Rock with Wings (16 page)

He’s had time to work on his story, Chee thought. “So you heard the shot and went out to see what happened?”

“Hell, no. I thought whoever shot the guard might be looking for me. I hunkered down in there until you two showed up.”

In that time, Chee thought, Samuel had bled to death. If he’d done his job and come straight to the room instead of posing with those tourists, Samuel might be alive.

“So, if you didn’t shoot him, who did?”

“I told you I couldn’t see through the closed door. Do you think I’m Superman or something?”

“Were you expecting any visitors?”

“No. Yeah, you.” Delahart removed the tissue from his nose.

“Did you recognize the other voice?”

Delahart shook his head. “Hard to hear well through the door.”

“So let me replay this. A mysterious stranger comes to your hotel room and shoots your security guard while you’re in the bathroom. Is that your story?” Delahart’s nose was bleeding again.

“That’s what happened.”

“Do you usually have a bodyguard?”

“Samuel wasn’t my bodyguard.” Delahart wiped his nose, reapplied pressure with the tissue. “He was doing some special assignments. He wanted to talk about that.”

“You might as well tell me.”

“One of the women in this movie is a hot ticket, so she gets extra security as part of her contract. Samuel would let me know if she was planning to go to Las Vegas for the weekend, had an argument with her boyfriend, changed the color of her toenail polish. I’d send out some tweets: the Zombie Queen sleeps late. Stuff like that.”

Chee shifted in the chair. “Was she OK with someone spying on her?”

Delahart coughed and moved the tissue back to his face. “Guess I forgot to ask her. The price of fame.”

“Did Samuel want more money?”

“He was whining about an ex-wife breathing down his neck for more child support. I told him he could quit working for me if he wasn’t happy with the arrangement. His ex wasn’t my problem; I’ve got two of my own to contend with.”

“Did he punch you? Is that how you got the nosebleed? Maybe you shot him in self-defense.”

“How many times do I have to say I didn’t shoot that obnoxious son of a gun? The nose problem is the dry air in the desert.”

Dry air and nose candy, Chee thought. He wondered if too much cocaine would cause a cough, too.

“Who is the star Samuel was spying on?”

“Rhonda Delay. Hey, maybe she offed him. Zombie Queen claims a new victim.”

Chee frowned. “You’re lucky she didn’t shoot you, too.” Delahart seemed more like a petty criminal than a murderer. He might have hired someone to do the deed, but he didn’t seem reckless enough to do it himself.

“Rhonda knows the way the game’s played. If you’re looking for a person who wanted Samuel dead, I’d start with his ex. From what I hear, he had a thing for young girls.” Delahart looked at the blood on his hands. “Can I go to the room and wash up?”

“No.”

“How long do I have to sit here?” A cough.

“Until my boss stops by to take you to the police station for safekeeping.”

“You’re joking, right? I’ve got a million things to do, man. I can’t afford to sit around.” Delahart made a move to rise. “I have to go get my phone, make some calls.”

Chee put a hand firmly on Delahart’s arm. “You better get used to waiting. If I had to guess what happens next, I’d say you’ll be waiting in jail.”

Everything about Delahart irritated Chee—the grating, high-pitched sound of his voice, his arrogantly unkempt look, the know-it-all attitude. But most of all, the lying.

“I came by hoping to talk to you about something that looks like a grave, remember?”

“Do you take me for a mortician? We’re busy making a movie, man. We don’t have time for a stunt like that. Like I told you before, I don’t know anything about a grave.”

Chee frowned. “So if you won’t tell the truth about something as easy as that, I figure you must be lying about everything, including murder.”

“You wanna know about the grave? What do I get in exchange?”

“Maybe I won’t volunteer the information about what I saw in the vial next to your watch.”

Delahart exhaled, made a sound as he cleared his throat. “The grave is a prop. Turner and I came up with the idea when he was scouting. I thought it would create a little buzz. Sorry it got your panties in a knot.”

“Clever to add bones to make it more realistic. Animal remains or something?”

Delahart laughed. “That’s a good one. I wish I’d thought of that. We ought to hire you to help with this promotion stuff.”

