into the man’s face. He got out with his pistol in his band. He felt dizzy. Everything was vague.

“Hold it right there,” Chee said.

The walker stopped. He looked intently at Chee, as if trying to bring him into focus. Then he sighed and sat on the pavement. He screwed the cap off the bottle, and took a long, gurgling drink. He looked at Chee again and said:

“
Baa yanisin, shiyaazh
.”

“You are ashamed?” Chee repeated. His voice choked. “Ashamed!” With his good hand he reached over the walker’s shoulder, jerked the pistol out of the man’s belt. He sniffed the muzzle of the barrel and smelled burned powder. He checked the cylinders. All six contained cartridges, but three of the cartridges were empty. They had been fired. He jammed the pistol under his belt, snatched the bottle out of the walker’s hand, and hurled it into the sagebrush beside the road.

“Dirty coyote,” Chee said in Navajo. “Get up.” His voice was fierce.

The man stared up at him, expression puzzled. The glare of the headlights reflected off the streaks of rainwater running down his face, dripping from his hair, from his eyebrows.

“Get up!” Chee screamed.

He jerked the man to his feet, hurried him to the patrol car, searched him quickly for another weapon, took a pocketknife and some coins from a front pocket and a worn wallet from his hip pocket. He handcuffed him, conscious of the man’s thin, bony wrists, conscious of the numbness in his own right hand, and the pain in his left palm. He helped the man into the backseat, closed the door behind him, and stood for a moment looking through the glass at him.

“
Shiyaazh
,” the man said again. “
Baa yanisin.” My son, I am ashamed
.

Chee stood with his head bowed, the rain beating against his shoulders. He wiped the back of his hand across his wet face and licked his lips. The taste was salty.

Then he walked into the sagebrush, looking for the bottle. It would be needed as evidence.

THERE WAS NOTHING Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn dreaded more than this — this unpleasant business of pretending to help people he could not possibly help. But those involved today were a family in Emma’s clan, his in-laws, people from Bitter Water clan. By the Navajos’ extended definition of kinship, they were Emma’s brothers and sisters. He’d rarely heard Emma speak of them but that was beside the point. It was beside the point, too, that Emma would never have asked him to interfere. Certainly not in this case, with one of their own policemen murdered. She would have tried to help them herself, though. Tried very quietly — and she would have been no less impotent than Leaphorn. But Emma was dead now and that left only him.

“We know he didn’t kill that policeman,” Mary Keeyani had said. “Not Ashie Pinto.”

By the white man’s way of reckoning kinship, the Keeyani woman was Ashie Pinto’s niece. In fact, she was the daughter of Ashie’s sister, which gave her among the Turning Mountain People the same status as a daughter. She was a small, bony woman dressed in her old-fashioned, traditional, going-to-town best. But the long-sleeved velvet blouse hung on her loosely, as if borrowed from fatter times, and she wore only a single bracelet of narrow silver and a squash blossom necklace which used very little turquoise. She sat stiffly upright in the blue plastic chair across from Leaphorn’s desk, looking embarrassed and uncomfortable.

While Mary Keeyani explained her relationship to Ashie Pinto, and therefore to Hosteen Pinto’s problem, in the proper fashion of a traditional Navajo, Louisa Bourebonette had not explained herself at all. She sat next to Mary Keeyani, looking determined.

“There is absolutely no doubt that this is all some sort of mistake,” Louisa Bourebonette said in a slow, precise, slightly southern voice. “But we haven’t had any success talking with the FBI. We tried to talk to someone at the Farmington office and then we went to Albuquerque. They simply won’t discuss it. And we don’t know who to get to look for evidence to prove he’s innocent. We thought we could hire a private detective. We thought maybe you could recommend someone who would be reliable.”

Louisa Bourebonette had given Leaphorn her card. He picked it up now and glanced at it again.

LOUISA BOUREBONETTE, PH.D.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,
AMERICAN STUDIES
NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY
FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

This wasn’t the information he wanted. He wanted to know how this trim, gray-haired, sharp-eyed woman was connected to the sorrowful business of Delbert Nez, a young man murdered and an old man destroyed. It was partly the wisdom Leaphorn had accumulated in a long life of police work that people have reasons for whatever they do — and the more effort required, the stronger the reason must be. Among Navajos, family is an overpowering reason. Bourebonette was not Navajo. What she was doing required a lot of effort. He put the card in his desk drawer.

“Have you talked to Hosteen Pinto’s attorney?”

“She didn’t seem to know much,” Bourebonette said. She made a small, self-deprecatory face and shook her head “Of course, they turned Mr. Pinto over to someone brand new in the job. She’d just moved in from Washington. Had just been hired. She told us the Federal Public Defender’s office had two investigators who might be helpful. But . . .”

Professor Bourebonette let the sentence trail off, intending to let the skepticism in her tone finish it. Leaphorn sat silently behind his desk. He glanced at her. And away. Waiting.

Bourebonette shrugged. “But I got the impression that she didn’t think they would be very helpful. I don’t think she knew them well yet. In fact, she didn’t give us much reason to believe that Mr. Pinto will be well represented.”

Leaphorn knew one of the federal defender cops. A good, solid, hardworking Hispano named Felix Sanchez. He used to be with the El Paso police department and he knew how to collect information. But there wasn’t much of anything Sanchez could do to help these women. And nothing Leaphorn could do, either. He could give them the names of private detectives in Farmington, or Flagstaff, or Albuquerque. White men. What could they do? What could anyone do? An old man had been turned mean by whiskey and had killed a policeman. Why waste what little money his family might have? Or this abrasive white woman’s money. How did she fit into this?

“If you hire a private detective it’s going to be expensive,” Leaphorn said. “He would want some money in advance as a retainer. I’d guess at least five hundred dollars. And you’d be paying his expenses. Mileage, meals, motels, things like that. And so much an hour for his fee.”

“How much?” Professor Bourebonette asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe twenty-five, thirty dollars an hour.”

Mrs. Keeyani sucked in her breath. She looked stricken. Dr. Bourebonette put a comforting hand on Mrs. Keeyani’s arm.

“That’s about what I’d expected,” Professor Bourebonette said, in a stiff, unnatural-sounding voice. “We can pay it. Who would you recommend?”

“It would depend,” Leaphorn said. “What do you—”

Professor Bourebonette interrupted him. “One would expect, or should expect if she didn’t know better, that you people would take care of this yourselves. That the family wouldn’t have to hire someone to find out the facts in a murder case.”

The anger left Leaphorn with nothing to say. So he said the obvious.

“In a case like this, a felony committed on a reservation, the jurisdiction . . .”

She held up her hand. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has the jurisdiction. We know that. We’ve already been told, and we knew it already, being reasonably intelligent. But after all, one of your own men was killed.” A trace of sarcasm crept into Bourebonette’s tone. “Aren’t you a little bit curious about who actually killed him?”

Leaphorn felt himself flushing. Surely this arrogant white woman didn’t expect him to answer that. Not in the presence of the murderer’s niece.

But the professor was waiting for an answer. Let her wait. Leaphorn waited himself. Finally he said: “Go on.”

“Since you don’t seem to be investigating, and since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is content to simply bring Ashie Pinto to trial without any effort to find the actual criminal, we hope you can at least give us some advice about who to hire. Somebody honest.”

Leaphorn cleared his throat. He was trying to imagine this haughty woman in the beautifully finished office of the agent-in-charge at Albuquerque. Nothing but politeness and good manners there, he was sure.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we were discussing. And to give you that advice I must know some things. What do you have to tell this private detective? What can you give him to work on? Would it be leads he’d be following on the Reservation — around where Hosteen Pinto lived? Or around Ship Rock and Red Rock where the — where it happened? In other words, what do you know that can help? What do you know that would help him find a witness, something to prove, for example, that Hosteen Pinto was somewhere else when this crime happened? What can you give him to give him a place to start looking?”