Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 07] (21 page)

He allowed himself to think a while about rain, sweeping its cool, wet blessing across the desert, but not to expect it. And now he needed to think of something else. The Badwater Clinic was over the next ridge.

The quirky wind generated by the thunderstorms' great updrafts bounced a tumbleweed across the unpaved clinic parking lot just as he pulled his truck to a stop. He turned off the engine and waited for the gust to subside. The place had been built only five or so years ago—a long one-story, flat-roofed rectangle set in a cluster of attendant buildings. A cube of concrete housing the clinic's water well was just behind the building, surmounted by a once-white storage tank. Beyond that stood a cluster of those ugly frame-and-brown-plaster housing units that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had scattered by the thousands across Indian reservations from Point Barrow to the Pagago Reservation. New as the clinic compound was, the reservation had already touched it, as it seemed to touch all such unnatural shapes imposed upon it, with an instant look of disrepair. The white paint of the clinic building was no longer white, and blowing sand had stripped patches of it from the concrete-block walls. None of this registered on the consciousness of Chee, who, Navajo fashion, had looked at the setting and not the structures. It was a good place. Beautiful. A long view down the valley toward the cliffs that rose above Chilchinbito Canyon and Long Flat Wash, toward the massive shape of Black Mesa—its dark green turned a cool blue by cloud shadow and distance. The view lifted Chee's spirits. He felt exultant—a mood he hadn't enjoyed since reading Mary Landon's letter. He walked toward the clinic entrance, feeling a gust of sand blown against his ankles and guessing that today it would finally rain and he would be lucky.

He was. The person sitting behind the counter-desk in the entrance foyer was the Woman from the Yoo'l Dinee, the Bead People. Chee's excellent Navajo-trained memory also produced her name—Eleanor Billie. She had been the receptionist on duty that cold late-spring day when he had come with the Onesalt woman to collect the wrong Begay. Her memory seemed to be as good as Chee's.

"Mister Policeman," she said, smiling very slightly. "Who can we get for you today? Do you need another Begay?"

"I just need you to help me understand something," Chee said. "About the time we got the wrong one."

Mrs. Billie had nothing to say to that. That smile, Chee realized, had not been a warm one. Maybe he wasn't so lucky.

"What I need to know is whether the woman who was with me—that woman from Window Rock—if she ever contacted anybody about that. Wrote a letter. Telephoned. Anything like that. Did she have any questions? Who would I ask about that?"

Mrs. Billie looked surprised. She produced an ironic chuckle. "She raised hell," she said. "She came in here the next day and acted real nasty. Wanted to see Dr. Yellowhorse. I don't know how she acted with him. She acted nasty with me."

"She came back?" Chee laughed. "I guess I shouldn't act surprised. She was mad enough to kill somebody." He laughed again. Mrs. Billie smiled, and now, he noticed, it seemed genuine. In fact, it was spreading into a broad grin.

"I always wondered what happened. To get that bitch in such a rage," Mrs. Billie said.

"Well, we took Begay to the chapter house over at Lukachukai. They were having a meeting—trying to settle whether a family from the Weaver Clan or an outfit from the Many Hogans Dinee had a right to live on some land over there. Anyway, Irma Onesalt had found out that this old Begay man had lived over there for about a thousand years and he was supposed to tell the council that the Many Hogans family had lived there first, and had the grazing and the water and all that. I didn't see all of it, but what I heard was that when they called on that Begay you gave us to talk about it, he gave them this long speech about how he never had lived there at all. He was born to the Coyote Pass People, and born for the Monster People, and him and his outfit lived way over east on the Checkerboard Reservation."

Chee was grinning as he finished, remembering Irma Onesalt's incoherent rage as she stomped out of the chapter house and back to his patrol car. "You should have heard what she said to me," he said. What Irma Onesalt had said would translate precisely from Navajo to English. It was the equivalent of: "You stupid son-of-a-bitch, you got the wrong Begay."

Mrs. Billie's grin showed an array of very white teeth in a very round face.

"I'd like to have seen that," Mrs. Billie said, with Chee now firmly established as a fellow victim. "You should have heard what she said to me. I just reminded her she'd called and said she was picking up Frank Begay to take him to the hearing, and we gave her the only Begay we had. Franklin Begay. Pretty damn close."

