Spider Woman's Daughter (8 page)

She remembered Nakai, the great and beloved
hataalii
, looking tiny and miserable on his hospital bed, filled with cancer. Like an animal in an experiment, not like the valued and beloved elder who knew many songs and sand paintings and had helped his people. She and Chee checked him out of the hospital against his doctor’s recommendation and allowed him to die as he wished in a ramada beneath the stars at home.

Hospitals made her restless, and she stood and paced. Leaphorn was more vigorous than Nakai. The advances of science, including new knowledge of our human brain and its complexity and resilience, might save his life. But what damage had the bullet done to his mind?

She watched a cloud shadow move against the building and a pile of thunderheads begin to rise. Rain this afternoon? She went back to the table and studied the paperwork the nurse had given her. Bernie had no answers for its questions: Was the lieutenant taking any medicine? Had he ever had surgery? Did anyone in his family ever have heart disease? Immune system conditions? What was he allergic to? She put the forms down. She opened her backpack and took out a mystery. A few pages later, a man in a white coat with graying brown hair in a ponytail and a laptop walked to her table.

“Bernadette Manuelito? Grant Moxsley. I’m the one in charge of Mr. Leaphorn’s case.”

She offered her hand, and he touched it gently and said, “Yá’át’ééh,” with an accent that sounded as though the doctor knew more than a little Navajo. He sat on the chair next to her.

“I understand you had some questions for me, and I wanted to talk to you before you saw him,” he said. “The injury is very serious. I’ve given the FBI basic information, the type of bullet, stuff like that, as part of their investigation.”

He paused. “Hospitals all have a lot of rules, and one of the rules is that I should only speak to next of kin. I know from my years with public health in Tuba City that the concept of kinship is different for us than for the Diné.”

Bernie waited. When Moxsley said nothing more, she said, “I visited his house after the shooting. He had a photo of his late wife. And the wedding picture my husband and I gave him. The lieutenant had no children and he has no sisters or brothers who are still with us.” She glanced toward the hospital ward where the lieutenant lay. “I was the first person to reach him after he was shot. I want to talk to him about what he saw, find out if he knows who did it. So, I would say I’m family and I’m also here on business.”

Moxsley said, “Would you like me to tell you what I think is happening because of the injury?”

“Please,” Bernie said.

He raised the laptop cover and called up images as he explained how the bullet had entered near the temple and progressed through the brain. The good news was that it had not damaged the lieutenant’s spinal cord.

“There are many things we don’t know about the human brain, but we have a good idea of where to find the control panels for various functions.” Moxsley looked at her with kindness. “The bullet penetrated brain centers crucial for speech, comprehension, memory, vision, and what we commonly call personality.” He showed them to her, tracing the bullet’s journey with his finger.

“Can he speak? Will he be blind?”

“I don’t know. For now, your uncle is in an induced coma. His brain swelled with the injury, and we removed part of his skull to reduce the pressure. He looks like he’s asleep, but we think some patients like this hear what’s going on around them. Some respond to touch, some to the sound of a familiar voice. He might respond to you. He might not.”

“What happens next?”

“Difficult to predict.” Moxsley closed his laptop. “We’re taking this hour by hour now, for the next few days. I’m sorry I can’t be more optimistic. We know a lot about the brain, but there’s a whole lot more we don’t know.”

Bernie said, “The lieutenant is sharper than my husband and me put together. I’ve never seen him give up on a challenge.”

Moxsley smiled. “That is definitely in his favor.”

The doctor took his pager out of a pocket, looked at it, pushed a button. “The next forty-eight hours are the most crucial. I’ll be keeping a close eye on him, and he will be continuously monitored by the nursing staff.”

Monitored, Bernie thought. The word made her think of those electronic bracelets offenders wore on house arrest. In a way, Leaphorn’s condition was the same. He couldn’t make a move, take a breath, without a machine recording it.

“We are observing him for seizures, for signs of infection, for other complications. When the swelling goes down, we will reattach the bone. In the meantime, his brain mass has room to expand without doing harm to itself. That’s why you’ll see all the bandaging.”

Bernie nodded.

“If he survives until the swelling subsides, we will be better able to decide what happens next in terms of treatment.” Moxsley extracted a card from his white smock and gave it to her. “I’ll make sure we list you and your husband as next of kin and that the staff knows you can visit whenever you like. Any other questions?”

