Coyote's Wife (16 page)

It was barely 8:30
A.M.
when they set out. Ella glanced at Justine. “You look more awake than I feel.”

“Take some coffee from my Thermos. That’ll wake you up for sure.”

Ella reached for the silver container. After pouring some of the thick syrupy liquid into the cup, she glanced at her partner. “Holy cow, girl. It’s the consistency of motor oil.”

Justine nodded.
“But it works. I couldn’t clear my thoughts this morning, and considering what’s on our agenda, I had to find a way to do that fast. I put an extra scoop in the percolator and that’s what came out,” she said.

Ella took a cautious sip. It looked lethal but it didn’t taste bad. “Let’s go to Wallace Curtis’ home first,” Ella said.

“Will Arthur Brownhat be our second stop?”

Ella considered it.
“There are several people I’d like to question today, including the old leader of the Fierce Ones, Jimmy Levaldo. Levaldo was replaced, so he may be more inclined to talk to us. Last time I saw him, I recall him mentioning something about a younger group coming up the
ranks. But the crime scene’s our first priority. After that, we’ll decide who to see next.”

“Tache mentioned Delbert John last
night, so I ran his name before coming to pick you up. There’s not much on him. He was arrested for drunk and disorderly once about fifteen years ago. That’s it. He’s been clean ever since. He’s thirty-seven and works construction as a framer for Navajo Housing.”

“Find out where he’s working at the moment,” Ella said.

“Already done,” Justine answered. “He’s at a job site less than two miles
away from Wallace Curtis’ place. They’re building a scatter home there.”

They arrived at Wallace Curtis’ home a short time later. The young officer who’d been keeping watch from his unit climbed out to greet them.

“Anything we should know about?” Ella asked, joining the patrol officer on loan from the station at Window Rock.

He shook his head. “Other than rabbits and a curious skunk, it’s been
real quiet.”

“Okay, thanks. Good job. Go home and get some sleep,” Ella said, noticing how tired he was.

Ella and Justine went up to the door that they’d wired shut last night, a necessity because the latch had been destroyed after being kicked in. Judging from the boot imprint, the same perp who’d kicked down the Charleys’ door had been at work here, too.

Ella unfastened the wire and they
stepped inside. In broad daylight they could see the full extent of the damage. The place had been effectively trashed. Red spray paint covered the living room, ruining nearly all the furniture and defacing the walls.

Tache and Neskahi pulled up a few seconds later and joined them inside. Almost immediately Tache began taking photos while Neskahi began working the scene.

“Another message was
left here,” Justine said, catching a glimpse of the back of the front door. She pushed it shut with the tip of her boot so Ella could see it clearly. “Our land, our law.” Justine read out loud, then pointed to the crudely painted eye below it.

Ella crouched by a small football-shaped battery-powered clock, which lay on the floor. It must have been thrown, judging from the damage, and the impact
had knocked the battery out. “This clock stopped about an hour after the call to dispatch from the Charley residence. That supports what we’d already suspected—Marilyn was the primary target, and this was a follow-up. The Fierce Ones often leave that eye symbol to remind the offender that they’ll be watching.”

Despite the vandalism, there were no signs that anyone had been harmed here. “If anyone
finds prints or something that’ll help us track down those responsible, I want to know right away.”

As they all processed the scene, time slipped by quickly. Noting it, Ella decided it would be better to divide their efforts. “I’m going to take the SUV and go pay Delbert John a visit.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Justine asked. “In the past we’ve always had problems questioning
the Fierce Ones.”

“He won’t pull anything at a job site. After I’m done, I’ll come back here, and we’ll ride together. I’d like you with me when we go question the other suspects.”

Ella followed the directions Dispatch gave her to Delbert John’s work site. Unfortunately, the directions were a bit vague. After wandering the back roads for about fifteen minutes, she found the tracks of several
heavy trucks and those led her to a house under construction.

Ella pulled up beside three pickups, then climbed out of the department SUV. Several of the men glanced her way,
and one man who’d been standing by a makeshift table inside the structure, plans in hand, came over to meet her. A radio in the background blared out country-western tunes.

