Talking God

TALKING GOD

Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn & Chee 10

EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML

March 14, 2003

Contents

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This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1989 by Tony Hillerman

All rights reserved.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1989 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

Cover illustration by Peter Thorpe

This book is dedicated to Delbert Kedelty, Terry Teller, David Charley, Donald Tsosie, and the other kids at Tsaile School who drew the Yeibichai pictures that started me thinking about Talking God.

And to Will Tsosie, Tsosie Tsinijinnie, Tribal Councilman Melvin Bigthumb, and the others who fight to preserve Hajiinei-Dine’tah and its ruins and pictographs for future generations.

The author is grateful to Caroline L. Rose, Martin Burke, Don Ortner, Jo Allyn Archambault, and other curators, conservators, and generally good people at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History for putting up with me and giving me some insight into what goes on behind the exhibits at a great museum.

All characters in this book, with the exception of Bernard St. Germain and Ernie Bulow, are figments of my imagination. Some of the job titles are more or less real, but the people who hold them are imaginary.

Chapter One

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Through the doorway which led from her receptionist-secretary’s office into her own, Catherine Morris Perry instantly noticed the box on her desk. It was bulky—perhaps three feet long and almost as high. The legend printed on it said it had originally contained a microwave oven manufactured by General Electric. Strips of brown tape had been wrapped erratically around it. It was a crude box, incongruous amid the pale pastels and tasteful artifacts of Catherine Perry's stylish office.

“How was the weekend?” Markie said.

Catherine Morris Perry hung her raincoat on its peg, hung her rain hat over it, removed the transparent plastic from her shoes, and said, “Hello, Markie.”

“How was Vermont?” Markie asked. “Wet up there, too?”

“Where’d that come from?” Catherine said, indicating the box.

“Federal Express,” Markie said. “I signed for it.”

“Am I expecting anything?”

“Not that you told me about. How was Vermont?”

“Wet,” Catherine said. She did not wish to discuss Vermont, or anything else involving life outside this office, with Markie Bailey. What she did wish to discuss with Markie was taste. Or lack of taste. Putting the big box, brown and ugly, on her antique desk, as Markie had done, was typical of the problem. It squatted there, ugly, obscenely out of place. As out of place as Mrs. Bailey was in this office. But getting rid of her would be almost impossible. Certainly a huge amount of trouble under federal civil service rules. Mrs. Perry’s specialty in law was not personnel, but she had learned something from the efforts to get rid of Henry Highhawk, that troublemaking conservator in the Museum of Natural History. What an unending fiasco that had been.

“You had a call,” Markie said. “The cultural attache’s office at the Chilean embassy. He wanted an appointment.”

“Later,” Catherine Morris Perry said. “I’ll return it later.” She knew what that problem would be. Another Indian-giver problem. General Something-or-Other wanting artifacts returned. He claimed his great-grandfather had only loaned them to some big shot in United Fruit, and he had no right to give them to the Smithsonian, and they were national treasures and must be returned. Incan, as she remembered. Gold, of course. Gold masks, encrusted with jewels, and the general would probably decide they were the general's personal treasure, if he could get his hands on them. And seeing that he didn't meant a huge amount of work for her, research into documents and into international law, which she should get working on right away.

But there sat the box taking up desk space. It was addressed to her as “Museum Spokesperson.” Catherine Morris Perry didn’t like being addressed as “Spokesperson.” That she was so addressed probably stemmed from the statement she'd given the Washington Post on museum policy. It had been more or less an accident, the whole thing. The reporter’s call had been referred to her only because someone was sick in the public affairs office, and someone else was away from his desk, and whoever had handled the call had decided a lawyer should deal with it. It concerned Henry Highhawk again, obliquely at least. It concerned the trouble he was stirring up about returning aboriginal skeletal remains. And the Post had called and identified her incorrectly as spokesperson, and quoted her when they should have quoted the museum board of directors. The policy on skeletons was, after all, official policy of the board. And a sound policy.

The Federal Express shipping order attached to the box was correct except for the erroneous title. She was “Temporary Assistant Counsel, Public Affairs” on loan from the Department of the Interior. She sat and flipped quickly through the remainder of her mail. Nothing much. What was probably an invitation from the National Ballet Guild to an upcoming fund-raiser. Something from the American Civil Liberties Union. A memo from the museum maintenance director telling her why it was impossible for him to deal with a personnel complaint as the law required him to. Another letter concerning insurance for borrowed items going into an exhibit opening next month, and three letters which seemed to be from private outside sources, none familiar.

Catherine Morris Perry put all the envelopes aside unopened, looked at the box, and made a wry face. She opened her desk drawer and extracted her letter opener. Then she buzzed Mrs. Bailey.

“Yes’um.”

“Mrs. Bailey. When packages arrive like this, don’t bring them in and put them on my desk. Open them and get the contents out.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Bailey said. “I’ll open it now. It's a heavy thing.” She paused. “Mrs. Paterson always wanted all the mail put in on her desk.”

“I’ll open it,” Catherine said. “I meant from now on. And Mrs. Paterson is on leave. She is not in charge now.”

“Okay,” Mrs. Bailey said. “Did you notice the telephone messages? Two of them? On your desk, there?”

“No,” Catherine said. They were probably under the box.

“Dr. Hebert called and just said he wanted to congratulate you on the way you handled the skeleton thing. On what you said in the Post.”

With her free hand Catherine Perry was slicing the tape away with the letter opener. She thought that this box was probably a result of that story in the Washington Post. Any time the museum got into the news, it reminded a thousand old ladies of things in the attic that should be saved for posterity. Since she was quoted, one of them had sent this trash to her by name. What would it be? A dusty old butter churn? A set of family albums?

“The other one was somebody in the anthropology division. I put her name on the slip. Wants you to call. Said it was about the Indians wanting their skeletons back.“

“Right,” Catherine said. She pulled open the top flaps. Under them was a copy of the Washington Post, folded to expose the story that had quoted her. Part of it was circled in black.

museum offers compromise in old bone controversy

The headline irritated Catherine. There had been no compromise. She had simply stated the museum’s policy. If an Indian tribe wanted ancestral bones returned, it had only to ask for them and provide some acceptable proof that the bones in question had indeed been taken from a burial ground of the tribe. The entire argument was ridiculous and demeaning. In fact, even dealing with that Highhawk man was demeaning. Him and his Paho Society. A museum underling and an organization which, as far as anybody knew, existed only in his imagination. And only to create trouble. She glanced at the circled paragraph.

“Mrs. Catherine Perry, an attorney for the museum and its spokesperson on this issue, said the demand by the Paho Society for the reburial of the museum’s entire collection of more than 18,000 Native American skeletons was ‘simply not possible in light of the museum's purpose.’

“She said the museum is a research institution as well as a gallery for public display, and that the museum’s collection of ancient human bones is a potentially important source of anthropological information. She said that Mr. Highhawk's suggestion that the museum make plaster casts of the skeletons and rebury the originals was not practical ‘both because of research needs and because the public has the right to expect authenticity and not to be shown mere reproductions.’ ”

The clause “the right to expect authenticity” was underlined. Catherine Morris Perry frowned at it, sensing criticism. She picked up the newspaper. Under it, atop a sheet of brown wrapping paper, lay an envelope. Her name had been written neatly on it. She opened it and pulled out a single sheet of typing paper. While she read, her idle hand was pulling away the layer of wrapping paper which had separated the envelope from the contents of the box.

Dear Mrs. Perry:

You won’t bury the bones of our ancestors because you say the public has the right to expect authenticity in the museum when it comes to look at skeletons.

Therefore I am sending you a couple of authentic skeletons of ancestors. I went to the cemetery in the woods behind the Episcopal Church of Saint Luke. I used authentic anthropological methods to locate the burials of authentic white Anglo types—

Mrs. Morris Perry’s fingers were under the wrapping paper now, feeling dirt, feeling smooth, cold surfaces. “Mrs. Bailey!” she said. “Mrs. Bailey!” But her eyes moved to the end of the letter. It was signed

“Henry Highhawk of the Bitter Water People.”

“What?” Mrs. Bailey shouted. “What is it?”

—and to make sure they would be perfectly authentic, I chose two whose identities you can personally confirm yourself. I ask that you accept these two skeletons for authentic display to your clients and release the bones of two of my ancestors so that they may be returned to their rightful place in Mother Earth. The names of these two authentic—

Mrs. Bailey was standing beside her now. “Honey,” she said. “What’s wrong?” Mrs. Bailey paused. “There's bones in that box,” she said. “All dirty, too.”

Mrs. Morris Perry put the letter on the desk and looked into the box. From underneath a clutter of what seemed to be arm and leg bones a single empty eye socket stared back at her. She noticed that Mrs. Bailey had picked up the letter. She noticed dirt. Damp ugly little clods had scattered on the polished desk top.

“My God,” Mrs. Bailey said. “John Neldine Burgoyne. Jane Burgoyne. Weren’t those—Aren't these your grandparents?”

Chapter Two

« ^ »

On the last Thursday in August, the doctor treating Agnes Tsosie in the Public Health Service hospital at Fort Defiance told her she was dying and there was nothing he could do about it.

“I knew that,” Agnes Tsosie said. And she smiled at him, and patted his hand, and asked him to call the chapter house at Lower Greasewood and leave word there for her family to come and get her.

“I won’t be able to release you,” the doctor said. “We have to keep you on medications to control the pain, and that has to be monitored. You won't be able to go home. Not yet.”

“Not ever,” Agnes Tsosie said, still smiling. “But you leave the message for me anyway. And don’t you feel bad about it. Born for Water told Monster Slayer to leave Death alive to get rid of old people like me. You have to make some room for the new babies.“

Agnes Tsosie came home from the hospital at Fort Defiance on the last Monday of August—overriding the objections of her doctor and the hospital establishment by force of the notorious Agnes Tsosie willpower.

In that part of the Navajo Reservation west of the Chuska mountain range and north of the Painted Desert, just about everybody knew about Agnes Tsosie. Old Woman Tsosie had twice served her Lower Greasewood Chapter on the Navajo Tribal Council. National Geographic had used her picture in an article about the Navajo Nation. Her iron will had a lot to do with starting tribal programs to get water wells drilled and water supplies available at every chapter house where hauling drinking water was a problem. Her stubborn wisdom had been important for years among her clansmen, the Bitter Water People. On the Bitter Water Dinee she imposed her rigid rules of peace. Once, she had kept a meeting of two Bitter Water families in session for eleven days until—out of hunger and exhaustion—they settled a grazing rights feud that had rankled for a hundred years.

“Too many people come out of these belagaana hospitals dead,” Agnes Tsosie had told her doctor. “I want to come out alive.” And no one was surprised that she did. She came out walking, helped by her daughter and her husband. She sat in the front seat of her daughter’s pickup, joking as she always did, full of teasing and funny stories about hospital behavior. But on the long drive through the sagebrush flats toward Lower Greasewood the laughter died away. She leaned heavily against the pickup door and her face was gray with sickness.

Her son-in-law was waiting at her hogan. His name was Rollie Yellow and Agnes Tsosie, who liked almost everyone, liked Yellow a lot. They had worked a way around the Navajo taboo that decreed sons-in-law must avoid mothers-in-law. Agnes Tsosie decided that role applied only to mean mothers-in-law with bad sons-in-law. In other words, it applied to people who couldn’t get along. Agnes Tsosie and Yellow had gotten along wonderfully for thirty years and now it was Yellow who half carried her into her summer hogan. There she slept fitfully all afternoon and through the night.

The next morning, Rollie Yellow made the long bumpy drive around the mesa to the Lower Greasewood Chapter House and used the telephone. He called the chapter house at Many Farms and left word that Nancy Yabenny was needed.

Nancy Yabenny was a clerk-typist in the office of the Navajo Timber Industries and a crystal gazer—one of the category of Navajo shamans who specialize in answering hard questions, in finding the lost, in identifying witches, and in diagnosing illnesses so that the proper curing ceremonial can be arranged.

Nancy Yabenny arrived Thursday afternoon, driving a blue Dodge Ram pickup. She was a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a yellow pantsuit which had fit her better when she was slimmer. She carried her crystal, her four- mountains bundle, and the other paraphernalia of her profession in a briefcase. She placed a kitchen chair in the shade beside Agnes Tsosie’s bed. Yellow had moved the bed out of the hogan into the brush arbor so that Agnes Tsosie could watch the thunderclouds form and blow away above the Hopi Buttes. Yabenny and Old Woman Tsosie talked for more than an hour. Then Nancy Yabenny arranged her slab of crystal on the earth, took her jish of sacred things out of her purse, and extracted from it a prescription bottle filled with corn pollen. She dusted the crystal with that, chanted the prescribed blessing song, held it so that the light from the sky illuminated it, and stared into it.

“Ah,” she said, and held the crystal so that Agnes Tsosie could see what she was seeing.

Then she questioned Agnes Tsosie about what they had seen.

It was sundown when Nancy Yabenny emerged from the brush arbor. She talked to Tsosie’s husband and daughter and to Rollie Yellow. She told them Agnes Tsosie needed a Yeibichai to be restored to harmony and beauty.

Rollie Yellow had half expected that, but still it was a blow. White men call it the Night Chant, but the ceremonial was named for its principal participant—Yeibichai, the great Talking God of Navajo metaphysics. As the maternal grandfather of all the other gods, he often serves as their spokesman. It is an expensive ceremony, nine days and nights of feeding the audience of clansmen and friends, and providing for the medicine man, his helpers, and as many as three teams of yei dancers. But much worse than the expense, in the mind of Rollie Yellow, was that what Yabenny had told them meant the belagaana doctor was probably right. Agnes Tsosie was very, very sick. No matter the cost, he would have to find a singer who knew how to do the Night Chant. Not many did. But there was time. The Yeibichai can be performed only after the first frost, after snakes have hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps.

Chapter Three

« ^ »

I heard you decided not to quit,” Jay Kennedy said. “That right?”

“More or less,” Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn said.

“Glad to hear it. How busy are you?”

Leaphorn hesitated, his eyes flicking over the pile of paperwork on his desk, his mind analyzing the tone of Kennedy’s voice on the telephone.

“Nothing unusual,” he said.

“You heard about this body out east of Gallup?”

“I heard a something-or-other,” Leaphorn said—which meant a secondhand report of what had been overheard by the radio dispatcher downstairs. Just enough to know it wasn’t a routine body find.

“It may not be Bureau business,” Kennedy said. “Except technically. But it’s interesting.”

Which was Kennedy’s way of saying he thought it soon would be his business. Kennedy was Gallup area Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been a friend of Leaphorn's long enough so that such things no longer had to be exactly said.

“The way I heard it, they found him beside the railroad,” Leaphorn said. “That would be off the reservation. None of our business either.”

“No, but it might get to be,” Kennedy said.

Leaphorn waited for an explanation. None came.

“How?” he asked. “And is it a homicide?”

“Don’t know the cause of death yet,” Kennedy said. “And we don't have an identification. But it looks like there's some sort of connection between this bird and a Navajo.” He paused. “There was a note. Well, not really a note.”

“What’s the interesting part? Is that it?”

“Well, that’s peculiar. But what interests me is how the body got where it is.”

Leaphorn’s face relaxed slightly into something like a smile. He looked over the work on the desk. Through the window of his second-floor office in the Navajo Tribal Police Building he could see puffy white autumn clouds over the sandstone formation which gave Window Rock, Arizona, its name. A beautiful morning. Beyond the desk, out through the glass, the world was cool, clear, pleasant.

“Leaphorn. You still there?”

“You want me to look for tracks? Is that it?”

“You’re supposed to be good at it,” Kennedy said. “That's what you always tell us.”

“All right,” Leaphorn said. “Show me where it is.”

The body was under the sheltering limbs of a clump of chamisa, protected from the slanting morning sun by an adjoining bush. From where he stood on the gravel of the railroad embankment, Leaphorn could see the soles of two shoes, their pointed toes aimed upward, two dark gray pant legs, a white shirt, a necktie, a suit coat, still buttoned, and a ground’s-eye view of a pale narrow face with oddly pouched cheeks. Under the circumstances, the corpse seemed remarkably tidy.

“Nice and neat,” Leaphorn said.

Undersheriff Delbert Baca thought he meant the scene of the crime. He nodded.

“Just luck,” he said. “A fellow running a freight engine past here just happened to notice him. The train was rolling so he couldn’t get down and stomp around over everything. Jackson here—” Baca nodded to a plump young man in a McKinley County deputy sheriff's uniform who was standing on the tracks “—he was driving by on the interstate.” Baca gestured toward Interstate Highway 40, which was producing a faint rumble of truck traffic a quarter-mile to the west. “He got out here before the state police could mess everything up.”

“Nobody’s moved the body then?” Leaphorn asked. “What about this note you mentioned? How did you find that?”

“Baca here checked his pockets looking for identification,” Kennedy said. “Reached under him to check hip pockets. He didn’t find a billfold or anything, but he found this in the handkerchief pocket of his coat.” Kennedy held out a small folded square of yellow paper. Leaphorn took it.

“You don’t know who he is then?”

“Don’t know,” Kennedy said. “The billfold is missing. There wasn't anything in his pockets except some change, a ballpoint pen, a couple of keys, and a handkerchief. And then there was this note in his coat pocket.“

Leaphorn unfolded the note.

“You wouldn’t think to look in that coat pocket if you were stripping somebody of identification,” Baca said. “Anyway, that's what I think was happening.”

The note was written with what might have been a ballpoint pen with a very fine point. It said: “Yeabechay? Yeibeshay? Agnes Tsosie (correct). Should be near Windowrock, Arizona.”

Leaphorn turned the square over. “Stic Up” was printed across the top, the trade name of the maker of notepads which stick to bulletin boards.

“Know her?” Kennedy asked. “Agnes Tsosie. It sounds familiar to me.”

“Tsosie’s like Kennedy in Boston,” Leaphorn said. He frowned. He did know one Agnes Tsosie. Just a little and from way back. An old lady who used to serve on the tribal council a long time ago. Elected from the Lower Greasewood district, if he remembered it right. A good woman, but probably dead by now. And there must be other Agnes Tsosies here and there around the reservation. Agnes was a common name and there were a thousand Tsosies. “Maybe we can find her, though. We can easy enough, if she's associated with a Yeibichai. They're not having many of those anymore.”

“That’s the ceremony they call the Night Chant, isn't it?” Kennedy asked.

“Or Nightway,” Leaphorn said.

“The one that lasts nine days,” Kennedy said. “And they have the masked dancers?”

’That's it,“ Leaphorn said. But who was this man with the pointed shoes who seemed to know an Agnes Tsosie? Leaphorn moved past the chamisa limbs, placing his feet carefully to erase nothing not already erased in Baca's search of the victim's pockets. He squatted, buttocks on heels, grunting at the pain in his knees. He should exercise more, he thought. It was a habit he'd dropped since Emma's death. They had always walked together—almost every evening when he got home from the office. Walked and talked. But now—

The victim had no teeth. His face, narrow as it was, had the caved-in, pointed-chin look of the toothless old. But this man wasn’t particularly old. Sixty perhaps. And not the sort to be toothless. His suit, blue-black with an almost microscopic gray stripe, looked old-fashioned but expensive, the attire of that social class with the time and money to keep its teeth firmly in its jaws. At this close range, Leaphorn noticed that the suit coat had a tiny patch by the middle button and the narrow lapel looked threadbare. The shirt looked threadbare, too. But expensive. So did a simple broad gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. And the face itself was an expensive face. Leaphorn had worked around white men for almost forty years, and Leaphorn studied faces. This man's complexion was dark—even with the pallor of death—but it was an aristocratic face. A narrow, arrogant nose, fine bones, high forehead.

Leaphorn shifted his position and examined the victim’s shoes. The leather was expensive, and under the day's thin film of dust it glowed with a thousand polishings. Handmade shoes, Leaphorn guessed. But made a long time ago. And now the heels were worn, and one sole had been replaced by a shoemaker.

