The Shape Shifter

by Tony Hillerman

  “Probably true,” Leaphorn said. “But if one comes home empty, he likes something else to blame.”

  The only trophy head on the wall of the Delos office was that of a large male bobcat snarling above an antique-looking rolltop desk. But a rifle rack against a wall revealed the nature of the Delos hobby. Behind its glass door four rifles and two shotguns were lined up in their racks. Delos motioned Leaphorn into a chair and seated himself beside his desk.

  “Is the time right for a drink? A Scotch or something? But I bet you’d prefer coffee?”

  “Coffee, if it’s no trouble,” Leaphorn said, seating himself and processing his impressions. The trophy heads, the gun collection, how Delos had presumed Leaphorn would want coffee, the sense of serene and confident dignity the man presented.

  “Coffee,” Delos told Tommy Vang, “for both of us.” Then he leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his belly, and smiled at Leaphorn.

  “Down to business,” he said. “I asked around, and I understand from my friends that you are a Navajo Tribal Policeman. I gather you have no jurisdiction here. Therefore, I am curious about why you came. I would like to think that you had learned that I obtained the tale-teller’s rug shown in that magazine and you simply, and very generously, wanted to reward me with some of the colorful tales of its past.” Delos smiled, raised his eyebrows, gave Leaphorn a few seconds to respond.

  Leaphorn nodded.

  Delos sighed. “But being well into my seventh decade, I have learned that it usually takes more than a generous spirit to send one on such a long trip. Normally some trade-off is involved. Some sort of tit-for-tat exchange. Am I right about that?”

  “You are,” Leaphorn said. “I have a whole list of things I hope to get from you, Mr. Delos.” He held up a finger. “Most important, I hope you can provide some information that will help me find out what happened to a friend of mine. Mel Bork. He seems to have disappeared. Second, I hope you’ll let me take a look at that tale-teller rug shown in that magazine. I admired that rug many years ago, and I haven’t seen it for years. Finally, I hope you will let me know where you obtained it.”

  Delos sat a moment, looking at his hands, apparently thinking. He shook his head, looked up. “That’s all?”

  Leaphorn nodded.

  “And what do you deliver to me in return?”

  Leaphorn shrugged. “Not a lot, I’m afraid. About all I can do is tell you what I remember of the hogan stories as a boy. Some of them were about the ‘rug woven from sorrows.’ And I could tell you how to get in touch with some of the old weavers who could tell you more.” He produced a wry smile. “But I expect you could do that with your own resources.”

  “Perhaps I could,” Delos said. “Some of it anyway. But only you can tell me why you thought I could help you find this friend of yours. This Mel Bork.”

  Leaphorn noticed Delos had put his hope of help in finding Bork in the past tense.

  “I still hope you can help me with that,” he said. “I hope you will tell me where he said he was going when he left here. And everything he said. Some of that might give me at least a hint of where he was going.”

  Delos threw up his hands, laughed. “I can tell you but if it’s helpful then it means you are indeed what my friends have told me about you. That you are a very shrewd detective.” Delos was smiling.

  Leaphorn, registering that Delos hadn’t denied that Bork had been here, returned the smile.

  “That causes me to ask another question: What prompted you to ask your friends about me? And which friends advised you?”

  The Delos smile faded.

  “I exaggerated. It was only Mr. Bork.”

  “Another question then. Why did Mr. Bork get me into his conversation with you?”

  Delos didn’t answer that. He shook his head. “I’ve led us off into a digression,” he said. “Let me start at the beginning. Mr. Bork called, asked for an appointment. He said, or perhaps just implied, that he was working in an insurance fraud investigation involving my tale-teller rug. He asked if he could see it. I said yes. He came out. I showed him the rug. He compared it to the photograph from the magazine. He said something like the photo and the rug looking identical.” Delos paused, awaiting reaction.

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I agree they looked very similar.”

  A tap at the office portal interrupted the answer. Tommy Vang stood there, a tray cart in front of him, smiling and waiting.

  Delos waved him in. Vang deposited a tray on a serving table beside Delos’s desk, slid it into reachable position between the two men, poured coffee into two saucered cups, removed the lids from a silver sugar bowl and a container of cream. Then, with a flourish and a broad smile, he whipped away a white cloth that had been covering a plate of cake slices and a bowl of nuts.

  “He makes that cake himself,” Delos said. “Fruitcake. It’s downright delicious.”

  “It looks very good,” Leaphorn said, admiring the cherry on top. He reached for his coffee cup.

  “But back to your question,” Delos said. “I told Bork that old rugs look a lot alike to me, so he showed me a white spot in the rug. Said it was a bird feather woven in. And a rough place. He said that was from some sort of bush that grows out at the Bosque Redondo camp where the Navajos were held captive. And he showed me the same spots on the photograph. I couldn’t argue with that. Then he asked me if I knew the rug was supposedly burned in a trading post fire. I said I’d heard about that, but figured it must have been another rug. And he said it looked to him like a hard rug to copy, and asked me where I had gotten it. He said the man who owned the trading post had collected insurance on it, and it looked like an insurance fraud case.”

