Coyote Waits (8 page)

“That’s Mr. Ji’s,” she said. “Are you going to arrest him?” Her voice sounded hopeful.

“Gee,” Chee said. “How does he spell it?”

“It’s H-U-A-N J-I,” she said, “so I guess if you pronounced it the way we pronounce ‘na-va-
ho
’ it would be ‘Mr. Hee.’”

“I heard he was a Vietnamese. Or Cambodian,” Chee said.

“Vietnamese,” the secretary said. “I think he was a colonel in their army. He commanded a Ranger battalion.”

“Where could I find him?”

“His algebra class is down in room nineteen,” she said, gesturing down the hallway. “School’s over but he usually keeps part of them overtime.” She laughed. “Mr. Ji and the kids have a permanent disagreement over how much math they are going to learn.”

Chee paused at the open door of room nineteen. Four boys and a girl were scattered at desks, heads down, working on notebooks. The girl was pretty, her hair cut unusually short for a young Navajo woman. The boys were two Navajos, a burly, sulky-looking white, and a slender Hispano. But Chee’s interest was in the teacher.

Mr. Huan Ji stood beside his desk, his back to the class and his profile to Chee, staring out the classroom window. He was a small man, and thin, rigidly erect, with short-cropped black hair and a short-cropped mustache showing gray. He wore gray slacks, a blue jacket, and a white shirt with a tie neatly in place and looked, therefore, totally misplaced in Ship Rock High School. His unblinking eyes studied something about level with the horizon. Seeing what? Chee wondered. He would be looking across the tops of the cottonwoods lining the San Juan and southwestward toward the sagebrush foothills of the Chuskas. He would be seeing the towering black shape of Ship Rock on the horizon, and perhaps Rol-Hai Rock, and Mitten Rock. No. Those landmarks would be beyond the horizon from Mr. Ji’s viewpoint at the window. Chee was creating them by looking into his own memory.

Mr. Ji’s expression seemed sad. What was Huan Ji seeing in his own memory? Perhaps he was converting the gray-blue desert mountains of Dinetah into the wet green mountains of his homeland.

Chee cleared his throat.

“Mr. Ji,” he said.

Five students looked up from their work, staring at Chee. Mr. Ji’s gaze out the window didn’t waver.

Chee stepped into the classroom. “Mr. Ji,” he said.

Mr. Ji jerked around, his expression startled.

“Ah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

“I wonder when I might talk to you,” Chee said. “Just for a moment.”

“We’re about finished here,” Ji said. He looked at the five students, who looked back at him. He looked at his watch. “You can go now,” he said. “If you have finished, give me your papers. If not, bring them in tomorrow — finished and corrected.” He turned to Chee. “You are a parent?”

“No sir,” Chee said. “I’m Officer Chee. With the Navajo Tribal Police.” As he said it, he was conscious of Mr. Ji noticing the thick bandage on his hand, his denims, his short-sleeved sport shirt. “Off duty,” he added.

“Ah,” Mr. Ji said. “What can I tell you?”

Chee heard hurrying footsteps — Janet Pete coming down the hallway toward them. Hosteen Pinto would be legally represented in this conversation, he thought. Well, why not? But it bothered him. Where does friend end and lawyer start?

“Mr. Ji?” Janet asked, slightly breathless.

“This is Janet Pete,” Chee said. “An attorney.”

Mr. Ji bowed slightly. If Mr. Ji ever allowed confusion to show, it would have shown now. “Is this about one of my students?” he said.

The last of Mr. Ji’s students hurried past them, the urge to be away overcoming curiosity.

“Miss Pete represents Ashie Pinto,” Chee said.

It seemed to Jim Chee that Mr. Ji momentarily stopped breathing. He looked at Janet Pete, his face showing no emotion at all.

“Is there a place we could talk?” Chee asked.

Someone was in the teachers’ lounge. They walked out to where Janet’s Toyota was parked.

“Is this your car?” Chee pointed to the Jeepster.

“Yes,” Ji said.

“It was seen out on Navajo 33 the night Officer Delbert Nez was killed.”

Ji said nothing. Chee waited.

Ji’s face was blank. (The inscrutable Oriental, Chee thought. Where had he heard that? Mary Landon had used it once to describe him. “You are, you know. You guys came over the icecap from the steppes of Mongolia or Tibet or someplace like that. We came out of the dark forests of Norway.”)

