The sergeant looked at him. “Bin key?”
“When he left his office last night, he took the key that unlocks all these bins off a hook beside his door and put it in his pocket,” Chee said. “It was on a little plain steel ring.” The killer probably had taken Highhawk’s key to open the bin and to relock it. Unless of course the killer was another museum employee with his (or her) own key.
“You saw him put the key in his pocket?”
Chee nodded. “He took it off the hook. He put it in his right front pants pocket.”
“No such key in his pocket,” the sergeant said. “What you see here is everything he had on him. From the car keys he was carrying, it looks like he was driving a Ford. You know about that? You know the license number?“
“There was a Ford Mustang parked in the driveway by his house. I’d say about five or six years old. I didn’t notice the license. And I don’t know if it was his,” Chee said.
“We’ll get it from Motor Vehicles Division. It’s probably parked somewhere close to here.”
Rodney put the tape recorder beside Highhawk’s possessions on the laboratory table. “I unwired the recorder from the watch. Just in case,” he said. “You want to hear it?”
He removed a pencil from his inside coat pocket, held it over the PLAY key, and glanced up at the sergeant, awaiting a response.
The sergeant nodded. “Sure.”
The first sounds Chee heard sent him back into boyhood, into the winter hogan of Frank Sam Nakai on the west slope of the Chuska Mountains. Bitter cold outside, the cast-iron wood stove under the smoke hole glowing with heat. Frank Sam Nakai, brother of his mother, teaching the children how the Holy People saved the Holy Boy and his sister from the lightning sickness. His uncle sitting on the sheepskin, legs crossed, head back against the blanket hung against the log wall, eyes closed, singing. At first, the voice so low that Cousin Emmett and little Shirley and Chee would have to lean forward to hear them: came the voices of Water Sprinkler, and the male yeis, forming sounds which—being the sounds gods make—would not produce any meaning mere humans could understand.
Chee noticed that both Rodney and the sergeant were looking at him, awaiting an explanation.
“It’s chanting from the Yeibichai,” Chee said. ’The Night Chant.“ That, obviously, explained nothing. ”Highhawk was at this ceremonial the night I arrested him,“ Chee said. ”He was recording it.“
As he said it, the sound of the chanting was replaced by the voice of Henry Highhawk.
There was silence. Chee glanced up. Rodney said: “Well, now—” and then Highhawk’s voice resumed: come to look at this display of masks to look around you in this exhibition, and throughout this museum. Do you see a display of the masks of the gods of the Christian, or of the Jew, or of Islam, or of any other culture strong enough to defend its faith and to punish such a desecration? Where is the representation of the Great God Jehovah who led the Jews out of their bondage in Egypt, or the Mask of Michael the Archangel, or the Mother of the Christian God we call Jesus Christ, or a personification of Jesus himself? You do not see them here. You have here in a storage room of this museum the Tano Pueblo’s representation of one of its holy Twin War Gods. But where is a consecrated Sacred Host from the Roman Catholic cathedral? You will not find it here. Here you see the gods of conquered people displayed like exotic animals in the public zoo. Only the overthrown and captured gods are here. Here you see the sacred things torn from the temples of Inca worshippers, stolen from the holy kivas of the Pueblo people, sacred icons looted from burned tepee villages on the buffalo plains.“
Highhawk’s voice had become higher, almost shrill. It was interrupted by the sound of a great intake of breath. Then a moment of silence. The ambulance crew picked up Highhawk’s stretcher and moved out—leaving only his voice behind. The forensic crew sorted his possessions into evidence bags.
“Do you doubt what I say?” Highhawk’s voice resumed. “Do you doubt that your privileged race, which claims such gentility, such humanity, would do this? Above your head, lining the halls and corridors of this very building, are thousands of cases and bins and boxes. In them you find the bones of more than eighteen thousand of your fellow humans. You will find the skeletons of children, of mothers, of grandfathers. They have been dug out of the burials where their mourning relatives placed them, reuniting them with their Great Mother Earth. They remain in great piles and stacks, respected no more than the bones of apes and…”
Rodney hit the OFF button and looked around him in the resulting silence.
