"You can tell them we have a suspect in the Endocheeney homicide," Leaphorn said. "Witnesses put him at the hogan at the right time. Expect to pick him up today and talk to him."
"You got the right fellow?" Yellowhorse asked. "He have a motive?"
"We haven't talked to him," Leaphorn said. "We're told he said he wanted to kill Endocheeney, so you can presume a motive."
Yellowhorse shrugged. "How about the other killing? Whatever his name was?"
"We don't know," Leaphorn said. "Maybe they're connected."
"Your suspect," Yellowhorse said. He paused, put the cigaret between his lips, lit it with a silver lighter, and exhaled smoke. "He another one of my constituents?"
"Seems to live up in the Lukachukais. Long way from your country."
Yellowhorse stared at Leaphorn, waiting for further explanation. None came. He inhaled smoke again, held it in his lungs, let it trickle from his nostrils. He extracted the cigaret and came just close enough to pointing it at Leaphorn to imply the insult without delivering it. Navajos do not point at one another.
"You guys s'posed to be out of the religion business, aren't you? Since the court cracked down on you for hassling the peyote people?"
Leaphorn's dark face turned a shade darker. "We haven't been arresting anyone for possession of peyote for years," Leaphorn said. He had been very young when the Tribal Council had passed its ill-fated law banning the use of hallucinogens, a law openly aimed at suppressing the Native American Church, which used peyote as a sacrament. He hadn't liked the law, had been glad when the federal court ruled it violated the First Amendment, and he didn't like to be reminded of it. He especially didn't like to be reminded of it in this insulting way by Yellowhorse.
"How about the Navajo religion?" Yellowhorse asked. "The tribal police got any policies against that these days?"
"No," Leaphorn said.
"I didn't think you did," Yellowhorse said. "But you got a cop working out of Shiprock who seems to think you have."
Yellowhorse inhaled tobacco smoke. Leaphorn waited. Yellowhorse waited. Leaphorn waited longer.
"I'm a crystal gazer," Yellowhorse said. "Always had a gift for it, since I was a boy. But only been practicing for the last few years. People come to me at the clinic. I tell 'em what's wrong with 'em. What kind of cure they need."
Leaphorn said nothing. Yellowhorse smoked, exhaled. Smoked again.
"If they have been fooling with wood that's been struck by lightning, or been around a grave too much, or have ghost sickness, then I tell them whether they need a Mountaintop sing, or an Enemy Way, or whatever cure they need. If they need a gallstone removed, or their tonsils out, or a course of antibiotics to knock a strep infection, then I check them into the clinic for that. Now, the American Medical Association hasn't approved it, but it's free. No charge. And a lot of the people out there are getting to know about me doing it, and it brings 'em in where we can get a look at 'em. The sick ones come in. Wouldn't have come in otherwise. They'd have gone to some other medicine man instead of me. And that way we catch a lot of early diabetic cases, and glaucoma, and skin cancer, blood poisoning, and God knows what."
"I've heard about it," Leaphorn said. He was remembering what else he'd heard. He'd heard that Yellowhorse liked to tell how his mother had died out there in that empty country of a little cut on her foot. It had led to an infection, and gangrene, because she never got any medical help. That, so the story went, was how Yellowhorse was orphaned, and got stuck in a Mormon orphanage, and got adopted into a large amount of Midwestern farm machinery money, and inherited a way to build himself a clinic—sort of a perfect circle.
"Sounds like a good idea to me," Leaphorn said. "We damn sure wouldn't have any policy against it."
"One of your cops does," Yellowhorse said. "He's telling people I'm a fake and to stay away from me. I hear the little bastard is trying to be a yataalii himself. Maybe he thinks I'm unfair competition. Anyway, I want you to tell me how what he's doing squares with the law. If it doesn't square, I want it stopped."
"I'll check into it," Leaphorn said. He reached for his notepad. "What's his name?"
"His name's Jim Chee," Yellowhorse said.
Chapter 3
Contents - Prev / Next
roosevelt bistie wasn't at home, his daughter informed them. He had gone into Farmington to get some medicine yesterday, and was going to spend the night with his other daughter, at Ship-rock, and then drive back this morning.
"When do you expect him?" Jay Kennedy asked. The relentless high desert sun of the reservation had burned the yellow out of Kennedy's short blond hair and left it almost white, and his skin was peeling. He looked at Chee, waiting for the translation. Bistie's Daughter probably understood English as well as Kennedy, and spoke it as well as Chee, but the way she had chosen to play the game today, she knew only Navajo. Chee guessed she was a little uneasy—that she hadn't seen many sunburned blond white men up close before.
"That's the kind of questions belagana ask," Chee told her in Navajo. "I'm going to tell him you expect your father when you see him. How sick is he?"
"Bad, I think," Bistie's Daughter said. "He went to a crystal gazer down there at Two Story and the crystal gazer told him he needed a Mountaintop sing. I think he's got something wrong with his liver." She paused. "What do you policemen want him for?"
"She says she expects him when he gets here," Chee told Kennedy. "We could start back and maybe meet him on the road. Or we could just wait here. I'll ask her if she knows where the old man went—what was it—two weeks ago?"
"Just a minute." Kennedy motioned Chee over toward the Agency's carryall. "I think she can understand some English," he said in just above a whisper. "We have to be careful of what we say."
"I wouldn't be surprised," Chee said. He turned back to Bistie's Daughter.
"Two weeks ago?" she asked. "Let's see. He went to see the crystal gazer the second Monday in July. That's when I go in and get all my laundry done down at Red Rock Trading Post. He took me down there. And then it was…" She thought, a sturdy young woman in an "I Love Hawaii" T-shirt, jeans, and squaw boots. Pigeon-toed, Chee noticed. He remembered his sociology professor at the University of New Mexico saying that modern dentistry had made crooked teeth an identifying mark of those who were born into the bottommost fringe of the American socioeconomic classes. Unstraightened teeth for the white trash, uncorrected birth defects for the Navajo. Or, to be fair, for those Navajos who lived out of reach of the Indian Health Service. Bistie's Daughter shifted her weight on those bent ankles. "Well," she said, "it would have been about a week later. About two weeks ago. He took the truck. I didn't want him to go because he had been feeling worse. Throwing up his food. But he said he had to go find a man somewhere way over there around Mexican Hat or Montezuma Creek." She jerked her chin in the general direction of north. "Over by Utah."
"Did he say why?"
"What you want to see him about?" Bistie's Daughter asked.
"She says Bistie went to see a man over by the Utah border two weeks ago," Chee told Kennedy.
"Ah," Kennedy said. "Right time. Right place."
"I don't think I will talk to you anymore," Bistie's Daughter said. "Not unless you tell me what you want to talk to my father. What's wrong with that belagana's face?"
"That's what sunshine does to white people's skin," Chee said. "Somebody got killed over there around Mexican Hat two weeks ago. Maybe your father saw something. Maybe he could tell us something."