“Do you think he knows where he is or what happened?”

“No way to tell,” Moxsley said.

Bernie thought of something else. A long shot.

“Do you know a Dr. John Collingsworth? I think he has a clinic called AIRC.”

Moxsley smiled. “Collingsworth isn’t a medical doctor. He’s a PhD, director of the American Indian Resource Center. That’s a great place. They have a fabulous private museum with an amazing collection of Indian art and artifacts, the kind of stuff that people from all over the Southwest come to study. My wife volunteers as a docent there. She gets us in to the museum for free.”

She’d heard about the center during a course in anthropology at the University of New Mexico, and remembered the story of its origins. A rich couple moved to Santa Fe from Delaware in the 1930s, fell in love with the town and with the Pueblo Indians who lived nearby in villages up and down the Rio Grande. The husband and wife worked to promote Indian rights at a time when Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, and other Indian people couldn’t even vote for president. They also collected beautiful Indian art and used their patronage to keep quality work alive in difficult times. When they died in a car wreck, they left their home, its extensive grounds, and their collection to the AIRC. Bernie had always wanted to see the place.

“Anything else?”

She shook her head. “Thank you.”

“Are you ready to see your uncle now?”

“Absolutely.”

Moxsley held the door. Bernie felt cold, nervous, as she walked past the CCU desk and into the medical area. In some rooms a curtain concealed the patient and whoever else was in the tiny cubicle. In others, she could see a prone figure, tubes connecting arms and body parts beneath the sheet to machines. In one room, two people sat in hard-backed chairs by the bed. Medical staff quietly went back and forth.

They stopped at the fourth room. “Here he is. Good luck finding the creep who did this.”

Bernie went in alone. Leaphorn lay on his back beneath a white sheet that came to his chin. A tube ran into his left arm from a metal stand; another tube emerged from the sheets into a bag that hung lower on the bed, and another protruded from his mouth. His eyes were closed, his head swathed in bandages. His chest moved up and down shallowly, and the lights on the machines flickered.

He looked, she thought, like a man whose spirit was deciding if it should stay or if it could go. So very different from the person she had shared breakfast with slightly more than twenty-four hours ago.

She quietly walked to the bed and put her hand on his arm that didn’t have the tubes. He felt warm. When the time was right, she spoke to him in Navajo. She spoke slowly, softly, but loud enough to be heard over the machines, saying what needed to be said about how she was sorry to have disappointed him, reminding him of her promise. When she was done, she noticed his eyes moving beneath the closed lids. Then the motion stopped.

Bernie stopped at the nurse’s station to ask about Leaphorn’s notebook.

“I imagine it’s with the rest of the belongings he arrived with. Check with security.”

“Where?”

“Go back down the hall, past the ER. It’s on your left. Watch for the signs.”

She found a sleepy-looking guard in the office, his feet propped up on the desk.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I need to collect the possessions of one of the patients here.”

The guard looked up.

“Are you family?”

“I’m Officer Bernadette Manuelito, Navajo Department of Public Safety. The person involved is the victim of a shooting we are investigating in conjunction with the FBI.”

The man came to life, noticed her uniform for the first time.

“Sure thing.” He moved his feet and brushed dirt off the desktop. He opened a drawer and pulled out a form. Handed it to her with a pen.

“You’re a long way from home, Officer. What do you think of Santa Fe?”

“All I’ve seen this trip is the hospital. I’d rather not be here. You know how it is.”

The guard returned with a clear heavy-duty plastic bag. He gave it to her in exchange for the paperwork.

Inside, Bernie found the clothes and shoes the lieutenant had worn when he’d been shot. The smaller items in his pockets had been bagged separately. She picked out his notebook and put it in the front pocket of her backpack.

It was warm outside, but not as hot as in Window Rock. The sun felt good after the chilly hospital rooms. She walked to her car, admiring the view of the Sangre de Cristo range to the east and the blue sprawl of the Jemez Mountains to the west. Whoever built the hospital, she thought, had done visitors a favor by placing the parking lot in this spot. Bernie opened the back hatch, put the lieutenant’s possessions inside. As she put on her seat belt, she noticed the envelope for the AIRC.