“You noticed the teeth?” Kennedy asked.

“I noticed the lack of them,” Leaphorn said. “Did anyone find a set of false teeth?”

“No,” Baca said. “But nobody really looked. Not yet. It seemed to me that the first question to consider was how this guy got here.”

Leaphorn found himself wondering why the sheriff’s office had called the FBI. Had Baca sensed something about the death of this tidy man that suggested a federal crime? He looked around him. The track ran endlessly east, endlessly west—the Santa Fe main line from the Midwest to California. North, the red sandstone ramparts of lyanbito Mesa; south, the piñon hills which rose toward the Zuni Mesa and the Zuni Mountains. And just across the busy lanes of Interstate 40 stood Fort Wingate. Old Fort Wingate, where the U.S. Army had been storing ammunition since the Spanish-American War.

“How did he get here? That’s the question,” Kennedy said. “He wasn't thrown off the Amtrak, that's obvious. He doesn't look the type to be riding a freight. So I’d guess that probably somebody carried him here. But why the hell would anybody do that?“

“Could this have anything to do with Fort Wingate?” Leaphorn asked. A half-mile or so up the main line he could see the siding that curved away toward the military base.

Baca laughed, shrugged.

“Who knows?” Kennedy said.

“I heard they were going to shut the place down,” Leaphorn said. “It’s obsolete.”

“I heard that too,” Kennedy said. “You think you can find any tracks?”

Leaphorn tried. He walked down the railroad embankment some twenty paces and started a circle through the sage, snakeweed, and chamisa. The soil here was typical of a sagebrush flat: loose, light, and with enough fine caliche particles to form a crust. An early autumn shower had moved over this area about a week ago, making tracking easy. Leaphorn circled back to the embankment without finding anything except the marks left by rodents, lizards, and snakes and confident there had been nothing to find. He walked another dozen yards down the track and started another, wider circle. Again, he found nothing that wasn’t far too old or caused by an animal. Then he crisscrossed the sagebrush around the body, slowly, eyes down.

Kennedy, Baca, and Jackson were waiting for him on the embankment above the body. Behind him, far down the track, an ambulance had parked with a white sedan behind it—the car used by the pathologist from the Public Health Service hospital in Gallup. Leaphorn made a wry face. He shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “If someone carried him in from this side, they carried him up from way down the tracks.”

“Or down from way up the tracks,” Baca said, grinning.

“What were you looking for?” Kennedy asked. “Besides tracks.”

“Nothing in particular,” Leaphorn said. “You’re not really looking for anything in particular. If you do that, you don't see things you're not looking for.”

“So you think he got brought in from way down the track?” Kennedy said.

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Why would anyone do that? That's lots of hard work. And the risk of being seen while you're doing it. Why is this sagebrush better than any other sagebrush?”

“Maybe they hauled him in from the other side,” Kennedy said.

Leaphorn stared across the tracks. There was no road over there either. “How about lifting him off a train?”

“Amtrak is going about sixty-five miles an hour here,” Kennedy said. “Doesn’t start slowing for Gallup for miles. I can't see that man on a freight, and they don't stop out here either. I checked with the railroad on all that.”

They stood then on the embankment above the man with the pointed shoes, with nothing to say in the presence of death. The ambulance crew came down the track, carrying a stretcher, trailed by the pathologist carrying a satchel. He was a small young man with a blond mustache. Leaphorn didn’t recognize him and he didn't introduce himself.

He squatted beside the body, tested the skin at the neck, tested the stiffness of the wrists, bent finger joints, looked into the toothless mouth.

He looked up at Kennedy. “How’d he get here?”

Kennedy shrugged.

The doctor unbuttoned the suit coat and the shirt, pulled up the undershirt, examined the chest and abdomen. “There's no blood anywhere. No nothin’.“ He unbuckled the belt, unzipped the trouser fly, felt. “You guys know what killed him?” he asked nobody in particular.

“What?” Baca said. “What killed him?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” the doctor said, still intent on the body. “I just got here. I was asking you.”

He rose, took a step back. “Put him on the stretcher,” he ordered. “Face down.”

Face down on the stretcher the man with the pointed shoes looked even smaller. The back of his dark suit was floured with gray dust, his dignity diminished. The doctor ran his hands over the body, up the spine, felt the back of the head, massaged the neck.

“Ah,” he said. “Here we are.”

The doctor parted the hair at the back of the man’s head at the point where the spine joins the skull. The hair, Leaphorn noticed, was matted and stiff. The doctor leaned back, looking up at them, grinning happily. “See?”

Leaphorn could see very little—only a small place where neck became skull and where there seemed to be the blackness of congealed blood.

“What am I seeing?” Kennedy asked, sounding irritated. “I don’t see a damned thing.”

The pathologist stood, brushed off his hands, and looked down at the man in the pointed shoes.

“What you see is where somebody who knows how to use a knife can kill somebody quick,” he said. “Like lightning. You stick it in that little gap between the first vertebra and the base of the skull. Cut the spinal cord.” He chuckled. “Zap.”

“That what happened?” Kennedy asked. “How long ago?”

“Looks like it,” the doctor said. “I’d say it was probably yesterday. But we'll do an autopsy. Then you'll have your answer.”

“One answer,” Kennedy said. “Or two. How and when. That leaves who.”

And why, Leaphorn thought. Why was always the question that lay at the heart of things. It was the answer Joe Leaphorn always looked for. Why did this man—obviously not a Navajo—have the name of a Navajo woman written on a note in his pocket? And the misspelled name of a Navajo’ ceremonial? The Yeibichai. It was the ceremonial in which the great mystical, mythical, magical spirits who formed the culture of the Navajos and created their first four clans actually appeared, personified in masks worn by dancers. Was the murdered man headed for a Yeibichai? As a matter of fact, he couldn't have been. It was weeks too early. The Yeibichai was a winter ceremonial. It could be performed only after the snakes had hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps. But why else would he have the note?

Leaphorn pondered and found no possible answers. He would find Agnes Tsosie and ask her.

The Agnes Tsosie Leaphorn remembered proved to be—apparently—the right one. At least when Leaphorn inquired about her as the first step in what he feared would be a time-consuming hunt he learned the family was planning a Yeibichai ceremonial for her. He spent a few hours making telephone inquiries and decided he had struck it lucky. There seemed to be only three of the great Night Chant ceremonials scheduled so far. One would be held at the Navajo Nation Fair at Window Rock for a man named Roanhorse and another was planned in December over near Burnt Water for someone in the Gorman family. That left Agnes Tsosie of Lower Greasewood as the only possibility.

The drive from Leaphorn’s office in Window Rock to Lower Greasewood took him westward through the ponderosa forests of the Defiance Plateau, through the piñon-juniper hills which surround Ganado, and then southeast into the sagebrush landscape that falls away into the Painted Desert. At the Lower Greasewood Boarding School those children who lived near enough to be day students were climbing aboard a bus for the trip home. Leaphorn asked the driver where to find the Agnes Tsosie place.

“Twelve miles down to the junction north of Beta Hochee,” the driver said. “And then you turn back south toward White Cone about two miles and take the dirt road past the Na-Ah-Tee trading post, and about three-four miles past that, to your right, there’s a road that leads off toward the backside of Tesihim Butte. That's the road that leads up to Old Lady Tsosie's outfit. About two miles, maybe.”

“Road?” Leaphorn asked.

The driver was a trim young woman of perhaps thirty. She knew exactly what Leaphorn meant. She grinned.

“Well, actually, it’s two tracks out through the sage. But it's easy to find. There's a big bunch of asters blooming along there—right at the top of a slope.”

The junction of the track to the Tsosie place was easy to find. Asters were blooming everywhere along the dirt road past Na-Ah-Tee trading post, but the place where the track led off from the road was also marked by a post which the bus driver hadn’t mentioned. An old boot was jammed atop the post, signaling that somebody would be at home. Leaphorn downshifted and turned down the track. He felt fine. Everything about this business of learning why a dead man had Agnes Tsosie’s name in his pocket was working well.

“I don’t have no idea who that could be,” Agnes Tsosie said. She was reclining, thin, gray haired, propped up by pillows on a metal bed under a brush arbor beside her house, holding a Polaroid photograph of the man with the pointed shoes. She handed it to Jolene Yellow, who was standing beside the sofa. “Daughter, you know this man?”

Jolene Yellow examined the photograph, shook her head, handed the print back to Leaphorn. He had been in the business too long to show disappointment.

“Any idea why some stranger might be coming out here to your Yeibichai?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not this stranger.”

Not this stranger. Leaphorn thought about that. Agnes Tsosie would explain in good time. Now she was looking away, out across the gentle slope that fell away from Tesihim Butte and then rose gradually toward the sharp dark outline of Nipple Butte to the west. The sage was gray and silver with autumn, the late afternoon sun laced it with slanting shadows, and everywhere there was the yellow of blooming snake-weed and the purple of the asters. Beauty before her, Leaphorn thought. Beauty all around her.

But Agnes Tsosie’s face showed no sign she was enjoying the beauty. It looked strained and sick.

“We have a letter,” Agnes Tsosie said. “It’s in the hogan.” She glanced at Jolene Yellow. “My daughter will get it for you to look at.”

The letter was typed on standard bond paper.

September 13. Dear Mrs. Tsosie:

I read about you in an old issue of National Geographic—the one with the long story about the Navajo Nation. It said you were a member of the Bitter Water Clan, which was also the clan of my grandmother, and I noticed by the picture they had of you that you two look alike. I write to you because I want to ask a favor.

I am one-fourth Navajo by blood. My grandmother told me she was all Navajo, but she married a white man and so did my mother. But I feel I am a Navajo, and I would like to see what can be done about becoming officially a member of the tribe. I would also like to come out to Arizona and talk to you about my family. I remember that my grandmother told me that she herself was the granddaughter of Ganado Mucho and that she was born to the Bitter Water People and that her father’s clan had been the Streams Come Together People.

Please let me know if I can come and visit you and anything you can tell me about how I would become a Navajo.

Sincerely,

Henry Highhawk

I am enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Leaphorn reread the letter, trying to connect these words, this odd plea, with the arrogant face of the man with the pointed shoes.

“Did you answer it?”

“I told him to come,” Agnes Tsosie said. She sighed, shifted her weight, grimaced.

Leaphorn waited.

“I told him there would be a Yeibichai for me after the first frost. Probably late in November. That would be when to come. There would be other Bitter Water People there for him to talk to. I said he could talk to the hataalii who is doing the sing. Maybe it would be proper for him to look through the mask and be initiated like they do with boys on the last night of the sing. I said I didn’t know about that. He would have to ask the hataalii about that. And then he could go to Window Rock and see about whether he could get on the tribal rolls. He could find out from the people there what proof he would need.“

Leaphorn waited. But Agnes Tsosie had said what she had to say.

“Did he answer your letter?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Or maybe he did and his letter is down at Beta Hochee. That’s where we pick up our mail.”

“Nobody has been by the trading post there for a while,” Jolene Yellow said. “Not since last week.”

“Do you think you know who this man’s grandmother was?” Leaphorn asked.

“Maybe,” Agnes Tsosie said. “I remember they said my mother had an aunt who went away to boarding school and never did come back.”

“Anyway,” Jolene Yellow said, “he’s not the same man.”

Leaphorn looked at her, surprised.

“He sent his picture,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

It was about two inches square, a color photograph of the sort taken by machine to be pasted in passports. It showed a long, slender face, large blue eyes, and long blond hair woven into two tight braids. It was a face that would always look boyish.

“He certainly doesn’t look like a Navajo,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking that this Henry Highhawk looked even less like the man with the pointed shoes.

Chapter Four

« ^ »

From behind him in the medicine hogan, Officer Jim Chee could hear the chanting of the First Dancers as they put on their ceremonial paint. Chee was interested. He had picked a spot from which he could see through the hogan doorway and watch the personifiers preparing themselves. They were eight middle-aged men from around the Naschitti Chapter House in New Mexico, far to the east of Agnes Tsosie’s place below Tesihim Butte. They had painted their right hands first, then their faces from the forehead downward, and then their bodies, making themselves ready to represent the Holy People of Navajo mythology, the yei, the powerful spirits. This Night Chant ceremonial was one that Chee hoped to learn himself someday. Yeibichai, his people called it, naming it for Talking God, the maternal grandfather of all the spirits. The performance was nine days long and involved five complicated sand paintings and scores of songs. Learning it would take a long, long time, as would finding a hataalii willing to take him on as a student. When the time came for that, he would have to take leave from the Navajo Tribal Police. But that was somewhere in the distant future. Now his job was watching for the Flaky Man from Washington. Henry Highhawk was the name on the federal warrant.

“Henry Highhawk,” Captain Largo had said, handing him the folder. “Usually when they decide to turn Indian and call themselves something like Whitecloud, or Squatting Bear, or Highhawk, they decide they’re going to be Cherokees. Or some dignified tribe that everybody knows about. But this jerk had to pick Navajo.”

Chee was reading the folder. “Flight across state lines to avoid prosecution,” he said. “Prosecution for what?”

“Desecration of graves,” Largo said. He laughed, shook his head, genuinely amused by the irony. “Now ain’t that just the ideal criminal occupation for a man who decides to declare himself a Navajo?”

Chee had noticed something that seemed to him even more ironic than a white grave robber declaring himself to be a Navajo—a tribe which happened to have a fierce religious aversion to corpses and everything associated with death.

“Is he a pot hunter?” Chee asked. “Is the FBI actually trying to catch a pot hunter?” Digging up graves to steal pre-Columbian pottery for the collector’s market had been both a federal crime and big business on the Colorado plateau for generations, and the FBI’s apathy about it had been both unshakable and widely known. Chee stood in front of Largo’s desk trying to imagine what would have stirred the federals from such historic and monolithic inertia.

“He wasn’t hunting pots,” Largo said. “He’s a politician. He was digging up belagaana skeletons back East.” Largo explained what Highhawk had done with the skeletons. “So not only were they white skeletons, they were Very Important People belagaana skeletons.”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“Anyway, all you need to know about it is that you go out to the Lower Greasewood Chapter House and you find out where they’re holding this Yeibichai. It will probably be at Agnes Tsosie’s place. She’s the one they’re doing the Night Chant for. Anyway, this Highhawk nut is supposed to come to it. Probably he’s already there. The FBI says he rented a Ford Bronco from Avis in Washington. A white one. They think he drove it out here. So you get yourself to Old Woman Tsosie’s place. If he’s there, bring him in. And if he’s not there yet, then stick around and wait for him.“

“Nine days?”

“Tonight’s the last night of the Yeibichai,” Largo said. “That’s when Mrs. Tsosie said she told him to come.”

“What makes us think this guy is coming all the way out here for a Yeibichai? Sounds strange to me.” Chee had been looking at the sheet in the folder when he said it. When he looked up, Captain Largo was glowering at him.

“You don’t get paid to make decisions on whether the feds know what the hell they’re doing,” the captain said. “You get paid for doing what I tell you to do. But if it makes you happier, we’re told that this Highhawk told it around back in Washington that he was coming out to the Navajo Reservation to attend this specific Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai. Is that good enough for you?”

It had been good enough. And so for the past four hours Chee had been at the Agnes Tsosie place waiting for Henry Highhawk to arrive at this Yeibichai ceremonial so that he could arrest him. Chee was good at waiting. He waited at his favorite lurking point near Baby Rocks Mesa for the endless empty miles of U.S. 160 to provoke drivers into speeding. He waited at the fringe of rodeo crowds for unwary bootleggers, and in the hallways outside the various Navajo Nation Department of Justice courtrooms to be called in to testify. Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee, his good friend who had tagged along on this venture, complained endlessly about the waiting their jobs required. Chee didn’t mind. He had one of those minds in which curiosity is constantly renewed. Wherever he waited, Chee’s eyes wandered. They always found something that interested him. Here, waiting for the white Ford Bronco to appear (or fail to appear), Chee was first fascinated with the ceremonial itself. And then he’d noticed the Man with Bad Hands.

Bad Hands was curious indeed.

He had arrived early, as had Chee, a little before sundown in that recess between the afternoon singing in the medicine hogan and the dancing of the yeis, which would begin only when the night was totally dark. He was driving a green four-door Jeep Cherokee which bore a Farmington car rental company’s sticker. Chee had identified him at first as a belagaana, that grab bag of social-ethnic types which included whites plus all those who were neither fellow members of the Dineh (Navajos), nor Nakai (Mexicans), nor Zunis, nor Hopis, nor Apaches, nor Utes, nor members of any of the other Indian tribes who lived near enough to the Navajos to have earned a name in the Navajo language—which had no noun for “Indian.” Thus Bad Hands was belagaana by default. Bad Hands wasn’t the only white attracted by this ceremonial, but he was the only one who defied Chee’s personal classification system.

The handful of other whites standing around the bonfires or keeping warm in their vehicles fit neatly enough. Two were “friends.” They included a lanky, bald-headed man from whom Chee sometimes bought hay at a Gallup feed store, and Ernie Bulow, a towering, gray-bearded desert rat who’d been raised on the Big Reservation and had written a book about Navajo taboos. Bulow spoke coherent Navajo and had developed close personal relationships with Navajo families. He had brought with him today in his dusty station wagon a fat Navajo man and three middle-aged white women, all of whom stood beside the vehicle looking cold, nervous, and uncomfortable. Chee put the women in his “tourist” category. The remainder of the belagaana delegation were mostly “Lone Rangers”—part of the liberal/intellectual covey. They had flocked into the Navajo Mountain territory and declared themselves spokesmen for, and guardians of, the Navajo families facing eviction from their lands in what had become the Hopi part of the old Joint Use Reservation. Lone Rangers were a nuisance, but also a source of anecdotes and amusement. There were three of these, two males not much older than Chee and a pretty young blonde woman with her hair rolled atop her head. All wore the ragged jeans, jean jacket, and horse-blanket uniform of their clique.

Bad Hands’ necktie, his neatly fitted business suit, his white shirt, his gloves of thin black leather, his snap-brim felt hat, his fur-collared overcoat, all disqualified him as a Lone Ranger. Like them he was a city person, but without the disguise. Total disinterest in the ceremonial ruled him out as a tourist, and he seemed to know no one here—most of them Bitter Water People of the patient’s maternal clan. Like Jim Chee, Bad Hands was simply waiting. But for Bad Hands, waiting was a joyless matter of enduring. He showed no sign of pleasure in it.

Chee had first noticed him when he emerged from the Jeep Cherokee. He’d parked it amid a cluster of shabbier vehicles a polite distance from the dance grounds. He had stretched, rotated his shoulders in his overcoat, bent his knees, bowed his back, went through those other movements of people who have been confined too long in a car. He gave no more than a glance to the men who were unloading sawmill waste from the tribe’s lumbermill to help fuel the fires which would warm the spectators and illuminate the dancing tonight. He was more interested in the parked vehicles. These he inspected carefully, one after another. He had noticed Chee noticing him, and he had noticed Chee’s police uniform, but he showed no special interest. After stretching his muscles he climbed back into his vehicle and sat. It was then that Chee noticed his hands.

He had opened the door by grasping the handle with two fingers of his left hand, then pressing in the release button with a finger of his right hand. It was obviously a practiced motion. Still it was clumsy. And as he did it, Chee noticed that the thumb and little finger of the right glove jutted out stiffly. The man was either missing that thumb and finger, or they were immobilized. Why then didn’t he open the door with the other hand? Chee couldn’t get a look at it.

But now Chee’s curiosity was clicked up a notch. He prowled the dance ground the Tsosie family had cleared, he chatted with people, he watched the fire builders build the stacks of logs and waste wood which would line the dancing area with flames. He talked to the husband of the woman whose mother was the patient. Yellow was his name. Yellow was worrying about everything going right.