"Pretty close," Chee agreed.

"And the only Begay we had," Mrs. Billie said. "Still is, for that matter."

"Wonder what caused her to get the wrong name—or whatever happened."

"Oh, Frank Begay used to be here. He was diabetic, with all sorts of complications. But he died way back in the winter. Earlier than that. It was in October. He was the one from Lukachukai."

"I wonder if that's what caused the confusion," Chee said. "She didn't seem like a woman who'd get confused much."

Mrs. Billie nodded, agreeing. She looked thoughtful. "What she said was that we had our records all screwed up. Said we had him on our list as a patient. I looked, and told her we didn't. And she said, Damn it, yes we did. Maybe not today, she said, but a couple of weeks ago." Mrs. Billie was showing her white teeth in another joyful grin, remembering. "That's why I know just when Frank Begay died. October three. I went back into the files and found it."

Chee allowed himself to imagine for a moment how much pleasure Mrs. Billie had attained by giving that news to Irma Onesalt. He remembered his own discomfort at the chapter house, with the woman leaning on the door of his patrol car, staring at him contemptuously, bombarding him with questions about why he had delivered Franklin Begay when she had told him to deliver Frank Begay. An unusually arrogant woman, Irma Onesalt. He wondered, half seriously, if Dilly Streib, or whoever was working her homicide for the FBI, had considered that as a motive for her murder. Someone might simply have got tired of suffering Irma Onesalt's bad conduct.

"What else did Onesalt say?" Chee asked.

"Wanted to see the doctor to argue about it."

"Dr. Yellowhorse?"

"Yeah. So I sent her on in."

Yellowhorse and Onesalt, Chee thought. Two tough coyotes. For different reasons, he didn't like either of them—but Yellowhorse he respected. His differences with the doctor were purely philosophical—the believer and the agnostic exploiting the belief. Onesalt was, or had been, simply an obnoxious jerk. "I wish I could have seen those two," Chee said. "What happened?"

Mrs. Billie shrugged. "She went in. Maybe five minutes she came out."

The telephone at Mrs. Billie's plump elbow buzzed. "Badwater Clinic," she said. "What? Okay. I'll tell him." She hung up. "Came out steaming," she continued, grinning again. "Pure rage now. The doctor, he can be rough, you get him stirred up."

Chee was remembering what Janet Pete had told him—of Irma Onesalt's remark about the wrong Begay business tipping her off to something. This conversation hadn't opened any doors to what that might be. Or had it?

"She say anything else? Any remarks or anything?"

"No," Mrs. Billie said. "Well, not much. She got almost to the door and then she turned around and came back and asked me what that date was when Frank Begay died."

"You told her October third?"

"No. I hadn't looked it up yet. I told her last fall, I guess. And then she asked me if she could see a list of the patients we had in here." Mrs. Billie's face expressed disapproval of this remembered outrage. "Imagine that kind of brass!" she said. "And I said she'd have to ask the doctor about that and she said to hell with it then, she'd get it another way." Mrs. Billie looked even more disapproving. "Actually she said a little worse than that. Rough-talking woman."

A middle-aged black woman in a nurse's uniform came down the hall with a young Navajo who was pushing a wheelchair. The wheelchair contained a woman with her leg in a cast. "Now tell her again that it will itch, but she's not supposed to scratch it. Just let it itch. Think about something else." The Navajo said, "Don't scratch," in Navajo, and Woman in Cast said, in English, "Don't scratch. You told me that before."

"She speaks English," Mrs. Billie told the nurse. "Better than I do."

"That was it? Nothing else?" Chee asked, getting Mrs. Billie's attention again.

"Just walked out after that," Mrs. Billie said.

"She said she could get the list of patients another way?"

"Yeah," Mrs. Billie said. "I guess she could, too. They'd all be on some sort of medical-cost reimbursement list. Medicare, or Medicaid, or some insurance claim if they had insurance. Most of them wouldn't."

"Just have to go through the red tape?"

"Probably no big deal. She worked in Window Rock with all the other bureaucrats. Probably just get somebody in the right accounting office to get her a Xerox, or let her take a peek."

