"I've seen some of those Arizona public health people here and there. That sounds like one of them, Woody said. "But I don't know her name."
"You remember the last time you saw her? And where she was?"
"Nice-looking woman, was she?" Woody said, and glanced up at Chee, not wanting to give the wrong impression. "I don't mean pretty, but good bone structure." He laughed. "Cute wouldn't be the word, but you might say handsome. Looked like she might have been an athlete."
"She was around here?"
"I think it was over at Red Lake that I saw her. Filling the gas tank on a Health Service Jeep, if that's the right woman. She asked me about the van, if I was the man doing rodent research on the reservation. She asked me to let them know if I saw any dead rodents. Let her know if I saw anything that suggested the plague was killing the rodents."
He pushed himself up from the cot. "By golly, I think she gave me a card with a phone number on it." He sorted through a box labeled OUT on his desk, said "Ah," and read: "'Catherine Pollard, Vector Control Specialist, Communicable Disease Division, Arizona Department of Public Health.'"
He handed the card to Chee, grinned, and said: "Bingo."
"Thanks," Chee said. It didn't sound like bingo to him.
"And, hey," Woody added. "If the time's important you can check on it. When I drove up there was a Navajo Tribal Police car there and she was talking to the driver. Another woman." Woody grinned. "That one you really could call cute. Had her hair in a bun and the uniform °n, but she was what we used to call a dish."
"Thanks again," Chee said. "That would be Officer Manuelito. I'll ask her."
But he wouldn't. The timing didn't matter, and if he asked Bernie Manuelito about it, he'd have to ask her why she hadn't reported that Kinsman had been hitting on her. That was a can of worms he didn't want to dig into. Claire Dineyahze, who as secretary in Chee's little division, always knew such things, had already told him. "She doesn't want to cause you any trouble," Claire had said. Chee had asked her why not, and Claire had given him one of those female "you moron" looks and said: "Don't you know?"
Chapter Fourteen
AS THEY DROVE NORTHWARD out of Cameron, Leap-horn explained to Louisa what was troubling Cowboy Dashee.
"I can see his problem," she said, after spending a while staring out the windshield. "Partly professional ethics, partly male pride, partly family loyalty, partly because he feels Chee is going to think he's trying to use their friendship for a personal reason. Is that about it? Have you decided what you're going to do about it?"
Leaphorn had pretty much decided, but he wanted to give it some more thought. He skipped past the question. "It's all of that, I guess. But it's even more complicated. And why don't you pour us some coffee while we're thinking about it."
"Didn't you just drink about two cups in there?" Louisa asked. But she reached back and extracted her thermos from the lunch sack.
"It was pretty weak," Leaphorn said. "Besides, I believe the caffeine helps my mind work. Didn't I read that somewhere?"
"Maybe in a comic book," she said. But she poured a cup and handed it to him. "What's the more complicated part that I'm missing?"
"Another friend of Cowboy Dashee's is Janet Pete. She's been assigned as Jano's public defender. Janet and Chee were engaged to be married a while back and then they had a falling-out."
"Ouch," Louisa said, and grimaced. "That does complicate matters some."
"There's more," Leaphorn said, and sipped his coffee.
"It's starting to sound like a soap opera," Louisa said. "Don't tell me that the deputy sheriff was the third party in a love triangle."
"No. It wasn't that."
He took another sip, gestured out of the windshield at the cumulus clouds, white and puffy, drifting on the west wind away from the San Francisco Peaks. "That's our sacred mountain of the west, you know, made by First Man himself, but—"
"He built it with earth brought up from the Fourth World in the usual version of the myth," Louisa said. "But if it 'wasn't that,' then what was it?"
"I was going to tell you that in the stories told out here on the west side of the reservation, some of the clans also call it 'Mother of Clouds.'" He pointed through the windshield. "You can see why. When there's any humidity, the west winds hit the slopes, rise, the moisture cools with altitude, the clouds form, and the wind drifts them, one after another, out over the desert. Like a cat having a litter of kittens."
Louisa was smiling at him. "Mr. Leaphorn, am I to conclude that you don't want to tell me what it was with Miss Pete and Jim Chee if it wasn't another man?"
"I'd just be passing along gossip. That's all I have. Just guesswork and gossip."
"You don't start something like that with someone and just leave it hanging. Not if you're going to be trapped in the front seat with them all day. They'll nag you. They'll get mad and surly."
"Well, then," Leaphorn said, "maybe I better make up some sort of a story."
"Do it."
Leaphorn sipped coffee, handed her the empty cup.
"Miss Pete's half Navajo. On the paternal side. Her dad's dead and her mother's a socialite rich lady. Ivy League type. Janet came out here to work for DNA after quitting a job with some big Washington law firm, which handled tribal legal work. Now we get to the gossipy part."
"Good," Louisa said.
"The way the gossips tell it, she and one of the big-shot lawyers were very good friends, and she quit the job because they had a breakup, and she was very, very, very angry with the guy. She was sort of his protegee from way back when he was a professor and she was his law student."
Leaphorn stopped talking and glanced at Louisa. He found himself thinking how much he had come to like this woman. How comfortable he felt with her. How much more pleasant this drive was because she was there on the seat beside him.
"You enjoying this so far?"
"So far, so good," she said. "But I wonder if it's going to have a happy ending."
"I don't know," Leaphorn said. "1 doubt it. But anyway. Out here, she and Jim meet because she's defending Navajo suspects and he's arresting them. They get to be friends and—" Leaphorn paused, gave Louisa a doubtful look. "Now this is about fifthhand. Pure hearsay. Anyway, the gossips had it that what Miss Pete had told Chee about her ex-boss and boyfriend had Jim hating the guy, too. You know, thinking he was a real gold-plated manipulative jerk who had simply used Janet. Understand?"
"Sure," Louisa said. "Probably true, too."
"Understand, it's just gossip."
"Get on with it," Louisa said.
"So Chee tells her some of the information he s learned in a case he's working on. It involved a client of her old Washington law firm and her old boyfriend. So she passes it along to her old boyfriend. Jim figures she's betrayed him. She figures he's being unreasonable, that she was just being friendly and helpful. No harm done, she says. Chee's just being jealous. They have an angry row. She moves back to Washington with no more talk of marriage."
"Oh," Louisa said. "And now she's back."
"It's all just gossip," Leaphorn said. "And you didn't get any of it from me."
"Okay," Louisa said, and shook her head. "Poor Mr. Dashee. What did you tell him?"
"I told him I'd talk to Jim the first chance I get. Probably today." He made a face. "That won't be so easy either, talking to Chee. I'm his ex-boss and he's sort of touchy with me. And, after all, it's none of my business."
"Well, it shouldn't be."
Leaphorn took his eyes off the road long enough to study her expression. "What do you mean by that?"
"You should have just told Mrs. Vanders you were too busy. Or something like that." Leaphorn let that pass.
"You're retired, you know. The golden years. Now's the time to travel, do all those things you wanted to do."