Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God

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Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 09 - Talking God Page 19

by Talking God(lit)


  Mama was looking at the policeman, then she looked up at him. Her mouth was partly open, working as if she was trying to say something. Nothing came out but a sort of an odd sound. A squeaking sound. It occurred to him that Mama was afraid. Afraid of him.

  "Mama," Leroy Fleck said. "I got even. Did you see that? I didn't let him step on me. I didn't kiss any boot."

  He waited. Not long but more time than he could afford under the circumstances, waiting for Mama to win her struggle to form words. But no words came and Fleck could read absolutely nothing in her eyes except fear. He walked out the door without a glance toward the reception desk, and down the narrow hallway toward the rear exit, and out into the cold, gray rain.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ®

  Museum Security had located Dr. Hartman, and Dr. Hartman had located possible sources of the fish trap. It was a matter of deciding in what part of the world the trap had originated (obviously in a place which produced both bamboo and good-sized fish) and then knowing how to retrieve data from the museum's computerized inventory system. The computer gave them thirty-seven possible bamboo fish traps of appropriate antiquity. Dr. Hartman knew almost nothing about fish and almost everything about primitive construction methods and quite a bit about botany. Thus she was able to organize the hunt.

  She pushed her chair back from the computer terminal, and her hair back from her forehead.

  "I'm going to say this Palawan Island tribe is the best bet, and then we should check, I'd say, this coastal Borneo collection, and then probably Java. If none of those collections is missing a fish trap, then it's back to the drawing board. That must be a Smithsonian fish trap and if it is then we can find out where it was stored."

  She led them down the hallway, a party of five now with the addition of a tired-looking museum security man. With Hartman and Rodney leading the way, they hurried past what seemed to Leaphorn a wilderness of branch corridors all lined with an infinity of locked containers stacked high above head level. They turned right and left and left again and stopped, while Hartman unlocked a door. Above his head, Leaphorn noticed what looked like, but surely wasn't, one of those carved stone caskets in which ancient Egyptians interred their very important corpses. It was covered with a sheet of heavy plastic, once transparent but now rendered translucent with years of dust.

  "I have a thing with locks," Dr. Hartman was saying. "They never want to open for me."

  Leaphorn considered whether it would be bad manners to lift the plastic for a peek. He noticed Chee was looking too.

  "Looks like one of those Egyptian mummy cases," Leaphorn said. "What do you call 'em? But they wouldn't have a mummy here."

  "I think it is," Chee said, and lifted the sheet.

  "Yeah, a mummy coffin." His expression registered distaste. "I can't think of the name either."

  Dr. Hartman had solved the lock. "In here," she said, and ushered them into a huge, gloomy room occupied by row after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving racks. As far as Leaphorn could see in every direction every foot of shelf space seemed occupied by something-mostly by what appeared to be locked canisters.

  Dr. Hartman examined her list of possible fish trap locations, then walked briskly down the central corridor, checking row numbers.

  "Row eleven," she said, and did an abrupt left turn. She stopped a third of the way down and checked bin numbers.

  "Okay, here we are," she said, and inserted her key in the lock.

  "I think I had better handle that," Rodney said, holding his hand out for the key. "And this is the time to remind everyone that we may be interested in fingerprints in here. So don't be touching things."

  Rodney unlocked the container. He pulled open the door. It was jammed with odds and ends, the biggest of which was a bamboo device even larger than the fish trap found by the janitor. It occupied most of the bin, with the remaining space filled with what seemed to be a seining nets and other such paraphernalia.

  "No luck here," Rodney said. He closed and locked the door. "On to, where was it? Borneo?"

  "I'm having trouble with making this seem real," Dr. Hartman said. "Do you really think someone killed Henry and left his body in here?"

  "No," Rodney said. "Not really. But he's missing. And a guard's been killed. And a fish trap was located out of place. So it's prudent to look. Especially since we don't know where else to look."

  The Borneo fisherman's bin, Dr. Hartman's second choice, happened to be only two aisles away.

  Rodney unlocked it, pulled open the door.

  They looked at the top of a human head.

  Leaphorn heard Dr. Hartman gasp and Jim Chee suck in his breath. Rodney leaned forward, felt the man's neck, stepped aside to give Chee a better view. "Is this Highhawk?"

  Chee leaned forward. "That's him."

  Some of the homicide forensic crew was still out at the Twelfth Street entrance and got there fast. So did the homicide sergeant who'd been working the Alice Yoakum affair. Rodney gave him the victim's identification. He explained about the fish trap and how they had found the body. Dr. Hartman left, looking pale and shaken. Chee and Leaphorn remained. They stood back, away from the activity, trying to keep out of the way. Photographs were taken. Measurements were made. The rigid body of Henry Highhawk was lifted out of the bin and onto a stretcher.

