Chee sighed, defeated. “Okay,” he said. “Ms. Craig, this is Deputy Dashee, with the Navajo County Sheriff’s Department.” Craig, he guessed, would not know Navajo County was across the border in Arizona, devoid of any jurisdiction here. “I presume you know that the only material evidence the state has to connect Mr. Tuve with the robbery-homicide at Zuni is a diamond he attempted to pawn. We are hoping to find concrete evidence that Mr. Tuve got that diamond exactly as he claims. To check it out, we want to get some more details from him about the circumstances.”
Craig considered this. Nodded. “Have a seat,” she said. “Or join us at the table.” She moved her purse off a chair and put it on a closet shelf. The purse was a large and fashionable leather affair and it seemed to Chee remarkably heavy, even for its size.
The Clark Gable Suite offered numerous comfortable choices for seating—a richly covered sofa, three overstuffed chairs, an ottoman, and four standard dining room chairs around the table. The windows offered a view to the east and north of the mainline railroad tracks, now carrying a seemingly endless line of freight cars toward California, the traffic flowing by on Interstate Highway 40, and beyond all that the spectacular red cliffs that had attracted Hollywood here to produce its horse operas so common through the middle years of the century. Through a double doorway Chee could see into the suite’s handsome bedroom.
He selected an overstuffed chair and seated himself. Dashee, wearing a “what the hell” expression, chose the sofa.
“We’re going to ask Mr. Tuve some questions, then,” Chee said. “And it appears we have a mutual interest in the answers. But first we’d like to know why the organization you represent has a fifty-thousand-dollar interest in this.”
Joanna Craig pondered this a moment, studying Chee. “What organization is that?” she asked.
“The one you just mentioned that sent you here to protect Mr. Tuve. The one that gave you the check to pay for bonding Mr. Tuve out of jail.”
“Its identity is confidential.”
“The check you provided to pay for the bond was written on a Bank of America account. It had your name on it.”
Joanna Craig sighed, shrugged, nodded.
“Why did your employers send you here?” Chee asked. “Why do they have a fifty-thousand-dollar interest in Mr. Tuve?”
“You’ll have to ask them.” She smiled at him.
“I will,” Chee said. “Give me the name and address.”
She considered that awhile, shook her head.
“I would, but they’d just tell you it’s none of your business. Just waste your time.”
For a while the room was silent. Through the windows came the diminishing sound of thunder, already dim and distant, the jumbled noise of truck traffic on Interstate 40, and the nearer sound of cars on Railroad Avenue. Inside the room only Cowboy Dashee chuckling, and the click of his spoon as Tuve stirred sugar into his cup of coffee.
“Well, then,” Chee said. “I guess we might as well just get down to business. Mr. Tuve, would you please tell us how you got that diamond.”
“Like I already told the sheriff and that FBI man, an old man gave it to me,” Tuve said. “Didn’t look like a Hopi. Old. Had a lot of long white hair. Looked Indian, though, but maybe not. Maybe a Havasupai. They live down there in the bottom of the canyon, across the river, but they ought not be around our Salt Shrine. That’s just for Bear Clan people.”
Billy Tuve took a sip of his coffee, glowering over the rim of the cup at the thought of that.
“Let’s skip back, then,” Chee said. “Start from what you were doing down in the canyon, where you said it happened, and take it from there.”
“Some of it I can’t talk about. It’s kiva business. Secret.”
“Then when you come to the secret part, just tell it to Dashee. In Hopi. That will keep it confidential.”
“We’re both in the Bear Clan but we didn’t get initiated into the same kiva,” Tuve said. “There’s some of it I couldn’t tell him, either.”
“Well, just do what your conscience lets you do, then.”
Joanna Craig frowned.
Tuve nodded and began his account, Hopi fashion, from the beginning.
Chee slumped back into his chair, relaxing, getting comfortable, preparing for a long, long session. He’d listen carefully when Tuve got through the religious preamble and began to discuss receipt of the diamond. Until then he’d consider whether Craig was actually a lawyer. Anyone could have posted Tuve’s bond. He’d ponder what she was doing here. If the opportunity arose, he’d try to find out what caused her purse to seem so heavy, even for its size. A tape recorder? A pistol? Meanwhile, he’d enjoy himself. He concentrated on thinking about Bernadette Manuelito. Happy, happy thoughts. About fixing up his place on the San Juan with her. They’d have to move in a double bed. Couldn’t use those little narrow foldout bunks after you’re a married couple. Have to get some curtains on the windows. Things like that.
Tuve was talking now of having to go to a meeting in the kiva of the Hopi religious society to which he belonged. He was being considered for membership in an ancient organization that non-Hopis called the Bow Society, which wasn’t its real name. Anyway, he was going to take part in an initiation. That involved a pilgrimage by potential members from their village on Second Mesa all the way to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. From there they made the perilous climb down the cliffs—a descent of more than four thousand feet—to the bottom near where the Little Colorado pours into the Colorado River. But first Billy Tuve had to deal with the ceremonial eagle, tell Miss Craig how it had been collected from one of the nests guarded by his society, how a shaman brought it in, prayers were said, the proper herbs were smoked. Then the eagle was smothered, plucked, sprinkled with blessed cornmeal, and, as Tuve expressed it, “sent home to join his own spirits with our prayers to help him lead us on a safe journey.”
Chee let his attention drift and his gaze shift from Ms. Craig’s face to the window behind her. The rainstorm had drifted east, and the red cliffs that formed their walls north of Gallup were streaked now with sunlight and shadow, varying from dark crimson where the rain had soaked them to pale pink where it hadn’t, leaving a dozen shades in between. And above them another great tower of white was climbing, with the west wind blowing mist from it, forming an anvil shape at its top and producing a thin screen of ice crystals against the dark blue sky. Some other parts of the Navajo Nation would be getting rain.
Chee was remembering a chant a Zuni girlfriend had taught him from a prayer of her tribe’s A’shiwannis religious order:
Send out your cloud towers to live with us,
stretch out your watery hands of mist.
Let us embrace one another.
This had been before Chee met Bernadette Manuelito, and fallen in love with her, so that now even rain clouds caused him to think of her. Thinking now of embracing Bernie, instead of listening to Tuve, who was still talking, but not talking about diamonds. Who needed diamonds with ice crystals glittering against the blue, blue sky. With Bernie willing to marry him. With the time for that already established.
Behind him Tuve was now droning through the required ceremonialism of the Salt Trail, talking about feathers and prayer sticks being properly painted to be used as required at the springs, shrines, and sacred places they would be passing. And for Billy Tuve, conditioned as he was to getting the details of Hopi ceremonialism precisely correct, this took patient listening. And more time was taken because he often nodded apologetically to Chee and Ms. Craig, and shifted into Hopi to speak directly to Dashee, thus preserving the secrets of the tribe’s religions. When special affairs of his own kiva became involved, Tuve simply showed Dashee the palms of his hands and went silent.