"They didn't say who was shot?"
"'Police did not reveal the identity of the victim,'" she said, but the smile faded as she said it. "Who was it?"
"It was Roosevelt Bistie," Chee said.
"Oh, no," she said. She sat down on the front seat again, wrinkled her face, closed her eyes, shook her head against this mortality. "That poor man." She put her hands across her face. "That poor man."
"Somebody came to his house last night. His daughter was gone. They shot him."
Janet Pete lowered her hands to listen to this, staring at Chee. "Why? Do you know why? He was dying, anyway. He said the doctor told him the cancer would kill him."
"We don't know why," Chee said. "I want to talk to you about it. We're trying to find out why."
They left Janet Pete's clean Chevy and got into Chee's unwashed patrol car. At the Turquoise Cafe, Janet Pete ordered iced tea and Chee had coffee.
"You want to know who called me. That's funny, because the man who called lied. I found out later. He said his name was Curtis Atcitty. Spelled with the A. Not E. I had him spell it for me."
"Did he say who he was?"
"He said he was a friend of Roosevelt Bistie's, and he said Bistie was being held without bond and without any charges being filed against him, and that he was sick and didn't have any lawyer and he needed help." She paused, thinking about it. "And he said that Bistie had asked him to call DNA about a lawyer." She looked at Chee. "That's where he lied. When I told Bistie about it, he said he hadn't asked anybody to call. He said he didn't know anybody named Curtis Atcitty."
Chee clicked his tongue against his teeth, the sound of disappointment. So much for that.
"When you left the jail, I saw you driving back into Farmington. Where did you go? When was the last time you saw him?"
"Down to the bus station. He thought one of his relatives might be there, and they'd give him a ride home. But nobody he knew was there, so I took him back to Shiprock. He saw a truck he recognized at the Economy Washomat and I left him out there."
"Did he ever tell you why he tried to kill Old Man Endocheeney?"
Janet Pete simply looked at him.
"He's dead," Chee said. "No lawyer-client confidentiality left. Now it's try to find out who killed him."
Janet Pete studied her hands, which were small and narrow, with long, slender fingers, and if her fingernails were polished it was with the transparent, colorless stuff. Nice feminine hands, Chee thought. He remembered Mary Landon's hands, strong, smooth fingers intertwined with his own. Mary Landon's fingertips. Mary Landon's small white fist engulfed in his own. Janet Pete's right hand now gripped her left.
"I'm not stalling," she said. "I'm thinking. I'm trying to remember."
Chee wanted to tell her it was important. Very important. But he decided it wasn't necessary to say that to this lawyer. He watched her hands, thinking of Mary Landon, and then her face, thinking of Janet Pete.
"He said very little altogether," she said. "He didn't talk much. He wanted to know if he could go home. We talked about that. I asked him if he knew exactly what he was accused of doing. What law he was supposed to have broken." She glanced at Chee, then turned her eyes away, gazing out the street window through the dusty glass on which THE TURQUOISE CAFE was lettered in reverse. Beyond the glass, the dry wind was chasing a tumbleweed down the street. "He said he had shot a fellow over in the San Juan Canyon. And then he sort of chuckled and said maybe he just scared him. But anyway the man was dead and that was what you had him in jail for." She frowned, concentrating, right hand gripping the left. "I asked him why he had shot at the man and he said something vague." She shook her head.
"Vague?"
"I don't remember. Something like 'I had a reason,' or 'good reason' or something like that—without saying why."
"Did you press him at all?"
"I said something like 'You must have had a good reason to shoot at a man,' and he laughed, I remember that, but not like he thought it was funny, and I asked him directly what his reason was and he just shut up and wouldn't answer."
"He wouldn't tell us anything, either," Chee said.
Janet Pete had taken a sip from her glass. Now she held it a few inches from her lips. "I told him I was his lawyer—there to help him. What he told me would be kept secret from anyone else. I told him shooting at somebody, even if you missed them, could get him in serious trouble with the white man and if he had a good reason for doing it, he would be smart to let me know about it. To see if we could use it in some way to help keep him out of jail."
She put down the glass and looked directly at Chee. "That's when he told me about being sick. It was easy enough to see anyway, with the way he looked. But anyway, he said the white man couldn't give him any more trouble than he already had, because he had cancer in his liver." She used the Navajo phrase for it—"the sore that never heals."
"That's what his daughter told me," Chee said. "Cancer of the liver."
Janet Pete was studying Chee's face. It was a habit that Chee had learned slowly, and come to tolerate slowly, and that still sometimes made him uneasy. Another of those cultural differences that Mary found odd and exotic.
("That first month or two in class I was always saying: 'Look at me when I talk to you,' and the kids simply wouldn't do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive, deceptive."
And Chee had said something about it not seeming odd or evasive to him. It seemed merely polite. Only the rude peered into one's face during a conversation. And Mary Landon had asked him how this worked for a policeman. Surely, she'd said, they must be trained to look for all those signals facial expressions reveal while the speaker is lying, or evading, or telling less than the truth. And he had said… )
"You needed to know who called me," Janet Pete was saying, "because you suspect that whoever called is the one who killed Roosevelt Bistie. Isn't that it?"
Like police academy, Chee thought, law schools teach interrogators a different conversational technique than Navajo mothers. The white way. The way of looking for what the handbook on interrogation called "nonverbal signals." Chee found himself trying to keep his face blank, to send no such signals. "That's possible," he said. "It may have happened that way."
"In fact," Janet Pete said, slowly and thoughtfully, "you think this man used me. Used me to get Mr. Bistie out of jail and home…" Her voice trailed off.
Chee had been looking out past the window's painted lettering. The wind had changed direction just a little—enough to pull loose the leaves and twigs and bits of paper it had pinned against the sheep fence across the highway. Now the gusts were pulling these away, sending them skittering along the pavement. Changing winds meant changing weather. Maybe, finally, it would rain. But the new tone in Janet Pete's voice drew his attention back to her.
"Used me to get him out where he could be killed."
She looked at Chee for confirmation.
"He would have gotten out, anyway," Chee said. "The FBI had him, and the FBI didn't charge him with anything. We couldn't have—"
"But I think that man wanted Mr. Bistie out before he would talk to anyone. Doesn't that make sense?"
It was exactly the thought that had brought him looking for Janet Pete.
"Doubtful," Chee said. "Probably no connection at all."
Janet Pete was reading his nonverbal signals. Rude, Chee thought. No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual's privacy.
"It's not doubtful at all," she said. "You are lying to me now." But she smiled. "That's kind of you. But I can't help but feel responsible." She looked very glum. "I am responsible. Somebody wants to kill my client, so they call me and have me get him out where they can shoot him." She picked up her glass, noticed it was empty, put it down again. "He didn't even particularly want to be my client. The guy who wanted to shut him up just put me on the job."