Chee helped Yellow check the wiring from the little generator he’d rented to provide the electric lighting he’d rigged up behind the medicine hogan. Chee kept an eye on five boys wearing Many Farms football jackets who might become trouble if their group became large enough to reach teenage critical mass. Chee prowled among the parked vehicles on the lookout for drunks or drinking. He stopped where Cowboy Dashee was parked in his Apache County Sheriffs Department patrol car to see if Cowboy was still asleep. (“Wake me when your criminal gets here, or wake me when the dancing gets going,” Dashee said. “Otherwise, I need my rest.”) But always he wandered back to where he could see the Jeep Cherokee and its driver.

The man was sometimes sitting in it, sometimes leaning against it, sometimes standing beside it.

He’s nervous, Chee decided, but he’s not the sort who allows himself to show his nerves in the usual ways. When the light of an arriving car lit his face, Chee noticed that he might be part Indian. Or perhaps Asiatic. Certainly not Navajo, or Apache, or a Pueblo man. In the same light he saw his hands again, gloved, both of them, this time resting lightly on the steering wheel. The thumbs and little fingers of both hands jutted out stiffly as if their joints were frozen.

Chee was standing beside the medicine hogan thinking of these odd hands and what might have happened to them when Henry Highhawk arrived. Chee noticed the vehicle coming over the rim of the mesa and jolting toward the parking area. In the reflected light from the fires it seemed to be small and white. As it parked he saw it was the white Ford Bronco he had been waiting for.

“… Wind Boy, the holy one, paints his form,” the voices behind him chanted in rhythmic Navajo.

“With the dark cloud, he paints his form.

With the misty rain, he paints his form…“

The vehicle disappeared from sight in an irregular row of mostly pickup trucks. Chee strolled toward it, remaining out of the firelight when he could. It was a Bronco, new under its heavy coating of dust. Its only occupant seemed to be the driver. He opened the door, lighting the overhead bulb. He swung his legs out, stretched, emerged stiffly, and closed the door behind him. In no hurry, apparently.

Neither was Jim Chee. He leaned against the side of an old sedan and waited.

The cold breeze moved through the sage around him, whispering just loud enough to obscure the ceremonial chanting. The fires that lined the sides of the dance ground between the hogan and the little brush-covered medicine lodge were burning high now. The light reflected from the face of Henry Highhawk. Or, to be more accurate, Chee thought, the man I presume to be Henry Highhawk. The man, at least, who drove the prescribed white Bronco. He wore a shirt of dark blue velvet with silver buttons—the shirt a traditional Navajo would have proudly worn about 1920. He wore an old-fashioned black felt hat with a high crown and a band of silver conchas—a “reservation hat” as old-fashioned as the shirt. A belt of heavy silver conchas hung around his waist, and below it he wore jeans and boots—the left boot, Chee now noticed, reinforced with a metal brace and thickened sole. He stood for a long time beside the car in his shirt sleeves, oblivious of the cold, engrossed in what he was seeing. In contrast to Bad Hands, this visitor was obviously fascinated by this ceremonial event. Finally, he reached inside, pulled out a leather jacket, and put it on. The jacket had leather fringes. Of course it would have fringes, Chee thought. Hollywood’s Indian.

Chee strolled past him to Cowboy’s patrol car and rapped on the window.

Cowboy sat up, looked at him. Chee opened the door and slid in.

“They ready to dance?” Cowboy asked, the question muffled by a yawn.

“Any minute now,” Chee said. “And our bandido has arrived.”

Cowboy felt around for his gun belt, found it, straightened to put it on. “Okay,” he said. “Away we go.”

Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee climbed out of his patrol car and followed Navajo Tribal Policeman Jim Chee toward the crowd gathering around the fires. Dashee was a citizen of Mishhongnovi on the Hopi Second Mesa, born into the distinguished Side Corn Clan, and a valuable man in the ancient Hopi Antelope Society. But he was also a friend of Jim Chee from way back in their high school days.

“There he is,” Chee said. “The cat with the reservation hat, leather jacket with the Buffalo Bill fringes.”

“And the braids,” Dashee said. “He trying to set a new style for you guys? Replace buns with braids?”

The driver of the Bronco was standing very close to a squat, elderly man in a red plaid coat, leaning over him as he first talked, then listened attentively. Chee and Dashee edged through the crowd toward him.

“Not now,” Plaid Coat was saying. “Old Lady Tsosie she’s sick. She’s the patient. Nobody can talk to her until this sing is over.”

Why would this belagaana grave robber want to see Agnes Tsosie? Chee had no idea. That irritated him. The big shots never told working cops a damned thing. Captain Largo certainly didn’t. Nobody did. Someday he would walk into something and get his head shot off because nobody had told him anything. There was absolutely no excuse for it.

Bad Hands walked past him, approached Highhawk, waited for the polite moment, touched the man’s shoulder. Highhawk looked startled. Bad Hands seemed to be introducing himself. Highhawk offered a hand, noticed Bad Hands’ glove, listened to what might have been an explanation, shook the glove gingerly. “Let’s get him,” Dashee said. “Come on.”

“What’s the hurry?” Chee said. “This guy’s not going anyplace.”

“We arrest him, we put him in the patrol car, and we don’t have to worry about him,” Dasheé said.

“We arrest him, and we have to baby-sit him,” Chee said. “We have to haul him down to Holbrook and book him into jail. We miss the Yeibichai dance.”

Dashee yawned a huge yawn, scrubbed his face with both palms, yawned again. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I forget how you talked me into coming out here anyway. It’s us Hopi that have the big tourist-attraction ceremonials. Not you guys. What am I doing here, anyway?”

“I think I told you something about all the Miss Navajo and the Miss Indian Princess contestants always coming to these Yeibichais,” Chee said. “They haul them in from Albuquerque and Phoenix and Flagstaff on buses.”

“Yeah,” Dashee said. “You did say something about girls. Where the hell are they?”

“Be here any minute,” Chee said.

Dashee yawned again. “And speaking of women, how you doing with your girlfriend?”

“Girlfriend?”

“That good-looking lawyer.” Dashee created curves in the air with his hands. “Janet Pete.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Chee said.

Dashee put on his skeptical expression.

“I’m her confidant,” Chee said. “The shoulder upon which she weeps. She’s got a boyfriend. In Washington. Her old law professor down at the University of Arizona decided to quit teaching and be a millionaire. Now she’s back there working for him.”

Dashee’s disappointment showed. “I liked her,” he said. “For a Navajo, that is. And for a lawyer, too. Imagine liking a lawyer. But I thought you two had something going.“

“No,” Chee said. “She tells me her troubles. I tell her mine. Then we give one another bad advice. It’s one of those things.”

“Your troubles? You mean that blue-eyed little schoolteacher? I thought she’d kissed you off and moved back to Milwaukee or someplace. Is she still your trouble?”

“Mary Landon,” Chee said.

“That sure has dragged along,” Dashee said. “Is she back out here again?”

“She did move back to Wisconsin,” Chee said, thinking he really didn’t much want to talk about this. “But we write. Next week, I’m going back there to see her.”

“Well,” Dashee said. The breeze had shifted now and was moving out of the north, even colder than it had been. Dashee turned up his coat collar. “None of my business, I guess. It’s your funeral.”

The screen of blankets had been dropped over the doorway of the patient’s hogan now and all the curing activities were going on in privacy. The bonfires that lined the cleared dance ground burned high. Spectators huddled around them, keeping warm, gossiping, renewing friendships. There was laughter as a piñon log collapsed and the resulting explosion of sparks routed a cluster of teenagers. Mr. Yellow had built a kitchen shelter behind the hogan, using sawed telephone poles as roof posts, two-by-fours and particle board for its walls. Through its doorway, Chee could see dozens of Mrs. Tsosie’s Bitter Water clansmen drinking coffee and helping themselves from stacks of fry bread and a steaming iron pot of mutton stew. Highhawk had drifted that way too, with Bad Hands trailing behind. Chee and Dashee followed Highhawk into the kitchen shelter, keeping him in sight. They sampled the stew and found it only fair.

Then the curtain drew back and the hataalii backed out through it. He walked down the dance ground to the yei hogan. A moment later he made the return trip, walking slowly, chanting. Old Woman Tsosie emerged from the medicine hogan. She was bundled in a blanket, her hair bound in the traditional fashion. She stood on another blanket spread on the packed earth and held out her hands toward the east. The kitchen shelter emptied as diners became spectators. The socializing at the bonfires quieted. Then Chee heard the characteristic call of Talking God.

“Huu tu tu. Huu tu tu. Huu tu tu. Huu tu tu.”

Talking God led a row of masked yei, moving slowly with the intricate, mincing, dragging step of the spirit dancers. The sound of the crowd died away. Chee could hear the tinkle of the bells on the dancers’ legs, hear the yei singing in sounds no human could understand. The row of stiff eagle feathers atop Talking God's white mask riffled in the gusty breeze. Dust whipped around the naked legs of the dancers, moving their kilts. Chee glanced at Henry Highhawk, curious about his reaction. He noticed the man with the crippled hands had moved up beside Highhawk.

Highhawk's lips were moving, his expression reverent. He seemed to be singing. Chee edged closer. Highhawk was seeing nothing but Talking God dancing slowly toward them. “He stirs. He stirs,” Highhawk was singing. “He stirs. He stirs. Now in old age wandering, he stirs.” The words were translated from the ceremony called the Shaking of the Masks. That ritual had been held four days earlier in this ceremonial, awakening the spirits which lived in the masks from their cosmic dreams. This white man must be an anthropologist, or a scholar of some sort, to have found a translation.

Talking God and his retinue were close now and Highhawk was no longer singing. He held something in his right hand. Something metallic. A tape recorder. Hataalii rarely gave permission for taping. Chee wondered what he should do. This would be a terrible time to create a disturbance. He decided to let it ride. He hadn’t been sent here to enforce ceremonial rules, and he was in no mood to be a policeman.

The hooting call of the Yeibichai projected Chee’s imagination back into the myth that this ceremony reenacted. It was the tale of a crippled boy and his compact with the gods. This was how it might have been in those mythic times, Chee thought. The firelight, the hypnotic sound of the bells and pot drum, the shadows of the dancers moving rhythmically against the pink sandstone of the mesa walls behind the hogan.

Now there was a new smell in the air, mixing with the perfume of the burning piñon and dust. It was the smell of dampness, of impending snow. And as he noticed it, a flurry of tiny snowflakes appeared between him and the fire, and as quickly disappeared. He glanced at Henry Highhawk to see how the grave robber was taking this.

Highhawk was gone. So was Bad Hands.

Chee looked for Cowboy Dashee. But where was Cowboy when you needed him? Never in sight. There he was. Talking to a young woman bundled in a down jacket. Grinning like an ape. Chee jostled his way through the crowd. He grabbed Dashee’s elbow.

“Come on,” he said. “I lost him.”

Deputy Sheriff Dashee was instantly all business.

“I’ll check Highhawk’s car,” he said. And ran.

Chee ran for Bad Hands’ car. The two men were standing beside it, talking.

No more waiting, Chee thought. He could see Dashee approaching.

“Mr. Highhawk,” Chee said. “Mr. Henry Highhawk?”

The two men turned. “Yes,” Highhawk said. Bad Hands stared, his lower lip clenched nervously between his teeth.

Chee displayed his identification.

“I’m Officer Chee, Navajo Tribal Police. We have a warrant for your arrest and I’m taking you into custody.”

“What for?” Highhawk said.

“Flight across state lines to avoid prosecution,” Chee said. He sensed Dashee at his elbow.

“You have the right to remain silent,” Chee began. “You have the right to—”

“It’s for digging up those skeletons, isn’t it?” Highhawk said. “It’s okay to dig up Indian bones and put ’em on display. But you dig up white bones and it’s a felony.”

“—can and will be used against you in a court of law,” Chee concluded.

“I heard the law was looking for me,” Highhawk said. “But I wasn’t sure exactly why. Is it for sending those skeletons through the mail? I didn’t do that. I sent them by Federal Express.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Chee said. “All I know is you’re Henry Highhawk and I got a warrant here to arrest you on. As far as I know you shot eighteen people in Albuquerque, robbed the bank, hijacked airplanes, lied to your probation officer, committed treason. They don’t tell us a damned thing.”

“What do you do to him?” Bad Hands asked. “Where do you take him?”

“Who are you?” Dashee asked.

“We take him down to Holbrook,” Chee said, “and then we turn him over to the sheriff’s office and they hold him for the federals on the fugitive warrant, and then he goes back to somewhere or other. Wherever he did whatever he did. Then he goes on trial.”

“Who are you?” Dashee repeated.

“My name is Gomez,” Bad Hands said. “Rudolfo Gomez.”

Cowboy nodded.

“I’m Jim Chee,” Chee said. He held out his hand.

Bad Hands looked at it. Then at Chee.

“Pardon the glove, please,” he said. “I had an accident.”

As he shook it, Chee felt through the thin black leather an index finger and, perhaps, part of the second finger. All else inside the glove felt stiff and false.

That was the right hand. If his memory was correct, the right hand was Bad Hands’ better hand.

Chapter Five

« ^ »

Leroy Fleck enjoyed having his shoes shined. They were Florsheims—by his standards expensive shoes—and they deserved care. But the principal reason he had them shined each morning at the little stand down the street from his apartment was professional. Fleck, who was often after other people, felt a need to know if anyone was after him. Sitting perched these few minutes on the Captain’s shoeshine throne gave him a perfect opportunity to rememorize the street. Each morning except Sunday Fleck examined every vehicle parked along the shady block his apartment house occupied. He compared what he saw with what he remembered from previous days, and weeks, and months of similar studies.

Still, he enjoyed the shine. The Captain had gradually grown on him as a person. Fleck no longer thought of him as a nigger, and not even as one of Them. The Captain had gradually become—become what? Somebody who knew him? Whatever it was, Fleck found himself looking forward to his shoeshine.

This morning, though, Fleck had other things on his mind. Things to do. A decision to make. He examined the street through habit. The cars were familiar. So was the bakery truck making its delivery to the coffee shop. The old man limping down the sidewalk had limped there before. The skinny woman was another regular walking her familiar dog. Only the white Corvette convertible parked beside the Texaco station down the street and the dark green Ford sedan immediately across from the entrance to the apartments were strangers. The Corvette was not the sort of car that interested Fleck. The Ford he would check and remember. It was one of those nondescript models that cops liked to use.

Fleck glanced down at the top of the head of the shoeshine man. The hair was a thick mass of tight gray curls. Darky hair, Fleck thought. “How you doing there, Captain?”

“About got ’em.”

“You notice that green Ford yonder? Across the street there? You know who belongs to that?”

The man glanced up, found the Ford, examined it. Once his face had been a shiny, coffee black. Age had grayed it, broken it into a wilderness of lines. “I don’t know it,” the Captain said. “Never noticed it before.”

“I’ll get a check on the license number down at headquarters,” Fleck said. “You tell me if you see it around here again.”

“Sure,” the Captain said. He whipped his shine cloth across the tip of Fleck’s right shoe. Snapped it. Stood up and stepped back. “Done,” he said.

Fleck handed him a ten-dollar bill. The Captain folded it into his shirt pocket.

“See if you can get a look at who gets into it,” Fleck said.

“Your man, maybe?” the Captain said, his expression somewhere between skeptical and sardonic. “You think it’s that dope dealer you been after?”

“Maybe,” Fleck said.

He walked the five blocks down to the telephone booth he was using today, thinking about that expression on the Captain’s face, and about Mama, and about what he was going to tell The Client. The Captain’s expression made it clear that he didn’t really believe Fleck was an undercover cop. The old man had seemed convinced enough last summer when Fleck had first taken this job and moved into the apartment. He’d shown the Captain his District of Columbia police detective credentials the third morning he had his shoes shined. The man had seemed properly impressed then. But weeks ago—how many weeks Fleck couldn’t quite decide—Fleck’s subconscious began registering some peculiarities. Now he was pretty sure the old man didn’t believe Fleck was a cop. But he was also fairly sure the Captain didn’t give a damn. The old man was playing lookout partly because he enjoyed the game and partly because of the money. The Captain was a neutral. He didn’t give a damn whether Fleck was part of the law, or outside it, or the Man from Mars.

At that point, Fleck had even considered talking to the Captain about Mama. He was a nigger, but he was old and he knew a lot about people. Maybe he’d have some ideas. But talking about Mama was complicated. And painful. He didn’t know what to do about her. What could he do? She hadn’t been happy out there at Bluewater Home outside Cleveland, and she wasn’t happy at this place he’d put her when he came to D.C.—Eldercare Manor. Maybe she wouldn’t be happy anywhere. But that wasn’t the point right now. The point was Eldercare wanted to be shut of her. And right away.

“We just simply can’t put up with it,” the Fat Man had told him. “Simply cannot tolerate it. We have to think of our other clients. Look after their welfare. We can’t have that woman harassing them.“

“Doing what?” Fleck had asked. But he knew what Mama was doing. Mama was getting even.

“Well,” the Fat Man had said, trying to think how to put it. “Well, yesterday she put out her hand and tripped Mrs. Oliver. She fell right on the floor. Might have broken her bones.” The Fat Man’s hands twisted together at the thought, anxiously. “Old bones break easily, you know. Especially old ladies’.”

“Mrs. Oliver has done something to Mama,” Fleck said. “I can tell you that right now for dead certain.” But he knew he was wasting his breath when he said it.

“No,” Fat Man said. “Mrs. Oliver is a most gentle person.”

“She did something,” Fleck had insisted.

“Well,” Fat Man said. “Well, I hadn’t meant to say anything about this because old people do funny things and this isn’t serious and it’s easy to deal with. But your mother steals the silverware at the table. Puts the knives and forks and such things up her sleeve, and in her robe, and slips them into her room.” Fat Man smiled a depreciatory smile to tell Fleck this wasn’t serious. “Somebody collects them and brings them back when she’s asleep, so it doesn’t matter. But Mrs. Oliver doesn’t know that. She tells us about it. Maybe that was it.”

“Mama don’t steal,” Fleck had said, thinking that would be it all right. Mama must have heard the old woman telling on her. She would never tolerate anybody snitching on her, or on anybody in the family. Snitching was not to be tolerated. That was something you needed to get even for.

“Mrs. Oliver fell down just yesterday,” Fleck had said. “You called me before then.”

“Well,” Fat Man said. “That was extra. I told you on the phone about her pulling out Mr. Riccobeni’s hair?”

“She never did no such thing,” Fleck had said, wearily, wondering what Mr. Riccobeni had done to warrant such retribution, wondering if pulling out the old man’s hair would be enough to satisfy Mama’s instinct for evening the score.

But there was no use remembering all that now. Now he had to think of what he could do with Mama, because the Fat Man had been stubborn about it. Get Mama out of there by the end of next week or he would lock her out on the porch. The Fat Man had meant it, and he had gotten that much time out of the son of a bitch only by doing a little very quiet, very mean talking. The kind of talk where you don’t say a lot, and you don’t say it loud, but the other fellow knows he’s about to get his balls cut off.

With the phone booth in view ahead, Fleck slowed his brisk walk to a stroll, inspecting everything. He glanced at his watch. A little early, which was the way he liked it. The booth was outside a neighborhood movie theater. There was a single car in the lot, an old Chevy which Fleck had noticed before and presumed was owned by the morning cleanup man. Nothing unusual on the street, either. Fleck went into the booth, felt under the stand, found nothing more sinister than dried chewing gum wads. He checked the telephone itself. Then he sat and waited. He was thinking he would just have to be realistic about Mama. There was simply no way he could keep her with him. He’d have to just give up on that idea. He’d tried it and tried it, and each time Mama had gotten even with somebody or other, things had gone to hell, and he’d had to move her. The last time, the police had come before he’d gotten her out, and if he hadn’t skipped they probably would have committed her.

The phone rang. Fleck picked it up.

“This is me,” he said, and gave The Client his code name. He felt silly doing it—like kids playing with their Little Orphan Annie code rings.

“Stone,” the voice said. It was an accented voice which to Fleck’s ear didn’t match an American name like Stone. A Spanish accent. “What do you have for me today?”

“Nothing much,” Fleck said. “You gotta remember, there’s one of me and seven of them.” He paused, chuckled. “I should say six now.”

“We’re interested in more than just six,” the voice said. “We’re interested in who they’re dealing with. You understand that?”

Fleck didn’t like the tone of voice. It was arrogant. The tone of a man used to giving orders to underlings. Mama would call The Client one of Them.

“Well,” Fleck said. “I’m doing the best I can, just being one man and all. I haven’t seen nothing interesting though. Not that I know of.”

“You’re getting a lot of money, you know. That’s not just to pay for excuses.”

“When we get right down to it,” Fleck said, “you’re owing me some money. There was just two thousand in that package Monday. You owed me another ten.”

“The ten is if the job was done right,” The Client said. “We don’t know that yet.”

“What the hell you mean? It’s been almost a month and not a word about anything in the papers.” Fleck was usually very good at keeping his emotion out of his voice. It was one of the skills he prided himself in, one of the tricks he’d learned in the recreation yards of detention centers and jails and, finally, at Joliet. But now you could hear the anger. “I need that money. And I’m going to get it.”

“You will get it when we decide nothing went wrong with that job,” The Client said. “Now shut up about it. I want to talk to you about Santero. We still don’t know where he went when he left the District. That worries us.”

And so the man who called himself Stone talked about Santero and Fleck half listened, his mouth stiff and set with his anger. Stone outlined a plan. Fleck told him the number of the pay phone where he would be next Tuesday, blurting it out because he had some things to say to this arrogant son of a bitch. Some rules to lay down, and some understanding that Fleck was nobody’s nigger.

“So that’ll be the number and now I want you to listen—” Fleck began, but he heard the line disconnect. He stared at the phone. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You dirty son of a bitch.” His voice squeaked with the anger. The rage. This was what Mama had told them about. Him and Delmar. About the ruling class. The way they put you down if you let them. Treated you like niggers. Like dogs. And the only way you kept your head up, the only way to keep from being a bum and a wino, was by getting even. Always keeping things even. Always keeping your pride.

He walked back toward his apartment thinking about how he would go about it. Lot of work to be done. They knew who he was, he’d bet a million dollars on that. The shyster pretended otherwise. Elkins pretended that what he called “protective insulation” worked both ways. But lawyers lied. Lawyers were part of Them. Leroy Fleck would be expendable, something to be thrown to the police when he wasn’t useful. Safer for everybody to have Fleck dead, or back in lockup. But The Client was where the money came from, so The Client would know everything he wanted to know.

There would be plenty of time to even that up, Fleck thought, because there was nothing he could do until he had Mama taken care of. He had to have another place for her, and that always meant a big advance payment. While he was hunting a place for Mama, he’d find out just who The Client was and where he could find him. Now he was almost certain The Client was an embassy. Spanish-speaking. Some country that had revolution problems, judging from the work they had him doing.

Chapter Six

« ^ »

The trouble was nobody was interested. November had become December and the man with the pointed shoes remained nameless, an unresolved problem. Somewhere someone worried and waited for him. Or, if they had guessed his fate, they mourned him. The man had taken on a personality in Joe Leaphorn’s mind. Once he would have discussed him with Emma, and Emma would have had something sensible to say.

“Of course no one is interested,” Emma would have said in that small, soft voice. “The Bureau doesn’t have to take jurisdiction so it’s not an FBI problem. And McKinley County has had about five bodies since then to worry about and these bodies are local with relatives who vote. And it didn’t happen on the reservation, and it wouldn’t be your problem even if it had because it’s clearly a homicide, and reservation homicides are the FBI’s problem. You’re just interested because it’s an interesting puzzle.” To which he would have said: “Yes. You’re right. Now tell me why he was put under those chamisa bushes when it was so tough to get him there, carrying him all the way down the railroad tracks, and explain the Yeibichai note.” And Emma would have said something like, “They wanted the body seen from the train and reported and found, or they stopped the train and put him off.”

But Leaphorn couldn’t imagine what Emma would have said about the Yeibichai and Agnes Tsosie. He felt the oíd, painful, overwhelming need to talk to her. To see her sitting in that old brown chair, working on one of those endless making - something - for - somebody’s - baby projects which always kept her hands busy while she thought about whatever problem he’d presented her. A year now, a little more than a year, since she had died. This part of it seemed to get no better.

He turned off the television, put on his coat, and walked out on the porch. It was still snowing a little—just an occasional dry flake. Enough to declare the end of autumn. Inside again, he got his winter jacket from the closet, dropped it on the sofa, turned on the TV again, and sat down. Okay, Emma, he thought, how about the missing dentures? They don’t just pop out when one is struck. They’re secured. He’d told the pathologist he was curious about those missing false teeth and the man had done some checking during the autopsy. There was not just one question, the doctor had said, but two. The gums showed the victim secured his teeth with a standard fixative. Therefore either the fellow had been killed while his teeth were out, or they had been removed after his death. In light of the way the man was dressed the first seemed improbable. So why remove the teeth? To avoid identification of the victim? Possibly. Would Emma have any other ideas? The second question was exactly the sort which intrigued Leaphorn.

“I didn’t find any sign of any of those gum diseases, or those jawbone problems, which cause dentists to remove teeth. Everything was perfectly healthy. There was some sign of trauma. The upper right molars, upper left incisor, had been broken in a way that caused some trauma to the bone and left resulting bone lesions.” That’s what the pathologist had said. He had looked up from his report at Leaphorn and said: “Do you know why his teeth are missing?”

So tell me, Emma, Leaphorn thought. If you’re so smart, you tell me why such a high class gentleman got his teeth extracted. And why.

As he thought it, he heard himself saying it aloud. He pushed himself out of the chair, embarrassed. “Crazy,” he said, also aloud. “Talking to myself.”

He switched off the TV again and retrieved the coat. It was colder but no longer snowing. He brushed the feathery deposit from the windshield with his sleeve, and drove.

Eastbound through Gallup, he saw Kennedy’s sedan parked at the Zuni Truck Stop Cafe. Kennedy was drinking tea.

“Sit,” Kennedy said, indicating the empty bench across the booth table from him. He extracted the tea bag from his cup and held it gingerly by its string. “Peppermint,” he said. “You ever drink this stuff?”

Leaphorn sat. “Now and then,” he said.

“What brings you off the reservation on such an inclement Saturday evening?”

What, indeed? Old friend, I am running from Emma’s ghost, Leaphorn thought. I am running from my own loneliness. I am running away from craziness.

“I’m still curious about your man with the pointed shoes,” Leaphorn said. “Did you ever get him identified?”

Kennedy gazed at him over the cup. “Nothing on the fingerprints,” he said. “I think I told you that. Nothing on anything else, either.”

“If you found his false teeth, could you identify him from that?”

“Maybe,” Kennedy said. “If we knew where he was from, then we could find out who made that sort of denture. Probably we could.”

The waitress appeared with a menu. “Just coffee,” Leaphorn said. He had no appetite this evening.

“My wife tells me coffee is giving me the night sweats. The caffeine is making me jumpy,” Kennedy said. “She’s got me off on tea.”

Leaphorn nodded. Emma used to do such things to him.

“That guy’s sheriffs office business anyway,” Kennedy said. “I had a hunch he’d be my baby if he was identified. Just by the looks of him. He looked foreign. Looked important.” He grinned. “Kinda nice, not having him identified.”

“How hard did you try?”

Kennedy glanced at him over the teacup, mildly surprised at Leaphorn’s tone.

“The usual,” he said. “Prints. Clothes were tailor-made. So were the shoes. We sent them all back to Washington. Sent photographs, too. They didn’t match anyone on the missing list.”

He shook his head. “Nothing matched anywhere. Nada. Absolutely nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Lab decided the clothes were foreign made. European or South American probably. Not Hong Kong.”

“That’s a big help,” Leaphorn said. He sipped the coffee. It was fresh. Compared to the instant stuff he’d been drinking at home it was delicious.

“It confirmed my hunch, I think,” Kennedy said. “If we ever get that sucker identified, it will be a federal case. He’ll be some biggie in drugs, or moving money illegally. Something international.”

“Sounds like it,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking of a middle-aged woman sitting somewhere wondering what had happened to Pointed Shoes. He was wondering what circumstances brought a man in old, worn, lovingly polished custom-built shoes to die amid the chamisa, sage, and snakeweed east of Gallup. He was wondering about the fatal little puncture at the base of his skull. “Anything new about the cause of death? The weapon?”

“Nothing changed. It’s still a thin knife blade inserted between the first vertebra and the base of the skull. Still a single thrust. No needless cuts or punctures. Still a real pro did it.”

“And what brings a real pro to Gallup? Does the Bureau have any thoughts on that?”

Kennedy laughed. “You caught me twenty-eight years too late, Joe. When I was on the green side of thirty and still bucking for J. Edgar’s job, then this one would have worried me to death. Somewhere back there about murder case three hundred and nine it dawned on me I wasn’t going to save the world.”

“You ran out of curiosity,” Leaphorn said.

“I got old,” Kennedy said. “Or maybe wise. But I’m curious about what brings you off the reservation in this kind of weather.”

“Just feeling restless,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’m going to drive out there where the body was.”

“It’ll be dark by the time you could get out there.”

“If the pathologist is right, it was dark when that guy got knifed. The night before we found him. You want to come along?”

Kennedy didn’t want to come along. Leaphorn cruised slowly down Interstate 40, his patrol car causing a brief bubble of uneasy sixty-five-mile-an-hour caution in the flood of eastbound traffic. The cold front now was again producing intermittent snow, flurries of small, feathery flakes which seemed as cold and dry as dust, followed by gaps in which the western horizon glowed dully with the dying day. He angled off the highway at the Fort Wingate interchange and stopped where the access road met the old fort’s entrance route. He sat a moment, reviving the question he raised when he’d seen the body. Any link between this obsolete ammunition depot—long on the Pentagon’s list for abandonment—and a corpse left nearby wearing clothing cut by a foreign tailor? Smuggling out explosives? From what little Leaphorn knew about the mile after mile of bunkers here, they held the shells for heavy artillery. There was nothing one would sneak out in a briefcase—or find a use for if one did. He restarted the car and drove under the interstate to old U.S. Highway 66, and down it toward the Shell Oil Company’s refinery at Iyanbito. The Santa Fe railroad had built the twin tracks of its California-bound main line here, paralleling the old highway with the towering pink ramparts of Nashodishgish Mesa walling in this corridor to the north. Leaphorn parked again, pulling the car off in the snakeweed beside the pavement. From this point it was less than four hundred yards to the growth of chamisa where the body of Pointed Shoes had been laid. Leaphorn checked the right-of-way fence. Easy enough to climb through. Easy enough to pass that small body over. But that hadn’t been done.

Not unless whoever did it could cross four hundred yards of soft, dusty earth without leaving tracks.

Leaphorn climbed through the fence and walked toward the tracks. A train was coming from the east, creating its freight train thunder. Its locomotive headlight made a dazzling point in the darkness. Leaphorn kept his eyes down, the brim of his uniform hat shading his face, walking steadily across the brushy landscape. The locomotive flashed past, pushed by three other diesels and trailing noise, towing flatcars carrying piggyback truck trailers, and then a parade of tank cars, then hopper cars, then cars carrying new automobiles stacked high, then old slab-side freight cars, and finally a caboose. Leaphorn was close enough now to see light in the caboose window. What could the brakeman in it see? Could some engineer have seen two men (three men? four men? The thought was irrational) carrying Pointed Shoes along the right of way to his resting place?

He stood watching the disappearing caboose lights and the glare of an approaching east-bound headlight on the next track. The snow was a little heavier now, the wind colder on his neck. He pulled up his jacket collar, pulled down the hat brim. What he didn’t know about this business had touched something inside Leaphorn—a bitterness he usually kept so submerged that it was forgotten. Under this dreary cold sky it surfaced. If Pointed Shoes had been something different than he was, someone too important to vanish unmissed and unreported, someone whose tailored suit was not frayed, whose shoe heels were not worn, then the system would have answered all these questions long ago. Train schedules would have been checked, train crews located and interviewed. Leaphorn shivered, pulled the jacket tighter around him, looked down the track trying to get a reading on what an engineer could see along the track in the glare of his headlight. From the high vantage point of the cabin, he could see quite a lot, Leaphorn guessed.

The freight rumbled past, leaving silence. Leaphorn wandered down the track, and away from it back toward the road. Then he heard another train coming from the east. Much faster than the freights. It would be the Amtrak, he thought, and turned to watch it come. It whistled twice, probably for the crossing of a county road up ahead. And then it was roaring past. Seventy miles an hour, he guessed. Not yet slowing for its stop at Gallup. He smiled, remembering the suggestion he had put into Emma’s voice—that maybe they stopped the Amtrak and put him off. He was close enough to see the heads of people at the windows, people in the glass-roofed observation car. People with a fear of flying, or rich enough to afford not to fly. Maybe they stopped the Amtrak and put him off, he thought. Well, maybe they did. It seemed no more foolish than his vision of a platoon of men carrying Pointed Shoes down the tracks.

Bernard St. Germain happened to be the only railroader who Leaphorn knew personally—a brakeman-conductor with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company. Leaphorn called him from the Fina station off the Iyanbito interchange and got the recording on St. Germain’s answering machine. But while he was leaving a message, St. Germain picked up the receiver.

“I have a very simple question,” Leaphorn said. “Can a passenger stop an Amtrak train? Do they still have that cord that can be pulled to set the air brakes, like you see in the old movies?”

“Now there’s a box in each car, like a fire alarm box,” St. Germain said. “They call it the ‘big hole lever.’ A passenger can reach in there and pull it.”

“And it stops the train?”

“Sure. It sets the air brakes.”

“How long would it be stopped?”

“That would depend on circumstances. Ten minutes maybe. Or maybe an hour. What’s going on?“

“We had a body beside the tracks east of Gallup last month. I’m trying to figure out how it got there.”

“I heard about it,” St. Germain said. “You think somebody stopped the Amtrak and took the body off?”

“Just a thought. Just a possibility.”

“What day was it? I can find out if somebody pulled the big hole lever.”

Leaphorn gave him the date of the death of Pointed Shoes.

“Yeah. All that stuff has to be reported,” St. Germain said. “Any time a train makes an unscheduled stop for any reason you have to turn in a delay report. And that has to be radioed in immediately. I’ll find out for you Monday.”

Chapter Seven

« ^ »

One is not supposed to deal with one’s personal mail while on duty in the Navajo Tribal Police Office at Shiprock. Nor is one supposed to receive personal telephone calls. On Monday, Officer Jim Chee did both. He had a fairly good reason.

The post office would not deliver mail to Chee’s little aluminum house trailer parked under the cottonwoods beside the San Juan River. Instead, Chee picked it up at the post office each day during his lunch break. On Monday his portion was an L. L. Bean catalog for which he had sent off a coupon, and a letter from Mary Landon. He hurried back to the office with them, put the catalog aside, and tore open the letter.

“Dearest Jim,” it began. From that excellent beginning, it went downhill fast.

When your letter arrived yesterday, I was thrilled at the thought of your visit, and seeing you again. But now I have had time to think about it and I think it is a mistake. We still have the same problem and all this will do is bring all the old pain back again…

Chee stopped reading and stared at the wall across from his desk. The wall needed painting. It had needed painting for years. Chee had stuck a calendar to it, and an eight-by-ten photograph of Mary Landon and himself, taken by Cowboy Dashee with the two of them standing on the steps of the little “teacherage” where she had lived when she taught at the Crownpoint Elementary School. Like many of Cowboy’s photographs it was slightly out of focus but Chee had treasured it because it had managed to capture Mary’s key ingredient: happiness. They had been out all night, watching the final night of an Enemy Way ceremonial over near the Whippoorwill Chapter House. Looking back on it, Chee had come to realize that it was that night he decided he would marry Mary Landon. Or try to marry her.

He read the rest of the letter. It was short—a simple recitation of their problem. She wouldn’t want her children raised on the reservation, bringing them up as strangers to her own culture. He wouldn’t be happy away from the reservation. And if he made the sacrifice for her, she would be miserable because she had made him miserable. It was an impossible dilemma, she said. Why should they revive the pain? Why not let the wound heal?

Why not, indeed? Except it wasn’t healing. Except he couldn’t seem to get past it. He put the letter aside. Think of something else. What he had to do today. He had pretty well cleaned up everything pending, getting ready for this vacation. There was a man he was supposed to find out behind Toh-Atin Mesa, a witness in an assault case. The trial had been postponed and he’d intended to let that hang until he came back from Wisconsin and seeing Mary. But he would do it today. He would do it right now. Immediately.

The telephone rang. It was Janet Pete, calling from Washington.

“Ya et eeh,” Janet Pete said. “You doing all right?”

“Fine,” Chee said. “What’s up?”

“Our paths are crossing again,” she said. “I’ve got myself a client and it turns out you arrested him.”

Chee was puzzled. “Aren’t you in Washington?”

“I’m in Washington. But you arrested this guy on the rez. Out at a Yeibichai, he tells me.”

Henry Highhawk. “Yeah,” Chee said. “Guy with his hair in braids. Like a blond Kiowa.”

“That’s him,” Janet said. “But he noticed he wasn’t in style on the reservation. He changed it to a bun.” There was a pause. “You doing all right? You sound sort of down.”

“Even Navajos get the blues,” Chee said. “No. I’m okay. Just tired. Tomorrow my vacation starts. You’re supposed to be tired just before vacation. That’s the way the system’s supposed to work.”

“I guess so,” Janet said. She sounded tired, too. “When you arrested him, do you remember if there was another man with him? Slender. Latin-looking.”

“With crippled hands? He said his name was Gomez. I think it was Gomez. Maybe Lopez.”

“It was Gomez. What did you think of him?”

The question surprised Chee. He thought. “Interesting man. I wondered how he managed to lose so many fingers.”

There was a long silence.

“How did he lose those fingers?”

“I don’t know,” Janet said. “I’m just trying to get some sort of handle on this man. On my client, really. I like to understand what I’m getting into.”

“How did you manage to get involved with this Highhawk bird anyway?” Chee asked. “Are you specializing in really weird cases?”

“That’s easy. Highhawk is part Navajo and very proud of it. He wants to be whole Navajo. Anyway, he talks like he does. So he wants a Navajo attorney.”

“Totally his idea then,” Chee said, sounding skeptical. “You didn’t volunteer?”

Janet laughed. “Well, there’s been a lot about the case in the papers here. Highhawk’s a conservator at the Smithsonian and he’d been raising hell about them keeping a million or so Native American skeletons in their warehouse, and last year they tried to fire him. So he went and filed a suit and won his job back. It was a First Amendment case. First Amendment cases get a lot of space in the Washington Post. Then he pulls this caper you arrested him for. He dug up a couple of graves up in New England, and of course he picked a historically prominent couple, and that got him a lot more publicity. So I knew about him, and I had read about the Navajo connection…” Her voice trailed off.

“I think you have a strange one for a client,” Chee said. “Any chance to get him off?”

“Not if he gets his way. He wants to make it a political debate. He wants to put the belagaana grave robbers on trial for robbing Indian graves while he’s on trial for digging up a couple of whites. It might work in Washington, if I could pick the right jury. But the trial will be up in New Haven or someplace up in New England. Up in that part of the country everybody’s happy memories are of hearing great-granddaddy tell about killing off the redskins.“

Another pause. Chee found himself looking at the picture. Mary Landon and Jim Chee on the doorstep, clowning. Mary’s hair was incredibly soft. Out on the malpais that day they went on the picnic, it had blown around her face. He had used his first finger to brush it away from her forehead. Mary’s voice saying: “You have a choice. You know if you go to the FBI Academy, then you’ll do well, and you know they’ll offer you a job. They need some Navajo agents. It’s not as if you didn’t have any choice.” And he had said, you have a choice, too, or something like that. Something inane.

“You’re probably supposed to be working,” Janet Pete was saying, “and I don’t know what I called about exactly anyway. I think I just hoped you could tell me something helpful about Gomez. Or about Highhawk.”

