The Shape Shifter (12 page)

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Halfway down the slope from the Delos mansion a sharp

“ting-a-ling” sound from the seat beside Leaphorn startled him and interrupted his troubled thoughts. It came, he realized, from the cell phone he’d forgotten in the pocket of his jacket. He pulled to the side of the road, parked, fished it out, pushed the Talk button, identified himself, heard Bernadette Manuelito’s voice.

“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Bernie was saying, “this is the former Officer Bernadette Manuelito, who is now Mrs. Bernadette Chee. We decided not to wait for your callback. Got that obituary information you needed. Or at least some of it.”

“I’m not used to this Mrs. Chee title yet,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll just call you Bernie.”

“I’m going to be Officer Manuelito again pretty soon,” she said, sounding happy about it. “Captain Largo said they kept that job open for me. Isn’t that great?”
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“Great for us,” Leaphorn said, realizing as he said it that he wasn’t part of that “us” anymore. “Great for the Navajo Tribal Police Department. How is your husband behaving?”

“He’s wonderful,” Bernie said. “I should have captured him long ago. And you should come to visit us. I want you to see how we’re fixing up Jim’s trailer house.

It’s going to be very nice.”

“Well, I’m happy you got him, Bernie. And I will accept that invitation as soon as I can get there.” He found himself trying to imagine Chee’s rusty trailer with curtains in the windows, throw rugs here and there. Maybe even some colorful wallpaper pasted to those aluminum walls.

“Here’s the stuff on the Totter obituary,” Bernie said, reverting to her role as a policewoman. “You want me to read it to you?”

“Sure.”

“Erwin James Totter, operator of Totter’s Trading Post and Art Gallery north of Gallup for many years, died last week in Saint Anthony’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. He was admitted there earlier this month with complications following a heart attack.

“Mr. Totter was born in Ada, Oklahoma, April 3, 1939.

A bachelor, he left no known dependents. A navy veteran who had served in the Vietnam War, he was interred in the Veterans Administration cemetery at Oklahoma City.

He had asked that, in lieu of flowers, any memorial contributions be made to the Red Cross in an account at the Wells Fargo Bank of Oklahoma City.”

Bernie paused. “It wasn’t very long,” she said, sounding regretful.

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“That was it?” Leaphorn asked. “No mention of any family. Nothing about any survivors?”

“Just what I read to you,” Bernie said. “The woman at the desk, the one who helped me find it, she said she thought it came in a letter, with some cash with it to pay the publication fee. She couldn’t remember who sent it.

She said maybe Mr. Totter had written it himself when he knew he was dying and just got the hospital to mail it.

Does that sound reasonable?”

“Not very,” Leaphorn said. He chuckled. “But then nothing much about this whole business seems very reasonable. For example, I’m not sure what the devil I’m doing out here.”

“You want me to check on it?” Bernie’s tone carried a sort of plaintive sound.

“Golly, Bernie,” Leaphorn said. “I hope it didn’t sound like I was complaining. You did exactly what I asked you to do. Tell the truth, I think I’m just floundering around feeling frustrated.”

“Maybe I could find out from the bank if any contributions had come in. And who made them. Would that help?”

Leaphorn laughed. “Bernie, the trouble is, I don’t really know what I’m looking for. I guess the bank would cooperate on that. We don’t seem to have any reason for asking. If we did, I guess someone could check for people named Totter in Ada. Find out something about him. It sounds like a small town.”

“No crime involved though? Is that right? Wasn’t there a fire involved?”

“A fire, yes. But no evidence of arson. A man who worked for Totter was burned up, but the arson folks
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blamed a drunk smoking in bed and no sign of crime beyond carelessness,” he said. “Anyway, thanks. And now can I ask you another favor?”

This produced a pause.

After all, Leaphorn thought, she’s a new bride, busy with all sorts of things. “Never mind. I don’t want to impose on—”

“Sure,” Bernie said. “Doing what?”

Leaphorn struggled briefly with his conscience and won. “If you are still formally, officially a policewoman—

you are, aren’t you? Just on a leave?”

“That’s right.”

“Then maybe you could ask that hospital in Oklahoma City to give you the date and details of Totter’s death, mortuary arrangements, all that.”

