The Shape Shifter (11 page)

“That’s a ranch I’ve hunted on,” Delos said. “I get elk permits from the foreman. A fellow named Arlen Roper.

In fact, I’m going up there this week.” He laughed, made an expansive gesture. “Going to try to get me an absolute THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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record-breaking set of antlers before I get too old for it.”

“I think I already am,” Leaphorn said.

“Well, I can’t climb up the cliffs, and down into the canyons like I used to, but Roper has some blinds set up in the trees on a hillside up there. One of them lets you look right down on the Brazos. Elk come in, morning and evening, to get themselves a drink out of the stream. I’ve got that one reserved for next week.”

Leaphorn nodded, without comment. Ranchers who allowed deer, elk, and antelope herds to share grazing with their cattle were granted hunting permits as a rec-ompense. They could either harvest their winter meat supply themselves or sell the permits to others. It was not a practice Leaphorn endorsed. Not much sportsman-ship in it, he thought, but perfectly pragmatic and legal.

Traditional Navajos hunted only for food, not for sport. He remembered his maternal uncle explaining to him that to make hunting deer a sport, you would have to give the deer rifles and teach them how to shoot back. His first deer hunt, and all that followed, had been preceded by the prescribed ceremony with his uncles and nephews, with the prayer calling to the deer to join in the venture, to assure the animal that cosmic eternal law would return him to his next existence in the infinite circle of life. A lot of time and work was involved in the Navajo way—the treatment of the deer hide, the pains taken to waste nothing, and, finally, the prayers that led to that first delicious meal of venison. Leaphorn had known many
belagaana
hunters who shared the “waste no venison” attitude, but none who bought into the ceremonial partnership between man and animal. And this was not the place nor the time to discuss it. Instead, he said he’d heard hunting
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was expected to be unusually good in the Brazos country this season.

Delos smiled. “I’ve always liked to claim that the skill of the hunter determined how good the season turns out.”

“Probably true,” Leaphorn said. “But if one comes home empty, he likes something else to blame.” The only trophy head on the wall of the Delos office was that of a large male bobcat snarling above an antique-looking rolltop desk. But a rifle rack against a wall revealed the nature of the Delos hobby. Behind its glass door four rifles and two shotguns were lined up in their racks. Delos motioned Leaphorn into a chair and seated himself beside his desk.

“Is the time right for a drink? A Scotch or something?

But I bet you’d prefer coffee?”

“Coffee, if it’s no trouble,” Leaphorn said, seating himself and processing his impressions. The trophy heads, the gun collection, how Delos had presumed Leaphorn would want coffee, the sense of serene and confident dignity the man presented.

“Coffee,” Delos told Tommy Vang, “for both of us.” Then he leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his belly, and smiled at Leaphorn.

“Down to business,” he said. “I asked around, and I understand from my friends that you are a Navajo Tribal Policeman. I gather you have no jurisdiction here. Therefore, I am curious about why you came. I would like to think that you had learned that I obtained the tale-teller’s rug shown in that magazine and you simply, and very generously, wanted to reward me with some of the colorful tales of its past.” Delos smiled, raised his eyebrows, gave Leaphorn a few seconds to respond.

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Leaphorn nodded.

Delos sighed. “But being well into my seventh decade, I have learned that it usually takes more than a generous spirit to send one on such a long trip. Normally some trade-off is involved. Some sort of tit-for-tat exchange. Am I right about that?”

“You are,” Leaphorn said. “I have a whole list of things I hope to get from you, Mr. Delos.” He held up a finger. “Most important, I hope you can provide some information that will help me find out what happened to a friend of mine. Mel Bork. He seems to have disappeared.

Second, I hope you’ll let me take a look at that tale-teller rug shown in that magazine. I admired that rug many years ago, and I haven’t seen it for years. Finally, I hope you will let me know where you obtained it.” Delos sat a moment, looking at his hands, apparently thinking. He shook his head, looked up. “That’s all?” Leaphorn nodded.

