Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (18 page)

JOHN O'MALLEY made a tent out of his hands and looked past Leaphorn at something at the back of the Zuñi Tribal Courtroom. "To sum it up," he said, "we still don't know where to put our hands on George Bowlegs."

He shifted his eyes slightly to look at Leaphorn. He smiled. The action made a dimple in each cheek and crinkled the skin around his blue eyes. "I hope you'll stick to that chore. I'd put somebody on it to work with you if there was anybody. But everybody is working on something else. I think that kid knows something about why Cata and Shorty Bowlegs were killed. And I think he can tell us something about that commune." The eyes shifted away and the smile turned off. "We really wanted to talk to him today."

Leaphorn said absolutely nothing.

"Second, you think somebody else is hunting George. Maybe so," O'Malley said. "I don't doubt it. I can see why maybe some people would want to shut him up. But it looks like he's hard to catch." The smile came on again. "And it's too bad you getting shot by that coyote trap or whatever it was. We'll keep that syringe. Maybe we can track down where it came from and who bought the serum." The smile turned into a grin. "However, I think there's going to be enough charges to file when we get this broken so we may not need to worry about making a case on whoever committed that particular assault."

O'Malley folded the finger tent. The grin went away. He stood up.

"It might help," Leaphorn said quickly, "if you'd fill me in on what you've been learning."

O'Malley peered at him curiously.

"I gathered someone recognized Baker as a narcotics agent," O'Malley said. "He is." The silence stretched. That was all. Leaphorn realized with incredulous anger that this was all O'Malley was going to tell him.

"O.K. Then you think the commune is a cover for a narcotics drop—heroin or what have you," Leaphorn said. "And the killings were done to protect it?"

O'Malley said nothing.

"Is that right?" Leaphorn insisted.

O'Malley hesitated. Finally he said, "It's pretty obvious. But we haven't gotten everything we need yet to get the indictments. We need to talk to George. Among other things."

"Can I guess that Baker was working on this before the killings? That you've got enough so you don't have any doubts about it?"

O'Malley grinned again. "I'd say you could guess that."

"What have you got?"

The grin faded. "For a long time," O'Malley said, "our policy has been that every officer working a case is told everything he needs to know about the part he is working on. But we don't fill everybody in on everything that comes up if it doesn't have anything to do with the angle they're on. For example, I can tell you that we'd really like to talk to George today—but I don't guess that's likely?"

"Why today?"

"Tomorrow's this big Zuñi Shalako ceremonial. Thousands of people here—strangers from all over. It would be a good cover for somebody to come in and make a pickup."

"Anybody in particular?"

There was another pause while O'Malley thought about it. He unzipped the briefcase on his desk and pulled out a sheaf of photographs. Some were official police mug shots. Some were candid shots of the sort stakeouts collect through telescopic lenses. Leaphorn recognized Halsey in a photograph that seemed to have been taken on a college campus, and the pale boy called Otis in a police mug photo. There were five others he didn't recognize, including a balding fat man and a young man with an Indian face in a paratroop uniform. Leaphorn picked up this photograph and examined it.

"If you see any of these birds around tomorrow, I want to know about it," O'Malley said.

"This guy a Zuñi?"

"Yeah. He got the habit in Vietnam and he's been involved in dealing some since he got back."

Leaphorn put the photograph on the desk.

"That's the motive for the killings then?" he said. "Keeping a narcotics operation covered up? You got enough to be sure of that?"

"That's right," O'Malley said. "We're sure."

"O.K.," Leaphorn said. "So I'll just stick to finding George for you."

Pasquaanti wasn't in his office but his secretary—a small, cheerful girl with a very round face and a striking display of squash blossom jewelry—sent someone to find him after being persuaded it was important. Pasquaanti listened impassively while Leaphorn told him about seeing the kachina at the commune, about the ambition of George Bowlegs to become a Zuñi, about the note the boy had left for his brother, and about what had happened on the mesa. The Zuñi interrupted only once. He asked Leaphorn to describe the mask.

"It had a thick ruff of feathers around the neck," Leaphorn said. "Black. Probably crow or raven feathers. Had a beak maybe six inches long and round, like a broom handle. And the mask was rounded on top, with a sort of wand of feathers pointing quills-forward as a topknot. Then there was a design drawn on the cheek. I think it was a Salamobia mask."

