One of them was Joe Leaphorn, which was fortunate on this day because even the short way from Window Rock to Crownpoint involved some seventy miles of mostly empty road.
Plenty of time for conversation. They covered Streib's plans for building a greenhouse behind his home when he retired from the Bureau. They rehashed cases they had worked together, skirted around the sensitive subject of what Leaphorn intended to do with his accumulated leave time, and covered an assortment of gossip about the small world of Indian Country law enforcement. Just as they passed the turnoff to the Nahodshosh Chapter House, they got to the question of why anyone would want to kill a Saint Bonaventure Mission School shop teacher. Theft was clearly the number one choice, since some silver ingots and other materials seemed to be missing from Dorsey's shop.
Trouble over a girlfriend made number two as the motive. Trouble with a student made number three. No number four suggested itself.
Finally, Streib brought up the sensitive subject.
"You going with the professor?"
Leaphorn was sure he didn't want to open this subject to discussion. Not even with Dilly.
"Where? What do you mean?"
"To China with that professor from Northern Arizona University, goddammit," Streib said.
"Bourebonette's the name. I heard that's the plan. What are you being so goddam coy about?"
Leaphorn had never, ever discussed accompanying Bourebonette to China with Dilly or with anyone else that he could think of. It wasn't the sort of thing he would discuss. But it didn't occur to him to be surprised that Dilly knew. In empty country everybody knew everything about everybody. One's inner thoughts seemed to transmit themselves through the clear, dry air without need for verbalizing.
"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "That's the plan."
"That's what I heard," Streib said.
Leaphorn looked at his watch, a $13.99 Casio digital. He pushed the proper buttons and adjusted the seconds.
"I checked it when they gave the time on the radio," he said. "It's a little slow. Or maybe the radio is a little fast. Probably it was exactly right. Makes you wonder why anyone would pay a hundred bucks for a watch. Or one of those five-thousand-dollar jobs."
Streib ignored this signal to change the subject.
"That's a hell of a long ways to go," Streib said. "All the way to China. If you got something going with the lady, why not just stay here? Nobody would care. You're a widower. I think she's single. That's what I heard."
"I always wanted to go to China."
"Yeah," Streib said. "Really. I'll bet you did."
The skepticism provoked Leaphorn. "I used to talk about it with Emma," he said, irritated with himself for explaining this to Streib. "But she didn't like to travel. She went to New York with me once. And once to Washington. But it was really just to keep me company. It made her nervous, being away from the reservation. Even when we just went to Albuquerque. Or Phoenix. She'd be anxious to get home."
"I heard the lady was doing a research project in China. Quite a coincidence." The tone remained skeptical. "Good thing she wasn't doing research on Antarctica or you'd be telling me of your lifelong fascination with penguins."
"Back when I was a grad student at Arizona State I got interested," Leaphorn said. "We had an anthro professor who was into linguistics.
The evolution of languages, that sort of thing. He'd ask me how my grandfather said things, and my relatives. And he'd show me the charts he'd accumulated about the Athabascan languages up and down the Pacific Coast, Canada, Alaska, and across the straits among some of the Siberian tribes. It got me interested."
Leaphorn looked up, made a deprecatory gesture. "You know," he said. "Where's my homeland? Where'd the Dineh come from? Where are my roots?"
"You Navajos came up from the underworld," Streib said. "Up from the fourth world into the fifth world. Through a hollow reed, wasn't it?"
"Flooded out, just like you bilagaani," Leaphorn said. "You guys made yourself an ark out of gopher wood. Hauled out the animals. We had to climb through a hole in the ceiling and the animals had to climb out, too."
"I guess my ancestors—the German ones— came out of Alsace. That part that switches back to France depending on who won the last war. But I never much wanted to go see it."
Streib uncapped his thermos, poured coffee into a cup marked AUSTIN SAM FOR
TRIBAL COUNCIL, NEW LANDS CHAPTER, and handed it to Leaphorn. He poured coffee into the thermos cap for himself. "Maybe if I had a good-looking woman as a traveling companion I'd find Alsace more interesting."
Leaphorn let it pass. Sipped coffee.
Streib grinned at him. "Admit it," he said. "Knock off the bullshit about tracking down your roots. I've met the prof a couple of times. At cultural doings there at the university. She's a nice-looking woman."
Leaphorn finished his coffee slowly.
"Don't tell me you hadn't noticed," Streib said.
"See if you can pour me some more coffee," Leaphorn said, passing the cup. "Without talking."
"I'm not knocking it," Streib said. "I think it's a good idea. Why not? You've been alone now for too damn long. It's making you cranky. The old testosterone must still be working.
Young man like you. You better find yourself a permanent lady or you'll be hanging around the squaw dances and getting yourself into trouble."