And this time, Chee realized, Delahart was telling the truth.

When she got off the phone with Chee, Bernie returned Darleen’s call. Her sister answered on the third ring.

“Howdy, sis. How’s it goin’?’”

Darleen had been drinking. Bernie’s heart sank.

“I got a buncha drawings done for that portfolio. When can you come over so I can show you? I’m celebrating now.”

“You aren’t driving tonight, are you?”

“Duh. That’s why I called, so you can come over here. Mama and I are watching an old movie on TV. I forget the name, but it’s funny. Here, she wants to talk to you.”

Bernie could hear the phone being transferred.

“Eldest Daughter, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Mama. Did you and Darleen have dinner?”

“Yes. Pancakes. Everything is fine here.”

“Except that Darleen has been drinking.”

“We have an agreement now. She only drinks at home, and I have her car keys.”

“I don’t think that school in Santa Fe is a good idea.” Bernie spoke without her usual caution.

“It is a good idea for her to have something to look forward to.”

“Tell Sister I’m tired tonight. I will look at her drawings tomorrow when I come to see you.”

Bernie was getting ready for bed when the phone rang. She checked the ID, and was relieved to learn that it wasn’t work, or Darleen calling back to argue.

“Hi, Louisa.”

“Hey there. I wanted to tell you that Joe is enjoying the laptop. We installed the Navajo language font.”

“Great.”

“He’s doing research on hummingbirds. And he’s looking up that cactus you gave me to see what kind it is.”

Bernie thought of the necklace Chee had mentioned, and explained the situation to Louisa. “I’m going to e-mail the Lieutenant a photo. Maybe he can find out something about it. He has Chee’s listing in his address book, so he can respond directly to him.”

“Good idea. Joe is really taking to this computer. You know, his spirit has been up and down. The physical therapist says that he’s frustrated, and it’s all part of the brain injury. But he’s got some of his old sparkle back.”

Bernie couldn’t imagine the Lieutenant having mood swings. She’d seen him satisfied, if not actually happy, when a case came to conclusion, and noticed brief, rare flashes of irritation, usually directed at Chee or the feds, but that was it.
Sparkle
was not a word she ever would have used to describe the Lieutenant. But she didn’t know him the way Louisa did.

Bernie woke early, went for a run, took a shower, and ate a tortilla with some peanut butter. She put on her uniform for work and headed to Mama’s.

Mama was sweeping the porch when Bernie drove up, using the broom for a bit of support.

“You’re working hard this morning. Did you have your breakfast?”

“I made the coffee.” Mama indicated the chair against the front of the house, next to her walker. “You sit here while I finish.”

It was nearly nine. Bernie asked, “May I fix you something to eat?”

Mama shook her head. “Youngest Daughter set up oatmeal in that envelope. She leaves me a bowl, even the water in a cup.” Mama swept the last of the dirt off the porch and moved carefully toward the walker. “She likes that beeping machine and those little packages.”

The microwave oatmeal Darleen had purchased was full of sugar, not as healthy for Mama, and more expensive than the regular kind. “I’ll tell her how to make the oatmeal you like.”

“I already showed her.” Mama laughed. “You explain how to make it in the
bee na’niildóhó
. That’s the way she does it.”

Bernie smiled at the Navajo word for microwave oven. It translated to “you warm things up with it.”

Mama looked good this morning. Relieved, no doubt, that what seemed to be a major problem for Darleen turned out to be less than that. Bernie would talk to her sister about the ramifications of her arrest, and learn what came next, if anything.

“How are you, my daughter? There’s some trouble in your voice.”

“Oh, a little problem at work.”

“And with the one you married?”

“I miss him.”

“He works hard, that one. He won’t forget you. Can you stay here with us today?”

“No, I have to patrol this afternoon. I just came by for a quick visit and to take a look at Sister’s new drawings.”

“That’s good. She’s in the kitchen.”

Darleen had opened a Mountain Dew, and sat at the table with two piles of papers in front of her. She wore silver hoop earrings
that reached her chin and a knit shirt with a butterfly on it that, Bernie thought, would have fit better a size larger.

