So Acting Lieutenant Chee showed up at his office in Shiprock early to get his desk cleared and make the needed arrangements. He arrived with tape plastered over the stitches around his left eye and a noticeable shiner visible behind them. He lowered himself carefully into the chair behind the desk to avoid jarring his ribs and gave Officers Teddy Begayaye, Deejay Hondo, Edison Bai, and Bernadette Manuelito a few moments to inspect the damage. In Begayaye and Bai it seemed to provoke a mixture of admiration and amusement, well suppressed. Hondo didn’t seem interested and Officer Bernie Manuelito’s face reflected a sort of shocked sympathy.
With that out of the way, he satisfied their curiosity with a personal briefing of what actually happened at the Maryboy place, supplementing the official one they would have already received. Then down to business.
He instructed Bai to try to find out where a .38-caliber pistol confiscated from a Shiprock High School boy had come from. He suggested to Officer Manuelito that she continue her efforts to locate a fellow named Adolph Deer, who had jumped bond after a robbery conviction but was reportedly “frequently being seen around the Two Gray Hills trading post.” He told Hondo to finish the paperwork on a burglary case that was about to go to the grand jury. Then it was Teddy Begayaye’s turn.
“I hate to tell you, Teddy, but you’re going to have to be taxi driver today,” Chee said. “I have to go up to the Lazy B ranch on this Maryboy shooting thing. I thought I could handle it myself, but”—he lifted his left arm, flinched, and grimaced—“the old ribs aren’t quite as good as I thought they were.”
“You shouldn’t be riding around in a car,” Officer Manuelito said. “You should be in bed, healing up. They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital.”
“Hospitals are dangerous,” Chee said. “People die in them.”
Edison Bai grinned at that, but Officer Manuelito didn’t think it was funny.
“Something goes wrong with broken ribs and you have a punctured lung,” she said.
“They’re just cracked,” Chee said. “Just a bruise.” With that subject closed, he kept Bai behind for a fill-in about the pistol-carrying student. Typically, Bai provided far more details than Chee needed. The boy had been involved in a joyride car theft during the summer. He was born to the Streams Come Together people, his mother’s clan, and for the Salt clan, for his paternal people, but his father was also part Hopi. He was believed to be involved in the smaller and rougher of Shiprock’s juvenile gangs. He was meanness on the hoof. People weren’t raising their kids the way they used to. Chee agreed, put on his hat and hurried stiffly out the door into the parking lot. It had been chilly and clouding up when he came to work. Now there was solid overcast and an icy northwest wind swept dust and leaves past his ankles.
The gale was blowing Begayaye back toward him.
“Jim,” he said. “I forgot. The wife made a dental appointment for me today. How about me switching assignments with Bernie? That Deer kid isn’t going anywhere.”
“Well,” Chee said. Across the parking lot he saw Bernie Manuelito standing on the sheltered side of his patrol car, watching them.
“Is it okay with Manuelito?”
“Yes, sir,” Begayaye said. “She don’t mind.”
“By the way,” Chee said, “I forgot to thank you guys for sending me those flowers.” Begayaye looked puzzled. “Flowers? What flowers?”
Thus it was that Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee headed north toward the Colorado border leaning his good shoulder against the passenger-side door with Officer Bernadette Manuelito behind the wheel. Chee, being a detective, had figured out who had sent him the flowers. Begayaye hadn’t done it, and Bai would never think of doing such a thing even if he was fond of Chee—which Chee was pretty sure he wasn’t. That left Deejay Hondo and Bernie. Which clearly meant Bernie had sent them and made it look like everybody did it so he wouldn’t think she was buttering him up. That probably meant she liked him. Thinking back, he could 71 of 102
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remember a couple of other signs that pointed to that conclusion.
All things considered, he liked her, too. She was really smart, she was sweet to everybody around the office, and she was always using her days off to take care of an apparently inexhaustible supply of ailing and indigent kinfolks, which gave her a high score on the Navajo value scale. When the time came he would have to give her a good efficiency rating. He gave her a sidewise glance, saw her staring unblinkingly through the windshield at the worn pavement of infamous U.S. Highway 666. A very slight smile curved the corner of her lip, making her look happy, as she usually was. No doubt about it, she really was an awfully pretty young woman.
That wasn’t the way he should be thinking about Officer Bernadette Manuelito. Not only was he her superior officer and supervisor, he was more or less engaged to marry another woman. And he was thinking that way, most likely, because he was having a very confusing problem with that other woman. He was beginning to suspect that she didn’t really want to marry him. Or, at least, he wasn’t sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he currently existed—a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed to the more romantic and politically correct Indigenous Person. Making it worse, he didn’t know what the hell to do about it. Or whether he should do anything. It was a sad, sad situation.
Chee sighed, decided the ribs would feel better if he shifted his weight. He did it, sucked in his breath, and grimaced.
“You all right?” Bernie asked, giving him a worried look.
“Okay,” Chee said.
“I have some aspirin in my stuff.”
“No problem,” Chee said.
Bernie drove in silence for a while.
“Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you remember telling us how Lieutenant Leaphorn was always trying to get you to look for patterns? I mean when you had something going on that was hard to figure out.”
“Yeah,” Chee said.
“And that’s what you wanted me to try to find in this cattle-stealing business?” Chee grunted, trying to remember if he had made any such suggestion.
“Well, I got Lucy Sam to let me take that ledger to that Quik-Copy place in Farmington and I got copies made of the pages back for several years so I’d have them. And then I went through our complaint records and copied down the dates of all the cattle-theft reports for the same years.”
“Good Lord,” Chee said, visualizing the time that would take. “Who was doing your regular work for you?”
“Just the multiple-head thefts,” Officer Manuelito said, defensively. “The ones which look sort of professional. And I did it in the evenings.”
“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed.
“Anyway, I started comparing the dates. You know, when Mr. Sam would write down something about a certain sort of truck, and when there would be a cattle theft reported in our part of the reservation.” Officer Manuelito had been reciting this very carefully, as if she had rehearsed it. Now she stopped.
“What’d you notice?”
She produced a deprecatory laugh. “I think this is probably really silly,” she said.
“I doubt it,” Chee said, thinking he would like to get his mind off of Janet Pete and quit trying to find a way to turn back the clock and make things the way they used to be. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me about it.”
“There was a correlation between multiple-theft reports and Mr. Sam seeing a big banged-up dirty white camper truck in the neighborhood,” Manuelito said, looking fixedly at the highway center stripe. “Not all the time,” she added. “But often enough so it made you begin to wonder about it.”
Chee digested this. “The trailer like Mr. Finch’s rig?” he said. “The New Mexico brand inspector’s camper?”