Or wanted to hear a friendly voice, Chee thought. It was his own feeling, exactly. “Maybe I’m overlooking something,” Chee said. “Maybe if I understood the problem better—”

“I don’t understand the problem myself.”

Janet said. She exhaled noisily. “Look. What would you think if you’re talking to your client and it went like this. This guy’s going on trial for desecrating a grave. You are being very cool, trying to talk some sense into him about how to handle it if he actually did what they accuse him of, and all of a sudden he says: ‘Of course I did it. I’m proud I did it. But would you be my lawyer for another crime?’ And I say, ‘What crime?’ And he says, ‘It hasn’t been committed yet.’ And I don’t know what to say to that so I say something flippant. ‘If you’re going to dig up another grave, I don’t want to hear about it,’ I say. And he says, ‘No, this one would be something better than that.’ And I look at him, surprised, you know. I’m thinking it’s a joke, but his face is solemn. He’s not joking.”

“Did he tell you what crime?”

“I said, ‘What crime? How serious?’ And he said we can’t talk about it. And, if we told you, you would be an accessory before the fact. He was smiling when he said that. Notice, he said we.”

“We,” Chee repeated. “Any idea who? Is he part of some sort of Indian Power organization? Is somebody working with him on this ‘free the bones’ project?”

“Well, he’s always talking about his Taho Society but I think he’s the only member. This time I think he meant Gomez.”

“Why Gomez?”

“I don’t know. Gomez brings him to my office. I call Highhawk at Highhawk’s place, and Gomez answers the telephone. Gomez always seems to be around. Did you know Gomez bonded him out after you picked him up in Arizona?”

“I didn’t,” Chee said. “Maybe they’re just friends.”

“I wanted to ask you about that,” Janet said. “Did they come to the Yeibichai together? Did you get the feeling they were friends? Old friends?”

“They were strangers,” Chee said. “I’m sure of that.” He remembered the scene, described it to Janet—Gomez arriving first, waiting in the rental car, disinterested, making contact with Highhawk. He described the clear, obvious fact that Highhawk didn’t know Gomez. “I’d say that Gomez came to the Yeibichai just to find Highhawk. But how could he have known Highhawk was coming, if they were really strangers?”

“That’s easy. The same way the FBI knew where to arrest him,” Janet said. “He told everybody, the woman he rents his apartment from, his neighbors, his drinking buddies, the people he works with at the Smithsonian, told everybody, that he was coming out to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai for his shima’sa’ni’.”

“He used that word? Maternal grandmother?”

“Well, he told them he had found this old woman in his Bitter Water Clan. He claims his maternal grandmother was a Bitter Water Dineh. And he claims the old woman had invited him to her Yeibichai.”

Chee found he was getting interested in all this. “Well, whatever, when I saw them, Gomez was trying to get acquainted with a stranger. Either that, or they’re both good actors. And who would they be trying to fool?” Chee didn’t wait for an answer to that rhetorical question. He was thinking about what Janet had said about the crime not yet committed. Something serious. Something “we” couldn’t talk about.

“I’d say you have a very flaky client,” Chee added. “Any reason to think this isn’t just some neurotic Lone Ranger trying to impress a pretty lawyer?”

“There’s a little bit more,” Janet Pete said. “His telephone is tapped.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “He tell you that?”

“I heard the click. The interference on the line. I called him just before I called you. In fact, that’s what actually motivated me to make this call.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “I thought maybe you were missing me.”

“That too,” Janet said. “That, and somebody’s been following me.”

“Ah,” Chee said. He was remembering Janet Pete. How she had handled him when she thought he was mishandling one of her clients the first time they had met; how she had dealt with the situation when he’d damaged a car she was buying. Janet Pete was not a person who would be easy to spook.

“If not exactly following me, then keeping an eye on my place. And on me. I see this guy outside my apartment. I see him in the newsstand below where we work. I see him too often. And I never saw him until I got tied up with this Highhawk business.”

Chee had been holding Mary Landon’s letter in his left hand, folding and unfolding it between his fingers. Now he dropped it into his out-basket on top of the little folder which held his round-trip Continental Airlines ticket to Milwaukee. He thought he might go to Washington, drop in at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. See what it looked like. Talk to a couple of people he knew back there. See what it would feel like to work for the Bureau.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m coming to Washington anyway. Next day or two. I have some business at the FBI office. I’ll let you know exactly when and you set it up for me to talk to Highhawk. And Gomez, too, if you can. That is, if you want to see what I think of it.”

“I do.” A long pause. “Thanks, Jim.”

“It’ll be good to see you,” he said. “And I want to meet your boyfriend, the rich and famous attorney.”

At least it would be better than two weeks lying around the trailer. And he had detected something in Janet Pete’s voice that he’d never heard before. She sounded frightened.

Chapter Eight

« ^ »

Sunday Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn had felt a lot better about the man with pointed shoes. His sense of the natural order of things had been restored. While in many ways Joe Leaphorn had moved into the world of the whites, his Navajo requirement for order and harmony remained. Every effect must have its cause, every action its necessary result. Unity existed, universal and eternal. And now it seemed that nothing violating this natural order had happened in the sagebrush plain east of Gallup. Apparently Pointed Shoes had flashed his bankroll in the wrong place, perhaps at a poker game in the observation car. The man with the knife had killed him, stopped the train, put the body under a convenient cover of chamisa brush, and gotten back on with the victim’s wallet.

There were some holes in that theory, some unanswered questions. For example, what the devil had happened to the false teeth? What was the connection with the Agnes Tsosie Yeibichai? But basically much of the disharmony had seeped out of this homicide. Leaphorn could think of other things. He thought about cleaning his house, and getting ready for his vacation. As with most Navajo Tribal Policemen, vacation time for Leaphorn came after the summer tourist season ended and before winter brought its blizzards with their heavy work load of rescue operations. If Leaphorn wanted to take his vacation, now was the time. He had already postponed it once, simply because in the absence of Emma he could think of nothing he would enjoy doing. But he should take it. If he didn’t, his friends would notice. He would see more of those subtle little indications of their kindness and their pity that he had come to dread. So he would think of someplace to go. Something to do. And he would think of it today. Just as soon as he got the dishes done, and the dirty clothes down to the laundromat. But when the phone rang just as he was getting ready to go to lunch Monday he still hadn’t thought of anything. Lunch was going to be with Kennedy. Kennedy was in Window Rock on some sort of Bureau records-checking business and was waiting for him at the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation Motor Inn. He had decided he would ask Kennedy for suggestions about what to do with eighteen days off. Leaphorn picked up the receiver and said “Leaphorn,” in a tone which he hoped expressed hurry.

The voice was Bernard St. Germain’s. Leaphorn had time for this call.

“Pretty good guess you made,” St. Germain said. “Not perfect, but close.”

“Good,” Leaphorn said. Now, he thought, Pointed Shoes becomes a homicide committed in interstate commerce. A federal case. Now the Bureau would be involved. More than eleven thousand FBI agents, well dressed, well trained, and highly paid, would be unleashed to attach an identity to the man with pointed shoes. The world’s most expensive crime lab would be involved. And if Pointed Shoes was important and a solution seemed imminent, law enforcement’s best-funded and most successful public relations machinery would spring into action. Kennedy, his old friend, with whom he was about to have lunch, would have to get to work.

“What do you mean, close but not perfect?” Leaphorn asked.

“Close because the Amtrak did stop that evening, and right about where your body was found. But nobody pulled the big hole lever,” St. Germain said. “The ATS system malfunctioned and stopped it.”

“ATS?”

“They used to call it the dead man’s switch,” St. Germain said. “If the engineer doesn’t push the button periodically, it automatically applies the air brakes. It’s just in case the engineer has a heart attack or a stroke or something. Or maybe goes to sleep. Then he doesn’t push the button and the ATS stops the train automatically.”

“That means it was just an accident? A passenger couldn’t cause that? No question about it?”

“No question at all. Such things have to be reported in writing. It’s all there on the delay report. The Amtrak was seven minutes behind schedule. Then, a few miles east of the Fort Wingate spur, the ATS shorted out or something and put on the brakes.”

Leaphorn stared at the map on the wall behind his desk, rethinking his theory.

“How long was it stopped?”

“I knew you’d ask that,” St. Germain said. “It was stopped thirty-eight minutes. From 8:34 until 9:12 P.M. That would be about average, I think. The engineer has to get the air pressure up and the brakes have to be reset. So forth.”

“Could passengers get off?”

“Not supposed to.”

“But could they?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“And get back on again?”

“Yep.”

“Would anybody see if someone did? Anybody on the train crew?”

“You mean at night? After dark? It would depend. But probably not. Not if the guy didn’t want to be seen. It would be simple enough. You’d just have to wait until everybody was busy. Nobody looking.”

“Bernard, what happens to the luggage if a passenger gets off before his destination and leaves it?”

“They take it off at the end of the line—the turnaround point when they’re cleaning out the cars. It goes into the claims office. The Lost and Found. Or, if it comes out of a reserved compartment on the sleeper, or a roomette, then they’d do a tracer on it and send it back to the point of origin. So the passenger could pick it up there.”

“This Amtrak that comes through here, would the turnaround point be Los Angeles?”

“Not exactly. There’s an eastbound and a westbound each day. West is Number 3. East is Number 4.”

“Who would I call there to find out about left-behind luggage?”

St. Germain told him.

Kennedy could wait a minute to have lunch with him. He called the Amtrak claims office in Los Angeles, and told the man who answered who he was, what he needed, and why he needed it. He gave the man the train and the date. Then he waited. It didn’t take long.

“Yeah. There was a suitcase and some personal stuff left in a roomette on that train. We held it here to see if somebody would claim it. But now it’s gone back to Washington,” the man said.

“Washington?”

“That’s where the passenger boarded. He transferred to Number 3 in Chicago.”

Leaphorn took the cap off his ballpoint, pulled his note pad toward him.

“What was his name?”

“Who knows? I guess you could get it from the claims office in Washington. Or from the reservations office. Wherever they keep that sort of records. That’s not my end of the business.”

“How about locating the train crew? That possible?”

“That’s Washington, too. That’s where that crew is based. I’d think it would be easy enough to get their names out of Washington.”

Kennedy had already ordered when Leaphorn reached his table. He was eating a club sandwich.

“You running on Navajo time?” he asked.

“Always,” Leaphorn said. He sat, glanced at the menu, ordered green chili stew. He felt great.

“I’ve learned a few things about that body,” he said. He told Kennedy about the Amtrak being stopped that night at the place where the body was left, and about what St. Germain had told him, and about the passenger’s baggage being left in the roomette.

Kennedy chewed, looking thoughtful. He grinned, but the grin was faint. “If you don’t quit this, you know, you’re going to make a federal case out of it,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Do your famous FBI thing,” Leaphorn said.

Kennedy swallowed, took a sip of water, nodded. “Okay. I’ll get somebody in Washington to go down and take a look at the luggage. We’ll see if they can get an identification. We’ll see where that leads us.”

“What more could anyone ask?”

“I can think of a few more things you’re going to ask,” Kennedy said. “Based on our past experiences with you. It’ll turn out this luggage belongs to an alcoholic who has a habit of falling through cracks. So we will sensibly decide he’s not the body, but you won’t be happy with that.” Kennedy held up a hand, all fingers extended. He bent down one. “One. You’ll want some sort of latent fingerprint check on the luggage.” He bent down another. “Two. You’ll want identification of the eighty-two people who have handled it since the owner.” He bent down a third. “Three. You’ll want a rundown on everybody who was on that particular Amtrak trip.” Kennedy bent down the surviving finger. “Four. You’ll want interviews with the train crews. Five—” Kennedy had exhausted his supply of fingers. He extended his thumb. “In summation, you’ll want the same sort of stuff we’d do if the Emperor of Earth had been kidnapped by the Martians. Cost eighty-six billions in overtime and then it turns out that your body is a car dealer who got in an argument with somebody in the bar of the train and it’s not the business of the Bureau.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“It’s none of your business, either,” Kennedy added. “You know that, don’t you?”

Leaphorn nodded again. “Not my business yet.” He took a spoonful of the stew, ate it. “But I wonder why he was going to the Yeibichai,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Kennedy said. “That seems strange.”

“And if he was going, why was he almost a month early?”

“I wonder about a lot of things,” Kennedy said. “I wonder why George Bush picked what’s-his-name for vice president. I wonder why the Anasazis walked away from all those cliff dwellings. I wonder why the hell I ever got into law enforcement. Or had lunch with you when I knew you’d be wanting a favor.”

“And I wonder about that guy’s false teeth,” Leaphorn said. “Not so much where the false ones went as what happened to his original teeth.”

Kennedy laughed. “I’m not that deeply into the wondering game,” he said.

“There was nothing wrong with his gums, or his jawbone,” Leaphorn said. “That’s what the autopsy showed. And that’s why people have their teeth pulled.”

Kennedy sighed, shook his head. “You get the check,” he said. “I’ll get somebody to check on the luggage in Washington.”

He did. Leaphorn got the call Tuesday.

“Here’s what they found,” Kennedy said. “The reservation was made in the name of Hilario Madrid-Peña. Apparently it was a bogus name. At least both the address and the telephone number were phony and the name isn’t in any of the directories.”

“That puts us back to square one,” Leaphorn said, trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice. “Unless they found something in the luggage.”

“Just a second,” Kennedy said. “ ‘One large suitcase and one briefcase,’ ” he read.“ ‘Suitcase contained the expected articles of underwear, shirts, socks, one pair trousers, ceramic pottery, toilet articles. Briefcase contained magazines and newspapers in Spanish, books, small notebook, stationery, envelopes, stamps, fountain pen, package Tums, incidentals. Nothing in notebook appeared helpful in establishing identity.’ ” Kennedy paused. “That’s it. That’s all she wrote.”

Leaphorn thought about it. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what to think.”

“I’m waiting for you to say ’Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,’” Kennedy said.

“Do you know the agent who checked?” Leaphorn asked.

“You mean personally? Or what was his name? No to both. It could have been anybody.”

“You think it would have been somebody who knew what he was doing?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Kennedy said. “Some rookie you’d want to get out of the office. A deal like this one wouldn’t be high priority.” Kennedy laughed. “Neither am I.”

“What’s the chance of getting the Bureau to run down the train crew, find out who picked up the luggage, cleaned up the roomette, that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Probably about the same as you pitching the opening game of the World Series next year.”

“I’m told that train crew works out of Washington.”

“So what?” Kennedy said. “Before they put a man on something like that, they have to have a reason.”

“I guess so,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking that he knew a man in Washington who might do it for him. Out of friendship. If Leaphorn was willing to impose on the friendship. He said, “Well, thank you Mr. Kennedy,” and hung up, still thinking about it. P. J. Rodney would do it out of friendship, but it would be a lot of work for him—or at least it might be. And maybe Rodney was retired by now. Leaphorn tried to remember what year it had been when Rodney left the Duluth Police Department and signed on at Washington. He must have enough years in to qualify for retirement, but when Leaphorn had written Rodney to tell him about Emma, he had still been on the District of Columbia force.

Leaphorn glanced at his watch. Time for the news. He walked into the living room, turned on the television, flicked it to channel seven, turned off the sound to avoid the hysterical screaming of the Frontier Ford commercial, then turned it up to hear the newscast. Nothing much interesting seemed to be happening and he found his thoughts returning to Rodney. A good man. They had become friends when they were both country-cousin outsiders attending the FBI Academy. One of those all-too-rare cases when you know almost at first glance that you’re going to like someone, and the liking is mutual. And when Rodney had stopped off at Window Rock to visit them on his way to California, he’d had the same effect on Emma. “You make good friends,” Emma had told him.

Rodney was a good friend. Leaphorn watched Howard Morgan warning about a winter storm moving across southern Utah toward northeastern Arizona and New Mexico. “Watch out for blowing snow,” Morgan said.

Leaphorn thought it would be good to see Rodney again. He knew what he would do with his vacation time.

Chapter Nine

« ^ »

Janet Pete met him at the Continental gate at National Airport, looking trim, efficient, tense, and happy to see him. She hugged him and shepherded him through the mob to the taxi stands.

“Wow,” Chee said. “Is it always this crowded?”

“Anthill East,” Janet said. She’s tired, he thought. But pretty. And very sophisticated. The suit she wore was pale gray and might have been made out of silk. Whatever it was made of it reminded Chee that Janet Pete had a very nice shape. It also reminded him that his town jeans, leather jacket, and bolo tie did not put him in the mainstream of fashion in Washington, D.C., as they did in Farmington or Flagstaff. Here every male above the age of puberty wore a dark three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. To Chee, the suits seemed to be identical

His eyes shifted back to Janet, studying her. “Nobody ever looks at anyone,” Chee said, who had been caught by Janet staring at her. “You notice that?”

“Avoid eye contact,” Janet said. “That’s the first rule of survival in an urban society. I hear it’s even worse in Tokyo and Hong Kong and places like that. And for the same reason. Too damn many people crowded together.” She gave the driver the address of Chee’s hotel. “It was nice of you to come,” she said, and her tone told Chee she meant it.

It was a gray, chilly, drizzling day, a “female rain” in Chee’s Navajo vocabulary. Janet asked about the reservation, about tribal politics, about their very few mutual acquaintances. Chee answered, wondering now why he had come, wondering if he should have gone to Wisconsin despite Mary’s letter. He’d told the travel agency at Farmington to get him a hotel in the “moderate to economical” range. The one where the cab stopped looked economical at best. He checked in. The price was seventy-six dollars per day—approximately triple a good room in the Four Corners country. This room was tiny, with a small double bed, a single chair, a TV set mounted on a wall bracket with one of the control knobs missing, a single narrow window looking out at the windows of a building across the street. Chee motioned Janet to the chair and sat on the bed.

“Here I am,” Chee said. “What can I do?”

Janet made a wry face. “The trouble is I don’t know what’s going on. Or even if anything is going on.”

“You said someone was following you. Tell me about that.”

“That doesn’t take long,” Janet said. “The first time I went to see Henry Highhawk, I couldn’t find his place at first. I walked right past it, and then back again. There was a car parked up the block a ways with a man sitting in it. He was staring at me, so I noticed him. Medium to small apparently. Maybe forty-five or so. Red hair, a lot of freckles, sort of a red face.” She paused and glanced at Chee with an attempt at a smile. “Do you ever wonder why they call us redskins?” she asked.

“Go on,” Chee said. “I’m interested.”

“Highhawk lives out on Capitol Hill, in a neighborhood they call Eastern Market. It’s easy to get there on the Metro. That’s the subway. So I took the Metro and walked to his house. About seven or eight blocks, maybe. I happened to walk past this guy twice sitting in his parked car, so I noticed him. Then when—”

“Hold it,” Chee said. “You mean he’d moved the car after you passed him the first time? He moved it up ahead of you?”

“Apparently. And then, when I left Highhawk’s place, he was still there. Still sitting in that car. Again, I noticed him twice more while I was walking back to the subway. He was walking the second time. Like he wanted to know where I was going and he left his car parked and followed me on foot. But he didn’t get on the subway. Or if he did, I didn’t see him.”

She paused, looked at him for reaction.

“Hmm,” Chee said, trying to sound thoughtful. He was thinking there were plenty of non-sinister reasons a man might follow Janet Pete.

“Since then, three or four times, I’ve seen him,” she added.

Chee apparently didn’t looked sufficiently impressed by this. Janet flushed.

“This isn’t Shiprock,” she said. “You don’t just keep seeing a stranger in Washington. Not unless you work in the same place. Or eat in the same place. Millions of people. But I saw this man outside the building where we have our law offices. Once in the parking lot and once outside the lobby. And not counting the Eastern Market Metro business, I saw him out at the Museum of Natural History. Too much to be a coincidence.”

“The very first time was at Highhawk’s place.“ Chee said. “Is that right? And again out in his neighborhood. Maybe he’s interested in Highhawk. And you’re Highhawk’s lawyer. Maybe he’s interested in you because of that.”

