The Oxford Book of American Det (108 page)

Somebody picked up on the other end. “Gun shop.”

“Mr. Lamb?”

“This is Orville Lamb. Did you want me or my brother, Avery?”

“Avery, actually. I have a quick question for him.”

“Well, he left a short while ago, and I’m not sure when he’ll be back. Is it something I can help you with?”

“Maybe so,” I said. “If you had a priceless shotgun—say, an Ithaca or a Parker, one of the classics—would you shoot a gun like that?”

“You could,” he said dubiously, “but it wouldn’t be a good idea, especially if it was in mint condition to begin with. You wouldn’t want to take a chance on lowering the value. Now if it’d been in use previously, I don’t guess it would matter much, but still I wouldn’t advise it—just speaking for myself. Is this a gun of yours?” But I’d hung up. Lisa was right behind me, her expression anxious. “I’ve got to go in a minute,” I said, “but here’s what I think went on. Eric Barnett’s stepfather has a collection of fine shotguns, one of which turns out to be very, very valuable. The old man was hospitalised, and Eric’s mother decided to hock one of the guns in order to do a little something for herself before he’d blown every asset he had on his medical bills. She had no idea the gun she chose was worth so much, but the gun dealer recognised it as the find of a lifetime. I don’t know whether he told her that or not, but when she realised it was more valuable than she thought, she lost her nerve and put it back.”

“Was that the same gun Rudd took in trade?”

“Exactly. My guess is that she mentioned it to her son, who saw a chance to square his drug debt. He offered Rudd the shotgun in trade, and Rudd decided he’d better get the gun appraised, so he took it out to the same place. The gun dealer recognised it when he brought it in.”

She stared at me. “Rudd was killed over the gun itself, wasn’t he?” she said.

“I think so, yes. It might have been an accident. Maybe there was a struggle and the gun went off.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay. Oh, wow. That feels better. I can live with that.” Her eyes came open, and she smiled painfully. “Now what?”

“I have one more hunch to check out, and then I think we’ll know what’s what.” She reached over and squeezed my arm. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not over yet, but we’re getting there.” When I got back to Jackie Barnett’s, the white Corvette was still in the driveway, but the old man in the wheelchair had apparently been moved into the house. I knocked, and after an interval, Eric opened the door, his expression altering only slightly when he saw me. I said, “Hello again. Can I talk to your mom?”

“Well, not really. She’s gone right now.”

“Did she and Avery go off together?”

“Who?”

I smiled briefly. “You can drop the bullshit, Eric. I saw the suitcase in the hall when I was here the first time. Are they gone for good or just for a quick jaunt?”

“They said they’d be back by the end of the week,” he mumbled. It was clear he looked a lot slicker than he really was. I almost felt bad that he was so far outclassed.

“Do you mind if I talk to your stepfather?”

He flushed. “She doesn’t want him upset.”

“I won’t upset him.”

He shifted uneasily, trying to decide what to do with me.

I thought I’d help him out. “Could I just make a suggestion here? According to the California penal code, grand theft is committed when the real or personal property taken is of a value exceeding two hundred dollars. Now that includes domestic fowl, avocados, olives, citrus, nuts, and artichokes. Also shotguns, and it’s punishable by imprisonment in the county jail or state prison for not more than one year. I don’t think you’d care for it.”

He stepped away from the door and let me in.

The old man was huddled in his wheelchair in the den. The rheumy eyes came up to meet mine, but there was no recognition in them. Or maybe there was recognition but no interest. I hunkered beside his wheelchair. “Is your hearing okay?” He began to pluck aimlessly at his pant leg with his good hand, looking away from me.

I’ve seen dogs with the same expression when they’ve done pottie on the rug and know you’ve got a roll of newspaper tucked behind your back.

“Want me to tell you what I think happened?” I didn’t really need to wait. He couldn’t answer in any mode that I could interpret. “I think when you came home from the hospital the first time and found out the gun was gone, the shit hit the fan. You must have figured out that Eric took it. He’d probably taken other things if he’d been doing cocaine for long. You probably hounded him until you found out what he’d done with it, and then you went over to Rudd’s to get it. Maybe you took the L. C Smith with you the first time, or maybe you came back for it when he refused to return the Parker.

