The Shape Shifter (9 page)

That provoked a brief, thoughtful silence.

Leaphorn cleared his throat. “This Shewnack must have been quite a man,” he said. “I’m thinking about the
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the way he sucked all of you into that plot he was working up. Sounds like he was awful damn persuasive. A genuine, bona fide charmer.”

Delonie produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “You bet. I remember Ellie saying he was the prettiest man she ever saw.” He laughed again. “Anyway, a lot prettier than me.”

“I don’t think there’s anything in the records about where he came from. Was he a local man? Family? Anything like that? If he had any criminal record, it must have been under some other name.”

“He told us he was from California, or somewhere out on the West Coast,” Delonie said. “But after Ellie got to know him, she said he was actually from San Francisco. Great talker, though. Always smiling, always cheerful. Never said anything bad about anybody or anything.

Seemed to know just about everything.” Delonie stopped, shook his head, gave Leaphorn a wry smile. “For example, how to unlock a locked car, or jump-start it; how to avoid leaving fingerprints. He even showed me and Bennie Begay how to get out of those plastic cuffs highway patrol-men carry.”

“You think he had a record?” Leaphorn asked.

“I think maybe he used to be a policeman,” Delonie said. “He seemed to know so much about cops and law enforcement. But I don’t know. Then I thought maybe he had worked in a machine shop or something like that. He seemed to know a lot about construction and machinery.

But with him, I think most of what he was saying was just sort of talk intended to give you a phony idea of who he was. Or had been.” He shook his head and chuckled. “I remember a preacher we used to listen to when I was a boy.

He’d have called Shewnack the ‘Father of Liars.’” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“Like the devil himself,” Garcia said.

“Yep,” Delonie said, “exactly.”

“Did he ever talk about what he’d done for a living?” he asked. “Any mention at all?”

Delonie shook his head. “Not really. Anytime anyone got serious about things like that he’d say something about there being lots of easy ways to get money. Once he made a crack about how coyotes know you don’t have to raise chickens to eat them.”

“Quite a guy,” Garcia said. “Well, look, Mr. Delonie, if you do decide to look some more, and you find anything, I want you to give me a call.” He handed Delonie his card.

“And don’t forget to keep checking in with your parole officer.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, “and you should—” But he stopped. Why inject himself into this until he knew a lot more than he did. Delonie would know that parolees were not allowed to possess firearms.

10

It was quiet in the patrol car until it had rolled down the last hump of the old Totter’s Trading Post access track and was reaching the junction of the gravel road.

“If you do a left here, we could take a three-or-so-mile detour and get to Grandma Peshlakai’s place,” Leaphorn said. “Wouldn’t take long. Unless you have something else to do.”

Garcia glanced at him, looking surprised. “You want to do that?”

“I’d like to see if she ever got her pinyon sap back. Or found out who stole it. Or anything.”

“Well, why not? That would probably be as useful as anything we learned here.”

They came to a culvert bridging the borrow ditch beside the county road. Up the hillside beyond it was an old-fashioned dirt-topped hogan; a zinc water tank sat atop a platform beside it. Behind it was a slab-sided out-78

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house, a rusty-looking camping trailer, and a sheep pen with a loading ramp. Garcia slowed.

“That it?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said.

“Probably nobody home,” Garcia said. “I don’t see any vehicles.”

“There’s that old tire hanging on the gate post though,” Leaphorn said, pointing. “Most people out here, they take that off when they leave the hogan.”

“Yeah. Some of ’em still do,” Garcia said. “But that old custom is sort of dying out. Tells the neighbors it’s safe to come in and see what they can steal.” Leaphorn frowned, and Garcia noticed it.

“Didn’t mean that as an insult,” Garcia said.

“Trouble is, it’s true.”

“Well, times change,” Garcia said, looking apologetic.

“It ain’t like it used to be.”

But it was at the Peshlakai place. As they drove up the track and stopped east of the hogan, a woman pulled back the carpet hanging across the doorway and stepped out.

Leaphorn got out of the car, nodded to her, said,
“Ya
eeh teh.”

She acknowledged that, nodded, looked surprised, and laughed. “Hey,” she said. “Are you that policeman that made Grandma so mad years and years ago?” Leaphorn grinned. “I guess so, and I came to apologize. Is she here?”

“No, no,” the girl said. “She’s gone off to Austin Sam’s place. He’s one of her grandsons, and she’s taking care of one of her great-grandchildren. She does that for him some when Austin is off doing political cam-THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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paigning. Running for the Tribal Council seat in his district.”

Leaphorn considered that a moment, wondering how old Grandma Peshlakai would be now. In her nineties at least, he was thinking, and still working.

“I’m sorry I missed her. Please tell her I said,
Ya eeh
teh
.”

This very mature woman, he was thinking, must be Elandra, who had been a lot younger when he’d first met her.

“Elandra, this man here is Sergeant Garcia, a deputy with the sheriff’s office down in Flagstaff.” The glad-to-meet-yous were exchanged, and Elandra, looking puzzled, held back the doorway carpet and invited them in. “I don’t have anything ready to offer you,” she said, “but I could make some coffee.” Leaphorn was shaking his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “I just came by to see your grandmother.” He paused, looking embarrassed. “And I was wondering if anything new had come up in that burglary you had.” Elandra’s eyes widened. “Lots of years gone by since then. Lot of things happened.”