“Yes,” Janet said. “I thought of that. That’s probably it.”

“I’d offer you some refreshments if I had any,” Chee said. “In Farmington, in a seventy-five-dollar hotel, if they had anything that expensive, you’d have a little refrigerator with all those snacks and drinks in it. Or you’d have room service.”

“In Washington that comes in the three-hundred-dollar-per-day hotels,” Janet said. “But I don’t want anything. I want to know what you think of Highhawk. What do you think of all of this?”

“He struck me as slightly bent,” Chee said. “Big, good-looking belagaana, but he wants to be a Navajo. Or that’s the impression I got. And I guess he dug up those bones he’s accused of digging up to be a militant Indian.”

Janet Pete looked at him, thoughtfully. “Do you know anything that connects him with the Tano Pueblo?”

“Tano? No. Really, I know damned little. I just got stuck with the job of taking the federal warrant and going out to the Yeibichai and arresting the guy. They don’t tell you a damn thing. If they don’t give you the ‘armed and dangerous’ speech, then you presume he’s not armed or dangerous. Just pick him up, take him in, let the federals handle the rest of it. It was a fugitive warrant. You know, flight to avoid. But I heard he was wanted sdmewhere East for desecrating a graveyard, vandalism. So forth.“

Janet sat with her lower lip caught between her teeth, looking troubled.

“Jim,” she said, “I think I’m being used.”

“Oh?”

“Maybe it’s just I’m the token Navajo and Highhawk wanted a Navajo lawyer. That would make sense. Washington is lousy with lawyers but not with Navajo lawyers.”

“Guess not.”

“But I’ve got a feeling,” she added. She shook her head, got up, tried to pace. The room was, by Chee’s quick estimate, about nine feet wide and sixteen feet long, with floor space deleted for a bathroom and a closet. Pacing was not just impractical, it was impossible. Janet sat down again. “This Highhawk, he’s a publicity hound. Oh, that’s not really fair. Just say he knows how to make his point with the press and he knows the press is important to him and the press loves him. So when he waived extradition and came back here, he said he wanted a Navajo lawyer and that made the Post.” She paused, glanced at Chee. “You know me,” she said.

Chee had known her on the reservation as a lawyer on the staff of the Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agaditahe, which translated loosely into English as “People Who Talk Fast and Help the People Out” but was more often called the DMA or Tribal Legal Aid, and which had earned a hard-nosed reputation for defending the underdog. In fact, Chee had gotten to know her when she nailed him for trying to keep one of her clients locked up in the San Juan County jail longer than Janet thought was legal or necessary.

“Knowing you, I bet you volunteered,” Chee said.

“Well, I called him,” she said. “And we talked. But I didn’t make any commitments. I thought the firm wouldn’t like it.”

“Let’s see,” Chee said. “It’s Dalman, MacArthur, Fenix, and White, isn’t it? Or something like that. They sound like they’d be a little too dignified to be representing somebody who vandalizes graveyards.”

“Dalman, MacArthur, White, and Hertzog,” Janet said. “And yes, it’s a dignified outfit. And it doesn’t handle criminal defense cases. I thought they’d want to avoid Highhawk. Especially when the case is going to make the Post every day and the client is a notorious grandstander. And I didn’t think John would like it either. But it didn’t work that way.“

“No,” Chee said. John was John McDermott. Professor John McDermott. Ex-professor. Ex-University of Arizona law faculty. Janet Pete’s mentor, faculty advisor, boss, lover, father figure. The man she’d quit her job with the Navajo Tribe to follow to Washington. Ambitious, successful John. “It doesn’t sound like John’s sort of thing.”

“It turned out I was wrong about that,” Janet said. “John brought it up. He asked me if I’d like to represent Highhawk.”

Chee made a surprised face.

“I said I didn’t think the firm would like it. He said it would be fine with the firm. It would demonstrate its social consciousness.”

Chee nodded.

“Bullshit,” Janet said. “Social consciousness!”

“Why then?”

Janet started to say something but stopped. She got up again and walked to the window and looked out. Rain streaked the glass. In the office across the street the lights were on. A man was standing at his window looking across at them. Chee noticed he had his coat off. Vest and tie but no coat. It made Chee feel more cheerful.

“You have an idea why, don’t you?” Chee said.

“I don’t know,” Janet said to the window.

“You could guess,” Chee said.

“I can guess,” she agreed. “We have a client. The Sunbelt Corporation. It’s a big factor in real estate development, apartment complexes, that sort of thing. They bought a ranch outside Albuquerque. From what little I know about it, I think they have some sort of big development planned there. She turned away from the window, sat down again, stared at her hands. “Sunbelt is interested in where an interstate bypass is located. It makes a lot of difference in their land values. From what I hear the route Sunbelt favors runs across Tano Pueblo land. The Tano tribal council is split on whether to sell the right of way. The traditionals say no; the progressives see economic development, money.” She glanced up at Chee. “The old familiar story.”

“It does sound familiar,” Chee said. When she got around to it, Janet Pete would explain to him how all this involved Henry Highhawk, and her being followed. It was still raining outside. He looked at the man in the tie and vest in the window across the street who seemed to be looking at him. Funny town, Washington.

“They’re having their tribal election sometime this winter,” Janet said. “Youngish guy named Eldon Tamana is a contender against one of the old guard. Tamana favors granting the right of way.” There was another long pause.

“Good chance of winning?” Chee asked.

“I’d guess not,” Janet said. She turned and looked at him.

“I’m getting to be like a white man,” Chee said. “I’m getting in a hurry for you to tell me what this is all about.”

“I’m not sure I know myself. What I know is that the Smithsonian seems to have in its collection a Tano fetish. It’s a figure representing one of their Twin War Gods. Somehow Tamana found out about it, and I think he knew John at Arizona, and he came to John to talk about how to get it returned.”

Janet hesitated, looked down at her hands.

“I’d think that would be fairly simple,” Chee said. “You’d have the Tano tribal council adopt a resolution asking for it back—or maybe have it come from the elders of the kiva society that owned the fetish. Then you’d ask the Smithsonian to return it, and they’d take it under advisement, and do a study to find out where they’d got their hands on it, and after about three years you’d either get it back or you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t think that would work. Not for Tamana,” Janet said, still studying her hands.

“Oh?”

Janet sighed. “Did I tell you he’s running for a position on the tribal council? I guess he wants to just walk in and present the War God, sort of prove he’s a young man who can get things done while the old-timers just talk about it. I doubt if the council knows the museum has the fetish.”

“Ah,” Chee said. “Are you representing Sunbelt interests in this? I guess Sunbelt has an interest in getting Tamana elected.”

“I’m not,” Janet said. “John is. John is the law firm’s Southwestern expert. He gets the stuff which involves public land policy, Indians, uranium, water rights, all the cases like that.”

“Did he tell you all this?”

“Mostly he was asking me. I’m the firm’s Indian. Indians are supposed to know about Indians. All us redskins are alike. Mother Earth and Father Sun and all that Walt Disney crap.” She smiled a wan smile. “That’s really not fair to John. He’s not as bad as most. Mostly he understands the cultural differences.”

“But you think he’s using you?”

“I think the law firm would like to use me,” Janet corrected. “John works for them. So do I.”

The gray rain outside, the form of the shirt-sleeved man standing in the window across from them, the narrow, shabby room, all of it was depressing Chee. He got off the bed and tried to pull the drape fully across the window. It helped some.

“I’m going to wash up,” Chee said. “Then let’s get out of here and get some coffee somewhere.” He wanted to think about what Janet had told him. He could understand her suspicion. The firm wanted her to represent Highhawk because Highhawk worked in a sensitive position for the museum which held Tano sacred objects. Why? Did they want Highhawk to steal the War Twin? Was Janet, as his lawyer, supposed to talk him into doing that?

“Fine,” Janet said. “We have an appointment with Highhawk. I don’t think I told you about that. Out at his place in Eastern Market.”

There were two bare bulbs above the washbasin mirror, one of which worked. Chee rinsed his face, looked at himself in the mirror, wondered again what the hell he was doing here. But in some subconscious way he knew now. He was looking forward to another conversation with the man who wanted to be a Navajo.

Chapter Ten

« ^ »

Leaphorn had left his umbrella. He’d thought of it as he boarded the plane at Albuquerque—the umbrella lying dusty in the trunk of his car and the plane flying eastward toward Washington and what seemed to Leaphorn to be inevitable rain. The umbrella had never experienced rain. He’d bought it last year in New York, the second of two umbrellas he’d purchased on the same trip—the first one having been forgotten God knows where. He’d tossed the second one into the trunk of his car with his luggage on his return to the Albuquerque airport. There it had rested for a year.

Now, with the rain drumming down on his neck, he paid the cabby. He pulled his hat lower over his ears, and hurried across the sidewalk to the Amtrak office. He had an appointment with Roland Dockery, who was the person in the Amtrak bureaucracy stuck with handling such nondescript problems as Leaphorn represented.

Dockery was waiting for him, a plump, slightly bald, and slightly disheveled man of perhaps forty. He examined Leaphorn’s Navajo Tribal Police identification through bifocal glasses with obvious curiosity and invited Joe to sit with a wave of his hand. He pointed to the luggage on his desk—a shabby leather suitcase and a smaller, newer briefcase.

“The FBI’s already been through them,” Dockery said. “Like I told you on the phone. I guess they would have told you if they found anything.”

“Nothing useful,” Leaphorn said. “What we’re looking for is anything that might connect the bags to a homicide we have out in New Mexico. I hope you won’t mind me going over some questions the FBI probably already covered.”

“No problem,” Dockery said. He laughed. “No trouble about keys. The FBI already opened them.” He flipped open both cases with a flourish. Dockery was obviously enjoying this. It represented something unusual in a job that must be usually routine.

Leaphorn sorted through the big case first. It held a spare suit, dark gray and of some expensive fabric, but looking much used. A sweater. Two dark blue neckties. White, long-sleeved shirts, some clean and neatly folded, some used and folded into a laundry sack. Eight altogether. Three used. Five clean. Leaphorn checked his notes. The neck and arm sizes matched the shirt on the corpse. Shorts and undershirts, also white. Same total, same breakdown. Same with socks, except the color now was black. He thought about the numbers and the timetable. He’d check but it seemed about right. If this was indeed the luggage of Pointed Shoes, then he had in fact been about three shirts west of Washington by the time he reached Gallup. Wearing shirt four when he was stabbed, with five clean ones to take him to where he was going. Or—if he was simply going to see Agnes Tsosie—home again to Washington.

The smaller bag contained a jumble of things. Leaphorn glanced up from it but Dockery didn’t give him a chance to ask the question.

“One of the cleanup crew packed it,” Dockery said. “Just dumped all the stuff that was around the roomette into the bag. I’ve got his name somewhere. The FBI had him in and talked to him when they checked on it.”

“So this would be everything left lying around?” Leaphorn asked. And Dockery nodded his agreement. But it wasn’t everything, of course, Leaphorn knew. Odds and ends that seemed to have no value would have been discarded. Old newspapers, notes, empty envelopes, just the sort of stuff that might be most helpful would have been thrown away.

But what hadn’t been thrown away was also helpful. First, Leaphorn noticed an almost empty tube of Fixodent and a small can of denture cleaner. He had expected to find them. If he hadn’t he would have doubted that this was the luggage of a man who wore false teeth. Three books, all printed in Spanish, added another bit of support. The clothing Pointed Shoes had been wearing had looked old-fashioned and foreign. So did the clothing in the suitcase. He found a thin little notebook, covered in black plastic, glanced at it, and set it aside. Under a sweater in the bag he found two pots, each wrapped in newspaper. He examined them. They were the sort Pueblo Indians made to sell to tourists—small, one with a black-on-white lizard design, the other geometric. Probably they had been purchased as gifts at the Amtrak station in Albuquerque, where such things were sold beside the track. But the pots interested Leaphorn less than the newspaper pages in which the purchaser had cushioned them.

Spanish again. Leaphorn unfolded a wad of pages, looking for the name and the date. The name was El Crepúsculo de Libertad. Something-or-other of Liberty. Leaphorn’s working vocabulary in Spanish was mostly the Gallup-Flagstaff wetback variety. Now he ransacked his memory of the twelve credit hours he’d taken at Arizona State. He came up with “sunrise,” or perhaps “twilight.” Dawn seemed more likely. The Dawn of Liberty. The date on the page was late October, about two weeks before Pointed Shoes had been knifed. Leaphorn glanced at the headlines, getting only a word or two, but enough to guess the subject was politics. Neither of the crumpled pages included a place of publication.

Leaphorn folded them into his pocket and sorted through the odds and ends in the bottom of the bag. He extracted a sheet of white note-paper, folded vertically as if to fit into a pocket. On it, someone had written what seemed to be a checklist.

Pockets

Prescription bottles eyeglasses (check case, too)

dentures (if any)

labels in coats address books, etc.

letters, envelopes book plats (plates?) stuff written in books addresses on mags, etc.

Leaphorn stared at the list, thinking. He showed it to Dockery. “What do you think of this?”

Dockery looked at it. “Looks like some sort of shopping list,” Dockery said. “No, it’s not that. Reminders, maybe. Things to do.”

Leaphorn put the list on the desk. He picked up the notebook he’d set aside, opened it. Several pages had been torn out. The writing in it was in Spanish, done with blue ink in a small, careful hand. He got out his wallet, extracted the note he’d found in the dead man’s shirt pocket. The handwriting matched the small, neat penmanship in the notebook. And it looked nothing at all like the handwriting on the list.

“Do you happen to know if that fellow had a roommate?” he asked.

“Just the single occupant,” Dockery said.

“Any sign somebody broke in?”

“Not that I know of,” Dockery said. “And I think I would have heard. I’m sure I would have. That’s the sort of thing that would get around.” He fished a pack of Winstons from his desk drawer, offered one to Leaphorn.

“I finally managed to quit,” Leaphorn said.

Dockery lit up, exhaled a blue cloud. “What are you fellows looking for, anyway?”

“What did the FBI tell you?”

Dockery laughed. “Not a damned thing. It was some young fella. He didn’t tell me squat.”

“We found the body of a man beside the tracks east of Gallup. Stabbed. All identification gone. False teeth missing.” Leaphorn tapped the Fixodent with a finger. “Turns out the Amtrak had an emergency there at the right time. Turns out the baggage unclaimed from this roomette has also been stripped of all identification. The clothing we have here in this bag is the same size and type the corpse was wearing. So we think it’s likely that the man who reserved this roomette under the phony name was the victim.”

“Hey, now,” Dockery said. “That’s interesting.”

“Also,” Leaphorn added slowly, looking at Dockery, “we think that someone—probably the person who knifed our victim—got into this roomette, searched through his stuff, and took out everything that would help identify the corpse.”

“Have you talked to the attendant?” Dockery asked.

“I’d like to,” Leaphorn said. “And whoever it was who cleaned up the room, and packed up the victim’s stuff.”

“He saw somebody in that roomette,” Dockery said.

Leaphorn stopped leafing through the notebook and stared at Dockery. “He told you that?”

“Conductor on that run’s a guy named Perez, an old-timer. He used to be our chapter chairman in the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. He told me he and the guy traveling in that roomette would chat in Spanish now and then. You know, just polite stuff. He said the guy was a nice man, and kind of sickly. Had some sort of heart condition and the altitude out there had been bothering him. So when they had that non-scheduled stop there in New Mexico, after they got the train rolling again, Perez checked at the roomette to see if this guy needed any help getting off at Gallup.” Dockery paused, ashed his cigarette into something invisible in his desk drawer, inhaled more smoke. Through the window behind him Leaphorn noticed it was raining hard now.

“There was a man in there. Perez said that he tapped on the door and when nobody answered it, he was uneasy about this sick passenger so he unlocked it. And he said there was a man in there. He asked Perez what he wanted, and Perez told him he was checking to see if the passenger needed any help. The man said ‘No help needed’ and shut the door.” Dockery blew a smoke ring. “Seemed funny to Perez because he said he couldn’t see his passenger back in the roomette and he’d never seen the passenger and this guy together. So he was watching for the passenger when they made the Gallup stop. Didn’t see him get off so he tapped at the door again and nobody answered. So he unlocked the door and went in and all this stuff was in there but no passenger.” Dockery stopped, waiting for reaction.

“Odd,” Leaphorn said.

“Damn right,” Dockery agreed. “It’s the sort of thing you remember.”

“You tell the FBI agent about this?”

“Didn’t really get a chance. He just wanted to look at the bags and be on his way.”

“Could I talk to Perez?”

“He’s on the same run,” Dockery said. He fished a timetable out of his drawer and handed it to Leaphorn. “Call some station a stop ahead where they stop long enough to get him to the telephone. He’ll call you back. He’d be damned interested in what happened to his passenger.”

Leaphorn was thumbing his way through the notebook a second time, making notes in his own notebook. Most of the pages were blank. Some contained only initials and what seemed to be telephone numbers. Leaphorn copied them off. One page contained only two letter-number combinations. Most of the notations seemed to concern meetings. The one Leaphorn was looking at read, “Harrington. Cuarto 832. 3 p.”

“Harrington,” Leaphorn said. “Would that be a hotel?”

“It’s downtown,” Dockery said. “Over on E Street and not far from the Mall. Sort of lower middle class. They let it run down. Usually when that happens somebody buys it and turns it into offices.”

Leaphorn wrote the address and room number in his notebook. At the top of the next page “AURANOFIN” was written in capital letters, followed by “W1128023.” He jotted that down, too. Below, on the same page, a notation touched a faint chord in Joe Leaphorn’s excellent memory. It was a name, slightly unusual, that he’d seen somewhere before.

The man with the pointed shoes had written: “Natl. Hist. Museum. Henry Highhawk.”

Chapter Eleven

« ^ »

Janet Pete decided they would take the Metro from the Smithsonian Station up to Eastern Market. It cost only eighty cents a ticket, and was just as fast as a taxi. Then, too, it would give Jim Chee a chance to see the Washington subway. As Chee was wise enough to guess, Janet wanted to play city mouse to his country mouse. That was okay with Chee. He could see that Janet Pete’s self-esteem could use a little burnishing.

“Not like New York,” Janet said. “It’s clean and bright and fast and you feel perfectly safe. Not at all like New York.” Chee, who had only heard rumors of the New York subway, nodded. He’d always wanted to ride the New York subway. But maybe this trip would be interesting, too.

It was. The soaring waffled ceiling, the machines which dispensed paper slips as tickets along with the proper change, the gates which accepted those paper slips, opened, and then returned the slips, the swarm of people conditioned to avoid human contact—eye, knee, or elbow. Chee clung to the bracket by the sliding door and inspected them. It surprised him, at first, that he wasn’t being inspected in return. He must look distinctly different: his best felt reservation hat with its silver band, his best leather jacket, his best boots, his rawboned, weather-beaten, homely Navajo face. But the only glances he drew were quick and secretive. He was politely ignored. That seemed odd to Chee.

And there were other oddities. He’d presumed the subway would be used by the working class. The blue-collar people were here, true enough, but there was more than that. He could see three men and one woman in navy uniforms, with enough stripes on their sleeves to indicate membership in the privileged class. Since rank had come young for them, they would be graduates of the Naval Academy. They would be people with political connections and old family money. At least half the white men, and about that mix of blacks, wore the inevitable dark three-piece suit and dark tie of the Eastern Establishment, or perhaps here it was the Federal Bureaucracy. The women wore mostly skirts and high heels. Chee’s study of anthropology at the University of New Mexico had led him into sociology courses. He remembered a lecture on those factors which condition humans and thereby form culture. He felt detached from this subway crowd, an invisible entity looking down on a species that had evolved to survive overcrowding, to endure aggression, to survive despite what old Professor Ebaar called “intraspecies hostility.”

On the long ride up the escalator to what his own Navajo Holy People would have called the Earth Surface World, Chee mentioned these impressions to Janet Pete.

