Coyote Waits (21 page)

The formation seemed to have been produced by a series of eruptions. In some places the basalt had been worn smooth by eons of time and softened by growths of lichens — its cracks sprouting buffalo and bunch grass, cactus, and even scraggly junipers. Elsewhere it was newer, still ragged and black. A couple of miles long, Leaphorn guessed, with a smaller formation beyond it extending perhaps another quarter of a mile.

Through the binoculars the formation seemed even rougher and more complex. In places the upthrust seemed to have forced overlying sandstone upward, producing broken walls and leaning slabs in a chaotic labyrinth. There, in the highest part of the ridge, the painting had been done.

Done carefully. Despite what Chee had told him, that surprised Leaphorn. At the point where the binoculars were focused, the black of the basaltic surface and the white of the paint formed a slight curve, not perfect but generally clean-cut. He shifted his vision to the next spot. The shape seemed irregular. Perhaps that was because of his perspective. But here, too, the margin was clean. He could see too little of the other painted surfaces to form a judgment.

He handed the binoculars to Professor Bourebonette. “Notice the edges. Notice how carefully done,” he said. While she looked, he thought about what she was seeing. As he did he understood exactly where the photographs had been taken.

His uncle had been right. Things seem random only because we see them from the wrong perspective.

He told Bourebonette about it as they drove down the bumpy road toward the Dineyahze place.

“It still sounds crazy as hell,” he said, “but I think either Ji or the boy took all those photographs and blew them up to plan where to put the paint.”

Professor Bourebonette looked suitably surprised. She considered. Leaphorn slowed, let the car roll across the borrow ditch and onto a road, which quickly became simply two parallel tracks through the bunch grass and snakeweed.

“Okay,” Bourebonette said finally. “If you wanted to paint something regular on a totally irregular surface, I guess that’s how you could do it.”

“I think so,” Leaphorn said. “You’d pick the spot you wanted to see it from, and take the photographs, mark out the places where the paint had to go. Little bit here on this corner of this slab, and then back here, and up there and so forth.”

“That leaves the really big question, though,” she said. “The big question is why anybody sane would want to paint something out here. And what it would be.” She looked at him. “You have that part of it figured out?”

“Afraid not,” Leaphorn said.

“I think that would take some real genius.”

The patrol car eased up a long slope, jolting over rocky places. The windshield was coated with dust, but the sun was low in the southwest now, out of their faces. Leaphorn shifted down, and up, and down again. And suddenly he found another answer. Or maybe he did.

“I have another thought,” he said. “About ‘what.’ Or more about ‘why.’”

Bourebonette looked at him, waiting.

Leaphorn considered whether he would look stupid if he was wrong. It occurred to him that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He considered that. Why would he be showing off? Why enjoying this?

“Are you going to tell me?” Bourebonette asked.

Leaphorn shifted up again as the tracks leveled off. “When we get to the top of this ridge here, we’re going to be able to see that formation again. From a different perspective now. I think we’re going to see those painted spaces coming together. Forming a unity.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Something to do with this little girl we’re going out to visit.” And as he said it, realized that it sounded absurd. It would be wrong. The painting would remain, forever, a crazy jumble.

They reached the summit of the ridge. The shoulder was wide here, blocking their view of the formation. But they could see the Dineyahze place. It was built on the slope opposite them. The Dineyahze outfit included a small oblong of house with a tar-paper roof weighed down against windy weather by a scattering of old automobile tires, a hogan built of stone, a mobile home set on concrete blocks, and the usual brush arbors, corrals, and storage sheds.

“If I’m guessing right, the Ji boy took those photographs from the ridge above the house. He wanted the same view that Jenifer would have from her yard.” He glanced at Bourebonette, who was looking impressed.

“If I am guessing wrong,” he added, feeling sudden embarrassment, “then I have made myself look foolish.”

“Right or wrong,” Bourebonette said, “I’d say you have made yourself look like an innovative thinker. None of that occurred to me at all.”

The rock formation emerged slowly into view as the car moved along the ridge. And then they could see the paint.

Leaphorn stopped the car. He pulled on the parking brake. He stared.

