Talking God jlajc-9 Read online

  “No, but it might get to be,” Kennedy said.

  Leaphorn waited for an explanation. None came.

  “How?” he asked. “And is it a homicide?”

  “Don’t know the cause of death yet,” Kennedy said. “And we don't have an identification. But it looks like there's some sort of connection between this bird and a Navajo.” He paused. “There was a note. Well, not really a note.”

  “What’s the interesting part? Is that it?”

  “Well, that’s peculiar. But what interests me is how the body got where it is.”

  Leaphorn’s face relaxed slightly into something like a smile. He looked over the work on the desk. Through the window of his second-floor office in the Navajo Tribal Police Building he could see puffy white autumn clouds over the sandstone formation which gave Window Rock, Arizona, its name. A beautiful morning. Beyond the desk, out through the glass, the world was cool, clear, pleasant.

  “Leaphorn. You still there?”

  “You want me to look for tracks? Is that it?”

  “You’re supposed to be good at it,” Kennedy said. “That's what you always tell us.”

  “All right,” Leaphorn said. “Show me where it is.”

  The body was under the sheltering limbs of a clump of chamisa, protected from the slanting morning sun by an adjoining bush. From where he stood on the gravel of the railroad embankment, Leaphorn could see the soles of two shoes, their pointed toes aimed upward, two dark gray pant legs, a white shirt, a necktie, a suit coat, still buttoned, and a ground’s-eye view of a pale narrow face with oddly pouched cheeks. Under the circumstances, the corpse seemed remarkably tidy.

  “Nice and neat,” Leaphorn said.

  Undersheriff Delbert Baca thought he meant the scene of the crime. He nodded.

  “Just luck,” he said. “A fellow running a freight engine past here just happened to notice him. The train was rolling so he couldn’t get down and stomp around over everything. Jackson here—” Baca nodded to a plump young man in a McKinley County deputy sheriff's uniform who was standing on the tracks “—he was driving by on the interstate.” Baca gestured toward Interstate Highway 40, which was producing a faint rumble of truck traffic a quarter-mile to the west. “He got out here before the state police could mess everything up.”

  “Nobody’s moved the body then?” Leaphorn asked. “What about this note you mentioned? How did you find that?”

  “Baca here checked his pockets looking for identification,” Kennedy said. “Reached under him to check hip pockets. He didn’t find a billfold or anything, but he found this in the handkerchief pocket of his coat.” Kennedy held out a small folded square of yellow paper. Leaphorn took it.

  “You don’t know who he is then?”

  “Don’t know,” Kennedy said. “The billfold is missing. There wasn't anything in his pockets except some change, a ballpoint pen, a couple of keys, and a handkerchief. And then there was this note in his coat pocket.“

  Leaphorn unfolded the note.

  “You wouldn’t think to look in that coat pocket if you were stripping somebody of identification,” Baca said. “Anyway, that's what I think was happening.”

  The note was written with what might have been a ballpoint pen with a very fine point. It said: “Yeabechay? Yeibeshay? Agnes Tsosie (correct). Should be near Windowrock, Arizona.”

  Leaphorn turned the square over. “Stic Up” was printed across the top, the trade name of the maker of notepads which stick to bulletin boards.

  “Know her?” Kennedy asked. “Agnes Tsosie. It sounds familiar to me.”

  “Tsosie’s like Kennedy in Boston,” Leaphorn said. He frowned. He did know one Agnes Tsosie. Just a little and from way back. An old lady who used to serve on the tribal council a long time ago. Elected from the Lower Greasewood district, if he remembered it right. A good woman, but probably dead by now. And there must be other Agnes Tsosies here and there around the reservation. Agnes was a common name and there were a thousand Tsosies. “Maybe we can find her, though. We can easy enough, if she's associated with a Yeibichai. They're not having many of those anymore.”

  “That’s the ceremony they call the Night Chant, isn't it?” Kennedy asked.

  “Or Nightway,” Leaphorn said.

  “The one that lasts nine days,” Kennedy said. “And they have the masked dancers?”

