Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (3 page)

"I don't know its name," Cecil said finally. "It's a Zuñi word. But I guess it would be the same kachina that got Ernesto."

"Oh," Leaphorn said. He tested the tightness of the lug nuts, lowered the jack, giving himself time to think. He rested his hip on the fender and looked at Cecil Bowlegs. The crumpled sack that jutted from the boy's jacket pocket would be his lunch sack—empty now. What would Cecil find in that hogan to take to school for lunch?

"Did a kachina get Ernesto Cata? How did you find out?"

Cecil looked embarrassed.

The boy was lying. That was obvious. And no boy that age was good at it. Leaphorn had found that listening carefully to lies is sometimes very revealing of the truth. "Why would the kachina get after Ernesto? Do you know the reason?"

Cecil caught his lower lip between his teeth. He looked past Leaphorn, thinking.

"Do you know why George is running away from this kachina?"

"I think it's the same reason," Cecil said.

"You don't know the reason, but whatever it is, it would make the kachina go after both of them?"

"Yeah," Cecil said. "I think that's the way it is."

Leaphorn no longer thought Cecil was lying. George must have told him all this.

"I guess, then, from what you tell me, that Ernesto and George must have done something that made the kachina mad."

"Ernesto did it. George just listened to him. Telling is what breaks the taboo and Ernesto told. George just listened." Cecil's voice was earnest, as if it was very important to him that no one think his brother had broken a Zuñi taboo.

"Told what?"

"I don't know. George said he didn't think he should tell me. But it was something about the kachinas."

Leaphorn pushed himself away from the fender and sat down on the dead grass, folding his legs in front of him. What he had to find out was fairly simple. Did George know the Cata boy was dead when George and Cecil left for school this morning? If he knew that, it would almost certainly mean that George had either killed Ernesto, or had seen him killed, or had seen the killer disposing of the body. But if he asked Cecil straight out, and the answer was negative, Leaphorn knew he would have to discount the answer. Cecil would lie to protect his brother. Leaphorn fished out his cigarettes. He didn't like what he was about to do. My job is to find George Bowlegs, he told himself. It's important to find him. "Do you sometimes smoke a cigarette?" he asked Cecil. He extended the pack.

Cecil took one. "Sometimes it is good," he said.

"It's never good. It hurts the lungs. But sometimes it is necessary, and therefore one does it."

Cecil sat on a rock, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke trickle out of his nostrils. Obviously it wasn't his first experience with tobacco.

"You think Cata broke a taboo, and the kachina got Cata for doing it, and is after George." Leaphorn spoke thoughtfully. He exhaled a cloud of smoke. It hung blue in the still sunlight. "Do you know when George got home last night?"

"After I was asleep," Cecil said. "He was there when I woke up this morning, getting ready to catch the school bus."

"You boys like school better than I did," Leaphorn said. "When I was a boy, I would have told my daddy probably no school today because one of the students got killed yesterday. Maybe he'd let me stay home. Worth trying, anyway." The tone was casual, bantering, exactly right, he felt. Maybe it would elicit an unguarded admission, and maybe it wouldn't. If not, he'd simply try again. Leaphorn was a man of immense patience.

"I didn't know about it yet," Cecil said. "Not till we got to school." He was staring at Leaphorn. "They didn't find the blood until this morning." Cecil's expression said he was wondering how this policeman could have forgotten that, and then he knew Leaphorn hadn't forgotten. The boy's face was briefly angry, then simply forlorn. He looked away.

"To hell with it," Leaphorn said. "Look, Cecil. I was trying to screw you around. Trying to trick you into telling me more than you want to tell me. Well, to hell with that. He's your brother. You think about it and then you tell me just what you'd want a policeman to know. And remember, it won't be just me you're telling. I've got to pass it on—most of it, anyway—to the Zuñi police. So be careful not to tell me anything you think would hurt your brother."

"What do you want to know? Where George is? I don't know that."

"A lot of things. Mostly, a way to find George, because when I can talk to him he can give us all the answers. Like did he see what happened to Cata? Was he there? Did he do it? Did somebody else do it? But I can't talk to George until I figure out where he went. You say he didn't tell you this morning that something had happened to Cata.

