Laughter slipped on protective goggles and demonstrated how it all worked by adding to the sandpainting in progress. Three eagle feathers, white tipped with black, appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the board as he played the nozzle back and forth over the treated surface.
“You can go pretty fast with the setup we have here,” he said as he shut off the unit and picked up another self-contained device. While they looked on, he carefully applied fixative to the feathers he’d just drawn, securing them to the board.
Moody found the technique more intriguing than the technology. “There’s nothing on there; no tracings, no outlines. Don’t you sketch in your designs before you start?
Laughter slid the goggles up onto his head. “Don’t need to. I started learning from my father when I was eight. The designs we use are sketched in permanently up here.” He tapped his forehead. “That’s where a good hatathli keeps his. But I’m not a hatathli, of course. I’m just a painter. Though I know what not to paint.”
Moody kept pace with him as they exited the workshop. “Paul’s told me about that.”
Laughter smiled softly. “Then you know that no commercial, fixed, permanent sandpainting, no matter how accurate it looks, is a precise reproduction of a medicine painting. If it was an exact replication it might adversely affect the painter, or the purchaser, or universal harmony. If I made such a reproduction and harm befell the purchaser, I could be sued. Maybe not in a Florida court, but things can be different here on the Rez.
“No commercial sandpainter would do such a thing anyway, because the misfortune might befall him instead of a customer. ”
Moody found himself wondering about the Kettrick painting. Could it be the unfortunate exception, the exact reproduction Laughter seemed so confident no sandpainter would create? Did that have something to do with the obsession of their killer? Misfortune had certainly befallen Elroy Kettrick.
Been out in the sun too long, he told himself. Need to spend more time inside.
That was exactly where Laughter was taking them. They turned right and entered the main house, emerging into a high-ceilinged kitchen. Wide, tinted windows looked out over the indifferent creek. The appliances were modern, though designed to run straight off DC. That made sense to Moody. Solar electric production was always more efficient when it could be used directly, instead of having to be run through a converter first.
The painter waved some coffee for them. When it was ready, he and Ooljee resumed talking.
Left to himself, Moody studied his surroundings. There were fewer of the homey, traditional touches that distinguished his partner’s condo, perhaps because the awesome setting in which this house stood would detract from the finest art.
Ooljee brought out the fax for Laughter’s inspection. He frowned at it in disbelief. “Somebody killed somebody, over this?”
“For a copy of it, we assume. Or maybe just for the chance to look at it. We do not know for a fact that a copy was made. We do know that the original was destroyed.” Laughter was studying it closely but without especial interest, like a lepidopterist examining a brilliantly colored but not unique specimen.
“We were told in Ganado that this painting or one similar to it might have been painted here.” Ooljee was watching the artist closely.
“Not by me.” Laughter shook his head. “I sure as hell have never seen anything like it.”
Mentally Moody was already back in the truck. It was the same answer they’d received from a hundred different people back in town.
Laughter, however, wasn’t through. “Let’s ask my dad. He won’t yell too loud if we break in on him.”
“You said you learned from him. Does he still paint?” Moody asked.
Laughter led them through the house. “Sometimes when he’s in the mood, or just when he gets bored. He leaves most of it to me. He prefers to handle the financial end of the business.”
The den was a cool, sunken oval dominated by a huge fireplace. A six-foot square top-of-the-line zenat color monitor occupied a recess in the curving wall. The oversized couches and peeled-wood furniture were covered with the familiar earthtone upholstery. San Idelefonso black pottery shone side-by-side with intricate titanium sculptures.
Clearly there was money in sandpainting as well as in art and tradition.
The man who rose from the couch in front of the screen was as tall as Bill Laughter but much slimmer. He looked as if time had worn the bulk off him much as the wind had sculpted the wild sandstone monuments of the canyon.
Moody glanced at the zenat, which the elder Laughter had thoughtfully muted at their entrance. Tucson was playing Dallas in the Columbia Dome, ahead 49 to 6. Good. He had nothing on the game and the boring spread would allow him to concentrate wholly on the discussion at hand.
Once more Ooljee repeated the reason for the visit, waiting while both Laughters studied the fax and conferenced. The younger asked questions while the older man nodded and ventured comments in Navaho. His first words in English drove all thoughts of football from the detective’s mind.
“Yes, I think I have seen this before. Or something very much like it.”
“Where?” Ooljee asked quickly, as though the response might slip away if he didn’t inquire rapidly enough.
“I think it might be one of my father’s pieces. Of course, I could be wrong.”
In the excitement of the moment Moody spoke without thinking, a fault he was not usually prone to. “Where is he? Can we ask him about it?”
“My father’s been dead for many years.” Courteously, the elder Laughter did not allow Moody time in which to apologize. “He taught me, just as I have taught Bill.”
“Then that’s it.”
“Not necessarily.” The elder Laughter smiled softly. “I had to prepare for the day when he would no longer be here to help me. So I put everything he could teach me on file. Come into the office and we’ll see what we can find. That is, if I’m not completely mistaken and there is actually something to be found.”
The room located just off the den was long and narrow, the zenat on the far wall a strictly utilitarian model from Zenith T&T’s industrial division. Red Laughter palmed a well-used tactile 3.4 Black Widow spinner from a desktop and aimed it at the mollybox squatting beneath the window.
Images washed across the zenat, the outside windows automatically dimming as the mollybox was activated. The elder Laughter’s fingers played with the Widow. A succession of sandpaintings appeared on the monitor. Some were badly positioned for recording purposes, others were frozen in primitive, uncorrectable out-of-focus.
“A lot of these were taken when I was just a kid, with an old hand-held two-D camera, and transferred to my file much later. When I was learning and helping my father we couldn’t afford fancy stuff like mollystorage, and I didn’t know anything about holomaging. This was the best I could do.”
“You deserve credit for thinking so far ahead,” Ooljee told him.
“1 can’t take credit. It was my grandmother’s idea. Preserving these designs and techniques didn’t strike me as important until 1 was a lot older. Only then did I realize the debt I owed to her. She was very proud of my father’s work and didn’t want it to be lost. I can still remember the two of them arguing about it. My father didn’t want to spend the money for film and developing. He said I should learn everything by rote, the way he had learned from my grandfather. He wanted me to be a hatathli, like him.” Red Laughter’s gaze shifted to Moody, who stood listening respectfully.
“My father was a real hatathli; one of the very best. He believed the paintings should only be used to make medicine. That was how he supported himself; by doing traditional medicine. Not by making paintings to sell in the stores.” Laughter froze the screen on a particularly complex piece of work.