Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 03 - Listening Woman

by Listening Woman(lit)

  "Below the East, she has discovered it,

  Now she has discovered Dawn Boy,

  The child now he has come upon

  it,

  Where it was resting he has come upon it,

  Now he talks to it, now it listens to him.

  Since it listens to him, it obeys him;

  Since it obeys him, it grants him beauty.

  From the mouth of Dawn Boy, beauty

  comes forth.

  Now the child will have life of

  everlasting beauty.

  Now the child will go with beauty

  before it,

  Now the child will go with beauty all

  around it,

  Now the child will be with beauty

  finished"

  Then the Endischee girl had gone, trailed again by cousins, and nieces and nephews, to run the final race of Kinaalda. The sun had come up and Leaphorn thought he'd try once more to talk to Mrs. Cigaret. She was sitting in her truck, its door open, listening to those who were about to remove the Kinaalda cake from the fire pit.

  Leaphorn sat down beside her. "One thing still troubles me," he said. "You told the FBI man, and you have told me, that the man who was killed said that sand paintings were spoiled. Sand paintings. More than one of the dry paintings. How could that be?"

  "I don't know," Mrs. Cigaret said.

  "Do you know of any sing that has more than one sand painting at a time?" Leaphorn asked. "Is there any singer anywhere on the reservation who does it a different way?"

  "They all do it the same way, if they do it the way the Talking God taught them to make dry paintings."

  "That's what my grandfather taught me," Leaphorn said. "The proper one is made, and when the ceremonial is finished, the singer wipes it out, and the sand is mixed together and carried out of the hogan, and scattered back to the wind. That's the way I was taught."

  "Yes," Margaret Cigaret said.

  "Then, old mother, could it have been that you did not understand what the man who was your patient said to you? Could he have said one sand painting was spoiled?"

  Mrs. Cigaret turned her face from the place where the Endischees had scraped away the hot cinders, and had brushed away a layer of ashes, and were now preparing to lift the Kinaalda cake from its pit oven. Her eyes focused directly on Leaphorn's face; as directly as if she could see him.

  "No," she said. "I thought I heard him wrong. And I said so. And he said... She paused, recalling it. "He said, `No, not just one holy painting. More than one.' He said it was strange, and then he wouldn't talk any more about it."

  "Very strange," Leaphorn said. The only place he knew of that a bona fide singer had produced genuine dry paintings to be preserved was at the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe. There it had been done only after much soul-searching and argument, and only after certain elements had been slightly modified. The argument for breaking the rules had been to preserve certain paintings so they would never be lost. Could that be the answer here? Had Standing Medicine found a way to leave sand paintings so a ceremony would be preserved for posterity? Leaphorn shook his head.

  "It doesn't make sense," Leaphorn said.

  "No," Mrs. Cigaret said. "No one would do it."

  Leaphorn opened his mouth and then closed it. It was not necessary to say the obvious. There was no reason to say, "Except a witch." In the metaphysics of the Navajo, these stylized reproductions of Holy People reliving moments from mythology were produced to restore harmony. But this same metaphysics provided that when not done properly, a sand painting would destroy harmony and cause death. The legends of the grisly happenings in witches' dens were sprinkled with deliberately perverted sand paintings, as well as with murder and incest.

  Mrs. Cigaret had turned her face toward the fire pit. Amid laughter and loud approval, the great brown cake was being raised from the pit-carefully, to avoid breaking-and the dust and ashes brushed away.

  "The cake is out," Leaphorn said. "It looks perfect."

  "The ceremony has been perfect," Listening Woman said. "Everything was done just right. In the songs, everybody got the words right. And I heard your voice among the singers."

  "Yes," Leaphorn said.

  Mrs. Cigaret was smiling now, but the smile was grim. "And in a moment you will ask me if the man who was to die told me anything about skinwalkers, anything about a den of witches."

  "I might have asked you that, old mother," Leaphorn said. "I was trying to remember if it is wrong to even ask about witches at a Kinaalda."

  "It's not a good thing to talk about," Mrs. Cigaret said. "But in this case it is business, and we won't be talking much about witches, because the old man told me nothing about them."

  "Nothing?"

  "Nothing. I asked him. I asked `him because I, too, wondered about the sand paintings," Mrs. Cigaret said. She laughed. "And all he did was get angry. He said he couldn't talk about it because it was a secret. A big secret."

  "Did you ever think that the old man might himself be a skinwalker?"

  Mrs. Cigaret was silent. At the hogan door, Mrs. Endischee was cutting portions from the rim of the cake and handing them out to relatives.

  "I thought about it," Mrs. Cigaret said. She shook her head again. "I don't know," she said. "If he was, he doesn't hurt anybody now."

  Just beyond the Mexican Water chapter house, where Navajo Route 1 intersects with Navajo Route 12, Leaphorn pulled the carryall onto the shoulder, cut the ignition, and sat. The Tuba City district office was 113 miles west, down Route 1. Chinle, and the onerous duty of helping provide Boy Scout security at Canyon De Chelly, lay 62 miles almost due south down Route 12. Desire pulled Leaphorn westward. But when he got to the Tuba City district office what could he tell Captain Largo? He had come up with absolutely nothing concrete to justify the time Largo had bought for him-and damned little that could be described even as nebulous. He should radio Largo that he was calling it all off and then drive to Chinle and report for duty. Leaphorn picked up the Tso-Atcitty file, flipped rapidly through it, put it down again and picked up the thicker file about the search for the helicopter.