  ’That's it,“ Leaphorn said. But who was this man with the pointed shoes who seemed to know an Agnes Tsosie? Leaphorn moved past the chamisa limbs, placing his feet carefully to erase nothing not already erased in Baca's search of the victim's pockets. He squatted, buttocks on heels, grunting at the pain in his knees. He should exercise more, he thought. It was a habit he'd dropped since Emma's death. They had always walked together—almost every evening when he got home from the office. Walked and talked. But now—

  The victim had no teeth. His face, narrow as it was, had the caved-in, pointed-chin look of the toothless old. But this man wasn’t particularly old. Sixty perhaps. And not the sort to be toothless. His suit, blue-black with an almost microscopic gray stripe, looked old-fashioned but expensive, the attire of that social class with the time and money to keep its teeth firmly in its jaws. At this close range, Leaphorn noticed that the suit coat had a tiny patch by the middle button and the narrow lapel looked threadbare. The shirt looked threadbare, too. But expensive. So did a simple broad gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. And the face itself was an expensive face. Leaphorn had worked around white men for almost forty years, and Leaphorn studied faces. This man's complexion was dark—even with the pallor of death—but it was an aristocratic face. A narrow, arrogant nose, fine bones, high forehead.

  Leaphorn shifted his position and examined the victim’s shoes. The leather was expensive, and under the day's thin film of dust it glowed with a thousand polishings. Handmade shoes, Leaphorn guessed. But made a long time ago. And now the heels were worn, and one sole had been replaced by a shoemaker.

  “You noticed the teeth?” Kennedy asked.

  “I noticed the lack of them,” Leaphorn said. “Did anyone find a set of false teeth?”

  “No,” Baca said. “But nobody really looked. Not yet. It seemed to me that the first question to consider was how this guy got here.”

  Leaphorn found himself wondering why the sheriff’s office had called the FBI. Had Baca sensed something about the death of this tidy man that suggested a federal crime? He looked around him. The track ran endlessly east, endlessly west—the Santa Fe main line from the Midwest to California. North, the red sandstone ramparts of lyanbito Mesa; south, the piñon hills which rose toward the Zuni Mesa and the Zuni Mountains. And just across the busy lanes of Interstate 40 stood Fort Wingate. Old Fort Wingate, where the U.S. Army had been storing ammunition since the Spanish-American War.

  “How did he get here? That’s the question,” Kennedy said. “He wasn't thrown off the Amtrak, that's obvious. He doesn't look the type to be riding a freight. So I’d guess that probably somebody carried him here. But why the hell would anybody do that?“

  “Could this have anything to do with Fort Wingate?” Leaphorn asked. A half-mile or so up the main line he could see the siding that curved away toward the military base.

  Baca laughed, shrugged.

  “Who knows?” Kennedy said.

  “I heard they were going to shut the place down,” Leaphorn said. “It’s obsolete.”

  “I heard that too,” Kennedy said. “You think you can find any tracks?”

  Leaphorn tried. He walked down the railroad embankment some twenty paces and started a circle through the sage, snakeweed, and chamisa. The soil here was typical of a sagebrush flat: loose, light, and with enough fine caliche particles to form a crust. An early autumn shower had moved over this area about a week ago, making tracking easy. Leaphorn circled back to the embankment without finding anything except the marks left by rodents, lizards, and snakes and confident there had been nothing to find. He walked another dozen yards down
the track and started another, wider circle. Again, he found nothing that wasn’t far too old or caused by an animal. Then he crisscrossed the sagebrush around the body, slowly, eyes down.

  Kennedy, Baca, and Jackson were waiting for him on the embankment above the body. Behind him, far down the track, an ambulance had parked with a white sedan behind it—the car used by the pathologist from the Public Health Service hospital in Gallup. Leaphorn made a wry face. He shook his head.

  “Nothing,” he said. “If someone carried him in from this side, they carried him up from way down the tracks.”

  “Or down from way up the tracks,” Baca said, grinning.

  “What were you looking for?” Kennedy asked. “Besides tracks.”

  “Nothing in particular,” Leaphorn said. “You’re not really looking for anything in particular. If you do that, you don't see things you're not looking for.”

  “So you think he got brought in from way down the track?” Kennedy said.

  “I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Why would anyone do that? That's lots of hard work. And the risk of being seen while you're doing it. Why is this sagebrush better than any other sagebrush?”