Bernie sat next to her. “Where are your drawings? I’m glad you did some.”

Darleen sighed. “I looked at them this morning. They still need work.” She put her elbows on the table. “And I don’t know about all this. I never was good at school.”

“You’re smart, you just weren’t motivated.” Bernie glanced at the paperwork Darleen had assembled—an admission application, student housing requests, and forms for financial aid. “Did you call the school and find out about the deadlines and the GED?”

“I left a message. No one called me back.” Darleen shoved a booklet toward her. “Look at this. They want to know all kinds of stuff. I don’t get it.”

Bernie opened the cover and thumbed through it. It was the application for financial aid, a universal form that many colleges used. Darleen had answered the questions requiring basic information but left most of it blank.

She could take over, Bernie thought, but she wasn’t going to. She poured herself half a cup of coffee. “Want some?”

“No, thanks. I made it too strong this morning.”

Bernie picked up the financial aid application again. “How much is tuition anyway?”

“I don’t remember. It’s here somewhere.” Darleen started shuffling through the piles.

“When the person from the school calls you back, ask about that too.”

“Are you going to help me?”

“When there’s something I can do. For now, you can handle all this.”

And if you can’t, Bernie thought, you shouldn’t be going away to school.

Darleen sighed. “You know, I just want to be an artist. This is really complicated.”

“Life’s complicated.”

“Like you and that the guy with the dirt?”

“Yeah,” Bernie said. “Like you getting arrested. What’s next with that?”

Darleen shrugged. “I got a ticket. Twenty-five dollars. Stoop Man is all mad at me and his sister for being drunk. He’ll get over it.”

Bernie said, “I don’t like you getting drunk either. Neither does Mama.”

“I’m OK. I just do it to celebrate or when I don’t have anything better to do. Don’t nag me anymore.”

Bernie took Mama some coffee. The rug Mama loved, the rug she planned to sell, was on the couch, folded into a rectangle. Mama ran her hand over it as she focused on the TV. “When I feel this one, I think of those sheep we had then. We had a time with some of those
dibé yázh
, the little lambs.”

“I remember that spring when it was so cold, and the lambs came early.” Even though she had been small herself, Bernie had bottle-fed one of the newcomers. She could hear the rhythmic sound the lamb made as it sucked and see the way its tail wagged as it gulped the milk. It grew to have wool the color of chocolate and became one of her favorites. The brown in the rug’s double diamonds came from its fleece.

As she drove into Shiprock, Bernie noticed the building clouds, potential thunderheads that held the flirtatious promise of rain. Had it rained somewhere on the sprawling Navajo Nation? She hoped so.

She arrived at the police station a little earlier than she had to for her shift, and ran into Bigman finishing his reports.

Bernie greeted him. “A couple of days ago, you said you wanted to ask me a favor?”

“Oh, that’s right. It’s for my wife. She’s interested in weaving. She asked me to see if I could find somebody who might be willing to teach her. She’d like to start soon, while she’s still off from school.”

A couple of years ago Bigman had married a
bilagaana
who taught at Shiprock’s elementary school. Bernie didn’t know her very well, but she liked the woman.

“Learning to weave takes a while. She won’t be able to pick up a whole lot before she has to go back to work.”

“She wants to keep at it, evenings and on the weekends, depending on how much she has to do for her classes.”

“Does she know anything about weaving?”

“She knows how to get to the auction at Crownpoint.”

Bernie laughed. The auction, held each month at the Crownpoint Elementary School, drew weavers from across the reservation and plenty of buyers, too. “I’ll see who I can come up with.” She wondered if Mama, probably the teacher Bigman and his wife had in mind, would be willing.

Her afternoon’s most interesting assignment involved two males with fake IDs, apparently underage, turned away from Falling Water Casino. They remained loitering in the parking lot, drawing the attention of a security guard who thought they might be working up the gumption to break into vehicles. The boys disappeared before Bernie could find them, vanishing at the first glimpse of her police car. The guard knew one of them because his teenage grandson had played basketball with the boy, and he agreed to have a word with that boy’s mother. The whole thing took longer than Bernie expected.