In either case, you blew his head off and then came back across the yards. And then you had another stroke.”

I became aware of Eric in the doorway behind me. I glanced back at him. “You want to talk about this stuff?” I asked.

“Did he kill Rudd?”

“I think so,” I said. I stared at the old man.

His face had taken on a canny stubbornness, and what was I going to do? I’d have to talk to Lieutenant Dolan about the situation, but the cops would probably never find any real proof, and even if they did, what could they do to him? He’d be lucky if he lived out the year.

“Rudd was a nice guy,” Eric said.

“God, Eric. You all must have guessed what happened,” I said snappishly.

He had the good grace to colour up at that, and then he left the room. I stood up. To save myself, I couldn’t work up any righteous anger at the pitiful remainder of a human being hunched in front of me. I crossed to the gun cabinet.

The Parker shotgun was in the rack, three slots down, looking like the other classic shotguns in the case. The old man would die, and Jackie would inherit it from his estate. Then she’d marry Avery and they’d all have what they wanted. I stood there for a moment, and then I started looking through the desk drawers until I found the keys. I unlocked the cabinet and then unlocked the rack. I substituted the L. C. Smith for the Parker and then locked the whole business up again. The old man was whimpering, but he never looked at me, and Eric was nowhere in sight when I left.

The last I saw of the Parker shotgun, Lisa Osterling was holding it somewhat awkwardly across her bulky midriff. I’d talk to Lieutenant Dolan all right, but I wasn’t going to tell him everything. Sometimes justice is served in other ways.

TONY HILLERMAN (b. 1925)

Tony Hillerman’s procedurals featuring the Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee represent all the strengths of the American regional mystery novel. Not only does Hillerman open a vista of the southwestern landscape, with which he is intimately acquainted, but his work offers an understanding of Native American culture.

Hillerman was born in the dust-bowl village of Sacred Heart Oklahoma, where he enjoyed a supportive family life and attended a boarding school for Potawatomie Indian girls. By growing up with Potawatomie and Seminole friends and neighbours, he learned, he says, that “racial difference exists only in the bigot’s imagination but that cultural differences are fascinating.”

Hillerman’s youthful hopes of becoming a chemical engineer were already dimmed by bad grades in math and chemistry courses when he was drafted to fight in World War II. In the infantry, he twice attained the rank of private first class and won the Silver Star and the Bronze Star with cluster. He also suffered a wound that left him with only one good eye and a need for a job outside a chemistry lab.

While he was home from Europe on a convalescent furlough, two crucial incidents occurred. A reporter who had read his letters to his family told him that he should be a writer. And while driving a truck to the Navajo Reservation, he witnessed a curing ceremony that later became the center of
The Blessing Way,
his first novel introducing Leaphorn.

Before he wrote that novel, Hillerman studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma, persuaded Marie Unzne. to marry him, and spent seventeen years as a journalist and another five years as a journalism professor at the University of New Mexico. After writing his second novel, which features a political reporter as its sleuth, Hillerman returned to Leaphorn, sending him to the nearby Zuni Reservation to help find a Navajo boy suspected of murder. This book,
The Dance Hall of the Dead,
won the ‘best novel’ Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America.

The series of novels that followed feature either Leaphom or Jim Chee, a younger, more traditional Navajo police officer. In the most recent five books, the two work in uneasy tandem, solving crimes through their knowledge of the culture of their people.

Hillerman’s books have won awards from the Navajos, the Centre for the American Indian, the American Anthropological Association, and the Department of the Interior.

His colleagues in the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master.

With its background of witchcraft and atmosphere of an impending desert storm,
Chee’s Witch
demonstrates how Hillerman makes tribal culture and the desert landscape germane to his plots. In his tale, the unravelling of a contemporary crime is impossible without an intimate knowledge of timeless ritual.

Chee’s Witch

Snow is so important to the Eskimos they have nine nouns to describe its variations.

Corporal Jimmy Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had heard that as an anthropology student at the University of New Mexico. He remembered it now because he was thinking of all the words you need in Navajo to account for the many forms of witchcraft. The word Old Woman Tso had used was ‘anti’l,’ which is the ultimate sort, the absolute worst. And so, in fact, was the deed which seemed to have been done.

