The woman shook her head, expression skeptical and disapproving.
"It would have been early this morning," Chee said. "Or maybe late last night."
"I haven't seen her."
"Does Albert Gorman have any other address you know about? Where he works? Any relatives I could check with?"
"I don't know," the woman said. "You wait. You ask him all that."
"I have a friend looking for an apartment," Chee said. "Could I look at the one you have vacant?"
"Not ready yet. Not cleaned up. Tenant still has his stuff in it. You wait." And with that she closed the door.
"All right," Chee said. "I will wait."
He sat in the chair on the porch of number 6 and waited for whatever his visit here had triggered to start happening. He made no effort to calculate what that might be. The woman, obviously, had called someone when she saw him on Gorman's porch. Apparently she had been told to keep him there, and so she had stalled.
He would stay partly because he was curious and partly because there was no other choice. If he drew a blank here, he knew of no promising alternatives. This address was his only link to the Turkey Clan and Margaret Sosi. Unfortunately, the chair was metal and uncomfortable.
He got up, stretched, sauntered across the grass, fingers stuck in the back pockets of his jeans, sending the woman who was surely watching from behind the curtain the signal of a man killing time. He walked down to the street and looked up and down it. Across from him, a neon sign over the entrance of a decaying brick building read korean gospel church. Its windows were sealed with warped plywood. Next door was a once-white bungalow with a wheelless flatbed truck squatting on blocks before its open garage door. Once-identical frame houses stretched down the block, given variety now by age, remodeling projects, and assorted efforts to make them more livable. The line terminated in a low concrete block building on the corner which, judging from the sign painted on its wall, was a place where used clothing was bought and sold. In general, it was a little worse than the street Chee had lived on as a student in Albuquerque and a little better than the average housing in Shiprock.
Gorman's side of La Monica Street was of a similar affluence but mostly two-story instead of one. Below his U-shaped apartment house were two more, both larger and both badly needing painting. Up the street, the remainder of the block was filled by a tan stucco building surrounded by lawn and a chain-link fence. Chee ambled along the fence, examining the establishment.
On the side porch, five people sat in a row, watching him. They sat in wheelchairs, strapped in. Old people, three women and two men. Chee raised a hand, signaling greetings. No reaction. Each wore a blue bathrobe: four white heads and one bald one. Another woman sat in a wheelchair on a concrete walk that ran just inside the fence. She, too, was old, with thin white hair, a happy smile, and pale blue vacant eyes.
"Hello," Chee said.
"He's going to come today," the woman said. "He's coming."
"Good," Chee said.
"He's going to come today," the woman repeated. She laughed.
"I know it," Chee said. "He'll be glad to see you."
She laughed again, looking happily at Chee through the fence. "Got shore leave," she said. "He's coming."
"Wonderful," Chee said. "Tell him hello for me."
The woman lost interest in him. She backed her wheelchair down the walk, humming.
Chee strolled along the fence, looking at the five who lined the porch. This was a side of white culture he'd never seen before. He'd read about it, but it had seemed too unreal to make an impression—this business of penning up the old. The fence was about six feet high, with the top-most foot tilted inward. Hard for an old woman to climb that, Chee thought. Impossible if she was tied in a wheelchair. Los Angeles seemed safe from these particular old people.
He turned the corner and walked past the front of the place. silver threads rest home, a sign on the front lawn said. Here there were flowers—beds of marigolds, petunias, zinnias, and blossoms of the mild coastal climate that Chee could not identify. Banks of flowers flourishing safe from the old people.
Silver Threads occupied the entire end of the block. Chee circled it, glancing at his watch, killing time. He turned into the alley separating the rest home from Gorman's apartment complex and walked down it toward Gorman's porch. He'd used up almost ten minutes.
A man, bent and skinny, was standing inside the fence watching him approach with bright blue, interested eyes. He was standing in a waist-high aluminum walking frame, its four legs planted in the grass.
"Hello," Chee said.
"You Indian?" the man asked. He had trouble with "Indian," stopping mid-word, closing his eyes, exhaling breath, trying again until he pronounced it.
"Yes," Chee said. "I'm Navajo."
"Indian lives there," the man said. He removed a hand from the walker and gestured toward Gorman's apartment.
"Do you know him?" Chee asked.
The old man struggled for words, shook his head, sighed. "Nice," he said finally. "Talks."
Chee smiled. "His name is Albert Gorman. That the one?"
The man was frowning angrily. "Don't smile," he said. "Nobody talks to me but that…" His face twisted with a terrible effort, but he couldn't manage the rest of it. "Him," he said finally and looked down at his hands, defeated.
"It's a good thing to be friendly," Chee said. "Too many people never have time to talk."
"He's not home," the man said. Chee could see he wanted to say something else, and waited while his fierce will struggled with his stroke-blighted mind, making it work. "Gone," he said.
"Yes," Chee said. "He has an uncle who lives on the Navajo Reservation. In New Mexico. He went back there to visit him." Chee felt a twinge of guilt when he said it, as he always did when he was being deceptive. But why tell the old man his friend was dead?
The old man's expression changed. He smiled. "Kin?"
"No," Chee said. "But we're both Navajos, so we're kin in a way."
"He's in bad trouble," the man said, clearly and plainly. Whatever short circuit of nerve tissue impeded his speech, it seemed to come and go.
Chee hesitated, thinking like a policeman. But what was required here was not the formula in the police manual.
"Yes, he is. I don't understand it, but when he left here someone went after him. Very bad trouble."
The old man nodded, wisely. He tried to speak, failed.
"Did he tell you about it?"
The man shook his head in the negative. Thought. Canceled the denial with a shrug. "Some," he said.
A little round woman in a tight, white uniform was approaching across the lawn. "Mr. Berger," she said, "time for us to start or we'll miss our lunch."
"Shit," Mr. Berger said. He grimaced, picked up the walking frame carefully, and pivoted.
"Don't talk dirty," the round woman said. "If we were in a wheelchair like we should be, I could push you." She glanced at Chee, found him uninteresting. "That would save us time."
"Shit," Mr. Berger said again. He moved the walking frame up the lawn, stumbling along inside it. The round woman walked behind, silent and relentless.
Only the angle of the morning sun had changed on the porch of Gorman's apartment. Chee sat in the metal chair beside the door and thought of Mr. Berger. Then he thought about Grayson: who he might be, and what Grayson was doing in Shiprock, and how he might be connected with this odd business. He tried to guess what might have caused Albert Gorman's confusion about who lived in the aluminum trailer—if in fact it was confusion. And try as he did to avoid it, he thought about Mary Landon. He wanted to talk to her. Immediately. To get up and go to a telephone, and have her called out of her classroom at Crownpoint, and hear her voice: "Jim? Is everything all right?" And he would say… he would say, "Mary, you win." No, he wouldn't say it that way. He'd say, "Mary, you're right. I'm going to send in the application for the fbi job. And when I hang up this telephone, I'm going to walk right to my truck and drive directly, without stopping, to Crownpoint, and that will take me about twelve hours if I don't get stopped by the highway patrol for speeding, and when I get there, you have your bags packed, and tell the principal to get a substitute teacher, and…"