  Leaphorn noticed the long hair tied into a Navajo-style bun, he noticed the narrow face, sensitive even in the distortion of death. He noticed the dark mark above the eye which must be a bullet hole and the smear of blood which had emerged from it. He noticed the metal brace supporting the leg, and the shoe lift lengthening it. Here was the man whose name was scrawled on a note in a terrorist's pocket. The man who had drawn a second terrorist all the way to Arizona, if Leaphorn was guessing correctly, to a curing ceremonial at the Agnes Tsosie place. Here was a white man who wanted to be an Indian-specifically to be a Navajo. A man who dug up the bones of whites to protest whites digging up Indian bones. A man important enough to be killed at what certainly must have been a terrible risk to the man who killed him. Leaphorn looked into Highhawk's upturned face as it went past him on the police stretcher. What made you so important? Leaphorn wondered. What made Mr. Santillanes polish his pointed shoes and pack his bags and come west to New Mexico looking for you?

  What were you planning that drew someone with a pistol into this dusty place to execute you? And if you could hear my questions, if you could speak, would you even know the answer yourself? The body was past now, disappearing down the corridor. Leaphorn glanced at Chee. Chee looked stricken.

  Chee had found himself'simultaneously watching what had been Henry Highhawk emerge from the container and watching his own reaction to what he was seeing. He had been a policeman long enough to have conditioned himself to death. He had handled an old woman frozen in her hogan, a teenaged boy who had hanged himself in the restroom at his boarding school, a child backed over by a pickup truck driven by her mother. He had been investigating officer of so many victims of alcohol that he no longer tried to keep them sorted out in his memory. But he had never been involved with the death of someone he'd known personally, someone who interested him, someone he'd been talking to only a matter of minutes before he died. He had rationalized his Navajo conditioning to avoid the dead, but he hadn't eliminated the ingrained knowledge that while the body died, the chindi lingered to cause ghost sickness and evil dreams. Highhawk's chindi would now haunt this museum's corridors. It would haunt Jim Chee as well.

  Rodney had been inspecting the items removed from the container where Highhawk's body had rested. He held up a flat, black box with something round connected to it by wires. "This looks a little modern for a Borneo fishing village," he said, showing the box to all of them. The box was a miniature Panasonic cassette tape recorder.

  "I think it's Highhawk's tape recorder," Chee said. "He had one just like that when he was at Agnes Tsosie's place. And I saw it again in the office at his place." Chee could see now that tape recorder was w
ired to one of those small, battery-operated watches. It was much like the nine-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent model he was wearing except it used hands instead of digital numbers.

  "I think it's wired to turn on the recorder," Leaphorn said. "Possibly that's what Highhawk was talking about on that telephone call. Getting that thing fixed."

  Rodney inspected it carefully. He laughed. "If it was, it wasn't fixed very well," he said. "If Highhawk did this he doesn't know any more about electricity than my wife. And she thinks it leaks out of the telephone." He unwound the wires and removed the watch. Holding it care fully by the edges, he opened the recorder and popped out the miniature tape. He weighed it in his hand, examined it, and put it back in the machine. "Let's see what we have on this," he said. "But first, let's see what else we have in this container."

  Rodney sorted gingerly among the fish nets, bamboo fish spears, canoe paddles, clothing, and assorted items that Chee couldn't identify. Pressed against the side of the bin, partly obscured by folded twine of fish netting, was something white. It looked like leather. In fact, to Chee it looked like it might be a yei mask.

  "I guess that's it," Rodney said. "Except your team will come along and do a proper search and find the murder weapon in there, and the killer's photograph, fingerprints, and maybe his business card."

  "We'll catch that later," the sergeant said. "We'll get somebody from the museum who knows what's supposed to be in there and what isn't."

  "This is the mask Highhawk had been working on," Chee said. "Or one of them."

  The sergeant retrieved it, turned it over in his hands, examined it. "What'd you say it was?" he asked Chee, and handed it to him.

  "It's the Yeibichai mask. A Navajo religious mask. Highhawk was working on this one, or one just like it, for that mask display downstairs."

  "Oh," the sergeant said, his curiosity satisfied and his interest exhausted. "Let's get this over with."

  They followed Highhawk's body into the bright fluorescent lighting of the conservancy laboratory. When the sergeant finished whatever he wanted to do with him, Henry Highhawk would go from there to the morgue. Now the cause of death seemed apparent. The blackened round mark of what must be a bullet hole was apparent above the left eye. From it a streak of dried blood discolored the side of Highhawk's face.

  The sergeant went through Highhawk's pockets, spreading the contents on a laboratory table. Wallet, pocketknife, a half-used roll of Tums, three quarters, two dimes, a penny, a key ring bearing six keys, a crumpled handkerchief, a business card from a plumbing company, a small frog fetish carved out of a basaltic rock.

  "What the hell is this?" the sergeant said, pushing the frog with his finger.

  "It's a frog fetish," Leaphorn said.

  The sergeant had not been happy to have two strangers and Rodney standing around while he worked. The sergeant had the responsibility, but obviously Rodney had the rank.

  "What the hell is a frog fetish?" the sergeant asked.

  "It's connected with the Navajo religion," Leaphorn said. "Highhawk was part Navajo. He had a Navajo grandmother. He was interested in the culture."

  The sergeant nodded. He looked slightly less hostile.

  "No bin key?" Chee asked.

  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."

 

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