Leaphorn thought: A year and eight months and eleven days since the nurse had awakened him in the chair in Emma's room. She slipped away, the nurse had said. Emma had died while both of them were sleeping. Six hundred and twenty-two days. A lot longer if you counted the days before the operation, the days when the tumor had pressed against Emma's brain and cost her her ability to think clearly. It had robbed her of her memory, her happiness, her humor, and her personality, and even—on some terrible days—of her knowledge of who she was, and who he was. He remembered those nights when she would awaken beside him confused and terrified. When…
"Change the subject," Leaphorn said, and Streib instantly detected the anger in his voice.
That took them back to the killing of Eric Dorsey, routine as it seemed. A bit odd, perhaps, with no motive apparent immediately, and no promising suspects. But such things took time to develop, and the case was still fresh.
"One oddity though," Leaphorn said. He told Streib about Delmar Kanitewa running away the day Dorsey was killed, the bludgeon murder of his uncle, and the koshare effigy in Dorsey's shop.
"So," Streib said. "What's the connection?"
"Sounds unlikely," Leaphorn said. "But maybe."
"Or maybe not," Dilly said. "Maybe the kid just happened to take off the same day."
"And the boy's uncle being killed there at Tano. How about that?"
"I know you don't believe in coincidences," Streib said. "But they do happen. For example, you and the lady both wanting to go take a look at China. And this looks like another one.
Unless you can see some possible link."
"I can't," Leaphorn said. "But I'd like it better if we had a suspect in custody."
Which, as it happened, they did.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5
"HIS NAME'S Eugene Ahkeah," said Lieutenant Toddy. "The family lives out toward Coyote Canyon but he's got a place in Thoreau. He works out at the Saint Bonaventure Mission. Sort of a handyman job."
The lieutenant had spread an array of items on his desk top. "When he's sober," he added. He handed Streib an inventory sheet. Streib glanced at it and passed it to Leaphorn.
Cardboard grocery carton in which the following items were found:
•Plastic bread wrapper containing two ingots of silver
Plastic grocery bag containing following items:
•Sand-cast silver bracelet
•Sand-cast silver concha belt
•Hammered silver ornamental pin
•Seven silver belt buckles
•Four ingots of silver
•Ball-peen hammer with bloodstains on hammer head and on handle Leaphorn looked from the list at the array on the table, making an unnecessary check of the inventory. Unneeded but not useless. It kept him from thinking his dreary thoughts.
About the wages of avarice. About, almost certainly, the bloody cost of alcohol among The People, whose hunger was rarely for money. It was for oblivion bought by the bottle.
"Did you send a blood sample off to the lab?" Streib was asking.
"It's ready to go," Toddy said. "We just found this stuff this morning."
"It was under his house?" Streib asked. "That what you said?"
"Actually, it's a mobile home."
"Did you get a search warrant?"
Lieutenant Toddy gave Leaphorn an uneasy sidelong glance.
"We told him we'd gotten this call. A man called—wouldn't give his name—and reported some things taken from Dorsey's shop were under Ahkeah's place. We told Ahkeah we'd get a search warrant if he wanted us to," Toddy said. "And he said there wasn't anything under there. And I told him we'd have to find out for ourselves, one way or the other, and he said, 'Well, let's go see, then.' And he came out and pulled away the plywood he had there to keep the animals out, and there was the box. In plain view. Just pushed back in there."
Lieutenant Toddy paused, wrinkled his forehead at the weirdness of human behavior, and shook his head.
"He pulled the box out himself," Toddy added.
"How did he act then?" Leaphorn asked. "What'd he say? Any explanation?"
Toddy shrugged. "He acted like he'd been drinking. He said, 'How'd that get under there?'"
"Was he drunk?"
"About two-thirds. Maybe four-fifths."
"Any idea at all who the call was from? Did Ahkeah have any idea?"
"The dispatcher took it," Toddy said. "A man. He wouldn't give a name. She said he sounded like an Anglo. And Ahkeah, he acted like he didn't have any idea."
"I'll handle the blood sample," Streib said. "Get it to the lab for you. Did you get a statement from Ahkeah?"
"He said he didn't know anything about it."
Toddy extracted a clipboard from his desk and handed it to Streib. "He said Dorsey was a friend of his. That he didn't kill him."
Streib read, lips pursed. He handed the clipboard to Leaphorn. The statement was brief and Toddy had summarized it well. He'd only left out that Ahkeah wasn't going to talk to anyone anymore until he got a lawyer. Everybody was watching television these days.
Doing it like they did it on TV.
"Did he call a lawyer?" Leaphorn asked.
"He said he didn't have any money so we called DNA for him. He said they were going to send somebody out from Window Rock."
Leaphorn felt one of those uneasy premonitions. The supply of legal aid people at Window Rock was small, of those competent to defend criminal cases even smaller.
"Did they say who they're sending?"
"That woman," Toddy said. "Janet Pete."
"Oh, shit," Leaphorn said.
Streib noticed the tone. "She's trouble?"
"She's the lady friend of my new assistant," Leaphorn said. "At least I think he wants her to be. That's what I hear."
"That could be trouble," Streib said.
"Yes, indeed."
Back in the lockup section, they found Ahkeah dozing on his bunk under the window. He was slightly overweight and slightly gone-to-seed. Leaphorn guessed his age in the late forties. He sat up clumsily into the sunlight, facing them first with the apologetic confusion of one emerging from alcoholic sleep, and then with the defiant, tense look of a worried man. Seeing him now in the bright sunlight, Leaphorn reconsidered his judgment of Ahkeah's age. Maybe early thirties, with fifteen years subtracted from his prime by whiskey.
"I don't want to talk to you," Ahkeah said.
"You don't have to if you don't want to," Streib told him. "We just wondered how that silver, and jewelry, and all that other stuff got under your place. If you could help us with that maybe we could get you out of here."
"I got a lawyer coming," Ahkeah said. "Talk to the lawyer."
"You don't have to talk to us if you don't want. It just saves everybody some time. Maybe it would fix it so you could go on home."
"Or maybe not," Ahkeah said. "I just tell you one thing, though." He wiped his hand across his face and then stared directly into Streib's eyes. "There's no way I'd ever hurt Eric. He was a friend to me. There's no goddam way I'd ever hurt him," he said, and his voice was shaking as he said it. Then Eugene Ahkeah slumped back on his bunk, turned to the wall, and put his pillow over his head.
* * *
The twenty-seven twisting miles up and over Borrego Pass to Thoreau gave them time to talk about Ahkeah.
"He'd be pretty dumb to do it that way, or pretty drunk," Streib said.
"You know," Leaphorn said. "If I had just one single wish, what I think it would be, it would be to get rid of booze. No more beer. No more wine. No more bourbon, or Scotch, or any other damn thing that causes a man to hit his friend on the head with a hammer."
"You think he did it?" Streib's sideways glance showed surprise. "That anonymous telephone tip. I'll bet that makes you uneasy."
"It makes me uneasy some. But that little speech he made there at the end was sort of like a confession."
Streib looked surprised again. "You mean, where he was telling us he'd never hurt Dorsey?"
Leaphorn sighed. "Sounded to me like a drunk trying to convince himself that it was all a bad dream."
The acting assistant director of Saint Bonaventure Indian Mission was named Montoya, but she was clearly a Pueblo Indian and she looked to Leaphorn like a Zuni. She said she didn't know for sure why all that silver hadn't been reported missing from the craft shop inventory but she said she could make an educated guess.
"I'll bet it was because Eric didn't put it down in the first place."
"Why not?" Streib asked.
"Because he was always buying stuff out of his own money. Buying stuff we couldn't afford. Tools. Turquoise. Special fancy woods." She shrugged. "Everything. Eric wasn't very practical."
"So he didn't log it in when it was delivered. Is that what you mean?"
The conversation was getting more specific than the acting assistant director wanted. She looked slightly flustered. "You should be asking Father Haines. He'll be back next Tuesday."
"We'll ask him," Streib said. "We just wanted to hurry things along a little. How about the jewelry? The concha belt. The bracelet."
"I saw something about the belt here on the desk," she said, and fished a piece of salmon-colored notepaper out of the in-basket and read from it. "Tom Tso wants to pick up the concha belt he was finishing in Eric's class. How does he get it? And some other students want to get their projects. Let me know what to tell them.' That's from Mr. Denny. He helps Eric with driving the school buses." She made an odd face, and Leaphorn guessed it was to keep from crying. "Helped Eric, I meant. No more Eric now."
"Mrs. Montoya," Streib said. "I want to ask you to get us a list of everything students had in that craft shop that's missing now. We particularly want to know who was making one of the kachina dolls in there. The koshare. And then could you shed any light on a sort of funny-looking wood and cloth contraption we found on Dorsey's shelf? Looked like it might have been a hand puppet." Streib demonstrated with his own hand. "It looked like a duck."
But Mrs. Montoya was focused on the koshare doll. "Oh, that koshare," she said. "That's my son doing that one." The thought startled her. "Why do you want to know about that?"
Streib glanced at Leaphorn. "See?" he said. Then, to Mrs. Montoya, "It's a class project?"
"Mr. Dorsey always wanted them to make something they thought they could sell. Allen thought he could sell one of those. Why?"
"We thought it might be significant," Leaphorn said. "But it probably isn't if it's a student project. Do you know about the hand-puppet duck?" He gave Streib a glance. Dilly hadn't told him about t
his duck.
Mrs. Montoya seemed relieved. She laughed. "Mr. Dorsey was our school comedian," she said. "When the kids put on programs they'd get him to be the master of ceremonies. He was a ventriloquist. He wasn't very good at it, but the children thought he was great."
"A funny man, then?" Streib said.
"He was our school clown," she said, looking sad at the thought. "He could always make other people laugh, but I don't think he laughed much himself."
This aroused Streib's interest. "Why not?"
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe Father Haines would know. Maybe he was lonely." She made a wry face and changed the subject. "I'll be glad to get that information for you," and while she was writing a reminder on her notepad, she added, "Eric Dorsey was a good man." She looked up, at Streib and then at Leaphorn, as if challenging them to deny it. "A kind man. And gentle. And talented, too."
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