Next stop lunch, then a post office and home.

She followed directions the security guard had given her to the College Plaza shopping center, passing up fast food restaurants and a couple franchised places in favor of the little café he’d recommended for an inexpensive lunch. It had a cute name, Jambo, and smelled like a rainbow of spices and fresh bread. Bernie sat at a table by the window and opened the menu. She found some things she recognized: lamb stew, lamb burgers, goat stew, and salads. Also, they served dishes she’d heard of but never tasted. And then came the more exotic choices—cinnamon-dusted plantains and a jerk organic tofu sandwich. And “stuffed phyllo,” whatever that was.

She’d never been an adventurous eater, but aromas from the kitchen tempted her to try something new. If she won the bet with Chee about the FBI checking into Louisa and a murder-for-hire scheme, she’d ask him to take her here. Maybe she’d try that tofu sandwich.

When the waiter asked for her order, she stuck to what she knew—goat stew and a Coke. Then she took the worn brown notebook out of her backpack.

7

B
ernie turned the little book over in her hands, feeling the soft leather of its cover. The book had metal rings to hold in the pages, rings that released for refills with pressure on a clasp at the bottom. From the wear on the edges, she guessed Leaphorn had used the book for decades.

By reading what he’d written here, she would intrude into the lieutenant’s private life again. This seemed more of an invasion than standing in his kitchen or rummaging through his deck. Looking inside the journal felt like snooping in his underwear drawer. Still, she had promised Largo she’d find the lieutenant’s relatives, and the book might hold the key to doing that job.

She opened it. The first pages were a printed annual calendar, the year-at-a-glance and then an expansion of each month. The rest of the pages were unlined white paper, some filled with the lieutenant’s precise handwriting. She fanned through, hoping for a heading that read “Contacts” or even “Friends and Relations” and finding nothing like that. Much of what she saw was incomprehensible. He’d filled several pages with doodles—zigzags, half circles with wavy lines beneath, a pattern that resembled stair steps, linked triangles.

Near the end of the notebook, she came across several lists. One short vertical row of figures:

5–20 125/85 195

5–27 140/90 197

6–5 120/80 194.5

They reminded her of something she’d seen before, but what? On the next page, the lieutenant had jotted down a column of letters with what might be phone numbers. She scanned the row, found “JC” and two sets of numbers, their home number and Chee’s cell number, next to it.

She looked up when the waiter brought her Coke. “Would you like some water, too?” He stood with a pitcher in hand.

“Sure,” she said. “Nobody even asks me back in Shiprock.”

“Santa Fe has rules about water in restaurants. It’s expensive here, so we try not to waste it.”

“Good idea.”

He filled her empty glass. “Your lunch will be here soon.”

She returned to the little book. More cryptic notes. Numbers that could be case file notations, each with a name—“Hightower,” “Yellowhorse,” “Shelley”—next to it. She copied them down in her own notebook. She’d talk to Chee about all this, see what ideas he could generate.

On the next pages, more dates and more figures, all without benefit of a heading. Why would he label the pages? He knew what it all meant. She found another set of entries with possible dates. The most recent, about two weeks ago, was followed by “WR/SF 179430–655.” She saw three earlier WR/SF notations with different, lower numbers, but still in the 17 series. WR equaled Window Rock, she thought, and the lieutenant had noted his truck’s odometer readings for his commute to Santa Fe and home again.

The waiter brought her lunch, a big white bowl filled with broth and vegetables. The smell made her mouth water. But instead of gravy like her mother made for goat stew, this African version came with curry sauce and a side of coconut rice. She poked at it suspiciously, then took a bite. Tender slow-cooked meat. Soft carrots, onions, and bite-size chunks of potato. She put down the notebook and focused on nothing but eating for the next few minutes. Maybe the savory meal would give her insights.

Next time the waiter came by, she asked for more water, instead of splurging on a refill on her Coke. Then went back to the notebook and looked at the numbers and letters again.

She remembered the lieutenant mentioning that a broken appointment had saved him a trip to Santa Fe. The brown envelope for Dr. Collingsworth now in her car was meant for a Santa Fe address—AIRC must be shorthand for his client.