Murder, apparently. Mutilation, certainly, if Old Woman Tso had her facts right. And then, if one believed all the mythology of witchery told among the fifty clans who comprised The People, there must also be cannibalism, incest, even necrophilia.

On the radio in Chee’s pickup truck, the voice of the young Navajo reading a Gallup used-car commercial was replaced by Willie Nelson singing of trouble and a worried mind. The ballad fit Chee’s mood. He was tired. He was thirsty. He was sticky with sweat. He was worried. His pickup jolted along the ruts in a windless heat, leaving a white fog of dust to mark its winding passage across the Rainbow Plateau. The truck was gray with it. So was Jimmy Chee. Since sunrise he had covered maybe two hundred miles of half-graded gravel and unmarked wagon tracks of the Arizona-Utah-New Mexico border country. Routine at first—a check into a witch story at the Tsossie hogan north of Teec Nos Pos to stop trouble before it started. Routine and logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer of rainless, desiccating heat.

Hopes dying, things going wrong, anger growing, and then the witch gossip. The logical. A bitter winter, a sand storm spring, a summer awry. The trouble at the summer hogan of the Tsossies was a sick child and a water well that had turned alkaline—nothing unexpected. But you didn’t expect such a specific witch. The skinwalker, the Tsossies agreed, was the City Navajo, the man who had come to live in one of the government houses at Kayenta. Why the City Navajo? Because everybody knew he was a witch. Where had they heard that, the first time? The People who came to the trading post at Mexican Water said it. And so Chee had driven westward over Tohache Wash, past Red Mesa and Rabbit Ears to Mexican Water. He had spent hours on the shady porch giving those who came to buy, and to fill their water barrels, and to visit, a chance to know who he was until finally they might risk talking about witchcraft to a stranger. They were Mud Clan, and Many Goats People, and Standing Rock Clan—foreign to Chee’s own Slow Talking People—but finally some of them talked a little.

A witch was at work on the Rainbow Plateau. Adeline Etcitty’s mare had foaled a two-headed colt. Hosteen Musket had seen the witch. He’d seen a man walk into a grove of cottonwoods, but when he got there an owl flew away. Rudolph Bisti’s boys lost three rams while driving their flocks up into the Chuska high pastures, and when they found the bodies, the huge tracks of a werewolf were all around them. The daughter of Rosemary Nashibitti had seen a big dog bothering her horses and had shot at it with her .22 and the dog had turned into a man wearing a wolfskin and had fled, half running, half flying. The old man they called Afraid of His Horses had heard the sound of the witch on the roof of his winter hogan, and saw the dirt falling through the smoke hole as the skinwalker tried to throw in his corpse powder. The next morning the old man had followed the tracks of the Navajo Wolf for a mile, hoping to kill him.

But the tracks had faded away. There was nothing very unusual in the stories, except their number and the recurring hints that the City Navajo was the witch. But then came what Chee hadn’t expected. The witch had killed a man.

The police dispatcher at Window Rock had been interrupting Willie Nelson with an occasional blurted message. Now she spoke directly to Chee. He acknowledged. She asked his location.

“About fifteen miles south of Dennehotso,” Chee said. “Homeward bound for Tuba City. Dirty, thirsty, hungry, and tired.”

“I have a message.”

“Tuba City,” Chee repeated, “which I hope to reach in about two hours, just in time to avoid running up a lot of overtime for which I never get paid.”

“The message is FBI Agent Wells needs to contact you. Can you make a meeting at Kayenta Holiday Inn at eight P.M.?”

“What’s it about?” Chee asked. The dispatcher’s name was Virgie Endecheenie, and she had a very pretty voice and the first time Chee had met her at the Window Rock headquarters of the Navajo Tribal Police he had been instantly smitten. Unfortunately, Virgie was a born-into Salt Cedar Clan, which was the clan of Chee’s father, which put an instant end to that. Even thinking about it would violate the complex incest taboo of the Navajos.

“Nothing on what it’s about,” Virgie said, her voice strictly business.

“It just says confirm meeting time and place with Chee or obtain alternate time.”