"Blackened up the wall," the Hopi said, inspecting it. "Have to be repainted." He turned to walk back to the motel office.
"Somebody ought to check the roof," Chee said. "The flames were going up over the parapet."
The Hopi stopped and looked toward the flat roof. His expression was skeptical.
"No smoke," he said. "It's all right. That roof would still be damp."
"I thought I saw smoke," Chee said. "Be hell if that tarred roof caught on fire. Is there a way to get up there?"
"I guess I better check," the clerk said. He headed off in the other direction at a fast walk.
To get a ladder, Chee guessed. He hoped the ladder was a long ways off.
Miss Pauling was coming, hurried and nervous, from behind the counter when Chee pushed through the door. Her face was white. She looked flustered.
Chee rushed her outside to his patrol car. The clerk was hurrying across the patio, carrying an aluminum ladder.
"Call come?"
She nodded, still speechless.
"Anybody see you?"
"Just a couple of customers," she said. "They wanted to pay their lunch tickets. I told them to just leave the money on the counter. Was that all right?"
"All right with me," Chee said. He held the car door for her, let himself in on the driver's side. Neither of them said anything until he pulled out of the parking lot and was on the highway.
Then Miss Pauling laughed. "Isn't that funny," she said. "I haven't been so terrified since I was a girl."
"It is funny," Chee said. "I'm still nervous."
Miss Pauling laughed again. "I think you're terrified of how embarrassed you're going to be. What are you going to say if that man comes back and there you are behind his counter playing switchboard operator?"
"Exactly," Chee said. "What are you going to say if he says, 'Hey, there, what are you doing burning down my cultural center?'"
Miss Pauling got her nerves under control. "But the call did come through," she said.
"It must have been short," Chee said.
"Thank God," she said fervently.
"What'd you learn?"
"It was a man," Miss Pauling said. "He asked for Gaines, and Gaines answered the phone on the first ring, and the man asked him if he wanted the suitcases back, and—"
"He said suitcases?"
"Suitcases," Miss Pauling confirmed. "And Gaines said yes, they did, and the man said that could be arranged. And then he said it would cost five hundred thousand dollars, and they would have to be in tens and twenties and not in consecutive order, in two briefcases, and he said they would have to be delivered by The Boss himself. And Gaines said that would be a problem, and the man said either The Boss or no deal, and Gaines said it would take some time. He said it would take at least twenty-four hours. And the man said they would have more than that. He said the trade would be made at nine p.m. two nights after tonight."
"Friday night," Chee said.
"Friday night," Miss Pauling agreed. "Then the man said to be ready for nine p.m. Friday night, and he hung up."
"That's all of it?"
"Oh, the man said he'd be back in touch to tell Gaines where they'd meet. And then he hung up."
"But he didn't name the place?"
"He didn't."
"Say anything else?"
"That's the substance of it."
"He explain why the boss had to deliver the money?"
"He said he didn't trust anybody else. He said if the boss was there himself, nobody would risk trying anything funny."
"Any names mentioned?"
"Oh, yes," Miss Pauling said. "The man called Gaines Gaines and once Gaines said something like Palanzer.' He said something like: 'I don't see why you're doing this, Palanzer. You would have made almost that much.' That was after the man—Palanzer, I guess—said he wanted the five hundred thousand."
"What did the man say to that?"
"He just laughed. Or it sounded like a laugh. His voice sounded muffled all through the conversation—like he was talking with something in his mouth."
"Or with something over his mouth." Chee paused. "He specified nine p.m.?"
Miss Pauling nodded. "He said, 'Exactly nine p.m.'"
Chee pulled off the asphalt, made a backing turn, and headed back toward the motel. He smelled of smoke.
"Well," Miss Pauling said. "Now we know who has it, and when they're going to make the switch."
"But not where," Chee said. Why the muffled voice, he was asking himself. Because the caller would have been good old Ironfingers, and because Ironfingers would want Gaines to believe the caller was Palanzer. Joseph Musket, despite his years of living among whites, would not have lost his breathy Navajo pronunciation.
"How do we find out where?"
"That's going to take some thinking," Chee said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Thinking didn't seem to help. Chee went to sleep that night thinking. He got up the next morning and went over to his office, still deep in thought. His only conclusion was that he must be thinking the wrong way. There was nothing much in his In basket except a note that Johnson of the dea was trying to reach him and a carbon of the report on the Burnt Water necklace turning up. It simply repeated what Dashee had told him, with the details filled in.
Subject named Edna Nezzie, twenty-three, unmarried, of the Graywoman Nezzie camp, north of Teec Nos Pos, had pawned the necklace at Mexican Water. It had been recognized from the description left with the post manager by Tribal Police. Subsequently, subject Nezzie had told investigating officer Eddie Begay that she had been given the necklace by a male subject she had met two nights earlier at a squaw dance next to Mexican Water. She identified the subject as a Navajo male about thirty, who had identified himself as Joseph Musket. The two had gone to a white Ford pickup Musket was driving. There they had engaged in sexual intercourse. Musket then had given the subject the necklace and they had returned to the dance. She had seen no more of him.
Chee frowned at the paper, trying to identify why something was wrong about it. Still staring at the report, he fumbled for the telephone, and dailed the operator, and asked for the number of the trading post at Teec Nos Pos. It rang five times before he got an answer.
Chee identified himself. "Just need some information. What clan is Graywoman Nezzie?"
"Nezzie," the voice said. "She's born to Standing Rock and born for Bitter Water."
"You're sure?"
"I'm one of the old lady's sons-in-law," the voice said. "Married into 'em. The father is Water Runs Together and Many Poles."
"Thanks," Chee said, and hung up. He remembered Mrs. Musket identifying herself. Born to Standing Rock Dinee, she had said, and born for the Mud Clan. So the man who had identified himself as Joseph Musket at the Mexican Water squaw dance could not possibly have been Joseph Musket. For a Navajo male to dance with a Navajo female of the same maternal clan violated the most stringent of taboos. And the intra-clan intercourse that followed was the most heinous form of incest—sure to cause sickness, sure to cause insanity, likely to bring death. If it was Musket, it could only mean that he had lied to the girl about his clan. Otherwise she would never have danced with him, gone to the truck with him, even talked to him except in the most formal fashion. And no Navajo male would engage in such a ghastly deception.
Unless, Chee thought, he was a witch.
Chee left a note to tell Largo where to find him and headed for Cameron. En route he remembered what Mrs. Musket had told him about the homecoming of Ironfingers, his urgent need for the traditional Navajo purification ceremonial, his stated intentions to rejoin the People as a herder of sheep. Such behavior was incongruous with deliberate incest—an act which any traditional Navajo knew endangered the health of the entire clan. Chee narrowed it down to two choices. Either someone had imitated Iron-fingers at the squaw dance, or Ironfingers was a madman. Or in other words, a witch.
In Cameron he bought a sack of cement at the lumberyard, and a tub at the hardware store, and a flexible plastic funnel at the drugstore. Then he made the long, lonely drive back to the Hopi Reservation, still thinking. At the windmill he left the sack of cement beside the well shaft, put the funnel beside it, and covered both with the tub, just in case the rain clouds building up again in the west produced some moisture.