“What was the date?” Ji asked.

Chee told him. “That was the night of the rain. Good hard rain. It would have been between seven-thirty and eight. But getting dark because the storm was coming.”

“Yes,” Ji said. “I remember it. I was there.”

“Did you see anyone? Anything?” Janet Pete asked.

“Where?” Ji asked.

Chee suppressed a frown. It seemed a stupid question.

“Where you were. Out beyond Ship Rock,” he said. “East of Red Rock on Route 33.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything,” Ji said.

“How about after you turned north on Route 63?”

“Route 63?” Ji looked genuinely puzzled. Not too surprising. Not many people, including those who routinely drove that dusty, bumpy route, would know its map number.

“The gravel road close to Red Rock that goes north toward Biklabito and Ship Rock.”

“Oh,” Ji said, nodding. “No. I saw nothing. Not that I remember.”

“You didn’t see the fire, Nez’s car burning?”

“I think I saw a glow. I thought it was the lights of a car. I really don’t remember much about that now.”

“Do you remember what you were doing out there?”

Ji smiled and nodded. “I remember that,” he said. “It looked like it might rain. Rain clouds back over the mountains. It rains a lot in my country and I miss it out here. I thought I would drive out and enjoy it.”

“How did you go?” Chee asked.

Ji thought. “I drove south on U.S. 666 toward Gallup, and then I turned west on that paved road over to Red Rock, and then circled back on the gravel road.”

“Did you see a Tribal Police car?”

“Ah, yes,” Ji said. “One passed me.”

“Where?”

“On the Red Rock road.”

That would have been Delbert’s Unit 44. “Did you see it again?”

“No.”

“You would have passed it,” Chee said. “It had pulled off the left side of the road and driven down a dirt track.”

“I didn’t notice it,” Ji said. “I think I would have remembered that.”

“Did you meet anyone, I mean on your way home?”

Mr. Ji thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “But I don’t remember.”

And that was exactly all they learned.

From the parking lot, they drove southward down 666, across the San Juan bridge.

“You want to go see where it happened?” he asked Janet.

She looked at him, surprised. “Do you?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But yes, I guess I do.”

“You haven’t been back?”

“I was in the hospital in Albuquerque for weeks,” Chee said. “And then, I don’t know, there just wasn’t any reason.”

“Okay,” Janet said. “I think I should see it.”

“You have a better reason than I do,” Chee said. “I’ve got nothing to do with it anymore. It’s FBI business. I’ll just testify as the arresting officer.”

Janet nodded. She saw no reason to comment on any of this. Chee knew she already knew it.

“I didn’t do any of the investigating,” he added, knowing she would have known that, too.

“Do you think the FBI took a statement from Mr. Ji?”

Chee shook his head. “He would have mentioned it.”

“Doesn’t it surprise you that they didn’t?”

He shook his head. “Not now. Remember? You explained it to me. They have all they need for a conviction. Why waste their time?”

She was frowning. “I know I said that. But they’d seen your statement. They knew you’d met that car driving away from the scene. You described it as a white Jeepster, said who owned it. I’d think just simple curiosity . . .” She let it trail off.

“They had their man, and their evidence,” Chee said. “Why make things complicated?”

Janet thought about that. “Justice,” she said.

Chee let it pass. Justice, he thought, wasn’t a concept that fit very well in this affair. Besides, the sun was just dipping behind the Chuskas now. On the vast, rolling prairie that led away from the highway toward the black shape of Ship Rock every clump of sagebrush, every juniper, every snakeweed, every hummock of bunch grass cast its long blue shadow — an infinity of lines of darkness undulating across the glowing landscape. Beautiful. Chee’s spirit lifted. No time to think of justice. Or of the duty he had left undone.

Janet’s Toyota topped the long climb out of the San Juan Basin and earth sloped away to the south — empty, rolling gray-tan grassland with the black line of the highway receding toward the horizon like the mark of a ruling pen. Miles to the south, the sun reflected from the windshield of a northbound vehicle, a blink of brightness. Ship Rock rose like an oversized, free-form Gothic cathedral just to their right, miles away but looking close. Ten miles ahead Table Mesa sailed through its sea of buffalo grass, reminding Chee of the ultimate aircraft carrier. Across the highway from it, slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged black form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore.

They did the right turn off 666 onto Navajo 33, driving into the setting sun.