Jubilation!

It wasn’t perfect from this perspective. But you could easily make it out. The white-against-black read:

I LOVE JEN

“Can you see it?” he asked. “Can you read it?”

“How about that?” Professor Bourebonette said. “Congratulations to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn.”

Her smile engulfed him with warm approval.

“I should have thought of it sooner,” he said. “I had all the information I needed. As soon as I knew where the girl lived, I should have guessed.”

“Modesty,” Bourebonette said. “I think that was right out of Sherlock Holmes.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m sort of proud of it myself,” he said.

“I wonder what the girl thinks?” Bourebonette said. “I think I’ll ask her.”

“I don’t see much need to bother her now,” Leaphorn said. “We were going to ask her if she had any idea what would be going on with Taka. Now we know.”

“We sure do,” Bourebonette said. She was silent while he backed the car around. Then she said: “What we don’t know is why somebody shot his father.”

“No, we don’t,” Leaphorn said.

But he was beginning to think he might know that, too.

CHEE HAD HOPED to catch Janet Pete before the federal court session convened. But there was the problem of finding a parking place in downtown Albuquerque. So he emerged from the elevator just in time to see the U.S. marshals ushering Hosteen Pinto into the courtroom.

“Jury selection today,” the receptionist at the Federal Public Defender’s office had told him. “She’ll be over in Judge Downey’s court in the new Federal Building. On Gold.”

“How long will that take?” Chee had asked, and the answer had been “Maybe all day. Maybe tomorrow. Probably you can catch her before it starts. If you hurry.”

He’d hurried, but not quite enough. Maybe, he thought, there would be a recess and he could talk to her then. He nodded to the bailiff at the door and started in.

“You’ll have to sit over by the wall, and about the fourth row,” the bailiff told him. “All the front rows are for the jury panel, and they use the back rows until their names get called.”

Chee sat against the wall in the fourth row and watched the panel being ushered in. There would be sixty of them if he remembered the procedure — men and women from around New Mexico with nothing much in common except that they lived in this judicial district and had registered to vote. Thus their names had been drawn for this duty.

When the last one was seated a middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress began spinning the bingo cage on a table beside the judge’s bench, pulling out names. An elderly Hispano named Martinez was first. He came down the aisle through the gate in the railing, turned right, and took the first chair in the row inside the railing.

“Mrs. Eloise Gibbons,” Blue Woman read, and a slender young woman in a gray pantsuit came down the aisle and took the chair next to Martinez.

“Mr. William Degenhardt,” Blue Woman said, and a conservative-looking man with a conservative haircut and a conservative gray suit took the chair to her right.

Blue Woman continued the litany, filling the row of chairs inside the railing, and then the two rows behind it. Slightly more women than men, Chee estimated. Altogether, seven Anglos and Hispanics, a Vietnamese or Cambodian, a middle-aged Navajo woman, a man who might be an Apache, and two who were clearly Pueblo Indians, although Chee couldn’t identify which of the Pueblos.

Janet Pete and a man who Chee guessed must be the federal prosecutor assigned to this case were standing in front of the high desk where the judge sat. The three were discussing something with her. Would that be an advantage? Woman judge, woman lawyer? Chee doubted it. It would be fairly common these days.

Chee felt tremendously drowsy. It was warm in the courtroom and he’d slept very little last night. He thought of his hand, which was itching under the bandage. How much use of it would he recover? He thought of what he wanted to tell Janet Pete — about Ji’s son being the driver of the car he’d seen the night Nez was killed. About Ji’s message on the wall. He thought of how Janet Pete looked. She was wearing something dark green with a skirt that came far below her knees. She had pretty knees, not that he’d seen them often, and pretty ankles.

Janet was standing facing the jury panel now and the judge was asking if any panelist knew her, knew her family, had had any dealing with her. A very classy woman, Chee thought. He felt a wave of affection, and of chauvinistic Navajo pride in her. And more than that, he felt a hunger for her. And a sense of failure. Since the day she’d come to the hospital to see him he’d lost ground with her. He was sure of that. She liked him less now than she did that morning.