  “Maybe they hauled him in from the other side,” Kennedy said.

  Leaphorn stared across the tracks. There was no road over there either. “How about lifting him off a train?”

  “Amtrak is going about sixty-five miles an hour here,” Kennedy said. “Doesn’t start slowing for Gallup for miles. I can't see that man on a freight, and they don't stop out here either. I checked with the railroad on all that.”

  They stood then on the embankment above the man with the pointed shoes, with nothing to say in the presence of death. The ambulance crew came down the track, carrying a stretcher, trailed by the pathologist carrying a satchel. He was a small young man with a blond mustache. Leaphorn didn’t recognize him and he didn't introduce himself.

  He squatted beside the body, tested the skin at the neck, tested the stiffness of the wrists, bent finger joints, looked into the toothless mouth.

  He looked up at Kennedy. “How’d he get here?”

  Kennedy shrugged.

  The doctor unbuttoned the suit coat and the shirt, pulled up the undershirt, examined the chest and abdomen. “There's no blood anywhere. No nothin’.“ He unbuckled the belt, unzipped the trouser fly, felt. “You guys know what killed him?” he asked nobody in particular.

  “What?” Baca said. “What killed him?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” the doctor said, still intent on the body. “I just got here. I was asking you.”

  He rose, took a step back. “Put him on the stretcher,” he ordered. “Face down.”

  Face down on the stretcher the man with the pointed shoes looked even smaller. The back of his dark suit was floured with gray dust, his dignity diminished. The doctor ran his hands over the body, up the spine, felt the back of the head, massaged the neck.

  “Ah,” he said. “Here we are.”

  The doctor parted the hair at the back of the man’s head at the point where the spine joins the skull. The hair, Leaphorn noticed, was matted and stiff. The doctor leaned back, looking up at them, grinning happily. “See?”

  Leaphorn could see very little—only a small place where neck became skull and where there seemed to be the blackness of congealed blood.

  “What am I seeing?” Kennedy asked, sounding irritated. “I don’t see a damned thing.”

  The pathologist stood, brushed off his hands, and looked down at the man in the pointed shoes.

  “What you see is where somebody who knows how to use a knife can kill somebody quick,” he said. “Like lightning. You stick it in that little gap between the first vertebra and the base of the skull. Cut the spinal cord.” He chuckled. “Zap.”

  “That what happened?” Kennedy asked. “How long ago?”

  “Looks like it,” the doctor said. “I’d say it was probably yesterday. But we'll do an autopsy. Then you'll have your answer.”

  “One answer,” Kennedy said. “Or two. How and when. That leaves who.”

  And why, Leaphorn thought. Why was always the question that lay at the heart of things. It was the answer Joe Leaphorn always looked for. Why did this man—obviously not a Navajo—have the name of a Navajo woman written on a note in his pocket? And the misspelled name of a Navajo’ ceremonial? The Yeibichai. It was the ceremonial in which the great mystical, mythical, magical spirits who formed the culture of the Navajos and created their first four clans actually appeared, personified in masks worn by dancers. Was the murdered man headed for a Yeibichai? As a matter of fact, he couldn't have been. It was weeks too early. The Yeibichai was a winter ceremonial. It could be performed only after the snakes had hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps. But why else would he have the note?

  Leaphorn pondered and found no possible answers. He would find Agnes Tsosie and ask her.

  The Agnes Tsosie Leaphorn remembered proved to be—apparently—the right one. At least when Leaphorn inquired about her as the first step in what he feared would be a time-consuming hunt he learned the family was planning a Yeibichai ceremonial for her. He spent a few hours making telephone inquiries and decided he had struck it lucky. There seemed to be only three of the great Night Chant ceremonials scheduled so far. One would be held at the Navajo Nation Fair at Window Rock for a man named Roanhorse and another was planned in December over near Burnt Water for someone in the Gorman family. That left Agnes Tsosie of Lower Greasewood as the only possibility.

  The drive from Leaphorn’s office in Window Rock to Lower Greasewood took him westward through the ponderosa forests of the Defiance Plateau, through the piñon-juniper hills which surround Ganado, and then southeast into the sagebrush landscape that falls away into the Painted Desert. At the Lower Greasewood Boarding School those children who lived near enough to be day students were climbing aboard a bus for the trip home. Leaphorn asked the driver where to find the Agnes Tsosie place.