“What do you think? He was going to broadcast this somehow with that mask display he was working on? Was that the plan?”
“Probably,” Chee said. “He seems to be speaking to the audience at the exhibition. Let’s hear the rest of it.”
“Why not?” Rodney said. “But let’s get out of here. Down to Highhawk’s office where I can use the telephone.”
The items from Highhawk’s pockets were in evidence bags now, except for the recorder.
“I’ve got to get moving,” the sergeant said. “I still have some work to do on the Alice Yoakum thing.”
“I’ll bring in the recorder,” Rodney said. “I’ll clean up here.”
“I’ll need to talk to—” The sergeant hesitated, searching for the name. “To Mr. Chee here, and Mr. Leaphorn. I’ll need to get their statements on the record.”
“Whenever you say,” Leaphorn said.
“I’ll bring them in,” Rodney said.
In Highhawk’s office, Rodney put the recorder on the desk top and pushed the PLAY button. Rodney, too, was anxious to hear the rest of it.
“—antelopes. Their children have asked that these bones be returned so that they can again be reunited with their Mother Earth with respect and dignity. What does the museum tell us? It tells us that its anthropologists need our ancestral bones for scientific studies. Why doesn’t it need the ancestral bones of white Americans for these studies? Why doesn’t it dig up your graves? Think of it! Eighteen thousand human skeletons! Eighteen thousand! Ladies and gentlemen, what would you say if the museum looted your cemeteries, if it dug up the consecrated ground of your graveyards in Indianapolis and Topeka and White Plains and hauled the skeletons of your loved ones here to molder in boxes and bins in the hallways? Think about this! Think about the graves of your grandmothers. Help us recover the bones of our own ancestors so that they may again be reunited with their Mother Earth.”
Silence. The tape ran its brief miniature-recorder course and clicked off. Rodney pushed the REWIND button. He looked at Chee. “Quite an argument.”
Chee nodded. “Of course there’s another side to it. An earlier generation of anthropologists dug up most of those bones. And the museum has given a few of them back. I think it sent sixteen skeletons to the Blackfoot Tribe awhile ago, and it says it will return bones if they were stolen from regular cemeteries or if you can prove a family connection.”
Rodney laughed. “Get those skeletons in the lineup,” he said. “Get the kinfolks in and see if they can pick their grannie out from somebody’s auntie.” About a millisecond before he ended that jest, Rodney’s expression shifted from amused to abashed. In the present company, maybe this was no laughing matter. “Sorry,” Rodney said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Now Chee looked amused. “We Navajos aren’t into this corpse fetish business,” he said. “Our metaphysics turns on life, the living. The dead we put behind us. We avoid old bones. You won’t find Navajos asking for the return of their stolen skeletons.”
It was now Leaphorn’s turn to look amused. “As a matter of fact, we are. The Navajo Tribe is asking the museum to send us our skeletons, if the museum has any of them. I think somebody in the tribal bureaucracy decided it was a chance to make a political point. A little one-upmanship on Washington.”
“Any reason to hear this again?” Rodney asked. He slipped the recorder into an evidence bag, sealed it, leaned heavily against the edge of the table
, and sighed. He looked tired, Chee thought, and unhappy.
“I don’t enjoy being involved in things I don’t understand,” Rodney said. “I don’t have the slightest goddamn idea why somebody killed this Highhawk bird, or whether it ties in with that guard being killed, or whether this tape has a damned thing to do with anything. That tape sounds like the Smithsonian Museum might have a motive to knock him off.” Rodney rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and made a wry face. “But I gather that museums tend to wait until you’re dead and then go after your skeleton. So I’d guess that tape doesn’t have much to do with this. And—”
“I’d guess it does,” Chee said.
Leaphorn studied him. He nodded, agreeing. “How?”
“I haven’t thought it through,” Chee said. “But think about it a minute. Highhawk goes to a lot of trouble to get to that Yeibichai to make this tape.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “He wrote to Old Lady Tsosie, didn’t he? He’d have to find a way to run down her address.”
“She was in that big Navajo Reservation article National Geographic ran,” Leaphorn said. “That’s where he got her name.”