  The recreated route of the copter still led erratically, but fairly directly, toward the vicinity of the Tso hogan. Leaphorn stared at the map, remembering that another line-drawn from an abandoned Mercedes to a water hole where two dogs had died-would, if extended, pass near the same spot. He flipped to the next page and began reading rapidly the description of the copter, the details of its rental, the pertinent facts about the pilot. Leaphorn stared at the name, Edward Haas. haas had been stenciled in white on the red plastic of the battery lantern on the blanket in the Endischee hogan.

  "Well, now," Leaphorn said aloud. He thought of dates and places, trying to make connections, and failing that, thought of what Listening Woman had said when he'd asked if Tso might have been a witch. Then he reached down, picked up the radio mike and checked in with the Tuba City headquarters. Captain Largo wasn't in.

  "Just tell him this, then," Leaphorn said. "Tell him that a boy named Eddie Gorman was at the Endischee Kinaalda with one of those floating fishermen's lanterns with the name Haas stenciled on it." He filled in the details of description, family, and where the boy might be found. "Tell him I'm going to Window Rock and clear a trip to Albuquerque."

  "Albuquerque?" the dispatcher asked. "Largo's going to ask me why you're going to Albuquerque."

  Leaphorn stared at the speaker a moment, thinking about it. "Tell him I'm going to the FBI office. I want to read their file on that helicopter case."

  11

  S pecial Agent George Witover, who ushered Leaphorn into the interrogation room, had a bushy but neat mustache, shrewd light-blue eyes, and freckles. He took the chair behind the desk and smiled at Leaphorn. "Well, Lieutenant-" He glanced down at the note the receptionist had given him. "Lieutenant Leaphorn. We understand you found a flashlight from the Haas helicopter." The blue eyes held Leaphorn's eyes expectantly. "Have a seat." He gestured to the ch
air beside the desk.

  Leaphorn sat down. "Yes."

  "Your Window Rock office called and told us a little about it," the man said. "They said you particularly wanted to talk to me. Why was that?"

  "I heard somewhere that the man to talk to about the case was Agent George Witover," Leaphorn said. "I heard you were the one who was handling it."

  "Oh," Witover said. He eyed Leaphorn curiously, and seemed to be trying to read something in his face.

  "And I thought about the rule the FBI has about not letting anybody see case files, and I thought about how we have just exactly the same rule, and it occurred to me that sometimes rules like that get in the way of getting things done. So I thought that since we're both interested in that copter, we could sort of exchange information informally."

  "You can see the report we made to the U.S. Attorney," Witover said.

  "If you're like us, sometimes that report is fairly brief, and the file is fairly thick. Everything doesn't go into the report," Leaphorn said.

  "What we heard from Window Rock was that you were at some sort of ceremonial, and saw the flashlight there with the name stenciled on it, but you didn't get the flashlight or talk to the man who had it."

  "That's about it," Leaphorn said. "Except it was a battery lantern and a boy who had it."

  "And you didn't find out where he'd gotten it?"

  Leaphorn found himself doing exactly what he'd decided not to do. He was allowing himself to be irritated by an FBI agent. And that made him irritated at himself. "That's right," he said. "I didn't."

  Witover looked at him, the bright blue eyes asking "Why not?" Leaphorn ignored the question.

  "Could you tell me why not?" Witover asked.

  "When I saw the lantern, I didn't know the name of the helicopter pilot," Leaphorn said, his voice cold.

  Witover said nothing. His expression changed from incredulous to something that said: "Well, what can you expect?" "And now you want to read our file," he stated.

  "That's right."

  "I wish you could tell us a bit more. Any sudden show of wealth among those people. Anything interesting."

  "In that Short Mountain country, if anybody has three dollars it's a show of wealth," Leaphorn said. "There hasn't been anything like that."

  Witover shrugged and fiddled with something in the desk drawer. Through the interrogation room's single window Leaphorn could see the sun reflecting off the windows of the post office annex across Albuquerque's Gold Avenue. In the reception room behind him, a telephone rang once.

  "What made you think I was particularly interested in this case?" Witover asked.

  "You know how it is," Leaphorn said. "Small world. I just remember hearing somebody say that you'd asked to come out from Washington because you wanted to stay on that Santa Fe robbery."

  Witover's expression said he knew that wasn't exactly what Leaphorn had heard.

  "Probably just gossip," Leaphorn said.

  "We don't know each other," Witover said, "but John O'Malley told me you worked with him on that Cata homicide on the Zu¤i Reservation. He speaks well of you."

  "I'm glad to hear that." Leaphorn knew it wasn't true. He and O'Malley had worked poorly together and the case, as far as the FBI was concerned, remained open and unsolved. But Leaphorn was glad that Witover had suddenly chosen to be friendly.