Most of the pages between the mileage log and the end of the book were blank. On the next-to-last page, she noticed a slight difference in the quality and color of the paper. Leaphorn had carefully inserted two sheets from an earlier notebook. One page had six sets of initials and numbers, beginning with “AL RR42 B50A 87401.” On the next, what looked like initials were followed by more letters and numbers, with symbols, %, #, *, scattered among them. “AZ JLLB %1934.” Puzzling. Then it dawned on her. Passwords. The initials before them—AZ on the first, for example—probably indicated the sites. AZ for Amazon?

She took another bite of stew. Thought some more about the lieutenant’s codes, then let her brain rest as she finished lunch.

She’d promised to contact Louisa after seeing Leaphorn. But her call went immediately to voice mail, as though Louisa’s cell phone had been turned off. She left a brief message.

Then she reopened the notebook to the first page with the older paper. The grouping of five numbers could be a zip code. If it was, the 87 series meant New Mexico. “RR” could be “Rural Route,” and “B50A” a box number. That left “AL.” Did Leaphorn have a contact named Al? Albert? Alfonso? Or were they initials? Or was what she took for an
L
his version of the number 1? A business in Farmington called A1? Or did the
L
stand for another member of the Leaphorn family? Arnie Leaphorn? Agnes?

She called the Shiprock station and asked for Chee. Sandra, the office manager, told her Chee was out.

“Could you do a favor for me? Largo asked me to track down the lieutenant’s relatives, and I’m having some trouble. Can you do some reverse directory searches?”

“Sure,” Sandra said. “Is your computer down again?”

“No.” Bernie sipped her water, wishing it were Coke. “I’m in Santa Fe without it.” Bernie read off what she assumed was AL’s address, and as much as she could decipher from the other five sets of numbers and letters.

“You want to hold on, or shall I call you back?”

“Call me back.”

While she waited, Bernie turned to an earlier set of numbers, and by the time Sandra called, she’d figured out that “5–20 125/85 195” must mean that on May 20 the lieutenant’s blood pressure was in the normal range, although his weight was approaching 200 pounds. It didn’t help solve the crime or find the relatives, but at least her thought process tracked with the lieutenant’s.

Her phone vibrated, and she answered. “No luck on most of what you gave me,” Sandra said. “But the AL traces to a Farmington residence that belongs to an Austin Lee.” She gave Bernie the phone number.

Bernie called, disappointed that Lee didn’t answer. She left a voice mail explaining that she was a friend of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn’s and needed to talk to Austin Lee or to someone in his family as soon as she could. She left her home number, too, and the number at the Shiprock substation. “Mr. Lee isn’t in any trouble,” Bernie added. If and when Lee called back, she would explore his connection to the lieutenant. Progress? She hoped so.

The waiter brought the check. She asked where she could find the closest post office.

“The closest, that would be on Pacheco Street, but that one’s closed because of a big roof leak. Well, not the leak exactly. Water shorted out the electricity in there.”

“So you’ve already had rain?”

“Last week. Not much, but the post office roof started to fail last year.”

“Where’s the closest one that’s open?”

“Downtown.” The waiter gave her complicated directions, sprinkled with things like, “Where that business supply store that closed used to be,” “I’m not sure of the name of that road,” and “I forget if that street is one-way.”

He ended with, “Good luck finding anyplace to park there. Downtown’s a zoo this time of year because of all the tourists. I avoid that post office at all costs.”

Bernie thought about taking the envelope back to Shiprock and mailing it there, but it would be after five when she arrived. Then she came up with a better plan.

“Do you know where the AIRC is?”

He shook his head. “Let me ask somebody.”

He returned a few minutes later with her change and the information. “It’s sort of near the big folk art museum.” He gave her directions, simple directions this time. Delivering the envelope to the AIRC would be easy, and she could find out what the lieutenant was working on for them. It probably had nothing to do with Jackson Benally, Leonard Nez, or the shooting. But since she was officially on leave, why not see a bit of Santa Fe?

She picked up the notebook again and opened it to the lieutenant’s June calendar. She saw penciled notations on many day-of-the-month squares: “final contract” on one day and “pu rx”—probably pick up a prescription—on another. She found a few squares where Leaphorn had written what seemed to be appointments. “11:30 Largo,” “2—truck aligned,” “9 AIRC,” and “12:30 EFB.
”
Several squares said “PM WRL.” WRL looked familiar, and she remembered the books she’d seen on his desk. Window Rock Library. PM must mean afternoon. AIRC and Largo she knew. What was EFB?