“Then he goes all the way out there from Washington, and finds out how to find Lower Greasewood, and the Tsosie place, dreams up that bullshit story about wanting to be a Navajo, and—”
“Maybe not bullshit,” Leaphorn said. “From what you told me about him.”
“No,” Chee said, thoughtfully, “I think maybe not. I think now that might have been part of the genuine Highhawk package. But anyway, it involved a lot of trouble. He must have written that oration he gave we just heard, and then got it dubbed in on the tape. Now why? What's he going to do with it? I think it's obvious he was planting it in that mask exhibit, in his Talking God exhibit. The tape practically says that. And Highhawk has a track record of knowing how to get publicity. The kind to put the heat on the Smithsonian. That tape was sure well designed to do that. Zany enough to make the front page.”
“Did he have it with him when he left you in his office?” Leaphorn asked.
“He had a cardboard box. About three times the size of a shoebox. Anyway, it was big enough for the mask and all. He picked it up just as he was leaving.”
“And that tells us what?” Rodney asked. He shook his head, thinking about it.
Silence in the room. Rodney now slouched in Highhawk’s swivel chair; Chee leaning against the wall in the practiced slouch of a man who had done a lot of leaning against things, a lot of waiting for his age; Joe Leaphorn sitting on the edge of the desk, looking uncomfortable in his three-piece suit, his gray, burr-cut head bowed slightly forward, his expression that of a man who is listening to sounds inside his own head. The quiet air around them smelled of dust and, faintly, of decay.
“Officer Chee here, he and I, we have a problem,” Leaphorn said—half to Rodney and half to the desk. “We are like two dogs who followed two different sets of tracks to the same brush pile. One dog thinks there’s a rabbit under the brush, the other thinks it’s a bobcat. Same brush pile, different information.” He glanced at Chee. “Right?”
Chee nodded.
“As for my end of it, I see the body of a worn-out, toothless man who keeps his old shoes polished. His body is under a chamisa bush in New Mexico. And in the shirt pocket is a note mentioning Agnes Tsosie’s Yeibichai ceremony. When I get out to Agnes Tsosie’s place, I run into the name of Henry Highhawk. He’s coming out. I follow those pointed shoes back to Washington and I find a little den of Chilean terrorists—or, maybe more accurately, the victims of Chilean terror. And right in the next apartment to this den is a little man with red hair and freckles and the torso of a weightlifter who just happens to fit the description of the guy who probably killed Pointed Shoes with his knife. But I’ve come to a dead end. Good idea who killed my man, now. I think that surely the man’s widow, his family, they’ll tell me why. No such luck. Instead of that, they act like they never heard of him.”
Leaphorn sighed, tapped his fingers on the desk top, and continued without a glance at either of his listeners. “I get a make on Mr. Pointed Shoes’ identity from the FBI. It turns out he’s one of the big ones in one of the factions that’s sort of at war with the right-wing government in Chile. Turns out the ins have already killed one of his bunch earlier. So now the mystery is solved. I know who Pointed Shoes is. His name is Santillanes. I know who killed him—or I think I do—and I think I know why. But now I’ve got a new problem. Why were Santillanes’ kinfolks acting that way? It looked like they didn’t want anyone to know the man had been killed.”
Leaphorn’s droning voice stopped for several seconds. “Now why in the world would that be?” he said. He was frowning. He shook his head, looked at Rodney and Chee. “Either one of you want to break in here?”
Neither one did.
“So,” Leaphorn said. “So, I’m almost to the brush pile. Now my question is what the hell is going on here? And for some reason I can’t get Highhawk out of my head. He doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. I think I know how Santillanes found out he should go to the Navajo Reservation to find Highhawk. But I don’t understand why.”
Leaphorn paused again, looked at Chee. “Do you know about this? Right after Highhawk pulled that business of digging up the graves and mailing the bones to the museum, he got the big splash of publicity he wanted. But before anybody could serve a warrant on him, he had dropped out of sight. All his friends and his neighbors could tell anybody looking for him that he was going to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai ceremonial for some relative named Agnes Tsosie. I think Santillanes probably read about his exploits in the paper and went looking for him about the same time the police did. Santillanes got the word that Henry was heading west for the Yeibichai. But he didn’t know it was a month in the future.”
