In the restaurant he took a table beside one of the west windows, ordered a bowl of what the menu called Hopi Stew, and coffee. The Hopi girl who served it was maybe twenty, and pretty, with her hair cut in the short bangs that old-fashioned Hopis wore. She had dazzled the group of tourists at the next table with her smile. With Chee, she was strictly business. The Hopi dealing with the Navajo. Chee sipped his coffee, and studied the other dining room patrons, and thought of the nature of the drought, and where Ironfingers Musket might be, and of ethnic antagonisms. This one was part abstraction, built into the Hopi legends of warfare: The enemy killed by the Hopi Twin War Gods were Navajo, as the enemy killed by the Navajo Holy People were Utes, or Kiowas, or Taos Indians. But the long struggle over the Joint Use Reservation lands lent a sort of reality to the abstraction in the minds of some. Now, at last, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, and the Hopis had won, and 9,000 Navajos were losing the only homes their families could remember. And the anger lingered, even among the winners. The windowpane beside him reflected red. The sun had gone down behind the San Francisco Peaks and turned the bottom of the clouds that hung over it a luminous salmon-pink. The mountain, too, was contested territory. For the Hopis, it was Mount Sinai itself—the home of the kachina spirits from August until February, when they left this world and returned underground where the spirits live. For Chee's people it was also sacred. It was Evening Twilight Mountain, one of the four mountains First Man had built to mark the corners of Dinetah. It was the Mountain of the West, the home of the great yei spirit, Abalone Girl, and the place where the Sacred Bear of Navajo legend had been so critically wounded by the Bow People that the ritual songs described him as being "fuzzy with arrows"—verbal imagery which had caused Chee as a child to think of the spirit as looking like a gigantic porcupine. The mountain now was outlined blue-black against a gaudy red horizon and the beauty of it lifted Chee's mood.
"Mr. Chee."
Miss Pauling was standing beside his table.
Chee stood.
"No. Don't get up. I wanted to talk to you."
"Why don't you join me?" Chee said.
"Thank you," she said. She looked tired and worried. It would be better, Chee thought, if she looked frightened. She shouldn't be here. She should have gone home. He signaled for the waitress. "I can recommend the stew," he said.
"Have you seen Mr. Gaines?" she asked.
"No," Chee said. "I haven't tried his room, but I didn't see his car."
"He's not here," she said. "He's been gone since yesterday morning."
"Did he say where he was going?" Chee asked. "Or when he'd be back?"
"Nothing," Miss Pauling said.
The waitress came. Miss Pauling ordered stew. The reflection from the fiery sunset turned her face red, but it looked lined and old.
"You should go home," Chee said. "Nothing you can do here."
"I want to find out who killed him," she said.
"You'll find out. Sooner or later the dea, or the fbi, they'll catch them."
"Do you think so?" Miss Pauling asked. The tone suggested she doubted it.
So did Chee. "Well, probably not," he said.
"I want you to help me find out," she said. "Just whatever you can tell me. Like things that the police know that don't get into the newspapers. Do they have any suspects? Surely they must. Who do they suspect?"
Chee shrugged. "At one time they suspected a man named Palanzer. Richard Palanzer. I think he was one of the people the dope was being delivered to."
"Richard Palanzer," Miss Pauling said, as if she was memorizing it.
"However," Chee said. He stopped. He'd been out of touch all day. Had Cowboy found the car? Was it known that Palanzer was no longer a suspect? Almost certainly.
"He was flying in narcotics, then," Miss Pauling said. "Is that what they think?"
"Seems to be," Chee said.
"And Palanzer was supposed to pay for it, and instead he killed him. Was that the way it went? Who is this Palanzer? Where does he live? I know there are times when the police know who did something but they can't find the evidence to prove it. I'd just like to know who did it."
"Why?" Chee asked. He wanted to know, too, because he was curious. But that wasn't her reason.
"Because I loved him," she said. "That's the trouble. I really loved him."
The stew arrived. Miss Pauling stirred it absently. "There was no reason for killing him," she said, watching the spoon. "They could have just pointed a gun at him and he would have given it to them with no trouble at all. He would have just thought it was funny."
"I guess they didn't know that," Chee said.
"He was always such a happy boy," she said.
"Everything was fun for him. I'm five years older and when our mother left… You know how it is—I sort of took care of him until Dad remarried."
Chee said nothing. He was wondering why it was so important for her to know who was to blame. There was a puzzle here to be solved, but after that, what did it matter?
"There was no reason to kill him," she said. "And whoever did it is going to suffer for it." She said it with no particular emphasis, still moving the spoon mechanically through the well-stirred stew. "They're not going to kill him and just walk away from it."
"But sometimes they do," Chee said. "That's the way it is."
"No," she said. The tone was suddenly vehement. "They won't get away with it. You understand that?"
"Not exactly," Chee said.
"Do you understand 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'?"
"I've heard it," Chee said.
"Don't you believe in justice? Don't you believe that things need to be evened up?"
Chee shrugged. "Why not?" he said. As a matter of fact, the concept seemed as strange to him as the idea that someone with money would steal had seemed to Mrs. Musket. Someone who violated basic rules of behavior and harmed you was, by Navajo definition, "out of control." The "dark wind" had entered him and destroyed his judgment. One avoided such persons, and worried about them, and was pleased if they were cured of this temporary insanity and returned again to hozro. But to Chee's Navajo mind, the idea of punishing them would be as insane as the original act. He understood it was a common attitude in the white culture, but he'd never before encountered it so directly.
"That's really what I want to talk to you about," Miss Pauling said. "If this Palanzer did it, I want to know it and I want to know where to find him. If somebody else was responsible, I want to know that." She paused. "I can pay you."
Chee looked doubtful.
"I know you say you're not working on this. But you're the one who found out how he was killed. And you're the only one I know."
"I tell you what I'll do," Chee said. "You go home. If I can find out whether Palanzer is the one, I'll call you and tell you. And then if I can find out where you could look for Palanzer, I'll let you know that, too."
"That's all I can ask," she said.
"Then you'll go home?"
"Gaines has the tickets," she said. "It was all so sudden. He called me at work, and told me about the crash and arranged to meet me. And he said he was Robert's lawyer and we should fly right out and see about it. So he took me home and I put some things in a bag and we went right out to the airport and all the money I have is just what was in my purse."
"You have a credit card?" Chee asked. She nodded. "Use that. I'll get you a ride to Flagstaff."
Two men at a table near the cash register had been watching them. One was about thirty—a big man with long blond hair and small eyes under bushy blond eyebrows. The other, much older, had thin white hair and a suntanned face. His pin-striped three-piece suit looked out of place on Second Mesa.