But he gave you the idea that a kachina was after both of them. What did he say?"

"It was kind of confused," Cecil said. "He was excited. I guess he borrowed Ernesto's bike after school and he took it back to where Ernesto was running and he was waiting there for Ernesto." Cecil stopped, trying to remember. "It was getting dark, and I guess it was then he saw the kachina coming. And he ran away from there and walked home. He didn't say it that way exactly, but that's what I think happened. When we got to school today, he was going to find out about the kachina."

"You didn't see George after he got off the bus?"

"No. He went looking for Ernesto."

"If you were me, where would you look for him?"

Cecil said nothing. He looked down at his shoes. Leaphorn noticed that the sole on the left one had split from the upper and they had been stuck together with some sort of grayish glue. But the glue hadn't held.

"O.K.," Leaphorn said. "Then has he got any other friends there at school? Anybody else who I should talk to?"

"No friends there at school," Cecil said. "They're Zuñis." He glanced at Leaphorn, to see if he understood. "They don't like Navajos," he said. "Just make jokes about us. Like Polack jokes."

"Just Ernesto? Everybody says Ernesto and George were friends."

"Everybody says George is kind of crazy," Cecil said. "It's because he wants to…" The boy stopped, hunting words. "He wants to do things, you know. He wants to try everything. One time he wanted to be a witch, and then he studied about Zuñi sorcery. And one time he was eating cactus buttons so he would have dreams. And Ernesto thought all that was fun, and he made George worse than he was about it. I don't think Ernesto was a friend. Not really a friend." Cecil's face was angry. "He was a goddam Zuñi," he said.

"How about anybody else? Anybody that might know anything."

"There's those white men who are doing all that digging for the arrowheads. George used to go there a lot and watch that one man dig. Used to hang around there most of the summer and then after school started, too. Him and that Zuñi. But Ernesto stole something, I think, and they ran 'em off."

Leaphorn had noticed the anthropology site and had asked Pasquaanti about it. It was less than a mile from where the blood had been found.

"Like stole what? When did that happen?"

"Just the other day," Cecil said. "I think Ernesto stole some of that flint they dug up. I think it was arrowheads and stuff like that."

Leaphorn started to ask why they would want to steal flint artifacts but bit off the question. Why did boys steal anything? Mostly to see if they could get away with it.

"And then there's those Belacani living over in the old hogans behind Hoski Butte," Cecil said. "George liked that blond girl over there and she was trying to teach him to play the guitar, I think."

"White people? Who are these Belacani?"

"Hippies," Cecil said. "Bunch of them been living over there. They're raising some sheep."

"I'll talk to them," Leaphorn said. "Anyone else?"

"No," Cecil said. He hesitated. "You been to our place, just now. My father. Was he…" Embarrassment overcame the need to know.

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "He'd been drinking some. But I think it'll be all right. I think he'll be asleep by the time you get home." And then he looked away from the pain and the shame in Cecil's face.

TED ISAACS ran the shovel blade carefully into the dusty earth. The pressure on the heel of his hand told him that the resistance to the blade was a little light, that he was digging slightly above the high-calcium layer which Isaacs now knew—with absolute certainty—was the Folsom floor. He withdrew the blade and made a second stroke—a half -inch deeper—his hand now registering the feel of the metal sliding along the proper strata.

"Twenty," he said, dumping the earth on the pile on the sifter screen. He leaned the shovel against the wheelbarrow and began sorting the soft earth through the wire with a worn trowel. He worked steadily, and fast, pausing only to toss away clumps of grama grass roots and the tangles of tumbleweeds. Within three minutes nothing was left on the screen except an assortment of pebbles, small twigs, old rabbit droppings, and a large scorpion—its barbed tail waving in confused anger. Isaacs fished the scorpion off the wire with a stick and flicked it in the direction of his horned lark. The lark, a female, had been his only companion for the past two days, flirting around the dig site feasting on such tidbits. Isaacs wiped the sweat with his sleeve and then sorted carefully through the pebbles. He was a tall, bony young man. Now the sun was low behind Corn Mountain and he worked hatless—the white skin high on his forehead contrasting sharply with the burned brown leather of his face. His hands worked with delicate speed, blunt, callused fingers eliminating most of the stones automatically, rejecting others after a quick exploratory touch, finally pausing with a chip no larger than a toenail clipping. This chip Isaacs examined, squinting in concentration. He put it into his mouth, cleaned it quickly with his tongue, spit, and reexamined it. It was a chip of agate flint—the third he had found this morning. He fished a jeweler's glass from the pocket of his denim shirt. Through the double lens, the chip loomed huge against the now massive ridges of his thumbprint. On one edge there was the scar he knew he would find—the point of percussion, the mark left a hundred centuries ago when a Folsom hunter had flaked it off whatever tool he had been making. The thought aroused in Isaacs a sense of excitement. It always had, since his very first dig as part of an undergraduate team—an exhilarating sense of making a quantum leap backward through time.