“And what do you deliver to me in return?” Leaphorn shrugged. “Not a lot, I’m afraid. About all I can do is tell you what I remember of the hogan stories as a boy. Some of them were about the ‘rug woven from sorrows.’ And I could tell you how to get in touch with some of the old weavers who could tell you more.” He produced a wry smile. “But I expect you could do that with your own resources.”

“Perhaps I could,” Delos said. “Some of it anyway. But only you can tell me why you thought I could help you find this friend of yours. This Mel Bork.”

Leaphorn noticed Delos had put his hope of help in finding Bork in the past tense.

“I still hope you can help me with that,” he said. “I
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hope you will tell me where he said he was going when he left here. And everything he said. Some of that might give me at least a hint of where he was going.” Delos threw up his hands, laughed. “I can tell you but if it’s helpful then it means you are indeed what my friends have told me about you. That you are a very shrewd detective.” Delos was smiling.

Leaphorn, registering that Delos hadn’t denied that Bork had been here, returned the smile.

“That causes me to ask another question: What prompted you to ask your friends about me? And which friends advised you?”

The Delos smile faded.

“I exaggerated. It was only Mr. Bork.”

“Another question then. Why did Mr. Bork get me into his conversation with you?”

Delos didn’t answer that. He shook his head. “I’ve led us off into a digression,” he said. “Let me start at the beginning. Mr. Bork called, asked for an appointment.

He said, or perhaps just implied, that he was working in an insurance fraud investigation involving my tale-teller rug. He asked if he could see it. I said yes. He came out.

I showed him the rug. He compared it to the photograph from the magazine. He said something like the photo and the rug looking identical.” Delos paused, awaiting reaction.

“What did you say to that?”

“I agree they looked very similar.”

A tap at the office portal interrupted the answer.

Tommy Vang stood there, a tray cart in front of him, smiling and waiting.

Delos waved him in. Vang deposited a tray on a serv-THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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ing table beside Delos’s desk, slid it into reachable position between the two men, poured coffee into two saucered cups, removed the lids from a silver sugar bowl and a container of cream. Then, with a flourish and a broad smile, he whipped away a white cloth that had been covering a plate of cake slices and a bowl of nuts.

“He makes that cake himself,” Delos said. “Fruitcake.

It’s downright delicious.”

“It looks very good,” Leaphorn said, admiring the cherry on top. He reached for his coffee cup.

“But back to your question,” Delos said. “I told Bork that old rugs look a lot alike to me, so he showed me a white spot in the rug. Said it was a bird feather woven in. And a rough place. He said that was from some sort of bush that grows out at the Bosque Redondo camp where the Navajos were held captive. And he showed me the same spots on the photograph. I couldn’t argue with that. Then he asked me if I knew the rug was supposedly burned in a trading post fire. I said I’d heard about that, but figured it must have been another rug. And he said it looked to him like a hard rug to copy, and asked me where I had gotten it. He said the man who owned the trading post had collected insurance on it, and it looked like an insurance fraud case.”

Leaphorn nodded. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I had bought it at the Indian market, or whatever they call it, in Santa Fe several years ago.

Anyway, I got it from an Indian under that sidewalk sales area on the plaza.”

“Not in a gallery? That sidewalk at the Palace of the Governors?”

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“Right,” Delos said.

“Who sold it to you?” Leaphorn asked, thinking he was wasting his breath. He was.

Delos frowned, looked thoughtful. “It was an Indian name,” he said. “Spanish-sounding, but I’m almost sure he was from one of the pueblos. Two of the women sitting just up from him against the wall were from San Felipe Pueblo, I remember that.”

“Did the salesman tell you where he got it?”

“Said it was an old Navajo rug. His mother had bought it years ago. Either at a tribal fair on the Navajo Reservation, or maybe at that rug auction the weavers have at the Crownpoint Elementary School gymnasium.