Leaphorn had drawn a neat
X
through each June day until yesterday, the day he was shot.

Bernie found a place for her Toyota in the AIRC’s gravel lot, in the shade near a patio wall. She’d heard that lack of pavement was a status symbol in Santa Fe, that some of the richest neighborhoods in the older sections of town bragged about their dirt roads. But she hadn’t expected dirt parking here.

A collection of beautiful old adobe buildings connected by flagstone walkways sat beneath large trees. Bernie admired the way little walls gave the flowers their own separate home, calling attention to their beauty and the mountain views beyond. She knew enough to realize that such gorgeous gardens didn’t happen by accident. The mix of native plants, hardy perennials, and blooming annuals reflected a long history of steady effort.

A worker glanced up from his raking at the sound of her steps on the flagstones. She noticed him looking at the Navajo Police Department patch on her shirt. “Yá’át’ééh,” he said.

She returned the greeting, surprised to run into another Navajo even though they were the country’s most populous tribe. He introduced himself, Mark Yazzie, and gave his clan affiliations. Bernie did the same. They weren’t related.

“You come all the way here to arrest me?” He pointed at the envelope she carried. “Looks like you got my records there.”

“So, you’ve done something?”

He laughed. “Who hasn’t? But not that I talk about.”

“I need to leave this envelope for a Dr. John Collingsworth. Could you tell me where I can find him?”

Yazzie said, “Go straight on. You’ll see his office down there. It’s the biggest one here, since he’s the big boss.”

The terra-cotta floors glowed as if someone had spent hours polishing them by hand. Who knows, Bernie thought, maybe someone had. A huge desk dominated both the outer office and the pale woman who sat behind it. A fan whirled between two of the massive carved wooden ceiling beams. A white pot at least three feet tall, decorated with birds and flowers, occupied the space beside the desk. Paintings filled the walls.

The woman stopped typing on her computer keyboard. “Good afternoon. May I help you?”

“I need to drop this off for John Collingsworth.” Bernie handed the envelope to the woman, who set it on the desktop. “This office is beautiful. What a lot of great artwork.”

The woman smiled. “I love it. It makes me happy to come to work. Have you been on campus before?”

“No. Never.”

The woman pulled out a desk drawer and handed Bernie a brochure. “We host scholars from all over the world who come to study in our archives and use the pieces in our collection in their research. We have Hopi
Katsinas
—they used to call them kachinas—baskets, beautiful ancient pots, and some great contemporary ones, too. Some splendid Navajo rugs, examples of modern weaving as well as some fine older work.”

Bernie noticed a pot with a spiderlike design on the shelf next to the window. She took a step toward it.

“That’s a Hopi piece,” the secretary said.

“I’ve never seen that variation on a spider,” Bernie said. “What does the other side look like?”

The secretary said, “I couldn’t tell you. The gal who had my job before got fired for breaking a pot. You would have thought she’d killed somebody, for all the uproar the AD made over it. I never touch any of the art.”

Bernie heard footsteps behind her clicking on the hard floor and noticed the receptionist straightening up in her chair. A woman, a short, slender blonde in a dove gray suit and light blue silk blouse that matched her eyes, walked toward the desk and put down a pile of envelopes and a small box. She wore Zuni earrings with a hummingbird design and a sand-cast silver bracelet that looked as though it had been made by a Navajo jeweler. A good one at that, Bernie thought. The blonde epitomized Bernie’s idea of the Santa Fe version of dressing for success.

“Mail’s here,” the woman said. She glanced at the envelope Bernie had brought and moved it onto the pile. Then she smiled at Bernie. “Is there some problem, Officer? I’m Dr. Maxie Davis, associate director here. AD and mail deliverer.”

Bernie introduced herself. “I just stopped in to drop something off for John Collingsworth. There’s no problem I know of.”

“That’s a relief. We’re already up to our eyeballs in complications, with this huge collection coming in.”

The secretary said, “Officer Manuelito was asking about the other side of the pot with the spider design. I didn’t want to touch it, but—”