“I’m the foreman, Lodis Michoby,” the stocky Navajo
man in the tan canvas jacket said. “Can I help you, Officer?…”

“Special Investigator Clah,” Ella said, and pulled back her jacket to reveal her department shield. “I need to speak to a member of your crew, Delbert John. He’s here today, correct?”

“Yes, he’s over there, wearing the black cap,” Michoby replied, pointing with his lips at two men cutting lumber with a table saw. “Is he in trouble?”
the foreman added quickly.

“I just need to ask him a few questions. It won’t take long.”

“Good.” He whistled. “DJ!”

The saw completed a cut, and both men looked at Michoby. “DJ!” Michoby repeated.

The man in the black cap, a Navajo of medium height wearing jeans, lace-up work boots, leather gloves, and a plaid long-sleeved shirt, walked toward her. His gaze was confrontational. Navajos never
looked at each other in the eye. It was considered an intrusion of privacy.

Normally, Ella would have gone to meet him halfway, but in this particular case, instinct told her it would be better to wait for him to come to her. When he did, she introduced herself.

“I know who you are. What do you want?” he snapped.

“I’ve been told you’re the new leader of the Fierce Ones,” Ella said, keeping
her tone deliberately flat and her voice low.

“The who?” he asked, a tiny grin touching the corners of his mouth.

“That’s an old rock band. What’s the problem, your ears full of sawdust?” she said, her voice hard now.

He grinned. “I think you want Jimmy Levaldo, but I’ve heard the Fierce Ones fell apart. They got too public for their own good.”

“So what are you telling me, that you’re taking
the Fierce Ones underground?”

“You think too much. But if there was such an organization, their main job would be doing what the police can’t, and that requires anonymity. Cops are saddled with too many
bilagáana
rules and that’s why they’re ineffective.”

“All the Fierce Ones do is terrorize,” she countered, a touch of anger clouding her words. “They act without thinking—often attacking the
wrong person.”

“If there was such an organization as the Fierce Ones,” he repeated, “they wouldn’t be afraid to use a firm hand when necessary to keep order and balance. That way everyone could walk in beauty. You can’t let murderers and thieves go free just because Anglo laws have a million loopholes. Where’s the justice in that?”

“There’s no justice in taking the law into your own hands and
striking out blindly. Everything in life is connected and actions have consequences—for the Fierce Ones, too. Those who act as both judge and jury destroy the balance they claim to want to uphold.”

His eyes blazed, and his gloved fists clenched. “Justice is crying to be heard.
Our
ways are simpler and far more effective.” He stopped abruptly, forced his hands to relax, then continued in an almost
leisurely tone. “By ‘our’ ways, I meant Navajo ways. The youth gangs on the Rez are a perfect example of how Anglo thinking and laws are creating chaos here. The Fierce Ones are the only protectors the tribe can count on. They balance the scales so that the weak have recourse.”

“How does beating a woman nearly to death fit in with all that fancy talk?”

“If the woman had planned for months to
kill her husband, and he suddenly turns up dead, how could anyone judge her innocent?”

“Where did you get that information?”

“Get your own sources. I’ve told you enough.”

“What you’ve heard is just gossip. Show me proof that she’s guilty of anything.”

“If you haven’t found it, it’s because you haven’t dug deeply enough.” He turned around and walked back to the table saw to join his partner.

Ella didn’t have any more questions—none that he’d be likely to answer truthfully. Her next step would be to talk to Hoskie Charley, the deceased’s uncle. There’d been no love lost between Marilyn and him. If the Fierce Ones hadn’t received their information from a department snitch, it was likely that Hoskie, or someone in his household, had been Delbert’s source.

After checking and learning
that Justine needed at least another forty minutes to finish processing the Curtis scene, Ella drove directly to Hoskie’s place. Remembering that he was a traditionalist, she parked, stepped outside the car, and waited. Smoke was coming from the metal chimney, so someone was home. An old pickup, the one she’d seen before, was parked by the side near the sheep pen.

Minutes ticked by but no one
appeared. She continued to wait. At long last, the same elderly man she’d seen before came out to the front porch and waved at her to come inside.