"There are six of those," Pasquaanti said. He took out his fountain pen and made a quick sketch on notepaper. "Like this?"

"Yes. That's it."

"What color was the face?"

"The face? It was black."

Pasquaanti looked old. Leaphorn hadn't noticed that before.

"Mr. Leaphorn," he said. "I thank you for telling me this."

"Is there anything you can tell me?"

Pasquaanti thought about it. "I can tell you that the Salamobia you saw was not genuine. Black is the color of the Hekiapawa kiva, the Mole kiva. That mask is safe. It is always safe. So are the other masks. You can be sure of that."

"Then could someone have taken another mask?"

"There are two kinds of masks," Pasquaanti said. "Some are the actual kachina and the kachina spirit lives in them and they are fed and watered and taken care of with prayer plumes and everything they want. They are…" He paused, searching his English vocabulary for the right words. "Sacred," he said. "Very holy." He shook his head. Neither phrase was exactly right. "The other kind of mask is different. They are borrowed, and repainted to be used for different kachinas, and the spirit is not there."

"So perhaps someone might have taken one of those and changed it to look like a Salamobia?"

Pasquaanti considered this. His fingers folded and unfolded on the desk. "There are the bad among us," he said finally. "Some of us drink, and have learned the whiteman's greed, and aren't worth anything. But I don't think a Zuñi would take the mask of his family and use it like this."

The two men looked at each other silently. What Leaphorn described had been a hideous desecration. Worse, it had happened in the most holy period of the Zuñi liturgical year—in the days of sacred retreat just before Shalako. If this ceremonial was not properly done, rain did not fall, crops did not sprout, and sickness and bad luck were loosened across the land.

"One more thing," Leaphorn said. "I think George Bowlegs is wild to become a Zuñi. Maybe that's not possible, but he thinks it is. I think he went to your sacred lake because he wanted to talk to your Council of the Gods. And from what he told his little brother, I think he will come to Shalako and maybe he will do something. I think it would be good if your people watched for him."

"We will."

"And the man who wore the mask. He was smart enough to figure out where to look for George. He will be smart enough to figure it out again."

"We will watch for that man," Pasquaanti said. His voice was grim. It caused Leaphorn to remember something that Rounder had told him years ago: in Zuñi mythology, the penalty for sacrilege is death.

LIEUTENANT JOSEPH LEAPHORN spent the afternoon on the ridge that overlooks the village of Zuñi from the south. He had picked the place carefully. It was a relatively comfortable spot, with soft earth under his buttocks and a sandstone slab for a backrest. A growth of chamiso and a gnarled piñon made it unlikely that anyone would see him and wonder what the devil he was doing there. And the view was ideal for his purpose. To his left his binoculars covered the old wagon trail that wandered up the Zuñi Wash from the southwest. To his right he looked down on a newly graded reservation road that angled under Greasy Hill at the edge of the village, swerved past the Zuñi cemetery, and ran southward. One or the other of these two roads would provide the most direct route from the mesa where George Bowlegs had killed his deer to the Shalako ceremonials in Zuñi Village. There were countless other ways Bowlegs might come—if come he did—including leaving his horse, walking to the paved highway, and hitchhiking. But Leaphorn could think of no other activity that offered better odds than did sitting here. And intercepting Bowlegs was only one of the reasons he was here. There was also the chance it offered him to think. He had a lot of thinking to do.

The swollen bruise on his abdomen reminded him of the first puzzle. Why had the trap been set to catch George Bowlegs but not to kill him? Cata and Shorty Bowlegs had been cut down without qualm or hesitation. Why not George?

Leaphorn leaned back against the rock, squirmed into an easier position. Above him the sky was turning gray. The overcast had been building since noon. First it was nothing more than high-altitude humidity—a thin layer of stratospheric ice crystals which hung a glittering halo around the sun. Then a semiopaque grayness had crept in from north-northwest and the day gradually lost its light.

Why not George? Leaphorn felt the faintest trace of breeze on his cheek. Cold. It had been dead calm. The orgy of baking which caught up the women of Zuñi each Shalako season had reached its climax during the morning. Now most of the outdoor ovens were cooling. But a thin layer of blue smoke still hung in the air over the pueblo. It made a faint smear as far northwest as the Zuñi Buttes and eastward to the gaudy water tower at Black Rock. Even here, high over the valley and a half mile away, Leaphorn's nose caught the vague scent of baking bread and the perfume of burned piñon resin.