  “Twelve miles down to the junction north of Beta Hochee,” the driver said. “And then you turn back south toward White Cone about two miles and take the dirt road past the Na-Ah-Tee trading post, and about three-four miles past that, to your right, there’s a road that leads off toward the backside of Tesihim Butte. That's the road that leads up to Old Lady Tsosie's outfit. About two miles, maybe.”

  “Road?” Leaphorn asked.

  The driver was a trim young woman of perhaps thirty. She knew exactly what Leaphorn meant. She grinned.

  “Well, actually, it’s two tracks out through the sage. But it's easy to find. There's a big bunch of asters blooming along there—right at the top of a slope.”

  The junction of the track to the Tsosie place was easy to find. Asters were blooming everywhere along the dirt road past Na-Ah-Tee trading post, but the place where the track led off from the road was also marked by a post which the bus driver hadn’t mentioned. An old boot was jammed atop the post, signaling that somebody would be at home. Leaphorn downshifted and turned down the track. He felt fine. Everything about this business of learning why a dead man had Agnes Tsosie’s name in his pocket was working well.

  “I don’t have no idea who that could be,” Agnes Tsosie said. She was reclining, thin, gray haired, propped up by pillows on a metal bed under a brush arbor beside her house, holding a Polaroid photograph of the man with the pointed shoes. She handed it to Jolene Yellow, who was standing beside the sofa. “Daughter, you know this man?”

  Jolene Yellow examined the photograph, shook her head, handed the print back to Leaphorn. He had been in the business too long to show disappointment.

  “Any idea why some stranger might be coming out here to your Yeibichai?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not this stranger.”

  Not this stranger. Leaphorn thought about that. Agnes Tsosie would explain in good time. Now she was looking away, out across the gentle slope that fell away from Tesihim Butte and then rose gradually toward the sharp dark ou
tline of Nipple Butte to the west. The sage was gray and silver with autumn, the late afternoon sun laced it with slanting shadows, and everywhere there was the yellow of blooming snake-weed and the purple of the asters. Beauty before her, Leaphorn thought. Beauty all around her.

  But Agnes Tsosie’s face showed no sign she was enjoying the beauty. It looked strained and sick.

  “We have a letter,” Agnes Tsosie said. “It’s in the hogan.” She glanced at Jolene Yellow. “My daughter will get it for you to look at.”

  The letter was typed on standard bond paper.

  September 13. Dear Mrs. Tsosie:

  I read about you in an old issue of National Geographic—the one with the long story about the Navajo Nation. It said you were a member of the Bitter Water Clan, which was also the clan of my grandmother, and I noticed by the picture they had of you that you two look alike. I write to you because I want to ask a favor.

  I am one-fourth Navajo by blood. My grandmother told me she was all Navajo, but she married a white man and so did my mother. But I feel I am a Navajo, and I would like to see what can be done about becoming officially a member of the tribe. I would also like to come out to Arizona and talk to you about my family. I remember that my grandmother told me that she herself was the granddaughter of Ganado Mucho and that she was born to the Bitter Water People and that her father’s clan had been the Streams Come Together People.

  Please let me know if I can come and visit you and anything you can tell me about how I would become a Navajo.

  Sincerely,

  Henry Highhawk

  I am enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

  Leaphorn reread the letter, trying to connect these words, this odd plea, with the arrogant face of the man with the pointed shoes.

  “Did you answer it?”

  “I told him to come,” Agnes Tsosie said. She sighed, shifted her weight, grimaced.

  Leaphorn waited.

  “I told him there would be a Yeibichai for me after the first frost. Probably late in November. That would be when to come. There would be other Bitter Water People there for him to talk to. I said he could talk to the hataalii who is doing the sing. Maybe it would be proper for him to look through the mask and be initiated like they do with boys on the last night of the sing. I said I didn’t know about that. He would have to ask the hataalii about that. And then he could go to Window Rock and see about whether he could get on the tribal rolls. He could find out from the people there what proof he would need.“