“Will you ever feel at home here?” he asked. She didn’t answer until they reached the top and walked out into the dim twilight, into what had become something between drizzle and mist.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so once. But it’s hard to handle. A different culture.”

“And you don’t mean different from Navajo?”

She laughed. “No. I don’t mean that. I guess I mean different from the empty West.”

Henry Highhawk’s place was about seven blocks from the Metro station—a narrow, two-story brick house halfway down a block of such narrow houses. Tied to the pillar just beside the mailbox was something which looked like a paho. Chee inspected it while Janet rang the bell. It was indeed a Navajo prayer stick, with the proper feathers attached. If Highhawk had made it, he knew what he was doing. And then Highhawk was at the door, inviting them in. He was taller than Chee remembered him from the firelight at Agnes Tsosie’s place. Taller and leaner and more substantial, more secure in his home territory than he had been surrounded by a strange culture below the Tsosies’ butte. The limp, which had touched Chee with a sense of pity at the Tsosie Yeibichai, seemed natural here. The jeans Highhawk wore had been cut to accommodate the hinged metal frame that reinforced his short leg. The brace, the high lift under the small left boot, the limp, all of them seemed in harmony with this lanky man in this crowded little house. He had converted his Kiowa-Comanche braids into a tight Navajo bun. But nothing would convert his long, bony, melancholy face into something that would pass for one of the Dineh. He would always look like a sorrowful white boy.

Highhawk was in his kitchen pouring coffee before he recognized Chee. He looked at Chee intently as he handed him his cup.

“Hey,” he said, laughing. “You’re the Navajo cop who arrested me.”

Chee nodded. Highhawk wanted to shake hands again—a “no hard feelings” gesture. “Policeman, I mean,” Highhawk amended, his face flushed with embarrassment. “It was very efficient. And I appreciated you getting that guy to drive that rent-a-car back to Gallup for me. That saved me a whole bunch of money. Probably at least a hundred bucks.”

“Saved me some work, too,” Chee said. “I would have had to do something about it the next morning.” Chee was embarrassed, too. He wasn’t accustomed to this switch in relationships. And Highhawk’s behavior puzzled him a little. It was too deferential, too—Chee struggled for the word. He was reminded of a day at his uncle’s sheep camp. Three old dogs, all shaggy veterans. And the young dog his uncle had won somewhere gambling. His uncle lifting the young dog out of the back of the pickup. The old dogs, tense and interested, conscious that their territory was being invaded. The young dog walking obliquely toward them, head down, tail down, legs bent, sending all the canine signals of inferiority and subjection, deferring to their authority.

“I’m Bitter Water Dinee,” Highhawk said. He looked shy as he said it, tangling long, slender fingers. “At least my grandmother was, and so I guess I can claim it.”

Chee nodded. “I am one of the Slow Talking Dineh,” he said. He didn’t mention that his father’s clan was also Bitter Water, which made it Chee’s own ”born for“ clan. That made him and Highhawk related on their less important paternal side. But then, after two generations under normal reservation circumstances, that secondary paternal link would have submerged by marriages into other clans. Chee considered it, and felt absolutely no kinship link with this strange, lanky man. Whatever his dreams and pretensions, Highhawk was still a belagaana.

They sat in the front room then, Chee and Janet occupying a sofa and Highhawk perched on a wooden chair. Someone, Chee guessed it had been Highhawk, had enlarged the room by removing the partition which once had separated it from a small dining alcove. But most of this space was occupied by two long tables, and the tables were occupied by tools, by what apparently had been a section of tree root, by a roll of leather, a box of feathers, slabs of wood, paint jars, brushes, carving knives—the paraphernalia of Highhawk’s profession.

“You had something to tell me,” Highhawk said to Janet. He glanced at Chee.

“Your preliminary hearing has been set,” Janet said. “We finally got them to put it on the calendar. It’s going to be two weeks from tomorrow and we have to get some things decided before then.“

Highhawk grinned at her. It lit his long, thin face and made him look even more boyish. “You could have told me that on the telephone,” he said. “I’ll bet there was more than that.” He glanced at Chee again.

Chee got up and looked for a place to go. “I’ll give you some privacy,” he said.

“You could take a look at my kachina collection,” Highhawk said. “Back in the office.” He pointed down the hallway. “First door on the right.”

“It’s not all that confidential,” Janet said. “But I can imagine what the bar association would say about me talking about a plea bargain with a client right in front of the arresting officer.”

The office was small and as cluttered as the living area. The desk was a massive old roll top, half buried under shoeboxes filled with scraps of cloth, bone fragments, wood, odds and ends of metal. A battered cardboard box held an unpainted wooden figure carved out of what seemed to be cottonwood root. It stared up at Chee through slanted eye sockets, looking somehow pale and venomous. Some sort of fetish or figurine, obviously. Something Highhawk must be replicating for a museum display. Or could it be the Tano War God? Another box was beside it. Chee pulled back the flaps and looked inside it. He looked into the face of Talking God.

The mask of the Yeibichai was made as the traditions of the Navajos ruled it must be made—of deerskin surmounted by a bristling crown of eight eagle feathers. The face was painted white. Its mouth protruded an inch or more, a narrow tube of rolled leather. Its eyes were black dots surmounted by painted brows. The lower rim of the mask was a ruff of fox fur. Chee stared at it, surprised. Such masks are guarded, handed down in the family only to a son willing to learn the poetry and ritual of the Night Chant, and to carry the role his father kept as a Yeibichai dancer.

Keepers of such masks gave the spirits that lived within them feedings of corn pollen. Chee examined this mask. He found no sign of the smearing pollen would have left on the leather. It was probably a replica Highhawk had made. Even so, when he closed the cardboard flaps on the box, he did so reverently.

Three shelves beside the only window were lined with the wooden figures of the kachina spirits. Mostly Hopi, it seemed to Chee, but he noticed Zuni Mudheads and the great beaked Shalako, the messenger bird from the Zuni heavens, and the striped figures of Rio Grande Pueblo clown fraternities. Most of them looked old and authentic. That also meant expensive.

Behind him in the front room, Chee heard Janet’s voice rise in argument, and Highhawk’s laugh. He presumed Janet was telling her client during this ironic gesture at confidentiality what she had already told Chee on the walk from the subway. The prosecutor with jurisdiction over crime in Connecticut had more important things on his mind than disturbed graves, especially when they involved a minority political gesture. He would welcome some sort of plea-bargain compromise. Highhawk and attorney would be welcome to come in and discuss it. More than welcome.

“I don’t think this nut of mine will go for it,” Janet had told Chee. “Henry wants to do a Joan of Arc with all the TV cameras in sharp focus. He’s got the speech already written. ’If this is justice for me, to go to jail for digging up your ancestors, where then is the justice for the whites who dug up the bones of my ancestors?’ He won’t agree, not today anyway, but I’ll make the pitch. You come along and it will give you a chance to talk to him and see what you think.”

And, sure enough, from the combative tone Chee could hear in Highhawk’s voice, Janet’s client wasn’t going for it. But what the devil was Chee supposed to learn here? What was he supposed to think? That Highhawk was taller than he remembered? And had changed his hairstyle? That wasn’t what Janet expected. She expected him to smell out some sort of plot involving her law firm, and a fellow following her, and a big corporation developing land in New Mexico. He looked around the cluttered office. Fat chance.

But it was interesting. Flaky as he seemed, Highhawk was an artist. Chee noticed a half-finished Mudhead figure on the table and picked it up. The traditional masks, as Chee had seen them at Zuni Shalako ceremonials, were round, clay-colored, and deformed with bumps. They represented the idiots born after a daughter of the Sun committed incest with her brother. Despite the limiting conventions of little round eyes and little round mouth, Highhawk had carved into the small face of this figurine a kind of foolish glee. Chee put it down carefully and reinspected the kachinas on the shelf. Had Highhawk made them, too? Chee checked. Some of them, probably. Some looked too old and weathered for recent manufacture. But perhaps Highhawk’s profession made him skilled in aging, too.

It was then he noticed the sketches. They were stacked on the top level of the roll-top desk, done on separate sheets of heavy artist’s paper. The top one showed a boy, a turkey with its feathers flecked with jewels, a log, smoke rising from it as it was burned to hollow it into a boat. The setting was a riverbank, a cliff rising behind it. Chee recognized the scene. It was from the legend of Holy Boy, the legend reenacted in the Yeibichai ceremony. It showed the spirit child, still human, preparing for his journey down the San Juan River with his pet turkey. The artist seemed to have captured the very moment when the illness which was to paralyze him had struck the child. Somehow the few lines which suggested his naked body also suggested that he was falling, in the throes of anguish. And above him, faintly in the very air itself, there was the blue half-round face of the spirit called Water Sprinkler.

The sound of Highhawk's laugh came from the adjoining room, and Janet Pete's earnest voice. Chee sorted through the other sketches. Holy Boy floating in his hollow log, prone and paralyzed, with the turkey running on the bank beside him—neck and wings outstretched in a kind of frozen panic; Holy Boy, partially cured but now blind, carrying the crippled Holy Girl on his shoulders; the two children, hand in hand, surrounded by the towering figures of Talking God, Growling God, Black God, Monster Slayer, and the other yei—all looking down on the children with the relentless, pitiless neutrality of the Navajo gods toward mortal men. There was something in this scene—something in all these sketches now that he was aware of it—that was troubling. A sort of surreal, off-center dislocation from reality. Chee stared at the sketches, trying to understand. He shook his head, baffled.

Aside from this element, he was much impressed both by Highhawk’s talent and by the man’s knowledge of Navajo metaphysics. The poetry of the Yeibichai ceremonial usually used didn’t include the role of the girl child. Highhawk had obviously done his homework.

The doorbell rang, startling Chee. He put down the sketch and went to the office door. Highhawk was talking to someone at the front door, ushering him into the living room.

It was a man, slender, dark, dressed in the standard uniform of Washington males.

“As you can see, Rudolfo, my lawyer is always on the job,” Highhawk was saying. The man turned and bowed to Janet Pete, smiling.

It was Rudolfo Gomez, Mr. Bad Hands.

“I’ve come at a bad time,” Bad Hands said. “I didn’t notice Miss Pete’s car outside. I didn’t realize you were having a conference.”

Jim Chee stepped out of the office. Bad Hands recognized him instantly, and with a sort of controlled shock that seemed to Chee to include not just surprise but a kind of dismay.

“And this is Jim Chee,” Highhawk said. “You gentlemen have met before. Remember? On the reservation. Mr. Chee is the officer who arrested me. Jim Chee, this is Rudolfo Gomez, an old friend.”

“Ah, yes,” Bad Hands said. “Of course. This is an unexpected pleasure.”

“And Mr. Gomez is the man who put up my bail,” Highhawk said to Chee. “An old friend.”

Bad Hands was wearing his gloves. He made no offer to shake hands. Neither did Chee. It was not, after all, a Navajo custom.

“Sit down,” Highhawk said. “We were talking about my preliminary hearing.”

“I’ve come at a bad time,” Bad Hands said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“No. No,” Janet Pete said. “We’re finished. We were just leaving.” She gave Chee the look.

“Right,” Chee said. “We have to go.”

A cold wind out of the northwest had blown away the drizzle. They walked down the steps from Highhawk’s porch and passed a blue Datsun parked at the sidewalk. It wasn’t the car Bad Hands had been driving at the Agnes Tsosie place, but that had been three thousand miles away. That one was probably rented. “What’d you think?” Janet Pete asked.

“I don’t know,” Chee said. “He’s an interesting man.”

“Gomez or Highhawk?”

“Both of them,” Chee said. “I wonder what happened to Gomez’s hands. I wonder why Highhawk calls him an old friend. But I meant Highhawk. He’s interesting.”

“Yeah,” Janet said. “And suicidal. He’s flat determined to go to jail.” They walked a little. “Stupid son of a bitch,” she added. “I could get him off with some community service time and a suspended sentence.”

“You know anything about this Gomez guy?” Chee asked.

“Just what I told you and what Highhawk said. Old friends. Gomez posted his bail.”

’They’re not old friends,“ Chee said. ”I told you that. I saw them meet at that Yeibichai where I arrested him. Highhawk had never seen the guy before.“

“You sure of that? How do you know?”

“I know,” Chee said.

Janet put her hand on his arm, slowed. “There he is,” she said in a tiny voice. “That car. That’s the man who’s been following me.”

The car was parked across the street from them. An aging Chevy two-door, its medium color hard to distinguish in the shadows.

“You sure?” Chee said.

“See the radio antenna? Bent like that? And the dent in the back fender? It’s the same car.” Janet was whispering. “I really looked at it. I memorized it.”

What to do? His inclination was to ignore this situation, to simply walk past the car and see what happened. Nothing would happen, except Janet would think he was a nerd. He felt uneasy. On the reservation, he would have simply trotted across the street and confronted the driver. But confront him with what? Here Chee felt inept and incompetent. This entire business seemed like something one saw on television. It was urban. It seemed dangerous but it was probably just silly. What the devil would the Washington Police Department recommend in such a circumstance?

They were still walking very slowly. “What should we do?” Janet asked.

“Stay here,” Chee said. “I’ll go see about it.”

He walked diagonally across the street, watching the dim light reflecting from the driver’s-side window. What would he do if the window started down? If he saw a gun barrel? But the window didn’t move.

Beside the car now, Chee could see a man behind the steering wheel, looking at him.

Chee tapped on the glass. Wondering why he was doing this. Wondering what he would say.

Nothing happened. Chee waited. The man behind the wheel appeared to be motionless.

Chee tapped on the window again, rapping the glass with the knuckles of his right hand.

The window came down, jerkily, squeaking.

“Yeah?” the man said. He was looking up at Chee. A small face, freckled. The man had short hair. It seemed to be red. “Whaddaya want?”

Chee wanted very badly to get a better look at the man. He seemed to be small. Unusually small. Chee could see no sign that he was armed, but that would be hard to tell in the darkness of the front seat.

“The lady I’m with, she thinks you’ve been following her,” Chee said. “Any reason for her to think that?”

“Following her?” The man leaned forward toward the window, looking past Chee at Janet Pete waiting across the street. “What for?”

“I’m asking if you’ve been following her,” Chee said.

“Hell, no,” the man said. “What is this anyway? Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a cop,” Chee said, thinking as he said it that it was the first smart thing he’d said in this conversation. And it was more or less true. A good thing to have said as long as this guy didn’t ask for identification.

The man looked up at him. “You sure as hell don’t look like a cop to me,” he said. “You look like an Indian. Let’s see some identification.”

“Let’s see your identification,” Chee said.

“Ah, screw this,” the man said, disappearing from the window. The glass squeaked as he rolled it up. The engine started. The headlights came on. The car rolled slowly away from the curb and down the street. It made a careful right turn and disappeared. Absolutely no hurry.

Chee watched it go. Through the back window he noticed that only the top of the driver’s head protruded above the back of the seat. A very small driver.

Chapter Twelve

« ^ »

Since boyhood Fleck had been one of those persons who like to worry about one thing at a time. This morning he wanted to worry only about Mama. What the devil was he going to do about her? He was up against the Fat Man’s deadline. Get her out of that nursing home. “Get her out now!” the Fat Man had shouted it at him. “Not one more day!” The only place he’d found to put her wanted first month and last month in advance. With all those so-called incidental expenses they always stuck you with for the private room, that added up to more than six thousand dollars. Fleck had most of it. Plus he had ten thousand coming, and overdue. But that didn’t help him right now. He’d scared the Fat Man enough to hold him a day or two. But he couldn’t count on much more than that. The son of a bitch was the kind who just might call the cops in on him. That wasn’t something Fleck wanted to deal with. Not with Mama involved. He had to get the ten thousand.

There was another problem. He had to give some thought to that cowboy who’d walked over to his car last night and tapped at the window. What the hell did that mean? The guy looked like an Indian, and he was with that Indian woman who’d been visiting Highhawk. But what did it mean to Fleck? Fleck smelled cop. He sensed danger. There was more going down here than he knew about. That worried him. He needed to know more, and he intended to.

Fleck pulled into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking area. He was a little early but he noticed that the Ford sedan with the telephone company symbol was already parked. His man was on a stool, the only customer in the place, eating something with a fork. Fleck took the stool next to him.

“You got it?” Fleck asked.

“Sure. You got fifty?”

Fleck handed the man two twenties and a ten and received a folded sheet of paper. He felt foolish as he did it. If he was smart, he could probably have found a way to get this information free without paying this creep in the telephone company. Maybe it was even in the library. He unfolded the paper. It was a section torn from a Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau map of the District of Columbia.

“I circled the area where they use the 266 prefix,” the man said. “And the little x marks are where the public phone booths are.”

Only a few x’s, Fleck noticed. Less than twenty. He commented on it.

“It’s mostly a residential district,” the man explained, “and part of the embassy row. Not much business for pay phones out there. You want a doughnut?”

“No time,” Fleck said, getting up.

“Haven’t heard much from you lately,” the man said. “You going out of business?”

“I’m in a little different line of work right now,” Fleck said, walking toward the door. He stopped. “Would you happen to know of any good nursing homes? Where they take good care of old people?”

“Don’t know nothing about ’em,” the man said.

Fleck hurried, even though he had until two P.M. He started on Sixteenth Street, because that’s where the countries without enough money to build on Massachusetts Avenue mostly located their embassies. None of the numbers matched there, although he found two booths with 266 numbers The Client had used earlier. He moved to Seventeenth Street and then Eighteenth. It was there he found the number he was scheduled to call at two P.M. Fleck backed out of the booth and looked up and down the street. No other pay booths in sight. He’d have to rent the car equipped with a mobile telephone. He’d reserved one at Hertz last night, just in case it worked out this way.

Fleck spent the next two hours driving out to Silver Spring and checking on a rest home he’d heard about out there. It was a little cheaper but the linoleum on the floors was cracked and streaked with grime and the windows hadn’t been washed and the woman who ran the place had a mean-looking mouth. He picked up the rent-a-car a little after one, a black Lincoln town car which was too big and too showy for Fleck’s taste but which would look natural enough in Washington. He made sure the telephone worked, put his Polaroid camera on the front seat beside him, and drove back to Eighteenth Street. He parked across the street and a little down the block from the phone booth, called it, left his receiver open, and walked down the sidewalk far enough to hear the ringing in the booth. Then he sat behind the wheel, slumped down to be less visible. He waited. While he waited, he thought.

First he went over his plan for this telephone call. Then he thought about the cowboy walking across the street and rapping at his window. If he was an Indian—and he looked like one—it might tie back to the killing. He’d left the train at the little town in New Mexico. Gallup, it was. Indians everywhere you looked. Probably they even had Indian cops and maybe one of them was looking into it. If that was true it meant they had tracked him back to Washington and somehow or other tied something together with that silly-looking bastard who wore his hair in a bun. That meant they must know a hell of a lot more about what Fleck was involved with than Fleck knew himself.

That thought made him uneasy. He shifted in the seat and looked out the window at the weather, getting his mind off what would happen to him if the police ever had him in custody, with his fingerprints matched and making the circuit. If it ever got that far, he could kiss his ass good-bye. He could never, ever let that happen. What would Mama do if it did?

If he could only find someplace where her always getting even didn’t get Mama into trouble. She was too old for that now. She couldn’t get away with it like when she was healthy. Like that time when they were living down there near Tampa when Mama was young and the landlord got the sheriff on to them to make them move out. He remembered Mama down on her stomach behind the stove loosening up something or other on the gas pipe with Delmar standing there handing her the tools. “You can’t let the bastards get up on you,” she was saying. “You hear that, Delmar? If you don’t even it up, they grind you down even more. They spit on you ever’ living time if you don’t teach them you won’t let them do it.”