  Leaphorn nodded. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I had bought it at the Indian market, or whatever they call it, in Santa Fe several years ago. Anyway, I got it from an Indian under that sidewalk sales area on the plaza.”

  “Not in a gallery? That sidewalk at the Palace of the Governors?”

  “Right,” Delos said.

  “Who sold it to you?” Leaphorn asked, thinking he was wasting his breath. He was.

  Delos frowned, looked thoughtful. “It was an Indian name,” he said. “Spanish-sounding, but I’m almost sure he was from one of the pueblos. Two of the women sitting just up from him against the wall were from San Felipe Pueblo, I remember that.”

  “Did the salesman tell you where he got it?”

  “Said it was an old Navajo rug. His mother had bought it years ago. Either at a tribal fair on the Navajo Reservation, or maybe at that rug auction the weavers have at the Crownpoint Elementary School gymnasium. He said when she died, she left it to him.”

  “No names then.”

  Delos shook his head. “Afraid it’s not much help.”

  “Oh, well,” Leaphorn said, and sipped his coffee. Excellent. He sipped again. “At least it tells me that this isn’t the rug destroyed in that fire.” But as he said it, he was thinking he hadn’t phrased that well. He should have said it proved that the tale-teller rug hadn’t been burned. But actually, it hadn’t really proved anything.

  “Try that fruitcake,” Delos said. “Tommy’s a damn fine cook, and that cake is his pride and joy. Everything’s in it. Apricots, apple, cherries, six kinds of nuts, just the right spices, all measured out just right. World’s best fruitcake.”

  “It sure looks good,” Leaphorn said. “Trouble is, I never did learn to like fruitcake.” He dipped into the nut dish. “I’ll eat more than my share of those walnuts and pecans instead.”

  Delos shrugged. “Well, I’ll guarantee you that you’d like Tommy’s version of it. I’ll have him make you a little snack package to take with you. If you don’t like it, toss it out for the birds. Now, let’s go see what you think of this famous rug.”

  The rug was displayed on the wall in a little sitting room adjoining the office, mounted on a hardwood frame. Leaphorn stared at it, trying to remember t
he time before the fatal fire when he examined it in Totter’s little gallery. It looked the same. He found the brilliant red spots formed by the liquid taken from the spider’s egg sacs, the little white spots formed by the dove’s feathers, other feathers from birds of different colors, and places where fibers from cactus, snakeweed, and other flora of eastern New Mexico grew. He found the sign of the trickster coyote, and of witchcraft, of the silver dollar, and of other assorted symbols of greed, the ultimate evil in the Dineh value system. And, sickening to Leaphorn, all of that evidence of sorrow and disharmony was surrounded by the enfolding symbol of Rainbow Man, the guardian spirit of Dineh harmony. That made it all an ultimate irony. The weaving, as his grandmother had always told them, was the work of an artist. But it was easy to understand why the shamans who saw it condemned it and put their curse on it.

  Delos was staring at it, too.

  “I always thought it was an interesting work,” he said. “After that picture got published in the magazine, a lawyer I know told me old man Totter had put in an insurance claim on it for forty thousand dollars. Said he finally settled for twelve thousand on the rug. About half of what he got for all the other stuff that he claimed was destroyed in that fire.”

  “You think this could be a copy of the original?” Leaphorn asked.

  Delos weighed that, staring at the rug. He shook his head. “I have no idea. No way for me to judge.”

  “Well, if my opinion was recognized as expert, I’d tell the insurance company that here it is, the original, right off old man Totter’s wall, that they were swindled. But the statute of limitations on that’s run out long ago, I guess. And anyway, old man Totter’s dead.”

  Delos’s eyebrows rose. “Dead?”

  “His obituary was published in the Gallup Independent,” Leaphorn said.

  “Really?” Delos said. “When did that happen?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I heard they had an obituary item in the paper some years ago.”

  “I never met the man,” Delos said. “But I guess he’d make another case for that rug bringing bad luck with it.”

  “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

  “You know,” Delos said, looking thoughtful, “I hadn’t heard about Totter dying. I think I’ll see what I can get for it.”

  “I would,” Leaphorn said. “I’m not really what you’d call superstitious, but I wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.”

  Delos laughed, a wry sound. “Think I’ll advertise it in the antique collectors’ journals. List all those semigenocidal horrors that inspired those women to weave it, and all the bad luck that has gone with it. That kind of legendary stuff makes artifacts more precious to some.” He laughed again. “Like the pistol that killed President Lincoln. Or the dagger that stabbed Julius Caesar.”

  “I know,” Leaphorn said. “We’ve had people contact us about trying to get genuine suicide notes. Or trying to get us to make copies for them.”

  “No accounting for taste, I guess,” Delos said, smiling at Leaphorn. “For example, just like your saying you don’t like fruitcake.”

  13

  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?”

  “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.

  “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 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 suspends 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 problem 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.