Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (2 page)

ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE of the Navajo Tribal Police, a
"traditional" at heart, had parked his trailer with its door facing
east. At dawn on July 8, he looked out at the rising sun, scattered a pinch of
pollen from his medicine pouch to bless the day and considered what it would
bring him.

He reviewed the bad part first. On his desk his monthly report for June—his
first month as administrator in charge of a Navajo Police subagency
unit—awaited him, half-finished and already overdue. But finishing the hated
paperwork would be fun compared to the other priority job—telling Officer Benny
Kinsman to get his testosterone under control.

The good part of the day involved, at least obliquely, his own testosterone.
Janet Pete was leaving Washington and coming back to Indian country. Her letter
was friendly but cool, with no hint of romantic passion. Still, Janet was
coming back, and after he finished with Kinsman he planned to call her. It
would be a tentative exploratory call. Were they still engaged? Did she want to
resume their prickly relationship? Bridge the gap? Actually get married? For
that matter, did he? However he answered that question, she was coming back and
that explained why Chee was grinning while he washed the breakfast dishes.

The grin went away when he got to his office at the Tuba City station.
Officer Kinsman, who was supposed to be awaiting him in his office, wasn't there.
Claire Dineyahze explained it.

"He said he had to run out to Yells Back Butte first and catch that
Hopi who's been poaching eagles," Mrs. Dineyahze said.

Chee inhaled, opened his mouth, then clamped it shut. Mrs. Dineyahze would
have been offended by the obscenity Kinsman's action deserved.

She made a wry face and shook her head, sharing Chee's disapproval.

"I guess it's the same Hopi he arrested out there last winter,"
she said. "The one they turned loose because Benny forgot to read him his
rights. But he wouldn't tell me. Just gave me that look." She put on a
haughty expression. "Said his informant was confidential." Clearly
Mrs. Dineyahze was offended by this exclusion. "One of his girlfriends,
probably."

"I'll find out," Chee said. It was time to change the subject.
"I've got to get that June report finished. Anything else going on?"

"Well," Mrs. Dineyahze said, and then stopped.

Chee waited.

Mrs. Dineyahze shrugged. "I know you don't like gossip," she said.
"But you'll probably hear about this anyway."

"What?"

"Suzy Gorman called this morning. You know? The secretary in the
Arizona Highway Patrol at Winslow. She said one of their troopers had to break
up a fight at a place in Flagstaff. It was Benny Kinsman and some guy from
Northern Arizona University."

Chee sighed. "They charge him?"

"She said no. Professional courtesy."

"Thank God," Chee said. "That's a relief."

"May not be over, though," she said. "Suzy said the fight
started because Kinsman was making a big move on a woman and wouldn't stop, and
the woman said she was going to file a complaint. Said he'd been bothering her
before. On her job."

"Well, hell," Chee said. "What next? Where's she work?"

"It was Catherine Pollard," Mrs. Dineyahze said. "You know?
Works out of that little office the Arizona Health Department set up here after
those two bubonic plague cases. They call 'em vector control people." Mrs.
Dineyahze smiled. "They catch fleas."

"I've got to get that report out by noon," Chee said. He'd had all the
Kinsman he wanted this morning.

Mrs. Dineyahze wasn't finished with Kinsman. "Did Bernie talk to you
about Kinsman?"

"No," Chee said. She hadn't, but he'd heard a rumble on the gossip
circuit.

"I told her she should tell you, but she didn't want to bother
you."

"Tell me what?" Bernie was Officer Bernadette Manuelito, who was
young and green and, judging from gossip Chee had overheard, had a crush on
him.

Mrs. Dineyahze looked sour. "Sexual harassment," she said.

"Like what?"

"Like making a move on her."

Chee didn't want to hear about it. Not now. "Tell her to report it to
me," he said, and went into his office to confront his paperwork. With a
couple of hours of peace and quiet he could finish it by lunchtime. He got in
about thirty minutes before the dispatcher buzzed him.

"Kinsman wants a backup," she said.

"For what?" Chee asked. "Where is he?"

"Out there past Goldtooth," the dispatcher said. "Over near
the west side of Black Mesa. The signal was breaking up."

"It always does out there," Chee said. In fact, these chronic
radio communication problems were one thing he was complaining about in his
report. "We have anyone close?"

"Afraid not."

"I'll take it myself," Chee said.

A few minutes after noon, Chee was bumping down the gravel trailing a cloud
of dust looking for Kinsman. "Come in, Benny," Chee said into his
mike. "I'm eight miles south of Goldtooth. Where are you?"

"Under the south cliff of Yells Back Butte," Kinsman said.
"Take the old Tijinney hogan road. Park where the arroyo cuts it. Half
mile up the arroyo. Be very quiet."

"Well, hell," Chee said. He said it to himself, not into the mike.
Kinsman had gotten himself excited stalking his Hopi poacher, or whatever he
was after, and had been transmitting in a half-intelligible whisper. Even more
irritating, he was switching off his receiver lest a too-loud response alert
his prey. While this was proper procedure in some emergency situations, Chee
doubted this was anything serious enough to warrant that sort of foolishness.

"Come on, Kinsman," he said. "Grow up."

If he was going to be backup man on whatever Benny was doing, it would help
to understand the problem. It would also help to know how to find the road to
the Tijinney hogan. Chee knew just about every track on the east side of the
Big Rez, the Checkerboard Rez even better, and the territory around Navajo
Mountain fairly well. But he'd worked out of Tuba City very briefly as a rookie
and had been reassigned there only six weeks ago. This rugged landscape beside
the Hopi Reservation was relatively strange to him.

He remembered Yells Back Butte was an outcrop of Black Mesa. Therefore it
shouldn't be too difficult to find the Tijinney road, and the arroyo, and
Kinsman. When he did, Chee intended to give him some very explicit instructions
about how to use his radio and to behave himself when dealing with women. And,
come to think of it, to curb his anti-Hopi attitude.

This was the product of having his family's home site added to the Hopi
Reservation when Congress split the Joint Use lands. Kinsman's grandmother, who
spoke only Navajo, had been relocated to Flagstaff, where almost nobody speaks
Navajo. Whenever Kinsman visited her, he came back full of anger.

One of those scattered little showers that serve as forerunners to the
desert country rainy season had swept across the Moenkopi Plateau a few minutes
before and was still producing rumbles of thunder far to the east. Now he was
driving through the track the shower had left and the gusty breeze was no
longer engulfing the patrol car in dust. The air pouring through the window was
rich with the perfume of wet sage and dampened earth.

Don't let this Kinsman problem spoil the whole day, Chee told himself. Be
happy. And he was. Janet Pete was coming. Which meant what? That she thought
she could be content outside the culture of Washington's high society?
Apparently. Or would she try again to pull him into it? If so, would she
succeed? That made him uneasy.

Before yesterday's letter, he had hardly thought about Janet for days. A
little before drifting off to sleep, a little at dawn while he fried his
breakfast Spam. But he had resisted the temptation to dig out her previous
letter and reread it. He knew the facts by heart. One of her mother's many
well-placed friends reported that her job application was "favorably
considered" in the Justice Department. Being half-Navajo made her
prospects for an assignment in Indian country look good. Then came the last
paragraph.

"Maybe I'll be assigned to Oklahoma—lots of legal work there with that
internal fight the Cherokees are having. And then there's the rumble inside the
Bureau of Indian Affairs over law enforcement that might keep me in
Washington."

Nothing in that one that suggested the old pre-quarrel affection. It had
caused Chee to waste a dozen sheets of paper with abortive attempts to frame
the proper answer. In some of them he'd urged her to use the experience she'd
gained working for the Navajo tribe's legal aid program to land an assignment
on the Big Rez. He'd said hurry home, that he'd been wrong in distrusting her.
He had misunderstood the situation. He had acted out of unreasonable jealousy.
In others he'd said, Stay away. You'll never be content here. It can never be
the same for us. Don't come unless you can be happy without your Kennedy Center
culture, your Ivy League friends, art shows, and high-fashion and cocktail
parties with the celebrity set, without the snobbish intellectual elite. Don't
come unless you can be happy living with a fellow whose goals include neither
luxury nor climbing the ladder of social caste, with a man who has found the
good life in a rusty trailer house.

Found the good life? Or thought he had. Either way, he knew he was finally
having some luck forgetting her. And the note he'd eventually sent had been
carefully unrevealing. Then came yesterday's letter, with the last line saying
she was "coming home!!"