And they had almost spit on them that time, if Mama hadn’t been so smart. Some of the neighbors had seen Delmar down there that night just before the explosion and the big fire. And they told on him, and the police came there to the Salvation Army shelter where Mama was keeping them and they took Delmar off with them. And then he and Mama had gone down to the sheriffs office and he told them it was him, not Delmar, the neighbors had seen. And it had worked out just like Mama had said it would. They had to go easy on him because he was only thirteen and it was a first offense on top of that, and they’d have to handle him in juvenile court. But with Delmar being older, and with shoplifting and car theft and assault already on his books, they would try him as an adult. Fleck had only got sixty days in the D Home and a year’s probation out of that one. Mama had always been good at handling things.

But now she was just too old and her mind was gone.

Fleck’s reverie was ended by a woman hurrying around the corner toward him. She wore a raincoat, something shiny and waterproof over her head, and was carrying a plastic sack. She walked past Fleck’s Lincoln without a glance. While he watched her in the rearview mirror, another figure appeared at the corner ahead of him. A man in a dark blue raincoat and a dark gray hat. He carried an umbrella and as he hesitated at the curb, looking for traffic, he opened it.

It had started to rain, streaking the car windows, pattering against the windshield. Fleck glanced at his watch. Seventeen minutes until two. If this was his man, the man was early. He crossed the street, slanting the umbrella against the rain, and hurried down the sidewalk toward the telephone booth. He walked past it.

Fleck slumped down in the seat, too low to see or be seen. He waited. Then he pushed himself up. He used the electric control to adjust the side mirror, found the man just as he turned the corner behind the car. Probably someone with nothing to do with this business, Fleck thought. He relaxed a little. He glanced at his watch again. Waited.

What Mama had always taught Delmar and him had saved him there in the Joliet State Penitentiary, that was certain enough. It had been hard to do it. Things are always hard when you’re a little man, and you’re young. He thought they’d kill him if he tried it. But it had saved him. He couldn’t have lived through those years if he’d let them spit on him. He’d have died. Or worse than that, been like the little pet animals they turned their baby dolls into. Three of them had been after him. Cassidy, Neal, and Dalkin, those were their names. Cassidy had been the biggest, and the one Fleck had been the most afraid of, and the one he’d decided he had to kill first. But looking back on it, knowing what he knew now, Dalkin was really the dangerous one. Because Dalkin was smart. Cassidy had made the move on him first, and when he got away from that, the three of him had got him into a corner in the laundry. He’d never forget that. Never tried to, in fact, because that had been the black, grim, hard-rock bottom of his life and he needed to think of it whenever things were tough, like today. They’d held him down and raped him, Cassidy first. And when they were all finished with him, he had just laid there a moment, not even feeling the pain. He remembered vividly exactly what he had thought. He’d thought: Do I want to stay alive now? And he absolutely didn’t want to. But he remembered what Mama had taught him. And he thought, I’ll get even first. I’ll get that done before I die. And he’d got up and told them all three they were dead men. Three or four other cons had been in the laundry by then. He hadn’t noticed them. He wouldn’t have noticed anyone then, but they got the word out in the yard. Cassidy had beaten him after that, and Dalkin had beaten him, too. But getting even had kept him alive.

It was raining harder now. Fleck turned on the ignition and started the windshield wipers. As he did, the man with the umbrella turned the corner again. He’d circled the block and was walking again down the opposite sidewalk toward the telephone booth. Fleck turned off the wipers and glanced at his watch. Five minutes until two. The Client was punctual. He watched him enter the booth, close the umbrella and the door. Cassidy had been punctual, too. Fleck had gotten the note to him. Printed on toilet paper. “I’ll have something just for you five minutes into the work break. Behind the laundry.”

He gambled that Cassidy would think only of sex. He gambled that a macho two-hundred-and-forty-pounder who could bench press almost four hundred pounds wouldn’t be nervous about a hundred-and-twenty-pounder, the kid the yard called Little Red Shrimp. Sure enough, Cassidy wasn’t nervous. He came around the corner, grinning. He had walked out of the sunlight into the shadow, squinting, reaching out for Fleck when he saw Fleck smiling at him, walking into the shank.

Fleck dialed all but the final digit of the 266 number, glanced at his watch. Almost a minute early. Fleck could still remember the sensation. Holding the narrow blade flat, just as he’d practiced it, feeling it slide between the ribs, flicking the handle back and forth and back again as it penetrated to make certain it cut the artery and the heart. He hadn’t really expected it to work. He expected Cassidy to kill him, or the thing to end with him on trial for premeditated murder and getting nothing better than life and probably the gas chamber. But there was no choice. And Eddy had told him it would be like Cassidy was being struck by lightning if he did it right.

“Do it right, he shouldn’t make a sound,” Eddy had said. “It’s the shock that does it.”

Now it was time. Fleck punched the final digit, heard the beginning of the ring, then The Client’s voice.

Fleck brought him up to date, told him about checking on Highhawk, about the woman lawyer showing up there with the cowboy, about Santero driving up and going in and the woman and the cowboy coming out a minute later. He told him about the cowboy walking right up and tapping on his window. “I circled the block and followed them back to the Eastern Market Metro station, and then I dropped it. There’s just one of me. Now I want to know who that cowboy is. He’s tall. Slender. Dark. Looks like an Indian to me. Narrow face. Leather jacket, boots, cowboy hat, all that. Who the hell is he? Something about him smells like cop to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the woman thought I was following her. I told him he was crazy. Told him to screw off.”

“Amateurs!” The Client’s voice was full of scorn. It took a moment for Fleck to realize he meant Fleck.

Fleck pressed it. “You know anything at all about the cowboy? Know who he is?”

“God knows,” The Client said. “This is the product of you letting Santero slip away from you. We don’t know where he went or who he talked to and we don’t know what he did. I warned you about that.”

“And I told you about it,” Fleck said. “Told you there’s just one of me and seven of them, not counting the womenfolk. I can’t watch them all all the time.”

“Seven?” The Client said. “Was that a slip? You told us you had subtracted one. The old man. You’re expecting us to pay you for that.”

“Six is the correct number,” Fleck said. “Old Man Santillanes is definitely off the list. Did you send the ten thousand?”

“We wait for the full month. Now I wonder if we should also ask to see a little more proof.”

“I sent you the goddamn billfold. And the false teeth.” Fleck sighed. “You’re just stalling,” he said. “I can see that now. I want that money by tomorrow night.”

There was a period of silence from the other end. Fleck noticed the rain had stopped. With his free hand he rolled down the window beside him. Then he picked up the camera and checked the settings.

“The deal is no publicity, no identification for one full month. Then you get the money. After a month. Now I want you to think about Santero. I think he needs to go. The same deal. But remember it can’t happen in the District. We can’t risk that. It should be a long way outside the Beltway. A long way from here. And no chance of identification. No chance at all of identification.”

“I have got to have the ten thousand now,” Fleck said. Never lose your temper, Mama had said. Never show them a thing. About all we got going for us, Mama had always told Delmar and him, is they never expect us to do anything at all but crawl there on the ground on our bellies and wait to get stepped on again.

“No,” The Client said.

“Tell you what. If you’ll have three thousand of it delivered to me tomorrow, then I can wait for the rest of it.“

“You can wait anyway,” The Client said. And hung up.

Fleck put down the telephone and picked up the camera. It rattled against the door, making him aware that he was shaking with rage. He took a deep breath. Held it. Through the range-finder he saw The Client emerge from the telephone booth, umbrella folded. He stood with hand outstretched, looking around, confirming that the rain had stopped. Fleck had taken four shots before he walked down the sidewalk away from him.

Fleck let The Client get well around the corner before he left the car to follow. He kept a block behind him down Eighteenth Street, and then east to Sixteenth. There The Client turned again. He walked down the row of second-string embassies and disappeared down a driveway.

Fleck walked past it with only a single sidelong glance. It was just enough to tell him who he was working for.

Chapter Thirteen

« ^ »

Since Joe Leaphorn and Dockery had arrived a little early, and the Amtrak train had arrived a little late, Leaphorn had been given the opportunity to answer a lot of Dockery’s questions. He’d presumed that Dockery had volunteered to come down to Union Station on his day off because Dockery was interested in murder. And clearly Dockery was interested in that. And he was interested in what Perez might have seen in the roomette of his doomed passenger. But Dockery seemed even more interested in Indians.

“Sort of a fascination with me ever since I was a kid,” Dockery began. “I guess it was all those cowboy and Indian movies. Indians always interested me. But I never did know any. Never had the opportunity.” And Leaphorn, not knowing exactly what to say to this, said: “I never knew any railroad people, either.”

“They have this commercial on TV. Shows an Indian looking at all this trash scattered around the landscape. There’s a tear running down his cheek. You seen that one?”

Leaphorn nodded. He had seen it.

“Are Indians really into that worshiping Mother Earth business?”

Leaphorn considered that. “It depends on the Indian. The Catholic bishop at Gallup, he’s an Indian.”

“But in general,” Dockery said. “You know what I mean.”

“There are all kinds of Indians,” Leaphorn said. “What religion are you?”

“Well, now,” Dockery said. He thought about it. “I don’t go to church much. I guess you’d have to say I’m a Christian. Maybe a Methodist.”

“Then your religion is closer to some Indians’ than mine is,” Leaphorn said.

Dockery looked skeptical.

“Take the Zunis or the Hopis or the Taos Indians for example,” said Leaphorn, who was thinking as he spoke that this sort of conversation always made him feel like a complete hypocrite. His own metaphysics had evolved from the Navajo Way into a belief in a sort of universal harmony of cause and effect caused by God when He started it all. Inside of that, the human intelligence was somehow intricately involved with God. By some definitions, he didn’t have much religion. Obviously, neither did Dockery, for that matter. And the subject needed changing. Leaphorn dug out his notebook, opened it, and turned to the page on which he’d reproduced the list from the folded paper. He asked Dockery if he’d noticed that the handwriting on that paper was different from the fine, careful script in the passenger’s notebook.

“I didn’t take a really close look at it,” Dockery said.

About what Leaphorn had expected. But it was better than talking religion. He turned another page and came to the place he had copied “AURANOFIN W1128023” from the passenger’s notebook. That had puzzled him. The man apparently spoke Spanish, but it didn’t seem to be a Spanish word. Aura meant something more or less invisible surrounding something. Like a vapor. No fin in Spanish, if it held such a phrase, would mean something like “without end.” No sense in that. The number looked like a license or code designation. Perhaps that would lead him to something useful.

He showed it to Dockery. “Can you make any sense out of that?”

Dockery looked at it. He shook his head. “Looks like the number off an insurance policy, or something like that. What’s the word mean?”

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said.

“Sounds like a medicine my wife used to take. Former wife, that is. Expensive as hell. I think it cost about ninety cents a capsule.”

The sound of the train arriving came through the wall. Leaphorn was thinking that in a very few minutes he would be talking to a conductor named Perez, and that there was very little reason to believe Perez could tell him anything helpful. This was the final dead end. After this he would go back to Farmington and forget the man who had kept his worn old shoes so neatly polished.

Or try to forget him. Leaphorn knew himself well enough to recognize his weakness in that respect. He had always had difficulty leaving questions unanswered. And it had become no better with the age that, in his case, hadn’t seemed to have brought any wisdom. All he had gotten out of Dockery was more evidence of how careful the killer of Pointed Shoes had been. That catalog of things on the folded paper must have been intended as a checklist, things to be checked off to avoid leaving behind any identification. The dentures were gone. So were the glasses, and their case, which might have contained a name and address, and prescription bottles which would certainly have a name on them. Prescription bottles were specifically mentioned on the checklist. And judging from the autopsy report the man must have taken medications. But no prescription bottles were in the luggage. He didn’t need more evidence of the killer’s cleverness. What he needed was some clue to the victim’s identity. He would talk to Perez but it would be more out of courtesy—since he had wasted everyone’s time to arrange this meeting—than out of hope.

Perez didn’t think he’d be much help.

“I just got one look at him,” the attendant said, after Dockery had introduced them and led them back to a cold, almost unfurnished room, where the passenger’s luggage sat on a long, wooden table. “I’d noticed this passenger wasn’t feeling all that great so I went by his compartment to see if he needed any help. I heard somebody moving in there but when I tapped on the door, nobody answered. I thought that was funny.”

Perez pushed his uniform cap back to the top of his head and looked at them to see if that needed explanation. It didn’t seem to.

“So, I unlocked it. There’s this man in there, standing over a suitcase. I told him I’d come by to see if my passenger needed a hand and he said something negative. Something like he’d take care of it, or something like that. I remember he looked sort of hostile.”

Perez stopped, looking at them. “Now when I think about that I think I was talking to the guy who had already knifed my passenger to death. And what he was probably thinking about right at that moment was whether he should do it to me, too.”

“What’d you do then?” Dockery asked.

“Nothing. I said, Okay. Or let me know if he needs a hand, or something like that. And then I got out.” Perez looked slightly resentful. “What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know anything was wrong. Far as I know this guy really is just a friend.”

“What did he look like?” Leaphorn asked. He had remembered now why the name Henry Highhawk scribbled in the notebook struck a chord. It was the name of the man who had written Agnes Tsosie about coming to the Yeibichai. The man who had sent his photograph. He felt that odd sort of relief he had come to expect when unconnected things that troubled him suddenly clicked together. Perez would describe a blond man with braided hair and a thin, solemn face—the picture Agnes Tsosie had shown him. Then he’d have another lead away from this dead end.

“I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. “I’d say sort of small. I think he had on a suit coat, or maybe a sports coat. And he had short hair. Red hair. Curly and close to his head. And a freckled face, like a lot of redheads have. Sort of a round face, I think. But he wasn’t fat. I’d say sort of stocky. Burly. Like he had a lot of muscles. But small. Maybe hundred and thirty pounds, or less.“

The good feeling left Leaphorn.

“Any other details? Scars? Limp? Anything like that? Anything that would help identify him?”

“I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. He made a wry face. “Just one look.”

“When did you check the room again?”

“When I didn’t see the passenger get off at Gallup. I sort of was watching for him, you know, because Gallup was his destination. And I didn’t see him. So I thought, well, he got off at another door. But it seemed funny, so when we was ready to pull out west, I took a look.” He shrugged. “The roomette was empty. Nobody home. Just the luggage. So I looked for him. Checked the observation car, and the bar. I walked up and back through all the cars. And then I went back and looked in the room again. Seemed strange to me. But I thought maybe he had got sick and just got off and left everything behind.”

“Everything was unpacked.”

“Unpacked,” Perez agreed. “Stuff scattered around.“ He pointed to the bags. ”I took it and put it in the bags and closed them.“

“Everything?”

Perez looked surprised, then offended.

“Sure, everything. What’d ya think?”

“Newspapers, magazines, empty candy wrappers, paper cups, everything?” Leaphorn asked.

“Well, no,” Perez said. “Not the trash.”

“How about some magazine that might have been worth saving?” Leaphorn phrased the question carefully. Perez was obviously touchy about the question of him taking anything out of the passenger’s room. “Some magazine, maybe, that might have something interesting in it and shouldn’t be thrown away. If it was something he had subscribed to, then it would have an address label on it.”

“Oh,” Perez said, understanding. “No. There wasn’t anything like that. I remember dumping some newspapers in the waste container. I left the trash for the cleaners.”

“Did you leave an empty prescription bottle, or box, or vial, or anything?”

Perez shook his head. “I would have remembered that,” he said. He shook his head again. “Like I’m going to remember that red-headed guy. Standing there looking at me and he had just killed my passenger a few minutes before that.”

In the taxi heading back for his hotel, Leaphorn sorted it out. He listed it, put it in categories, tried to make what little he knew as neat as he could make it. The final summation. Because this was where it finished. No more leads. None. Pointed Shoes would lie in his anonymous grave, forever lost to those who cared about him. If such humans existed, they would go to their own graves wondering how he had vanished. And why he had vanished. As for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, who had no legitimate interest in any of this anyway, he would make a return flight reservation from the hotel. He would return the call of Rodney, who had missed him returning Leaphorn’s call, and take Rodney out to dinner tonight if that was possible. Then he would pack. He would get to the airport tomorrow, fly to Albuquerque, and make the long drive back home to Window Rock. There would be no Emma there waiting for him. No Emma to whom he would report this failure. And be forgiven for it.

The cab stopped at a red light. The rain had stopped now. Leaphorn dug out his notebook, flipped through it, stared again at “AURANOFIN” and the number which followed it. He glanced at the license of the cab driver posted on the back of the front seat. Susy Mackinnon.

“Miss Mackinnon,” he said. “Do you know where there’s a pharmacy?”

“Pharmacy? I think there’s one in that shopping center up in the next block. You feeling okay?”

“I’m feeling hopeful,” Leaphorn said. “All of a sudden.”

She glanced back at him, on her face the expression of a woman who is long past being surprised at eccentric passengers. “I’ve found that’s better than despair,” she said.

The pharmacy in the next block was a Merit Drug. The pharmacist was elderly, gray-haired, and good-natured. “That looks like a prescription number all right,” he said. “But it’s not one of ours.”

“Is there any way to tell from this whose prescription it is? Name, address, so forth?”

“Sure. If you tell me where it was filled. If it was ours, see—any Merit Drug anywhere—then we’d have it on the computer. Find it that way.”

Leaphorn put the notebook back in his jacket pocket. He made a wry face. “So,” he said. “I can start checking all the Washington, D.C., drugstores.”

“Or maybe the suburbs. Do you know if it was filled in the city?”

“No way of guessing,” Leaphorn said. “It was just an idea. Looks like a bad one.”

“If I were you, I’d start with Walgreen’s. There was a W at the start of the numbers, and that looks like their code.”

“You know where the nearest Walgreen’s might be?”

“No. But we’ll look that sucker up,” the pharmacist said. He reached for the telephone book. It proved to be just eleven blocks away.

The pharmacist at Walgreen’s was a young man. He decided Leaphorn’s request was odd and that he should wait for his supervisor, now busy with another customer. Leaphorn waited, conscious that his cab was also waiting, with its meter running. The supervisor was a plump, middle-aged black woman, who inspected Leaphorn’s Navajo Tribal Police credentials and then the number written in his notebook.

She punched at the keyboard of the computer, looking at Leaphorn over her glasses.

“Just trying to get an identification? That right? Not a refill or anything?”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “The pharmacist at another drugstore told me he thought this was your number.”

“It looks like it,” the woman said. She examined whatever had appeared on the screen. Shook her head. Punched again at the keyboard.

Leaphorn waited. The woman waited. She pursed her lips. Punched a single key.

“Elogio Santillanes,” she said. “Is that how you pronounce it? Elogio Santillanes.” She recited a street address and a telephone number, then glanced at the computer screen again. “And that’s apartment three,” she added. She wrote it all on a sheet of note paper and handed it to Leaphorn. “You’re welcome,” she said.

Back in the cab Leaphorn read the address to Miss Susy Mackinnon.

“No more going to the hotel?” she asked.

“First this address,” Leaphorn said. “Then the hotel.”

“Your humor has sure improved,” Miss Mackinnon said. “They selling something in Walgreen’s that you couldn’t get in that other drugstore?”

“The solution to my problem,” Leaphorn said. “And it was absolutely free.”

“I need to remember that place,” Miss Mackinnon said.

The rain had begun again—as much drizzle as rain—and she had the wipers turned to that now-and-then sequence. The blades flashed across the glass and clicked out of sight, leaving brief clarity behind. “You know,” she said, “you’re going to have a hell of a tab. Waiting time and now this trip. I hope you’re good for about thirty-five or forty dollars when you finally get where you’re going. I wouldn’t want to totally tap you out. My intention is to leave you enough for a substantial tip.”

“Um,” Leaphorn said, not really hearing the question. He was thinking of what he would find at apartment number three. A woman. He took that for granted. And what he would say to her? How much would he tell her? Everything, he thought, except the grisly details. Leaphorn’s good mood had been erased by the thought of what lay ahead. But in the long run it would be better for her to know everything. He remembered the endless weeks which led to Emma’s death. The uncertainty. The highs of hope destroyed by reality and followed by despair. He would be the destroyer of this woman’s hope. But then the wound could finally close. She could heal.