Coyote Waits (5 page)

“Mostly just scars. Except for this hand. They think it will be all right, too. Probably. Or close enough so I can use it. But let’s get out of here. You have time for coffee?”

Janet Pete had time.

Walking from the university hospital, across the campus to the Frontier Restaurant, Janet touched gently on the death of Nez and deduced that Chee wasn’t ready to talk about it. Chee touched on Janet’s coming home from her law-firm job in Washington, and sensed this was a subject better returned to later. And so as they walked through the mild Albuquerque morning, they skipped further back in time and reminisced.

“Remember that day we met?” Janet said. “At the San Juan County jail. You were trying to keep my client locked up without charging him with anything. And I was being righteously indignant about it. Remember that?” She was laughing.

“I remember how I outsmarted you,” Chee said.

“Like hell you did,” Janet said. She stopped laughing. She stopped walking. “How? What do you mean?”

Chee looked back at her, grinning.

“What do you mean?” Janet demanded.

“Remember, you were getting your man out of lockup, and you had gotten his sack of stuff from the booking desk, and you got sore at me, thinking I was trying to worm some incriminating information out of him in the interrogation room. So when you went to call the FBI to complain about my conduct and get me called off, you took your client to the telephone with you.”

Janet was frowning. “I remember that,” she said. “The agent-in-charge said you didn’t have FBI authorization to talk to the man. What was his name?”

“Bisti,” Chee said. “Roosevelt Bisti.”

“Yes,” Janet said. “I remember he was sick. And I remember the fed said he wanted to talk to you and he told you to butt out. Didn’t he? So how did you outsmart me, wise guy?”

“When you went to the phone you took along Bisti, but you left his sack behind.”

Janet digested this. She walked toward him, shaking her head.

“You searched through his stuff,” she said, accusingly. “Is that what you’re telling me? That’s not outslicking me. That’s cheating.”

They were walking again, Chee still grinning. His hand hurt a little, and so did the burn on his chest, but he was enjoying this. He was happy.

“Whose rules?” he asked. “You’re a lawyer so you have to play by the
biligaana
rules. But you didn’t ask me what rules I was using.”

Janet laughed. “Okay, Jim,” she said. “Anyway, I got Old Man Bisti out of jail and out of your unfair clutches.”

“You enjoyed that job, didn’t you? I mean your work out on the Big Rez? Why don’t you go back to it? They’re short-handed. I’ll bet you could get your job back in a minute.”

“I am going back to it.”

“With the DNA?” Chee’s delight was in his voice. The Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agaditahe was the Navajo Tribe’s version of a legal aid society — providing legal counsel for those who couldn’t afford to pay. He’d be seeing Janet Pete a lot.

“Same sort of work but not the DNA,” she said. “I’ll be working for the Department of Justice. With the Federal Public Defender here in Albuquerque. I’ll be one of the court-appointed defense attorneys in federal criminal cases.”

“Oh,” Chee said. His quick mind formed two conclusions. Janet Pete, being Navajo and being the most junior lawyer on the staff, would have been given Ashie Pinto to represent. From that conclusion, the second was instantaneous and took the joy from the morning. Janet Pete had come to see Officer Jim Chee, not Friend Jim Chee.

“I went to school here, you know,” Chee said, simply to have something to say, to cover his disappointment.

They were walking under the sycamores that shaded the great brick expanse of the central mall. A squadron of teenaged skateboarders thundered past. Janet Pete glanced at him, curious about the change of subject and the sudden silence which had preceded it.

“After four years,” she said, “a campus starts to feel like home.”

“Seven for me,” Chee said. “You go a couple of semesters and then run out of money, and come back again when you’ve stacked some up again. That’s the average here, I think. About seven years to get a bachelor’s degree. But it never started to feel like home.”

“It was different at Stanford,” Janet said. “People either had money or they had the big scholarships. You lived around the campus, so you got acquainted, made friends. It’s more a community, I guess.” She glanced at him again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”

“Your mood changed. A cloud over the sun.”

“I shifted from the social mode into strictly business,” Chee said.

“Oh?” Puzzlement in her voice.

“You’re representing Ashie Pinto. Right?” The tone was a little bleaker than he’d intended.