“Long ago as it was, I always felt sorry that I couldn’t stay on that case. I got called away by my boss because the federals wanted help on that fire at the Totter store.” Elandra’s expression made it clear that she remembered. She laughed.

“I’ll tell her you told her ‘
ya eeh teh
,’ but telling Grandma to ‘be cool’ isn’t going to do it. She’s still mad at you for running off without finding that pinyon sap.” Then she had another sudden memory. “In fact, long time ago when she was going off to help with Austin’s kids, she
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said you had told her you would come back sometime to deal with that stolen sap problem, and she left something for me to give you if you did. Just a minute. I’ll see if I can find it.”

It was closer to five minutes later when Elandra emerged from the bedroom. She was carrying a sheet of notebook paper folded together and clasped with two hairpins. She grinned at Leaphorn and handed it to him.

On it was printed in pencil: TO THAT BOY POLICEMAN.

“That wasn’t my idea,” Elandra said. “She was mad at you. What she wanted to write was worse than that.”

“I guess I should read it?” Leaphorn said.

Elandra nodded.

Inside was the neatly penciled message:
Young policeman.

Get my sap back here before it spoils. If
not, get back $10 for each bucketful, and $5 for
each bucket. Rather have sap. Otherwise $30.

Garcia had been watching all this, his expression amused.

“What does it say?” he asked. “That is, if it’s not secret.”

Leaphorn read it to him.

Garcia nodded. “You know how much time and labor goes into collecting that damned pinyon sap,” he said.

“Did you ever try to get sticky stuff off of you? I’d say that thirty dollars would be a very fair price.” Leaphorn put the note in his shirt pocket.

Elandra looked slightly abashed. “Grandma is usually very polite. But she thought you were practicing THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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racial discrimination against us Indians. Remember? Or maybe she just wanted somebody to blame.”

“Well, I could see her point.”

“You want to know if we got our pinyon sap back?”

“Anything at all you can tell me about that.” Elandra laughed. “We didn’t recover any sap, but Grandma Peshlakai did get our buckets back. So I guess you should cut ten dollars off that bill.” Garcia’s eyebrows rose. “Got the buckets back? Well, now,” he said.

Leaphorn drew in a breath. “She recovered the buckets?” he said. “Tell me how she managed to do that.”

“Well, after that fire at Totter’s place, Grandma had been asking around everywhere. Right from the start she had the notion that Totter might have gotten that sap.” She laughed. “She thought he was going to start making his own baskets. Compete with us. Anyway, she noticed people were going over there after Mr. Totter moved with what was left of his stuff. And they were picking up things. Walking away with it. Just taking things away.” She paused.

“Like stealing stuff ?” Garcia said.

Elandra nodded. “So Grandma rode over there and looked around, and she came back with our buckets.” Leaphorn leaned forward. “Where were they?”

“I don’t know exactly. She said they were laying out by the porch. Or maybe out by the back door. I don’t really remember.”

“Empty buckets?” Leaphorn said.

Elandra nodded. “And dented up some, too,” she said. “But they still hold water.”

Leaphorn noticed that Garcia was grinning. That turned into a chuckle.

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“I guess we could make a burglary-theft case against Totter now, Joe. If we knew where he moved to when he left here. You want to try?”

Leaphorn was embarrassed. In no mood to be joshed.

“I think it would be a good idea to find out where he went,” he said. “Remember, one of his hired hands burned to death in that fire.”

“Okay, okay,” Garcia said. “I didn’t mean that to sound like I was joking.”

“Well, then—” Leaphorn began, but Elandra violated the “never interrupt” rule of her tribe.

“You don’t know where he is?” she said. She shook her head. “You don’t know about Mr. Totter? You don’t know he’s dead?”

“Dead?” Garcia said.

“How do you know that?” Leaphorn asked.

“It was in the newspaper,” she said. “After Grandma found the buckets, and knew for sure Mr. Totter had stolen our pinyon sap, she had a real angry spell. Really mad about it. So everywhere she went she would tell people about what he’d done and ask about him. And quite a while later somebody in a store where she was buying something told her Totter had died. He told her he’d seen it in the newspaper. That’s how we knew.”

“What newspaper?” Leaphorn asked.

“She was in Gallup, I think. I guess it was the Gallup paper.”

“The
Gallup Independent,”
Garcia said.

“Was it a news story about his being killed? Shot? Or in an accident?”

“I don’t know,” Elandra said. “But I don’t think so. I THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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think the man said it was one of those little pieces where they tell where you’re going to be buried, and who your relatives are, for sending flowers, all that.”

“An obituary item, I guess,” Garcia said.

“Well, since we know within a year or two when that was printed, I guess we can track that down,” Leaphorn said.

As he said it, he was wishing that Sergeant Jim Chee and Officer Bernadette Manuelito were not off somewhere on their honeymoon. Otherwise, retired or not, he could talk Chee into going down to Gallup and digging through their microfiche files of back copies until he found it. Or maybe Chee could talk Bernie into doing it for him. She’d get it done quicker, and not come back with the wrong obituary.

11

Back in Flagstaff, back in his own car, with farewells said to Sergeant Garcia, an agreement reached that they had pretty well wasted a tiresome day and a lot of the sheriff’s department’s gasoline budget, Leaphorn again pulled into the Burger King parking lot. He sat. Organized his thoughts.