Already the wide shoulders of state road 53 were cluttered with cars and campers and pickups. The Zuñi people had come home from wherever they had wandered—college campuses, jobs in California and Washington. Those who called themselves the Flesh of the Flesh were drawn back to their birthplace for this great Coming Home of their ancestor spirits.

And with them came the curious, the tourists, dilettante Indian lovers, anthropologists, students, hippies, other Indians. Among the crowd would be the Zuñis' Brothers of the Pueblos: people from Acoma, Laguna, Zia, Hopi, Isleta, Santo Domingo, men who were priests of their own kivas, themselves connoisseurs of the metaphysics of nature, men with their own Dancing Gods who came to share in the ancient magic of their cousins. And, of course, the Navajos. In from the lonely hogans, with wives and children. Taller, rawboned, wearing their Levi's—looking on with a mixture of awe for great medicine made by these Callers of the Clouds, and the countryman's contempt for the dweller of towns.

Leaphorn sighed. Normally Zuñi Village held perhaps 3,500 of the 4,500 Zunis. Tonight seven or eight thousand people would be crowded here. It would be, as O'Malley had said, the one time a stranger come to pay money or collect heroin would be least likely to be noticed. Leaphorn's anger at O'Malley had gone now, the victim of Leaphorn's habit of relating actions to causes. O'Malley would not be an agent of the FBI if his mind did not operate in a manner which conformed to FBI standards. Obviously someone in the agency had been interested in Halsey, or in Halsey's commune, before the killings. That would color O'Malley's thinking. And if O'Malley had no respect for Leaphorn as a policeman, Leaphorn must admit, in fairness, that he had no respect for O'Malley. He would think of other things. Why hadn't a shotgun been rigged into that trap set for Bowlegs? Or why hadn't the syringe been loaded with cyanide? Leaphorn considered the question, found no way to reach a conclusion, and skipped back to the beginning—back to Monday, when he had first arrived at Pasquaanti's office. From there he worked forward, examining each of the oddities that puzzled him.

There was a stir of activity in the village now—people gathering on the street that fronted along Zuñi Wash on the Old Village side. Leaphorn watched. Through his powerful navy-surplus binoculars he saw the figure of a boy, naked except for loincloth, crossing the footbridge behind a man in white buckskin. The boy wore a hood surmounted by a single feather. Mask and body were black, spotted with dots of red, blue, yellow, and white. The Little Fire God, Leaphorn knew—Shulawitsi entering the Old Village to make his ceremonial inspection of the sacred place before the entry of the Council of the Gods. Ernesto Cata was dead but the Little Fire God lived. The Badger Clan had provided another of its sons to personify this eternal spirit.

The afternoon wore on. Leaphorn watched the roads and pursued his thoughts. More activity in the village now. The sound of drums and flutes barely audible on the cold air. This would be the arrival of the Council of the Gods. They came dancing down Greasy Hill, past the white-painted village water tank. Some he could see through the magnifying lenses. The Fire God with a smoking cedar branch. Then Saiyatasha, the Rain God of the North, called Longhorn because of the great curved horn which jutted from the right side of his black-and-white mask. He was a burly man in white deerskin shirt and a blue-and-white kirtle, a bow in one hand and a deer-bone rattle in the other. And behind him Hu-tu-tu, who brought the rains from the south, his mask lacking the great horn. With Hu-tu-tu, the two Yamuhaktos, their round eye and mouth holes giving their masks an expression of silly, childlike surprise. And dancing attendance, two Salamobias—the same fierce beaked faces that Leaphorn remembered from his nightmare. In each hand they carried a heavy pointed whip wand of yucca blades. The crowd kept a respectful distance.

The procession disappeared into the village. The sun was lost now as the cloud cover steadily thickened. It was growing much colder. Below, two station wagons and a pickup truck pulled off the cemetery road and disgorged more than a dozen men and a load of paraphernalia. Several wore ceremonial kirtles and skullcaps of white doeskin. They would be the personifiers of the Shalako and their attendants. The group vanished beneath the slope.