He said when she died, she left it to him.”

“No names then.”

Delos shook his head. “Afraid it’s not much help.”

“Oh, well,” Leaphorn said, and sipped his coffee. Excellent. He sipped again. “At least it tells me that this isn’t the rug destroyed in that fire.” But as he said it, he was thinking he hadn’t phrased that well. He should have said it proved that the tale-teller rug hadn’t been burned. But actually, it hadn’t really proved anything.

“Try that fruitcake,” Delos said. “Tommy’s a damn fine cook, and that cake is his pride and joy. Everything’s in it. Apricots, apple, cherries, six kinds of nuts, just the right spices, all measured out just right. World’s best fruitcake.”

“It sure looks good,” Leaphorn said. “Trouble is, I never did learn to like fruitcake.” He dipped into the nut dish. “I’ll eat more than my share of those walnuts and pecans instead.”

Delos shrugged. “Well, I’ll guarantee you that you’d THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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like Tommy’s version of it. I’ll have him make you a little snack package to take with you. If you don’t like it, toss it out for the birds. Now, let’s go see what you think of this famous rug.”

The rug was displayed on the wall in a little sitting room adjoining the office, mounted on a hardwood frame.

Leaphorn stared at it, trying to remember the time before the fatal fire when he examined it in Totter’s little gallery. It looked the same. He found the brilliant red spots formed by the liquid taken from the spider’s egg sacs, the little white spots formed by the dove’s feathers, other feathers from birds of different colors, and places where fibers from cactus, snakeweed, and other flora of eastern New Mexico grew. He found the sign of the trickster coyote, and of witchcraft, of the silver dollar, and of other assorted symbols of greed, the ultimate evil in the Dineh value system. And, sickening to Leaphorn, all of that evidence of sorrow and disharmony was surrounded by the enfolding symbol of Rainbow Man, the guardian spirit of Dineh harmony. That made it all an ultimate irony. The weaving, as his grandmother had always told them, was the work of an artist. But it was easy to understand why the shamans who saw it condemned it and put their curse on it.

Delos was staring at it, too.

“I always thought it was an interesting work,” he said. “After that picture got published in the magazine, a lawyer I know told me old man Totter had put in an insurance claim on it for forty thousand dollars. Said he finally settled for twelve thousand on the rug. About half of what he got for all the other stuff that he claimed was destroyed in that fire.”

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“You think this could be a copy of the original?” Leaphorn asked.

Delos weighed that, staring at the rug. He shook his head. “I have no idea. No way for me to judge.”

“Well, if my opinion was recognized as expert, I’d tell the insurance company that here it is, the original, right off old man Totter’s wall, that they were swindled. But the statute of limitations on that’s run out long ago, I guess.

And anyway, old man Totter’s dead.”

Delos’s eyebrows rose. “Dead?”

“His obituary was published in the
Gallup Independent,”
Leaphorn said.

“Really?” Delos said. “When did that happen?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I heard they had an obituary item in the paper some years ago.”

“I never met the man,” Delos said. “But I guess he’d make another case for that rug bringing bad luck with it.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

“You know,” Delos said, looking thoughtful, “I hadn’t heard about Totter dying. I think I’ll see what I can get for it.”

“I would,” Leaphorn said. “I’m not really what you’d call superstitious, but I wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.”

Delos laughed, a wry sound. “Think I’ll advertise it in the antique collectors’ journals. List all those semigeno-cidal horrors that inspired those women to weave it, and all the bad luck that has gone with it. That kind of legendary stuff makes artifacts more precious to some.” He laughed again. “Like the pistol that killed President Lin-coln. Or the dagger that stabbed Julius Caesar.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“I know,” Leaphorn said. “We’ve had people contact us about trying to get genuine suicide notes. Or trying to get us to make copies for them.”

“No accounting for taste, I guess,” Delos said, smiling at Leaphorn. “For example, just like your saying you don’t like fruitcake.”