Isaacs stuffed the glass back in his pocket and extracted an envelope. He wrote "Grid 4 north, 7 west" on it in a small, neat hand, and dropped in the flake. It was then he noticed the white panel truck jolting up the ridge toward him.

"Crap," Isaacs said. He stared at the truck, hoping it would go away. It didn't. It kept bumping inexorably toward him, following the tracks his own truck-camper had left through the grama grass. And finally it stopped a polite fifty feet below the area marked by his network of white strings. Stopped gradually, avoiding the great cloud of dust which Dr. Reynolds in his perpetual hurry always produced when he drove his pickup up to the site.

The door of the carryall bore a round seal with a stylized profile of a buffalo, and the man who got out of it and was now walking toward Isaacs wore the same seal on the shoulder of his khaki shirt. The man had an Indian face. Tall, though, for a Zuñi, with a lanky, rawboned look. Probably a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee—which meant he could be anything from an Eskimo to an Iroquois. Whoever he was, he stopped several feet short of the white string marking the boundary of the dig.

"What can I do for you?" Isaacs said.

"Just looking for some information," the Indian said. "You have time to talk?"

"Take time," Isaacs said. "Come on in."

The Indian made his way carefully across the network of strings, skirting the grids where the topsoil had already been removed. "My name's Leaphorn," he said. "I'm with the Navajo Police."

"Ted Isaacs." They shook hands.

"We're looking for a couple of boys," Leaphorn said. "A Navajo about fourteen named George Bowlegs and a twelve-year-old Zuñi named Ernesto Cata. I understand they hang around here a lot."

"They did," Isaacs said. "But not lately. I haven't seen them since…" He paused, remembering the scene, Reynolds' yell of outrage and anger and Cata running from Reynolds' pickup as if hell itself pursued him. The memory was a mixture of amusement and regret. It had been funny, but he missed the boys and Reynolds had made it clear enough in his direct way that he didn't think much of Isaacs' judgment in letting them hang around. "… not since last Thursday. Most afternoons they'd come by after school," Isaacs said. "Sometimes they'd stay around until dark. But the last few days…"

"Have any idea why they haven't been back?"

"We ran 'em off."

"Why?"

"Well," Isaacs said. "This is a research site. Not the best place in the world for a couple of boys to be horsing around."

Leaphorn said nothing. The silence stretched. Time ticking silently away made Isaacs nervous, but the Indian seemed unaware of it. He simply waited, his eyes black and patient, for Isaacs to say more.

"Reynolds caught them screwing around in his truck," Isaacs said, resenting the Indian for making him say it.

"What did they steal?"

"Steal? Why, nothing. Not that I know of. They didn't take anything. One of 'em was at Dr. Reynolds' truck and Reynolds yelled at him to get the hell away from his stuff and they ran away."

"Nothing missing?"

"No. Why are you looking for them?"

"They're missing," Leaphorn said. Again the silence, the Indian's face thoughtful. "You're digging up artifacts here, I guess," he said. "Could they have gotten off with any of that stuff?"

Isaacs laughed. "Over my dead body," he said. "Besides, I would have missed it." The very thought made him nervous. He felt an urge to check, to hold the envelope marked "Grid north, 23 west," to feel the shape of the broken lance point under his fingers, to know it was safe.

"You're absolutely sure, then? Could they have stolen anything at all?"