They walked past the Student Union without an answer to that, toward the fountain formed of a great slab of natural stone. Chee remembered the local legend that the university architect, lacking funds for an intended sculpture, had scrounged the monolithic sheets of rough marble from a quarry and arranged them in something that might suggest Stonehenge, or raw nature, or whatever your imagination allowed. It worked beautifully and usually it lifted Chee’s spirits.

“I came to see you because I like you,” Janet Pete said. “If you weren’t my friend, which you happen to be, I would have come looking for you because you’re the arresting officer and it’s my job.”

Chee thought about that.

“So I had two reasons,” she said. “Is that one too many reasons for you?”

“What did I say?” Chee asked. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Hell you didn’t. Then why am I feeling like I’m on the defensive?” Janet said. “And not exactly knowing why.” She hurried a little faster. “Boy,” she said. “Boy, I can see why that white girl of yours went back to Wisconsin.”

Chee caught up with her.

“What was her name? Mary?”

“Mary Landon,” Chee said. “Look, I’m sorry. I know how it is. Somebody has to represent Pinto and naturally it would be you. So what do you want to know?”

Janet Pete, still walking fast, was out of the trees now, angling across the parking lot past Popejoy Hall. Chee followed her out under a morning sky that was dark blue and sunny — with just enough of those puffy forenoon clouds to suggest autumn was not too far along to produce afternoon thunderheads.

“FBI’s not cooperating, huh?” Chee said. “What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” Janet said.

“Come on, Janet. I said I was sorry.”

“Well,” she said. And then she laughed up at him, squeezed his arm.

“I can be as touchy as you are,” she said. “I can be a real bitch.” She laughed again. “But notice how neatly I put you in the wrong. Did you appreciate that?”

“Not much,” Chee said. “Is that something you learn in law school?”

“It’s something you learn from your mother.”

Jim Chee’s taste for coffee had been brutalized by years of drinking the version he used to make for himself in his trailer under the cottonwood trees at Ship Rock — recently he’d taken to using little filter things that fit over his cups. The Frontier coffee tasted fresh but weak. Over a second refill they decided that he would cash in his return ticket on the Mesa Airlines flight and ride back to Ship Rock with Janet Pete. Tomorrow he’d show her the scene of the crime. By tomorrow, he thought, he would feel like talking about it.

“Did you know Hosteen Pinto still won’t say anything about what happened?” Janet asked. “He’ll talk to me about other things but not about the crime. He just shuts up.”

“What’s there to say?”

“Well, everything. Whether he did it, for one thing. Why he did it, if he did. What he was doing out there. Did you know he’s a shaman, a crystal gazer? He finds things for people. That seems to be his only income. That and getting fees as an informant. From scholars, I mean. He’s sort of an authority on old stories, legends, what happened when. So the history professors, and the mythologists, and the sociologists, and that sort of people are always having him remember things on tape for them. He has a car, but it doesn’t run, so how did he get there? I mean where he was when you arrested him. What was he doing about two hundred miles from home? That’s what I want him to tell me. And if he did it, why. Everything.”

“He did it because he was drunk,” Chee said. “Nez picked him up to get him out of the rain, tried to put him in the backseat of the patrol car, and Pinto got sore about it.”

“That seems to be the official ‘theory of the crime.’ I know that’s what the U.S. attorney is going to trial with,” Janet said.

“And that seems to be pretty much what went on,” Chee said.

“But why didn’t Nez take that pistol away from him? You guys have a sort of standard procedure for things like that, don’t you? For handling drunks?”

Chee had wondered about that himself. “He wasn’t arresting him,” he said. “We take drunks in for their own protection. So they don’t freeze. Or drown.” As Janet Pete knew very well.

She sipped her coffee. Her dark eyes looked skeptical over the rim.

“He didn’t take the pistol because he didn’t see the pistol,” Chee added. “The old man had it stuck in his belt, behind him.”

Janet sipped. “Come on,” she said. “Gimme a break. Isn’t that sort of a usual place to stick a pistol?”

Chee shrugged.

“So how did Pinto get there?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe the guy in the white car brought him,” Chee said. “You’ve seen the FBI report, haven’t you? What did they say?”