“I’ll do it,” Bernie said, “and if Captain Largo sus-pends me because I can’t explain what I am doing that for, I will refer him to Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn.”

“Fair enough,” Leaphorn said, “and I’ll have to tell him I don’t know myself.”

Leaphorn spent a few moments digesting the information, or lack of it, that Bernie Manuelito’s call had provided. Its effect was to add one more oddity to the pile of oddities that seemed to cluster around this damned tale-teller’s rug. For him, at least, it had started with an oddity.

Why would anyone, especially anyone driving a fairly new, fairly expensive vehicle, get into the work shed behind Grandma Peshlakai’s hogan and steal two lard buckets full of the pinyon sap she had collected? Maybe he shouldn’t link that with the rug. It was a separate case. A wee little larceny memorable to him only because Grandma’s resentment of the way he had abandoned her prob-THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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lem to deal with the case of a deceased white man still seemed morally justified. But now it seemed vaguely possible there was a link. Grandma had found the purloined lard buckets at Totter’s gallery, which would make him the most likely suspect in that theft. And he had owned the rug. And now he was buried in a Veterans Administration cemetery at Oklahoma City. Or seemed to be.

Leaphorn groaned. To hell with this. He was going home. He would make a fire in the fireplace. He was going to spread his old Triple A Indian Country map out on the kitchen table, put a calendar down beside it, and try to make some sense out of all of this. Then he would call Mrs. Bork and tell her to let him know if anything turned up, if there was anything he could help her with. Better to make such unpleasant calls when one was at home and comfortable.

He opened the glove box, pushed the cell phone back into its place there, and encountered the neatly folded sack lunch Tommy Vang had handed him as he escorted him back to his truck.

“For your drive home,” Tommy had said, smiling at him. “Mr. Delos says people get hungry when they are driving. It be good to eat.”

True enough, Leaphorn thought, but this lunch would be better to eat if he took the time and trouble to put in the cooler box he kept behind the seat for such hunger and thirst moments. He leaned over the seat, opened the lid, and slid the sack in between his thermos jug and a shoe box that usually held a candy bar or two, and on which Louisa had lettered “Emergency Rations.” That reminded him of home, and he suddenly wanted to be there.

And he was, finally. But only after about five hours of
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driving eastward on Interstate 40 through Winslow, then northward on Arizona 87 past Chimney Butte to the turn east on U.S. 15 through Dilkon through Bidahochi, Lower Greasewood, and Cornfield to the Ganado junction, then north again on U.S. 64 past Two Story and St. Michael’s to Window Rock and home. On that last stretch Leaphorn was watching the big harvest moon rising over the Defiance Plateau. By the time he had parked, unloaded his suitcase from the car, and got the fireplace going and the coffeepot perking, he was almost too exhausted to take the time to eat the late supper he’d planned. But he poured himself a cup anyway, got two slices of salami from the refrigerator, and a loaf from the breadbox. Doing that reminded him of the lunch sack Tommy had handed him when he was bidding good-bye to Jason Delos. It was still in his pickup, still protected from his appetite by his aversion to whatever it was in fruitcake that gave him indigestion. Well, it would keep until tomorrow. He sat down with a sigh and switched on the TV.

It was time, he noticed, for the ten o’clock news. He ate his first sandwich, thinking his thoughts to the background sound of a car dealer touting the benefits of a Dodge Ram pickup. His thoughts were not particularly cheerful. The fireplace was helping, but the house still had that cold lonely feeling that greets one coming home to a vacant place. He spent a moment remembering how pleasant it had been when Emma was alive. Glad to see him, interested in hearing what the day had done for him, sympathetic when fate had dealt him nothing but disappointments and frustrations, often able to gently and obliquely make him aware of something helpful he’d overlooked, something he’d failed to check. In an odd way THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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Louisa Bourbonette was helpful, too. She wasn’t Emma.

