“Okay, okay, you caught me. I give up!”
Ella rolled him onto
his belly easily, and he offered no resistance as she handcuffed his wrists behind his back.
“I really wasn’t running away from
you,”
he said.
“You could have fooled me.” As Ella helped him to his feet, she glanced back down the highway and saw a tribal police unit heading her direction, lights flashing.
“I just wanted to get as far away from that place as I could,” he said with a grimace.
“What’s your name?”
“Elroy Begay.”
Ella read him his rights and saw from the expression on his face that he was very familiar with the routine. “Where’s Mr. Tapaha?” she demanded.
“Who?”
“The man who lives in the house you broke into,” she answered, nudging him into motion toward the highway.
“Don’t say his name,” he said quickly, cringing.
Ella heard the fear in his tone and pressed him
instantly for more of an answer. “Why not? What did you do to him?”
“Nothing, not a thing. Nada. I
never
touched that old man. Okay, I admit to unlawful entry, even attempted burglary. But that’s it.”
He was obviously acquainted with the legal system. “Then what’s got you so spooked? Is the old man okay?”
“Hey, I’m not saying another word. Not without my lawyer.”
Ella hurried back with Elroy
in tow to the road where Officer Justine Goodluck, her second cousin and partner, was waiting. Justine was smaller than Ella, and her hair, when it wasn’t tied in a bun, was well past her waist. Justine could pass for a teenager, but was as tough as the best cop, and could handle herself in a confrontation with both skill and courage.
“What’ve you got?” Justine asked, sizing up the prisoner at
a glance. “Nice hair,” she chuckled, noting leaves on some of the spikes, but the boy barely glanced at her.
“Take him,” Ella said, gesturing to Elroy, then opening the back door to Justine’s unit. “I need to return to the house he was burglarizing and look for the owner.”
“I wouldn’t go back in there if I were you,” Elroy said as Ella maneuvered him into the vehicle. His tone was deceptively
flat and in sharp contrast with the vivid spark of fear in his eyes.
“Let’s roll, partner,” Ella said, now really worried about the old man. She scrambled into the passenger side as Justine ran around the vehicle.
Two minutes later they were in front of Tapaha’s house. Ella had tried to get Elroy to talk again, but he’d only shake his head in response to her questions and refused to make eye
contact. Instinct and experience told her to expect major trouble in the man’s home.
Ella hurried inside via the unlocked front door. “Mr. Tapaha? It’s okay to come out now. I’m a police officer.”
There was no answer. An unnatural total silence permeated the house. Afraid that she’d wasted too much time already, Ella looked inside the first bedroom, then the bathroom, but found nothing except
open drawers and a closet. As she headed down the hall, a familiar, repulsive scent, reminiscent of a meat locker, led Ella to the last bedroom. As she stepped around the smashed TV Elroy had probably dropped, she found Mr. Tapaha, his pajamaclad body sprawled on the bed, one arm dangling over the edge. An open, empty, pill bottle lay just beyond his fingers. Tapaha’s eyes were open, blank, and
glazed over with a cloudy film. They seemed to stare at nothing and everything at the same time.
The smell of decaying flesh was strong here and she didn’t need to touch the body to know that he’d been dead for some time. Ella studied the label on the prescription bottle. It had been refilled recently but it was empty now. She recognized the brand of painkillers as a common but powerful drug.
She’d been given some after a dental visit and cautioned against overdosing. The counterindications had disturbed her so much she’d decided not to take any at all. Sometimes pain was preferable to the alternative.
“What have we got?” Justine asked, having followed her in. She stopped by the doorway, lifted a hand to cover her nose, and stepped back. “Never mind. Suicide?”
“Looks like it, though
that’s kind of rare for old Navajos,” Ella said, backing out of the room. “At least this is a modernist area so maybe his death won’t impact too badly on the neighborhood.”
Fear of the
chindi
—the evil side of a person that remained earthbound after death—was still strong on the reservation, but not with the modernists. Relatives or neighbors still wouldn’t line up to move into this house once
it became available, but even in the Anglo world few people wanted a house where a tragedy had occurred.
“Now I know why the boy ran off like he did,” Ella commented.
Justine nodded. “He’s sitting in my unit now, and he won’t even look at the house.”
Another cruiser pulled up outside and Ella saw Joseph Neskahi, a sergeant in the department, climb out of his unit. Joseph was a sturdy Navajo,
with a barrel chest and powerful arms. His dark eyes were flat—the look of a cop who’d long lost any hope that human nature could surprise him.
Neskahi came in, caught the smell in the air, then stopped without moving any farther into the room. “I heard the call and wanted to check it out. I know … knew Mr. H,” he said, avoiding mentioning the deceased’s first name out loud out of respect for
tradition. The Navajo Way taught that using the name of a dead person would call their
chindi
. “He was a friend of my dad’s and I knew he’d been sick for a long, long time—the big C—and things were getting worse. A week or so ago my dad mentioned that Mr. H had left the hospital, telling everyone that he didn’t want to die there. There was no hogan for him to go to anymore, and even if there had
been, he couldn’t have made it far into the desert. So, since he had no family to speak of, he decided that he’d go on his own terms in the comfort of his home. He told my father that his modernist neighbors wouldn’t give a rip if he died here.”
“It’s a sad way to go … with no way out and no friends around to comfort you,” Ella said, remembering being alone in the mine, facing hopelessness and
the certainty of death.
“He’d already said good-bye to the few friends he had,” Neskahi said. “The only thing his future held out to him was the certainty of more pain. He didn’t have many options.”
“I’ve always wondered if I’d make that same choice if I were faced with a long, painful illness I knew I couldn’t beat,” Justine said. “What about you?” she asked Ella.
