Tarkington at his gallery here. He thought it might be a copy. But he wasn’t ready to make any bets.” Garcia looked up from the photo. “Pretty flossy house it’s hanging in,” he said. “Judging from the view through the window, that might be old John Raskins’s house.”
“That’s what Tarkington told me. He told me this Delos fella lives there now.”
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“I take it you haven’t talked to Delos yet? Asked him where he got the rug?”
“I intend to do that tomorrow. Thought I’d call him and see if he’ll let me in. Let me look at the rug.” Garcia smiled. “Good luck,” he said. “He’s pretty high society for Flagstaff. He’s probably going to refer you to his Asian housekeeper. What are you going to tell him?
Going to just show him your Coconino deputy sheriff ’s badge and tell him you’re investigating a crime?” Leaphorn shook his head. “I see your point. What’s the crime?”
“Exactly.” Garcia tested his tea again, looking thoughtful.
Leaphorn waited.
“So you’re curious, too?” Garcia asked.
“Afraid so,” Leaphorn said. “After all these years.” Garcia drained his iced tea, picked up the ticket, put on his hat.
“Joe,” he said. “Let’s drive out to that old Totter place and look around and have a talk. I’ll explain why I’m still curious, and then you tell me what’s bothering you.”
“It’s a long drive,” Leaphorn said. “All the way up there past Lukachukai.”
“Well, it’s a long story, too,” Garcia said. “And a real sad one. Goes all the way back to that crime that put Ray Shewnack on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. And I wouldn’t think you’d be too busy. Being retired.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Leaphorn said, with a rueful chuckle.
“We’ll burn Coconino County sheriff gasoline,” Garcia said, as they got into his patrol car. “And remember, you’ve got to tell me more about what pulled THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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you into this. As I recall, all you were doing up there at Totter’s that day was sort of taking orders from the federals.”
“My story isn’t all that long,” Leaphorn said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand it myself.”
8
Garcia swerved off the interstate at Holbrook and roared up Highway 71 past Bidahochi, took 191 to Chinli, and thence along the north rim of Canyon de Chelly to Lukachukai and onward past Round Rock onto the gravel road that wandered between Los Gigante buttes into the empty rough country. Here the Carrizo Mountains ended and became the Lukachukai stem of the Chuska range.
That represented a three-hour drive, but Garcia made it in less than that. Talking all the way, and sometimes listening to Leaphorn.
Leaphorn had been doing some listening, too, but mostly he was enjoying his role as passenger—a position that policemen almost never hold. He had wasted a few moments trying to remember the last time he had rolled down a highway without being the driver. Then he concentrated on enjoying the experience, savoring the beauty of the landscape, the pattern of cloud shadows on 54
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the hills—all those details you miss when you’re navigat-ing through traffic—happy to surrender the job of staring at the center stripe, reading road signs, and so forth, to Sergeant Garcia.
Anyway a lot of what Garcia was telling him was already stored in his memory. It dealt with the old double murder of an elderly couple named Handy at their place of business. It had been so ruthlessly coldhearted that it had put Ray Shewnack right up among the FBI’s blue ribbon Most Wanted felons, advertised in post offices across the nation. But most of what Leaphorn had learned had been just hearsay filtered through police coffee talks. With Garcia he was hearing it right from the horse’s mouth. Or almost. Garcia had been too green to be at the middle of the first chase. But he’d been deeply involved in the cleanup work.
“Funny thing, Joe. Naturally it seemed downright too evil to believe for me back then. I was just a rookie.
Hadn’t seen a lot of violent crime.” Garcia shook his head, laughed. “But here I am now. Seen just about everything from incest murders to just-for-fun killings, and it still shocks me when I think about it.”
“You don’t mean the robbery itself,” Leaphorn said.
“You mean . . .”
“Well, not exactly. I mean the coldhearted and clever way Shewnack set it up. The way he used his partners and then betrayed them. Planning things so he could use his friends sort of as bait while he was driving away with all the loot. And that’s why I’ve always thought we should have taken a harder look at the Totter fire. Some people really, really, really hated Shewnack. And I have to admit he did give ’em a damn good reason to want to burn him THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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to death.” He laughed. “Burn him now. Sort of get a jump on the devil.”
Although Leaphorn’s Navajo culture hardly allowed even good reasons for hatred, he had to admit Shewnack had given Benny Begay, Tomas Delonie, and Ellie McFee some unusually strong causes for resentment. Ellie, as Garcia explained it, had been the clerk and cashier at the Big Handy’s service station/grocery store/trading post at the Chinli junction.
She had been, so she had told police, Shewnack’s girlfriend and soon to be his bride. But that would be after the robbery. Leading up to that she was the way Shewnack knew that Mr. Handy kept his accumulated sales collections in a backroom safe and made his deposits in a Gallup bank just once a month. So Shewnack had assigned Ellie her job in the robbery and told her that when it was over she should wait at a roadside turnout for him to pick her up and take her away to be married. She stayed there with her suitcase and waited until two Coconino County deputies came looking for her.
“She seemed like a nice young woman,” Garcia said.
“Not a real good looker, and too chunky for the taste of some, but nice eyes, nice smile.” He shook his head. “Not that she was doing much smiling when I was talking to her. She told me it had taken her a long time to believe that Shewnack was the one who had tipped off the cops about where to find her. And she still didn’t seem to really believe he’d done that to her.”
“I guess it was quite a contrast to the honeymoon trip he’d had her expecting,” Leaphorn said.
“How about that for a reason for some hatred?” Garcia asked. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say.” 56
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He glanced at Leaphorn. “Scorned and betrayed. And she was out and about when Shewnack got burned up. She’d gone to prison, done her years, earned some time off for good behavior, and then got a quick parole.”
“So she’s your suspect?” Leaphorn asked, and grinned. “I mean if the feds hadn’t taken over and ruled it was an accidental death.”
“Well, maybe,” Garcia said. “Delonie was still in stir when it happened. Benny Begay was just out on parole, but Benny didn’t seem like a killer to me. Or to anyone else. The judge agreed. He gave him just five to seven and he got that shortened with nothing but good conduct reports. Besides, he hadn’t had much to do with the crime.”
Begay, Garcia explained, had been sort of a stock boy, cleanup man, and gasoline pumper at Handy’s place.
His role in the crime was disconnecting the telephone to delay the call for police help. Tomas Delonie was the outside man—assigned to be there, armed with pistol and shotgun to make sure no one came along and interrupted the action. After that, Shewnack had instructed him to collect Benny and drive them both down that unim-proved road that leads from Chinli down through Beautiful Valley. There they waited on a trail down into Bis-E