No one could ever replace Emma. But it would be pleasant if Bourbonette were here tonight. She’d be reporting what she had added to her oral history archives—telling him another version of an oft-told southern Ute myth, or maybe happily reporting she found a new tale that extended the old ones. But Bourbonette wasn’t Emma. If Emma were here now, she would be reminding him that he should close that chain mail screen in front of the fireplace better because the pinyon logs he was burning would be popping as the sap heated and begin spraying sparks and ashes out onto the floor. Leaphorn leaned forward, adjusted the screen properly, and dusted back the ash that had already escaped. Louisa probably wouldn’t have noticed that problem.

And while he was considering their differences and sipping his second cup of coffee, the newscaster’s voice was intruding on his thoughts. Someone named Elrod was being quoted about finding a fatal accident.

“While state police wouldn’t confirm the victim’s identity until next of kin had been notified, sources at the scene said the body that Mr. Elrod found in the vehicle was believed to be that of a former Arizona lawman and a well-known Flagstaff businessman. His vehicle had apparently swerved on a sharp curve where the county road in-tersects with the access road to Forest Service fire watch stations in the San Francisco Peaks. Police reported the vehicle skidded in the roadside gravel and then rolled down the embankment and plunged into the canyon.

Officers said the car wasn’t seen by passing traffic until Mr. Elrod noticed the slanting afternoon sunlight reflecting off the vehicle’s windshield. Elrod told police he then
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pulled off the road, climbed down, saw the victim’s body in the front seat, and called the police on his cell phone.

The police spokesman said the accident had apparently happened about two days ago and the view of the vehicle was obscured by trees and brush.

“In another tragic accident here in Phoenix, police report a local teenager was killed when the all-terrain vehicle he was driving along an irrigation drain flipped over and rolled. Police said . . .”

But Leaphorn was no longer listening. He considered the “apparently happened about two days ago” statement. He put down his coffee cup, reached for the telephone, and dialed Sergeant Garcia’s home number. He considered the timing and the circumstances while the phone rang and the answering machine told him to leave a message.

“Sergeant, this is Joe Leaphorn. Call me as soon as you can about that wreck. If it was two days ago, it sure sounds like it might have been Mel Bork. And if it was Bork, then I think we might want to go for an autopsy.” He paused. “Even if it looks just like another traffic accident.”

The rest of the evening news flickered past on the screen without distracting Leaphorn from his thoughts.

He pulled open the drawer in the table under the telephone, fumbled through it for a notepad and pen stock-piled there, opened it to a blank page, thought a moment, and printed SHEWNACK near the top. He underlined that, skipped down two inches, wrote TOTTER, stared at the auto dealer offering cash back to purchasers of Dodge Ram trucks, and tapped the pen against the pad. A bit lower, he wrote MEL BORK. Then he stopped. He reached out and THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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switched off the TV, considered the flames working about the pinyon logs, shook his head, and started writing.

Under Shewnack’s name he wrote:

FBI Most Wanted. Two homicides at Handy’s. FBI thinks probably others.

Handy’s killing, summer 1961. Shewnack probably in his thirties then, been around for several months.

Came from either California or Midwest, or who knows where. Disappeared. Shows up at Totter’s Trading Post/Gallery in 1965. Was he intending to rob Totter? What happened to the loot he took from Handy’s? Had Shewnack tried to kill Totter as he’d killed Handy, gotten killed by Totter instead, and then Totter decides to burn the body erasing evidence of the crime, leaving it so he could keep any loot Shewnack had with him from the Handy’s crime, and add to the profits by pulling off a fire insurance fraud?

He stared at the last line a moment, shook his head and crossed it out. It just didn’t seem quite logical.

Under Totter’s name he wrote:

Born 1939, Ada, Okla. Came to Four-Corners Country when? Opened trading-post gallery when? Place burned autumn l965. Totter dies in Okla City in 1967. Leaves no kith nor kin, no survivors. So why did he go back to Oklahoma?

Leaphorn finished his coffee. Printed JASON DELOS on
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the sheet, got up to refill his cup in the kitchen, and then stood staring into the fire, thinking of the two empty five-gallon lard cans Grandma Peshlakai had found at Totter’s gallery. Navajos used lots of lard and usually got it in those cans because the cans themselves were so useful.

His own fire was burning hot now, and the room was filled with the wonderful perfume that only pinyon fires can produce. The aroma of the forest, of quiet places, of peace, tranquility. He sat again, picked up the pen and wrote: