Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 07 - Skinwalkers

by Skinwalkers(lit)

  "No," Chee said. "Nothing like that."

  "It could be something mild. Maybe just talking too often to a woman with a boyfriend who's paranoid."

  "I've got a woman," Chee said slowly.

  "You've thought all this out?" Leaphorn asked.

  He motioned toward the holes in the side of the trailer. "It's your ass somebody's after."

  "I've thought about it," Chee said. He threw his hands apart, an angry gesture aimed at himself. "Absolutely damned nothing."

  Leaphorn studied him, and found himself half persuaded. It was the gesture as much as the words. "Where did you sleep last night?"

  "Out there," Chee said, gesturing toward the hillside. "I have a sleeping bag."

  "You and the cat," Leaphorn said. He paused, dug out his pack of cigarets, offered one to Chee, took one himself. "What do you think about Roosevelt Bistie? And Endocheeney?"

  "Funny," Chee said. "That whole thing's odd. Bistie's." He paused, hesitated. "Why not come on in," Chee said. "Have a cup of coffee."

  "Why not," Leaphorn said.

  It was left-over-from-breakfast coffee. Leaphorn, made an authority on bad coffee by more than two decades of police work, rated it slightly worse than most. But it was warm, and it was coffee, and he sipped it appreciatively while Chee, sitting on the bunk where he had so nearly died, told him about meeting Roosevelt Bistie.

  "I don't believe he was faking anything," Chee concluded. "He didn't act surprised to see us. Seemed pleased when he heard Endocheeney was dead, and then the whole business about shooting at Endocheeney on the roof, thinking he'd killed him, not really wondering about it until he got home, not going back to make sure because he figured if he hadn't killed him, Endocheeney wouldn't have stuck around to give him a second chance at it." Chee shrugged, shook his head. "Genuine satisfaction when he heard Endocheeney was dead. I just don't think he could have been faking any of that. No reason to. Why not just deny everything?"

  "All right," Leaphorn said. "Now, tell me again exactly what he said when you asked him why he wanted to kill Endocheeney."

  "Just like I said," Chee said.

  "Tell me again."

  I "He wouldn't say anything. Just shut his mouth and looked grim and wouldn't say a word."

  "What do you think?"

  Chee shrugged. The light through the window over the trailer sink dimmed slightly. The shadow of the thunder head over the Chuskas had moved across the Shiprock landscape. With the shadow, the cloud's advance guard of breeze sighed through the window screen. But it wouldn't rain. Leaphorn had studied the cloud. Now he was considering Chee's face, which wore a look of uneasy distaste. Leaphorn felt his own face beginning a smile, a wry one. Here we go again, he thought.

  "Witchcraft?" Leaphorn asked. "A skinwalker?"

  Chee said nothing. Leaphorn sipped the stale coffee. Chee shrugged. "Well," he said. "That could explain why Bistie wouldn't talk about it."

  "That's right," Leaphorn said. He waited.

  "Of course," Chee added, "so could other things. Protecting somebody in the family."

  "Right," Leaphorn said. "If he tells us his motive, it's also the motive for the guy with the butcher knife. Brother. Cousin. Son. Uncle. What relatives does he have?"

  "He's born to the Streams Come Together Dinee," Chee said, "and born for the Standing Rock People. Three maternal aunts, four uncles. Two paternal aunts, five uncles. Then he's got three sisters and a brother, wife's dead, and two daughters and a son. So not even counting his clan brothers and sisters, he's related to just about everybody north of Kayenta."

  "Anything else you can think of? For why he won't talk?"

  "Something he's ashamed of," Chee said. "Incest. Doing something wrong to some relative. Witchery."

  Leaphorn could tell Chee didn't like the third alternative any better than he did.

  "If it's witchcraft, which one is the skinwalker?"

  "Endocheeney," Chee said.

  "Not Bistie," Leaphorn said, thoughtfully. "So if you're right, Bistie killed himself a witch, or intended to." Leaphorn had considered this witch theory before. Nothing much wrong with the idea, except proving it. "You pick up anything about Endocheeney to support it? Or try it on Bistie?"

  "Tried it on Bistie. He just looked stubborn.

  Talked to people up there on the Utah border who knew Endocheeney. Got nothing." Chee was looking at Leaphorn, judging the response.

  He's heard about me and witches, Leaphorn thought. "In other words, everybody just shut up," he said. "How about Wilson Sam. Anything there?"

  Chee hesitated. "You mean any connection?"

  Leaphorn nodded. It was exactly what he was driving at. They were right. Chee was smart.

  "That's out of our jurisdiction here," Chee said. "Where he was killed, that's in Chinle's territory. The subagency at Chinle has that case."

  "I know that," Leaphorn said. "Did you go out there and look around? Ask around?" It was exactly what Leaphorn would have done under the circumstances-with two killings almost the same hour.

  Chee looked surprised, and a little abashed. "On my day off," he said. "Kennedy and I hadn't gotten anything helpful on the Endocheeney thing yet, and I thought-"

  Leaphorn held up his palm. "Why not?" he said. "You seeing anything that links them?"

  Chee shook his head. "No family connections. Or clan connections. Endocheeney ran sheep, used to work when he was younger with that outfit that lays rails for the Santa Fe railroad. He got food stamps, and now and then sold firewood. Wilson Sam was also a sheepherder, had a job as a flagman on a highway construction job down near Winslow. He was fifty-something years old. Endocheeney was in his middle seventies."

  "Did you try Sam's name on people who knew Endocheeney? To see if." Leaphorn made a sort of inclusive gesture.

  "No luck," Chee said. "Didn't seem to know the same people. Endocheeney's people didn't know Sam. Sam's people never heard of Endocheeney."

  "Did you know either one of them? Ever? In any way? Even something casual?"

  "No connection with me, either," Chee said. "They're not the kind of people policemen deal with. Not drunks. Not thieves. Nothing like that."

  "No mutual friends?"

  Chee laughed. "And no mutual enemies, as far as I can learn."

  The laugh, Leaphorn thought, seemed genuine.

  "Okay," he said. "How about the shooting-at-you business."

  Chee described it again. While he talked, the cat came through the flap in the screen.

  It was a large cat, with short tan hair, a stub of a tail, and pointed ears. It stopped just inside the screen, frozen in the crouch, staring at Leaphorn with intense blue eyes. Quite a cat, Leaphorn thought. Heavy haunches like a bobcat. The hair was matted on the left side of its head, and what looked like a scar distorted the smoothness of its flank. Some belagana tourist's pet, he guessed. Probably taken along on a vacation and lost. Leaphorn listened to Chee with half of his mind, alert only for some variation in an account he had already read twice in the official report, and heard from Largo over the phone. The other half of his consciousness focused on the cat. It still crouched by the door-judging whether this strange human was a threat. The flap probably had made enough noise when the cat came in to waken a man sleeping lightly, Leaphorn decided. The cat was thin, bony; its muscles had the ropy look of wild predators. If it had, in fact, been a pampered pet, it had adapted well. It had got itself in harmony with its new life. Like a Navajo, it had survived.

  Chee had finished his account, without saying anything new. Or anything different. The metal seat of the folding chair was hard against Leaphorn's tailbone. He felt more tired than he should have felt after nothing much more than the drive from Window Rock. Chee was said to be smart. He seemed smart. Largo insisted he was. A smart man should have some idea who was trying to kill him. And why. If he wasn't a fool, was he a liar?

  "When it got light, you looked outside," Leaphorn prompted. "What did you find?"

  "Three empty shotgun she
lls," Chee said. His eyes said he knew Leaphorn already knew all this. "Twelve gauge. Center fire. Rubber sole tracks of a small shoe. Size seven. Fairly new. Led off up the slope to the road up there. Top of the slope, a vehicle had been parked. Tires were worn and it leaked a lot of oil."

  "Did he come in the same way?"

  "No," Chee said. The question had interested him. "Tracks down along the bank of the river."

  "Past where this cat has its den."

  "Right," Chee said.

  Leaphorn waited. After a long silence, Chee said, "It seemed to me that something might have happened there. To spook the cat out of his hiding place. So I looked around." He made a deprecatory gesture. "Ground was scuffed. I think somebody had knelt there behind the juniper. It's not far from where people dump their trash and there's always a lot of stuff blowing around. But I found this." He got out his billfold, extracted a bit of yellow paper, and handed it to Leaphorn. "It's new," he said. "It hadn't been out there in the dirt very long."

  It was the wrapper off a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. "Not much," Chee said, looking embarrassed.

  It wasn't much. Leaphorn couldn't imagine how it would be useful. In fact, it seemed to symbolize just how little they had to work on in any of these cases. "But it's something," he said. His imagination made the figure squatting behind the juniper, watching the Chee trailer, a small figure holding a pump shotgun in his right hand, reaching into his shirt pocket with his left hand, fishing out a package of gum. No furious emotion here. Calm. A man doing a job, being careful, taking his time. And, as an accidental byproduct, giving the cat crouched under the juniper a case of nerves, eroding its instinct to stay hidden until this human left, sending it into a panicky dash for a safer place. Leaphorn smiled slightly, enjoying the irony.

  "We know he chews gum. Or she does," Chee said. "And what kind he sometimes chews. And that he's." Chee searched for the right word. "Cool."

  And I know, Leaphorn thought, that Jim Chee is smart enough to think about what might have spooked the cat. He glanced at the animal, which was still crouched by the flap, its blue eyes fixed on him. The glance was enough to tilt the decision. Two humans in a closed place were too many. The cat flicked through the flap, clack-clack, and was gone. Loud enough to wake a light sleeper, especially if he was nervous. Did Chee have something to be nervous about? Leaphorn shifted in the chair, trying for a more comfortable position. "You read the report on Wilson Sam," Leaphorn said. "And you went out there. When? Let's go over that again."

  They went over it. Chee had visited the site four days after the killing and he'd found nothing to add significant data to the original report. And that told little enough. A ground-water pond where Wilson Sam's sheep drank was going dry. Sam had been out looking for a way to solve that problem-checking on his flock. He hadn't returned with nightfall. The next morning some of the Yazzie outfit into which Sam was married had gone out to look for him. A son of his sister-in-law had remembered hearing a dog howling. They found the dog watching the body in an arroyo that runs into Tyende Creek south of the Greasewood Flats. The investigating officers from Chinle had arrived a little before noon. The back of Sam's head had been crushed, just above where head and neck join. The subsequent autopsy confirmed that he'd been struck with a shovel that was found at the scene. Relatives agreed that it wasn't Sam's shovel. The body apparently had fallen, or had rolled, down the bank and the assailant had climbed down after it. The nephew had driven directly out to the Dennehotso Trading Post, called the police, and then followed instructions to keep everybody away from the body until they arrived.

  "There were still some pretty good tracks when I got there," Chee said. "Been a little shower there the day before the killing and a little runoff down the arroyo bottom. Cowboy boots, both heels worn, size ten, pointed toes. Heavy man, probably two hundred pounds or over, or he was carrying something heavy. He walked around the body, squatted beside it." Chee paused, face thoughtful. "He got down on both knees beside the body. Spent a little time, judging from the scuff marks and so forth. I thought maybe they were made by our people when they picked up the body. But I asked Gorman, and he said no. They were there when he'd checked originally."

  "Gorman?"

  "He's back with us now," Chee said. "But he was loaned out to Chinle back in June. Vacation relief. He was that guy who was walking out in the parking lot with me at noon. Gorman and Benaly. Gorman is the sort of fat one."

  "Was the killer a Navajo?" Leaphorn asked.

  Chee hesitated, surprised. "Yes," he said. "Navajo."

  "You sound sure," Leaphorn said. "Why Navajo?"