Leaphorn stopped again, inhaled hugely, exhaled, drummed his fingers against the desk top, thinking. Rodney made a sentence-opening sound but cut it off without actually saying anything. But he looked at his watch.
“Why would Chilean politicians want to meet with Henry Highhawk?” Leaphorn asked himself the question. “They had to want to contact him badly enough to send someone three thousand miles, and get him killed, and then send somebody else to complete the mission. And post his bail.” He glanced up at Chee. “That’s right, isn’t it? And Highhawk called that guy with the missing fingers his friend, didn’t he? Any idea how long they’d known each other?”
“They didn’t,” Chee said. “Highhawk was lying. They hadn’t met until the Yeibichai.”
“You sure?” Leaphorn asked.
“I watched them meet,” Chee said. “I’m sure.”
Rodney held up a hand. “Friends, I’ve got to go and do some things. Two or three in fact. I was going to be back at the office about an hour ago. Stick around. I’ll be back.” He slipped off the desk and disappeared into the hallway.
“Every effect has its cause,” Leaphorn said to Chee. “Once in a while, maybe, a star just falls at random. But I don’t believe in random. The Santillanes bunch had a hell of a good reason to chase after Highhawk. What was it?”
“I don’t know,” Chee said. “All I know about the Santillanes bunch is from seeing Bad Hands a couple of times. I got here by a totally different route. And I’ve got a different question under your brush pile.” He sat on the desk about where Rodney had been leaning, thinking, deciding how to explain this premonition, this hunch that had been making him uneasy.
“I keep remembering Highhawk at the Yeibichai,” Chee said. “I was curious about him so I was watching him, standing just a little off to the side where I could see his face. He was cold—” He laughed, glanced at Leaphorn. “Of course he was cold. Everybody’s cold at a Night Chant, but he was colder than most of us because, you know, if you come from the East you think desert country is supposed to be hot, so he wasn’t dressed like us. Just had on a leather jacket. Anyway, he was shivering.” Chee stopped. Why was he telling Leaphorn all this? Highhawk standing, shaking w
ith cold, hugging himself, the wind blowing dust across the dance ground around his ankles, the wavering light from the bonfires turning his face red. His expression had been rapt, and Chee had noticed his lips were moving. Highhawk was singing to himself. Agnes Tsosie had been standing on a blanket spread on the packed earth in front of the medicine hogan attended by the hataalii. Talking God, Humpback God, and Water Sprinkler had been making their slow, stately approach. Chee had edged closer, close enough to hear what Highhawk was chanting. “He stirs. He stirs. He stirs. He stirs,“ Highhawk had been singing. “Now in old age wandering, he stirs.” It had been words from the “Song of Waking” which the hataalii would have sung on the first midnight of the ceremonial, summoning the spirit in the mask from its cosmic sleep to take its part in the ritual. He remembered noticing as Highhawk sang that while some of the words were wrong, the man's expression was deeply reverent.
Now he noticed that Leaphorn’s expression was puzzled. “He was cold,” Leaphorn said. “Yes, but you haven’t made your point.”
“He was a believer,” Chee said. “You know what I mean. Some people come to a ceremonial out of family duty, and some come out of curiosity, or to meet friends. But to some it is a spiritual experience. You can tell by their faces.”
Leaphorn’s expression was still puzzled. “And he was one of those? He believed?”
Yes, Chee thought, Highhawk was one of those. You’re not one, lieutenant. You don’t believe. You see the Navajo Way as a harmless cultural custom. You would be one of those who go only as a family duty. But this crazy white man believed. Truly believed.
Leaphorn waited for that to be explained.
“Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. I don’t think Highhawk would use the yei mask like that. I don’t think he would put it on the head of a manikin in a public display. I don’t think the museum would approve of that either. Despite what Highhawk said. For example, they brought in a hataalii, a man named Sandoval, brought him in to check out the exhibit and make sure Henry wasn’t doing anything sacrilegious. So—” Chee paused, thinking about it.
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