The prosecutor was standing, undergoing the same scrutiny from the jury panel. One man on the front row put up his hand, and said he knew the man. They were members of the same church. He was excused.

Then Ashie Pinto stood. The business suit issued by the Bernalillo County jail for this appearance was too large for him, making him look even thinner than Chee had remembered.

“Face the jury panel, please, Mr. Pinto,” the judge said.

Hosteen Pinto reacted to his name. He looked back at the judge, puzzled.

“Interpreter!”

The interpreter responded to the impatience in Judge Downey’s voice. He awoke from whatever had been occupying his thoughts, stood, said something in Navajo too low for Chee to understand.

Hosteen Pinto looked at the man, cupped a hand behind his ear.

“She wants you to look out at those people,” the interpreter said, much louder now. “So they can see you.”

Pinto looked out at them, his expression sometimes embarrassed, sometimes determined. Pinto’s eyes moved across the courtroom, hesitating a moment when they came to the Navajo panelist, hesitating another moment when they met the eyes of Jim Chee.

Chee looked away, down at his itching hand.

No one knew Hosteen Ashie Pinto. The whites didn’t know him, nor the Hispanics, nor the Apache, nor the Pueblos, nor the Asian.
Nor Janet Pete, nor me. He is a shaman. He is a stranger to us all
.

The prosecutor looked at his notes then looked up. “Mrs. Greyeyes, I believe you live at Nakaibito. On the Navajo Reservation. Is that correct?”

“Actually, closer to Coyote Canyon,” Mrs. Greyeyes said.

“But on the Reservation?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a Navajo?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any clan relationships with the defendant?”

“I don’t know what he is.”

The prosecutor looked at his notes. “I have two clans written down here. Turning Mountain Dinee and the Bitter Water People.” He looked at the interpreter. “Is that right? Two clans?”

“Mother’s and father’s,” the interpreter said. “Two clans.”

“I am born to the Sage Brush Hill People,” the woman said. “And born for Towering House Clan.”

“So there is no connection? Correct?”

“We’re not kinfolks,” the woman said.

Judge Downey leaned forward and stared at the interpreter. “Miss Pete,” she said, “do you think your client should know what is going on here? Shouldn’t it be interpreted for Mr. Pinto?”

Janet Pete looked abashed.

“I would like to have it interpreted,” she said.

“So ordered,” said Judge Downey.

The interpreter was a man of perhaps forty with a disheveled look that was probably genetic. He explained in loud and precise Navajo the exchange between Mrs. Greyeyes and the prosecutor.

Chee began to doze. Snapped awake. The man with the conservative look was being questioned now by Janet Pete.

“Mr. Degenhardt, I want you to tell me if you have ever had or if anyone in your family, or even a close friend, has ever had any unpleasant experience involving a member of the Navajo Tribe. Have you ever been in a fight with a Navajo? Anything like that?”

Mr. Degenhardt thought about it.

The interpreter said: “She asked him if he ever been in a fight with a Navajo.”

Mr. Degenhardt shook his head. “No.”

“Can you think of any reason why you could not give this gentleman here, Mr. Pinto, a fair trial?”

“She say you be fair?” the interpreter said.

“No, Ma’am,” Degenhardt said.

“He say yes, he be fair,” the interpreter said.

Chee stopped listening. Who was the interpreter who translated Ashie Pinto’s words from the tape to the transcript? Had he been as lazy as this one? Skipping? Summarizing? Or, if he was a traditional Navajo, perhaps leaving out unpleasant parts about witches and skinwalkers? He was remembering he’d decided yesterday to hear Hosteen Pinto’s story in Hosteen Pinto’s very own words. This business of selecting a jury would take hours. Chee got up and moved quietly out the door.

Finding a parking place near the Federal Building downtown was child’s play compared to finding a place to park anywhere near the university library. Finally Chee left his pickup in a POLICE VEHICLES ONLY space behind the campus police station. He identified himself to the duty sergeant, explained his business, and got reluctant approval to leave it there.

By the time he climbed the stairs to the Reserve Room in Zimmerman Library, checked out the tapes and transcripts, and went to work, it was almost noon. He was hungry. He should have stopped for lunch.