  "Funny. I knew he was Navajo. But I didn't think about why," Chee said. He counted it off on his fingers. "He didn't step over the body, which could have just happened that way. But when he walked down the arroyo, he took care not to walk where the water had run. And on the way back to the road, a snake had been across there, and when he crossed its path he shuffled his feet." Chee paused. "Or do white men do that too?"

  "I doubt it," Leaphorn said. The don't-step-over-people business grew out of families living in one-room hogans, sleeping on the floor. A matter of respect. And the desert herders' respect for rain must have produced the taboo against stepping in water's footprints. Snakes? Leaphorn tried to remember. His grandmother had told him that if you walk across a snake's trail without erasing it by shuffling your feet, the snake would follow you home. But then his grandmother had also told him it was taboo for a child to keep secrets from grandmothers, and that watching a dog urinate would cause insanity. "How about the killer at Endocheeney's place? Another Navajo? Could it have been the same person?"

  "Not many tracks there," Chee said. "Body was about a hundred yards from the hogan, with the whole family milling around after he was found. And we hadn't had the rain there. Everything dry."

  "But what do you think? Another Navajo?" Chee thought. "I don't know," he said. "Couldn't be absolutely sure. But when we eliminated what everybody who lived there was wearing, I think it was a boot with a flat rubber heel. And probably a smallish hole worn in the right sole."

  "Different suspect, then," Leaphorn said. "Or different shoes." In fact, three different suspects. In fact, maybe four different suspects, counting Onesalt. He shook his head, thinking of the implausible, irrational insanity of it. Then he thought of Chee. An impressive young man. But why didn't he have at least an inkling of who had tried to kill him? Or why? Could he possibly not know? Leaphorn's back hurt. Sitting too long always did it these days. Easing himself out of the chair, he walked to the window over the sink and looked out. He felt something gritty under his boot sole, leaned down, and found it. The round lead pellet from a shotgun shell. He showed it to Chee. "This one of them?"

  "I guess so," Chee said. "I swept up, but when they went through the bedclothes, they bounced around. Got into everything."

  Into everything except Jim Chee, Leaphorn thought. Too bad he had so much trouble learning to believe in luck. "Did you see anything at all that would connect the Endocheeney and Sam things? Anything at all? Anything to connect either one of them to this?" Leaphorn gestured at the three patched shotgun holes.

  "I've thought about that," Chee said. "Nothing."

  "Did the name Irma Onesalt turn up either place?"

  "Onesalt? The woman somebody shot down near Window Rock? No."

  "I'm going to ask Largo to take you off of everything else and have you rework everything about Endocheeney and Sam," Leaphorn said. "You willing? I mean talk to everybody about everything. Who people talked to. Who people saw. Try to get a fix on whatever the killers were driving. Just try to find out every damn thing. Work on it day after day after day until we get some feeling for what the hell went on. All right?"

  "Sure," Chee said. "Fine."

  "Anything else about this shooting of your own here that didn't seem to fit on the FBI report?"

  Chee thought about it. His lips twitched in a gesture of doubt or deprecation.

  "I don't know,
" he said. "Just this morning, I found this. Might not have anything to do with anything. Probably doesn't." He pulled out his wallet again and extracted from it something small and roundish and ivory-colored. He handed it to Leaphorn. It was a bead formed, apparently, from bone.

  "Where was it?"

  "On the floor under the bunk. Maybe it fell out when I changed the bedding."

  "What do you think?" Leaphorn asked.

  "I think I never had anything that had beads like that on it, or knew anybody who did. And I wonder how it got here."

  "Or why?" Leaphorn asked.

  "Yes. Or why."

  If you believed in witches, Leaphorn thought, as Chee probably did, you would have to think of a bone bead as a way witches killed-the bone being human, and the fatal illness being "corpse sickness." And if you loaded your own shotgun shells, or even if you didn't, you would know how simple it would be to remove the little plug from the end, and the wadding, and add a bone bead to the lead pellets.