“Here’s probably about where he was when we first made radio contact,” Chee said. “Just about here.” His voice sounded stiff in his own ears.

Janet nodded.

He slowed, pointing. “I was way over there, twenty-five, thirty miles behind Ship Rock, driving south on the road from Biklabito. I was back there behind the rock. Something like that screws up radio communication. It keeps fading in and out.”

Chee cleared his throat. He pulled down the sunshade. Janet flipped down the one on the driver’s side, found she was too short to be helped by it, and fished out her sunglasses. She was thinking that Chee wasn’t as ready to talk about this as he’d thought he was.

“Going to be quite a sunset,” she said. “Look north.”

North, over Sleeping Ute Mountain in Colorado, over Utah’s Abajo Mountains, great thunderheads were reaching toward their evening climax. Their tops, reflecting in the direct sun, were snowy white and the long streamers of ice crystals blown from them seemed to glitter. But at lower levels the light that struck them had been filtered through the clouds over the Chuskas and turned into shades of rose, pink, and red. Lower still, the failing light mottled them from pale blue-gray to the deepest blue. Overhead, the streaks of high-level cirrus clouds were being ignited by the sunset. They drove through a fiery twilight.

“There’s where it happened,” Chee said, nodding to the left. “He pulled off the pavement right up there, and the car was burning over by that cluster of junipers, way off there.”

Janet nodded. Chee noticed her forehead, her cheeks rosy in the reflected light. Skin as smooth as silk. Her eyes were intense, staring at something. An intelligent face. A classy face. She frowned.

“What’s that over on those rocks?” She gestured. “Those white marks up in that formation over there?”

“That’s what was bothering Delbert,” Chee said, and made a chuckling sound. “That’s the artwork of our phantom vandal. Delbert noticed somebody had been painting those formations maybe six weeks ago. He wanted to catch the guy.”

“It bothered him? I don’t guess there’s a law against it. Nothing specific anyway,” she said. “But it bothers me too. Why ugly up something natural?”

“With Nez, I think it was a mixture of being bothered and thinking it was sort of weird. Who would climb up in there and waste all that time and paint turning black basalt into white? Anyway, Delbert was always talking about it. And that night, it sounded like he thought he’d seen the guy. He was laughing about it.”

“Maybe he did see him,” Janet said. She was staring out at the formation. “What caused all that? I know it must be volcanic but it doesn’t look like the normal ones. Frankly, they don’t teach you anything about geology in law school.”

“In anthropology departments either,” Chee said. “But from what I’ve been told, the volcanic action that formed Ship Rock lasted for tens of thousands of years. The pressure formed a lot of cracking in the earth’s surface, and every thousand years or so — or maybe it’s millions of years — there would be another bubbling up of melted rock and new ridges would form. Sometimes right beside the old ones.”

“Oh,” Janet said.

“These run for miles and miles,” Chee said. “Sort of parallel the Chuska Mountains.”

“Is there a name for them?”

Chee told her.

She made a wry face. “My parents wanted me to speak perfect English. They didn’t talk Navajo much around me.”

“It means something like ‘Long Black Ridges.’ Something like that.” He glanced at Janet, not knowing where she stood on the issue of Navajo witchcraft. “Lot of traditional Navajos wouldn’t want to go around those lava formations — especially at night. According to Navajo mythology, at least on the east side of the Reservation, those lava flows are the dried blood of the monsters killed by the Hero Twins. I think that’s one of the things that got Nez so interested. You know. Who was breaking that taboo?”

“Maybe Nez caught whoever it was, and the guy killed him,” Janet said.

“And gave the pistol to Hosteen Pinto,” Chee said. “You’re going to have trouble selling that one.”

Janet shrugged. “It’s as good as anything else I’ve thought of,” she said. “Let’s take a look at it.” She glanced at Chee, looking suddenly doubtful. “Or would there be a lot of snakes this time of year?”

“Always some snakes in places like that,” Chee said. “But they’re no problem if you use your head.”

“Just thinking about snakes is a problem,” Janet said. But she turned the Toyota off the asphalt.

Getting to part of the formation where the painter worked involved maneuvering the little Toyota across about a mile of trackless stone, cactus, Russian thistle, buffalo grass, sage, and snakeweed. After dropping a wheel with a rattling jolt into a little wash, Janet switched off the ignition.