Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman Page B

doing — as if it was my fault.” Jean Jacobs’s expression soured at the memory. “I hope the Navajos got him,” she added.
    “Is that where he was going? To the Navajo Reservation?”
    “Who knows?” she said. “Or gives a damn. But that’s where he’d been working.”
    “You know what he was working on?”
    “Vaguely. It had to be cops and robbers. That’s his field. ‘Law and Order in the Old West.’ He’s The Authority in that particular category.” She paused. “Or so he tells everybody.”
    “Do you know if he was working on that with a Navajo named Ashie Pinto?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Pinto was one of his informants this summer. For old stories and things like that.” Her eyes went from Chee’s hand to his face. “Chee,” she said, recognition dawning. “You’re the one who arrested Mr. Pinto. You got yourself burned trying to pull that other policeman out of the car.”
    Clearly Jean Jacobs was impressed.
    “I’m on leave,” Chee said, indicating the hand and feeling embarrassed. “But I’m trying to find out what Pinto was doing out there. Where the crime was committed. How he got there. So forth. And Pinto won’t talk about it.”
    Jean Jacobs had another question. “Why did he kill the policeman?”
    “He was drunk,” Chee said. It irritated him that it didn’t sound like a convincing motive. “Very drunk.”
    Jean Jacobs was looking at Chee. Smiling. Approving.
    “I thought maybe Professor Tagert could tell me something helpful. Maybe he was doing something for Tagert. Working with him on something.”
    “It might show in his calendar,” Jean Jacobs said. “Let’s look.”
    Tagert’s desk calendar was open to the second week in August. The spaces under Monday through Thursday were mostly filled with jottings — Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were blank except for a diagonal line drawn across them and the legend “Go hunting.” Just above the Wednesday space the words “pick up Oldfart” were written in a neat, precise hand.
    Chee indicated it with his finger.
    “I don’t know who that means,” Jacobs said. “I’m not his TA because I like him,” she explained. “He’s chairman of my dissertation committee. I’m trying to get a doctorate in history. Doing it on the impact of the trading post system on the Western tribes. That falls into Doctor Tagert’s field so he’s chairman of my committee — like it or not.”
    “He was here when I was a student,” Chee said. “I remember now. One of my friends told me to avoid Professor Tagert.”
    “Good thinking,” Jacobs said. “Sound advice.”
    “Except now. Now it looks like he had himself scheduled to pick up somebody, maybe Mr. Pinto, the day before Mr. Pinto shot a policeman. Now I think Tagert could tell me a lot.”
    “Well,” Jean Jacobs said, “I wish I could help you find him.” She sorted aimlessly through the papers on the desktop, as if some clue to Tagert’s whereabouts might be among them. Chee flipped forward in the desk calendar. The next week was blank. The following page was cluttered with notations of committee meetings, luncheon engagements, numbers to be called. “Looks like he intended to get back before classes started,” Chee said.
    “I noticed that.”
    He flipped the pages backward, reentering August, moving out of the time when Nez was dead, to the day Nez died because Chee hadn’t done his job. That page was blank.
    Jean Jacobs must have been watching his face.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” Chee said. “Just remembering.”
    He turned the pages back to the date where Tagert had left it, and back another page to a week when Chee had been a happy man. That week, too, was cluttered with the busy Tagert’s notations.
    Among them, near the bottom, in the space left for Friday, Tagert had written: “Find out what Redd wants.” That and a telephone number.
     
9
     
    REDD ANSWERED THE telephone.
    “Jim Chee?” he said. “Chee. Are you the cop who arrested