“I don’t dwell on things
like that,” Ella replied honestly. “I figure I’ll cross each bridge as I get to it.”
“At least he controlled the way he went,” Neskahi said. “That’s a win in my book.”
Joseph’s answer didn’t surprise Ella. Almost everyone she knew in law enforcement prized control. It was a survival skill so ingrained that it became a part of who they were. But her own perspective about Tapaha’s death was different.
From personal experience she was convinced that the end of this life wasn’t the End. Would Tapaha get to the other side and regret speeding up the clock? Would he miss all the little things that he’d taken for granted, or just be happy the ride was over? She hoped for his sake that he’d find peace in the hereafter.
“Call the funeral home that the tribe uses to take care of unclaimed bodies,”
Ella instructed Neskahi. “You’ve got the name and number?” When he nodded, Ella continued. “It’s not a suspicious death, so our role is over except for documenting the burglary attempt—just the TV, probably. The tribe’s ME gets a pass on this one.”
“I’ll handle it,” Neskahi said, then glanced around the room. “I don’t see a phone, so I’ll just relay the message through Dispatch.”
“Use my cell.”
Ella tossed him the phone. She and Justine had cell phones, courtesy of a community program, but routine patrol officers, as Neskahi was at the moment, had to rely on regular equipment unless they were called in for emergency duty, or carried one at their own expense.
Ella looked at Justine. “Take the kid back to the station and book him. Neskahi will process the break-in, and I’ll be in shortly.
I want to talk to the dead man’s neighbors and make sure that there’s no family that should be notified. After that, I’ll head to the station.”
Leaving Justine, Ella went across the street. May opened the door before Ella had the chance to knock. “Is he all right? Herbert, I mean. I haven’t seen him for several days, so I was wondering … .”
“I’m afraid he passed away” Ella said, deciding that
May didn’t need to know it had been a suicide.
May crossed herself, which marked her as a Catholic as well as a modernist.
“Do you know if he had family on the Rez?” Ella asked.
“No, I don’t think there’s anyone left now. I’d go over just to talk to him sometimes—to give him a little company, you know—and he told me once that he’d outlived all of them.” She sighed softly. “I tried to help him
out whenever I could, but he wasn’t easy to get along with. He never came right out and said so, but I got the distinct impression that he didn’t want me to come over too often. He said that he’d made peace with himself a long time ago and he preferred being alone. He even ran off his caregiver last time he came back from the hospital.”
Thanking her, Ella returned to Tapaha’s house and retrieved
her cell phone from Sergeant Neskahi, who was already busy taking photos of the interior of the house. Leaving him to his work, Ella headed down the street toward her unit. The run had left her sweaty and she absently lifted her long black hair off the back of her neck for a moment with her fingertips, enjoying the cool air that touched her skin.
Ella thought about Mr. Tapaha trapped inside a
body that had turned traitor, with no way to escape the disease that had been consuming him. Life without hope soon became unbearable. Without hope, you stopped moving forward and reaching toward the next goal, and you died inside long before you took your last breath.
Ella took one more look around the neighborhood as she opened the door to her unit. Here in this area of essentially modern
housing
filled with amenities, hope had a chance of being more than a fading dream shadow. But there were other places deep on the Rez that hope had deserted, where the land lay wounded with little chance of full recovery. Those places, ravaged by greed, stood empty and seemed as soulless as the gaze in Tapaha’s eyes. And that hopelessness, in turn, touched everyone because the land and the Navajo
were one. Mother Earth provided the food they ate and nourished their spirits, and, eventually, all living things went back to her, completing the endless circle.
Ella drove back to the station in a dark mood, unable to get the image of the old man out of her mind. With any luck this morning wouldn’t be an indication of how the rest of the week would go.
Ella had just pulled into a parking spot
at the station when her call number came over the radio. She answered Dispatch quickly. “I just pulled up at the station.”
“That explains the strong signal. Big Ed wants to see you right now, Investigator Clah.”
Before leaving her unit, Ella cracked the window open just a bit so the heat wouldn’t build up inside. Venting was the only way to avoid returning to a vehicle that would feel like a
cross between a pressure cooker and an oven in a very short time. It was nearly eleven-thirty now, and the cool air was quickly being replaced by high desert temperatures that only the long-awaited afternoon downpour would abate.
She’d just stepped into the station lobby when Big Ed spotted her from down the hall. Their chief of police was a large man. If Neskahi was a barrel of a man, Big Ed
Atcitty was a refrigerator with arms and legs. His hair was turning gray these days but to assume that he’d passed his prime was a huge mistake. As it always was on the reservation, appearances were deceiving. Big Ed could not only keep up with his officers, he qualified with them every year.
“Chief,” she said with a nod.
“You’re back. Good. In my office,” he said, cocking his head down the
hall.
The lack of inflection in his tone caught her attention and made her skin prickle with discomfort. He was trying too hard to act casual, and whenever that happened major-league trouble was at hand.
Ella took a seat in the chair across from his cluttered desk and waited as he closed the door and walked toward her.
“We have a situation,” he said, as he slowly lowered himself into his old
vinyl-covered swivel chair.
His words let her know without a doubt that something was brewing. Another bad sign was that the light on his phone was blinking, indicating he had someone on the line, holding. As silence stretched out between them, she waited, noting that her boss was rocking back and forth in his chair, an unspoken signal that he was thinking and didn’t want to be interrupted. The
chair squeaked slightly, but he apparently hadn’t noticed, and she wasn’t about to point it out or dare crack a smile.
Although on the outside she would have already fired off some questions, on the Rez things moved at their own pace. Respecting that, she remained still, wondering if the person on the other end of the line would be as patient as she was being forced to be right now.