Janet had put her cup down. “White car? What white car?”

“When I was driving down from Red Rock, I met a white — anyway a light-colored vehicle. It was raining and getting dark. But I think I recognized it. It’s an old banged-up Jeepster that one of the teachers at Ship Rock drives. What’d they say about that in the report?”

“They didn’t mention it,” Janet said. “All news to me.”

“They didn’t run that down?” Chee said. He shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” Janet said. “You gave them all they needed. Their suspect, arrested at the scene of the crime, holding the murder weapon. All that’s missing is the motive. Being drunk takes care of that. He doesn’t even deny he did it. So why waste time and complicate things by digging out all the facts?” The question sounded bitter.

“How about that fancy bottle he was carrying? Does the report show where that came from?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know it was fancy.”

“Like something you’d give a fancy drinker for Christmas. If you wanted to impress him. It wasn’t what a drunk would be buying.”

Janet finished her coffee, put down the cup, looked at him for a while.

“You know, Jim, you don’t have to do any of this. I know how you must feel. And I’m having trouble separating friend from lawyer when . . .”

He held up his right palm, interrupting her.

“When I think I’m hearing a lawyer, I’ll shut up,” he said. The thing about Janet Pete was that he could talk to her about things that were hard to talk about. She wasn’t Mary Landon. No soft, pale hair, no bottomless blue eyes, no talent for making him feel like the ultimate male. But by tomorrow, he thought, he could talk to her about listening to Delbert Nez laughing on the radio. He could talk to her about how the dreadful feeling grew as he sat over his coffee at the Red Rock Trading Post, and waited, and waited, and waited. He could tell her how long it had taken him to sense that he had made an unforgivable, irredeemable mistake. She would understand why, when Ashie Pinto was convicted, he would resign from the tribal police and find some job that he was fitted for. She would understand why he had to see the old drunk convicted. He hadn’t done his job. He hadn’t kept Delbert Nez alive. But at least he had arrested his killer. Done one thing right.

She’d have to defend the old man, get him a light sentence — or perhaps some sort of an insanity plea bargain that would put him in a hospital for a while. He had no problem with that. It didn’t matter to him if the old man was punished. That would do no possible good.

But he needed Janet Pete to understand that a verdict finding Pinto innocent would make Jim Chee doubly guilty.

JOE LEAPHORN STOOD at the door of Ashie Pinto’s house reexamining his understanding of what the law allowed in a criminal investigation. He was sure that only the most genial judge would tolerate what was going on here. It would be labeled as a search without a warrant, perhaps as downright breaking and entering. However, Mary Keeyani and Louisa Bourebonette had not been impressed with such niceties, nor with Leaphorn’s uneasiness.

“I thought we were just going to check around out here,” Leaphorn had said. “Ask some questions. See if anyone had seen anything. We don’t have any legal right to break into the suspect’s house.”

“He’s my uncle,” Mary Keeyani had said. She was using the tire tool from Professor Bourebonette’s car, prying at the padlock hasp that secured Ashie Pinto’s door.

“It’s not as if we were actually breaking in,” Bourebonette said. “We’re here for his own benefit.”

Joe Leaphorn wasn’t exactly sure why he was here. Partly curiosity, partly some irrational sense of responsibility to Emma’s clan sister — sort of a family gesture to soothe his conscience. Certainly he had no reason to be here that would sound either plausible or professional if this meddling into a federal homicide case caused any complications. True, that seemed extremely unlikely. But he stood aside as Mary Keeyani opened the violated door. The women filed in past him.

“He keeps his papers in a tin box,” Mary Keeyani said. “It’s in here somewhere if I can find it.”

Leaphorn left the women to their questionable task. He walked across the hard-packed earth behind Pinto’s house and inspected Pinto’s truck. It was a 1970-vintage Ford short-bed pickup with the left front tire flat, the left rear critically low, the glass missing from the driver’s-side window, and chicken manure on the seat. He released the hood catch and raised it. The battery was missing — the first thing taken on the back side of the Reservation when a truck gets too worn out to fix. Obviously, Ashie Pinto hadn’t driven this truck for a long, long time.