Next she talked with a man accused by a neighbor of siphoning gasoline. The gas thief explained that he was merely borrowing the gas. He had gone over to ask his neighbor if he could have some, but the neighbor didn’t come to the door, so he helped himself. He
meant to explain the situation, but he got busy. Bernie took him to the complainant’s house, where he apologized and promised to buy more gas than he stole as soon as he got his check. Apology accepted, case closed.

The day dragged on. She checked with the soil analysis lab and got good news; results should be available by the end of the day. She’d talk to Cordova when she found out what was in the dirt, tell him about the frequent calls to Las Vegas and Utah she’d seen on Miller’s phone. Maybe she could parlay the new information into an explanation of why Miller warranted federal attention.

The promising clouds vanished, pushed away by a hot, dry wind that unrelentingly blasted the landscape, stirring tiny bits of sand into dust devils. Bernie remembered walking on the dirt road near her house as a girl, the airborne dirt stinging her arms and legs. In high school, waiting for her events in track, she dreaded feeling the wind-blown sand buffet her skin, and she would shut her eyes and turn her back to the gusts.

She watched the swirling spirals move from the earth into the sky, as much a part of summer as rodeos and roadside flea markets. Diné tradition taught that, like everything in nature, the wind had its purpose—scouring the earth clean. Nonetheless, it made her feel edgy.

She heard the radio call for her.

“Largo wants you to head over to check out a burned car.” Sandra gave her the route number and directions to a house closest to the car. “Somebody who was driving out there called it in.”

“OK.” Bernie knew the area—a good place for mischief, complete with old stories of evil ones.

She soon saw and smelled the smoldering car, or what was left of it. She drove her unit off the road and parked. The cases of burned vehicles she knew about on the reservation had all been tied to revenge, and a few had involved grisly murders. She hadn’t been the
responding officer on those calls. Once, as a rookie, she had been on duty at a house fire. The family survived, but she never forgot the stench and sight of the dog that had burned in the blaze chained to the back wall.

As she walked closer, she realized the vehicle looked like the car she’d pulled over, the one with the boxes of dirt in the trunk. Even in its blackened condition, she was almost certain that she recognized it. She remembered Miller at the wheel, sweaty and uneasy, and hoped she would not encounter what was left of him now. Bernie’s aversion to associating with the dead had begun in childhood, learned from the example of her relatives and from the stories she’d heard as a little girl. The spirits of the dead,
chindis
, roamed restless and out-of-sorts. She tried not to imagine what she might find inside the car, but she had paid too much attention during training to return to naïveté. The thought of the body and the stink of the smoldering car made her queasy.

Reminding herself that she was a Navajo police officer, she stood straighter as she walked to the driver’s door. She forced herself to look through the broken window at the blackened remains of the seats. Empty seats. No burned body. She exhaled and stepped away. She took a few deep breaths, then walked back to the vehicle and found the VIN near the windshield, above the melted dashboard. She went to her unit to radio in the ID number, along with the good news that no one remained inside, then realized this place was a communication dead zone. No radio meant no cell phone service either.

Bernie surveyed the scene around the car: empty beer cans, broken glass, shredded plastic, and the usual accumulation of windblown trash. No obvious clues. When she’d seen enough, she drove to the closest house, a tiny home with a porch added on, covered to provide some shade. Whoever lived here might have seen the car burn.

An elderly man in a cream-colored cowboy hat sat on a wooden bench outside the house. A small flock of sheep watched from the corral as Bernie got out of her car, taking a couple of bottles of water with her.

On a calm day, the view of Ship Rock from this spot would be spectacular; today, the Rock with Wings rose against an ugly brown haze. The man was sheltered from the wind, but Bernie struggled to keep her hair out of her eyes as she walked toward him. She introduced herself, and the man, Mr. Tso, reciprocated, inviting her to sit down in a chair next to him. She offered him one of the bottles of water. He accepted and placed it on the porch beneath the bench.

Mr. Tso looked out toward the horizon. “You are the daughter of the one who weaves in Toadlena.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“My sister, she knows your mother. Your mother helped her string the loom for one of the big rugs.” Mr. Tso described his sister’s weaving in detail.