He led the way into the house and immediately moved closer to the potbelly stove. “It’s too cold outside today. When it’s windy, the cold seeps right into these old bones,” he muttered.

Ella took the seat he offered, then waited as he warmed his hands
by holding them above the flat top of the cast-iron stove. A heavy kettle sat there as well, vapor steaming from
the spout, adding humidity to the room. Ella knew that the extra humidity would help take some of the bite out of the cold, at least here in the Southwest where the air was very dry, especially indoors, during winter.

“Are you here because of my nephew’s wife? I know she’s in the hospital
at Shiprock.”

“Do you know why someone had her beaten up?” Ella asked, deciding to get directly to the point.

He shrugged, and stared at the stove. Small vents revealed the yellow glow of the fire inside, and it flickered constantly.

Ella didn’t interrupt the silence.

“That wasn’t my doing, you know,” he said after a lengthy silence.

“The beating?”

He nodded. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“But you know who’s responsible.”

He sat down on a three-legged stool, remaining close to the fire. “I didn’t like her. That’s no secret. She was always looking for ways for my nephew to make more money. Then she forced him to buy a life insurance policy, one of those they advertise on TV. Every month a handful of their money was going to that. I don’t think she knew that he quit paying on it
last year. The older he got, the more money the company wanted. He couldn’t afford it, he said.”

Ella knew there was no life insurance policy, and since he’d only worked at StarTalk for a short time, he hadn’t even been eligible for health coverage.

“Then all of a sudden he turns up dead,” he continued. “And this is after she gets herself a new man. I don’t think it was an accident, you know.
I just don’t believe that.”

“Was your nephew a heavy drinker?” she asked.

“He had a few beers now and then, but he never touched hard liquor or that cheap wine the
glonnies
around Gallup
buy just to get drunk. A beer or three after work helped him relax. That’s what he told me. Made it easier to take that woman of his, he said.”

“Did he have any enemies that you know of?”

“I would imagine
he did, most of us do, but he never said.”

“Do you know Delbert John?”

He nodded slightly, then looked away.

“The Fierce Ones went after your nephew’s wife. That was made very clear to me. Someone told them that she’d had something to do with his death.”

“She does. I’m convinced of it,” he said in a low, flat tone. “But I haven’t spoken to Delbert for many, many months, if that’s your question.”

“Did your nephew have another woman on the side?” she asked.

“He’s crawled into other beds besides his own,” he said with a shrug. “His wife knew about that, but she never threw his things outside.”

Ella nodded, understanding. On the Rez, the house belonged to the woman. If she’d thrown
all
his things outside, that would have been considered the equivalent of a divorce. If she didn’t, the marriage
continued. There were exceptions to that, of course, especially when a couple was Christian.

The interview completed for now, Ella drove back to the current crime scene. On the way, she called Neskahi and gave him the additional job of finding out if George had been cheating on his wife recently, and, if so, with whom. Jealousy worked both ways and women had been known to kill lovers who chose
to remain with their wives.

By the time Ella returned to the Curtis residence, her team had wrapped things up and the van was being loaded. To her surprise, Wallace Curtis was standing with the aid of crutches near the side of the house, another man beside him.

Ella went up to them first. “I see you’re feeling better,” she said, looking at Wallace.

“I’m still in pain and I’ll need time to heal,
but I don’t have to stay at the clinic anymore,” Wallace said, then in a low voice desperate with uncertainty, added, “I wanted to see what they’d done to my place, so I had my brother bring me over.”

“It’s mostly cosmetic, paint damage, and like that,” Ella said.

“Do you have any idea who attacked us and did this to our homes?” Wallace asked.

“As a matter of fact, we do.”

“Good. I hope you
catch them,” he spat out. “We didn’t deserve this—neither of us.”

“Some people believe that Marilyn had something to do with George’s death,” Ella said, mostly to see how he’d react.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said immediately.

“Did you know about the life insurance policy?” Ella asked offhand.

Wallace stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown horns. “They once had policies listing each other
as the beneficiary, but several months ago he decided to cancel his, so she did the same. You could verify that, probably.”