  "If I show you the file, I'd be breaking the rule," Witover said. It was a statement, but it included a question. What, it asked, do, I get in return?

  "Yes," Leaphorn said. "And if I found the helicopter, or found out how to find it, our rules would require me to report to the captain, and he'd inform the chief, and the chief would inform Washington FBI, and then they'd teletype you. It would be quicker if I picked up the telephone and called you directly-at your home telephone number-but that would break our rules."

  Witover's expression changed very slightly. The corners of his lips edged a millimeter upward. "Of course," he said, "you can't be tipping people off on their home telephones unless there's a clear understanding that nobody talks about it later."

  "Exactly," Leaphorn said. "Just as you can't leave files in here with me if you didn't know I'd swear it never happened."

  "Just a minute," Witover said.

  It actually took him almost ten minutes. When he came back through the door he had a bulky file in one hand and his card in the other. He put the file on the desk and handed Leaphorn the card. "My home number's on the back," he said.

  Witover sat down again and fingered the cord that held down the file flap. "It goes all the way back to Wounded Knee," he said. "When the old American Indian Movement took over the place in 1973, one of them was a disbarred lawyer from Oklahoma named Henry Kelongy." He glanced at Leaphorn. "You know about the Buffalo Society?"

  "We don't get cut in for much of that," Leaphorn said. "I know what I hear, and what I read in Newsweek."

  "Um. Well, Kelongy was a fanatic. They call him `The Kiowa' because he's half Kiowa Indian. Raised in Anadarko, and got through the University of Oklahoma law school, and served in the Forty-fifth Division in World War Two, and made it up to first lieutenant and then killed somebody in Le Havre on the way home and lost his commission in the court-martial. Some politics after that. Ran for the legislature, worked for a congressman, kept getting more and more militant. Ran an Indian draft-resisters group during the Vietnam war. So forth. Behind all this he was working as a preacher. Started out as a Church of the Nazarene evangelist, and then moved over into the Native American Church, and then started his own offshoot of that. Kept the Native American peyote ceremony, but tossed out the Christianity. Went back to the Sun God or whatever Indians worship." Witover glanced quickly at Leaphorn. "I mean whatever Kiowas worship," he amended.

  "It's complicated," Leaphorn said. "I don't know much about it, but I think Kiowas used the sun as a symbol of the Creator." Actually, he knew quite a bit about it. Religious values had always fascinated Leaphorn, and he'd studied them at Arizona State-but just now he wasn't prepared to educate an FBI agent.

  "Anyway," Witover continued, "to skip a lot of the minor stuff, Kelongy had a couple of brushes with the law, and then he and some of his disciples got active in AIM. We're pretty sure they were the ones who did most of the damage when AIM took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Washington. And then at Wounded Knee, Kelongy was there preaching violence. When the AIM people decided to cancel things, Kelongy raised hell, and called them cowards, and split off."

  Witover fished a pack of filtered cigarettes from his pocket, offered one to Leaphorn and lit up. He inhaled, blew out a cloud of blue smoke. "Then we started hearing about the Buffalo Society. There was a bombing in Phoenix, with pamphlets left scattered around, all about the Indians killed by soldiers somewhere or other. And some more bombings here and there... Witover paused, tapping his fingertips on the desktop, thinking. "At Sacramento, and Minneapolis, and Duluth, and one in the South-Richmond, I think it was. And a bank robbery up in Utah, at Ogden, and always pamphlets identifying the Buffalo Society and a bunch of stuff about white atrocities against the Indians." Witover puffed again. "And that brings us to the business at Santa Fe. A very skillful piece of business." He glanced at Leaphorn. "How much you know about that?"

  "Nothing much that didn't apply to our part of it," Leaphorn said. "Hunting the helicopter."

  "The afternoon before the robbery, Kelongy checked into the La Fonda and asked for a fifth-floor suite overlooking the plaza. You can see the bank from there. Then-"

  "He used his own name?" Leaphorn was frowning.

  "No," Witover said. He looked slightly sheepish. "We had a tail on him."

  Leaphorn nodded, his expression carefully noncommittal. He was imagining Witover trying to write the letter explaining how a man had managed a half-million-dollar robbery while under Witover's surveillance.

  "We've pretty well put together exactly what happened," Witover went on. He leaned back in the swivel chair, locked his fingers behind his he
ad, and talked with the easy precision of one practiced in delivering oral reports. The Wells Fargo truck had pulled away from the First National Bank on the northwest corner of Santa Fe Plaza at three-ten. At almost exactly three-ten, barriers were placed across arterial streets, detouring traffic from all directions into the narrow downtown streets. As the armored truck moved away from downtown, traffic congealed in a monumental jam behind it. This both occupied police and effectively sealed off the sheriff's and police departments, both in the downtown district. A man in a Santa Fe police uniform and riding a police-model motorcycle put up a barrier in the path of the armored truck, diverting a van ahead of the truck, the truck itself and a following car into Acequia Madre street. Then the barrier was used to block Acequia Madre, preventing local traffic from blundering onto the impending robbery. On the narrow street, lined by high adobe walls, the armored truck was jammed between the van and the car.