Chee had been remembering Leaphorn in his trailer, putting the list on his countertop. Leaphorn watching his face as he looked at the list. Leaphorn asking if he knew any of them. Looking disappointed when he didn't. Asking if the names suggested anything to him. They had suggested nothing. But now they did. Now they seemed terribly important.

"I haven't got any friends among the bureaucrats at Window Rock. Any way I could find out who was here that day?"

"You could ask Dr. Yellowhorse."

"Good," Chee said. "Can I get in to see him?"

"He's not here," Mrs. Billie said.

Chee looked as disappointed as possible. He shrugged, made a wry face.

"You're a policeman. I guess you could say it was police business."

"It's police business," Chee said.

"It will take a while," Mrs. Billie said, getting up. "Call me if the telephone rings."

It took about ten minutes and the telephone didn't ring. "I just copied them off for that date," Mrs. Billie said. "I hope you can read my writing."

Mrs. Billie's writing was a beautiful, clear, symmetrical script—a script that would win penmanship competitions, if there were still penmanship competitions. Chee noticed that before he looked at the names.

This was the list Leaphorn had told him about. The names for which Irma Onesalt was seeking death certificate dates. Wilson Sam's name was third. And second from the bottom Chee saw Dugai Endocheeney.

"Thanks," he said. He folded the paper absently and put it into his billfold, thinking: Sam and Endocheeney were alive when Onesalt was hunting their death certificates. Endocheeney had been into the clinic for that broken leg Iron Woman had told him about, and Sam for God knows what. But they were still alive. What was Onesalt…?

His mind answered the question even before he completed it. He knew why Irma Onesalt had died, and almost all the rest of it. All that remained of the puzzle was why someone had tried to kill him. He glanced at his watch. He'd spent more time here than he'd intended.

"Need to use your telephone," he told Mrs. Billie.

He would call Leaphorn and tell him what he'd learned. Then he had to hurry. He'd been hearing thunder and it seemed to be getting closer. He'd have to leave a little time in case it got muddy. After he made a deal with Alice Yazzie to conduct a Blessing Way, he'd see if he could figure out why Jim Chee's ghost was supposed to join the
chindis
of Onesalt, Sam, and Endocheeney. Now was not the time to be thinking such unpleasant thoughts.

the telephone was buzzing
when Leaphorn came through his office door. "You just missed a call," the operator told him. "I took the message for you."

"Okay," Leaphorn said. He was tired. He wanted to clean off his desk in a hurry, go home, take a shower, try to relax for a few minutes, and then drive back to Gallup. Emma had to stay overnight for the tests they were making, for the things they do when something is wrong inside the head. Why? Leaphorn didn't understand that. Uncharacteristically for him, he hadn't insisted on an explanation. Everything about Emma's illness left him feeling helplessly out of control. Things were happening to them that would change their lives—devastate his life—and there was nothing he could do that would affect it. He felt surrounded by inevitability—something new for Joe Leaphorn. It made him feel as he'd heard people felt when caught in earthquakes, with the solid earth no longer solid.

He worked quickly through the "Immediate Action" memos, and found none that required immediate action. The most urgent two concerned the rodeo. First, a bootlegger, a woman in a blue Ford 250 pickup, seemed to be selling more or less openly, according to the complaints, but hadn't been arrested. Second, a problem with traffic management had developed at points where the rodeo grounds access routes tangled with mainstream flow on Navajo Route 3. Leaphorn wrote the necessary order to deal with the traffic first. The bootlegger required thought. Who would the woman be? He sorted through a career-long accumulation of bootlegger knowledge, studied his map briefly. Usually five or six bootleggers would work an event as popular as the rodeo, two or three of them female. One of these women was sick, Leaphorn knew, maybe even in the hospital. Of the other two, the one who lived down at Wide Ruins drove a big pickup. Leaphorn conjured up her family connections. She was born to the Towering House Clan, born for the Rock Gap People? He compared this mentally with the clans of the policemen he had working the rodeo—following the simple and true theory that no one is going to arrest his own clan sister if he can avoid it. He found what he expected to find. The sergeant in charge of internal order was a Towering House man.

Leaphorn tore up the order he'd written to deal with the access problem and wrote another, switching the Towering House sergeant to traffic control and replacing him with the corporal who had been handling traffic. Then he looked at his telephone messages.