Home. Home with two exclamation points. He was thinking of that when
Kinsman's silly whispering had •jarred him back to reality. And now Kinsman was
whispering again. Unintelligible muttering at first, then: "Lieutenant!
Hurry!"

Chee hurried. He'd planned to pause at Goldtooth to ask directions, but
nothing remained there except two roofless stone buildings, their doorways and
windows open to the world, and an old-fashioned round hogan that looked equally
deserted. Tracks branched off here, disappearing through the dunes to the right
and left. He hadn't seen a vehicle since he'd left the pavement, but the center
track bore tire marks. He stayed with it. Speeding. He was out of the shower's
path now and leaving a rooster tail of dust. Forty miles to the right the San
Franciscos dominated the horizon, with a thunderstorm building over Humphrey's
Peak. To the left rose the ragged shape of the Hopi mesas, partly obscured at
the moment by the rain another cloud was dragging. All around him was the empty
wind-shaped plateau, its dunes held by great growths of Mormon tea, snake weed,
yucca, and durable sage. Abruptly Chee again smelled the perfume that showers
leave behind them. No more dust now. The track was damp. It veered eastward,
toward mesa cliffs and, jutting from them, the massive shape of a butte. The
tracks leading toward it were hidden behind a growth of Mormon tea and Chee
almost missed them. He backed up, tried his radio again, got nothing but
static, and turned onto the ruts toward the butte. Short of the cliffs he came
to the washout Kinsman had mentioned.

Kinsman's patrol car was parked by a cluster of junipers, and Kinsman's
tracks led up the arroyo. He followed them along the sandy bottom and then away
from it, climbing the slope toward the towering sandstone wall of the butte.
Kinsman's voice was still in Chee's mind. To hell with being quiet. Chee ran.

Officer Kinsman was behind an outcrop of sandstone. Chee saw a leg of his
uniform trousers, partly obscured by a growth of wheatgrass. He began a shout
to him, and cut it off. He could see a boot now. Toe down. That was wrong. He
slid his pistol from its holster and edged closer.

From behind the sandstone, Chee heard the sound boots make on loose gravel,
a grunting noise, labored breathing, an exclamation. He thumbed off the safety
on his pistol and stepped into the open.

Benjamin Kinsman was facedown, the back of his uniform shirt matted with
grass and sand glued to the cloth by fresh red blood. Beside Kinsman a young
man squatted, looking up at Chee. His shirt, too, was smeared with blood.

"Put your hands on top of your head," Chee said.

"Hey," the man said. "This guy…"

"Hands on head," Chee said, hearing his own voice harsh and shaky
in his ears. "And get facedown on the ground."

The man stared at Chee, at the pistol aimed at his face. He wore his hair in
two braids. A Hopi, Chee thought. Of course. Probably the eagle poacher he'd
guessed Kinsman had been trying to catch. Well, Kinsman had caught him.

"Down," Chee ordered. "Face to the ground."

The young man leaned forward, lowered himself slowly. Very agile, Chee
thought. His torn shirt sleeve revealed a long gash on the right forearm, the
congealed blood forming a curved red stripe across sunburned skin.

Chee pulled the man's right hand behind his back, clicked the handcuff on
the wrist, cuffed the left wrist to it. Then he extracted a worn brown leather
wallet from the man's hip pocket and flipped it open. From his Arizona driver's
license photo the young man smiled at him. Robert Jano. Mishongnove, Second
Mesa.

Robert Jano was turning onto his side, pulling his legs up, preparing to
rise.

"Stay down," Chee said. "Robert Jano, you have the right to
remain silent. You have the right to…"

"What are you arresting me for?" Jano said. A raindrop hit the
rock beside Chee. Then another.

"For murder. You have the right to retain legal counsel. You have the
right—"

"I don't think he's dead," Jano said. "He was alive when I
got here."

"Yeah," Chee said. "I'm sure he was."

"And when I checked his pulse. Just thirty seconds ago."

Chee was already kneeling beside Kinsman, his hand on Kinsman's neck, first
noticing the sticky blood and now the faint pulse under his fingertip and the
warmth of the flesh under his palm. He stared at Jano. "You
sonofabitch!" Chee shouted. "Why did you brain him like that?"