Delonie was shaking his head, looking grim.
“So you didn’t just get out here today?” Garcia asked.
“Yesterday,” Delonie said. “I’m about ready to give up.”
“You just came looking for anything useful Shewnack might have had that didn’t get burned up with him?”
“Like I said, I figured if he had any money with him, THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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if he was planning to stay with Totter as a hired hand, he might have tucked it away someplace safe. Maybe buried it. Hid it under something.”
“But you didn’t find anything?”
“Not yet.”
“You think you will?”
Delonie thought a while. “I guess not. I think I’m ready to quit looking.” He sighed, took a deep breath, looked down. “Don’t know,” he said. “I guess maybe I found what I really wanted. I wanted to just see for myself that the bastard was really dead.” He looked up at Garcia, then at Leaphorn. Forced a smile. “Get closure. Isn’t that what the shrinks are calling it now? Put it behind you.
“Mr. Leaphorn here, if he’s a Navajo like he looks, then he’d know about that. They have that curing ceremony to help them forgive and forget when they get screwed. Bennie Begay, he had one of those. An enemy way ceremony, he said it was.”
“You look like you might be Indian,” Leaphorn said.
“Not Navajo?”
“Part Pottawatomie, part Seminole,” Delonie said.
“Probably part French, too. We never had such a ceremony. Neither tribe. But maybe just seeing where the bastard burned up will work for me. Anyway, it gave me a little satisfaction. Maybe it wasn’t as hot as the hell he’s enjoying now but it must have been next to it. People who knew this place said Totter stored his firewood in that gallery back room where Shewnack was sleeping. That wood burns hot.”
That provoked a brief, thoughtful silence.
Leaphorn cleared his throat. “This Shewnack must have been quite a man,” he said. “I’m thinking about the 74
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the way he sucked all of you into that plot he was working up. Sounds like he was awful damn persuasive. A genuine, bona fide charmer.”
Delonie produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “You bet. I remember Ellie saying he was the prettiest man she ever saw.” He laughed again. “Anyway, a lot prettier than me.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in the records about where he came from. Was he a local man? Family? Anything like that? If he had any criminal record, it must have been under some other name.”
“He told us he was from California, or somewhere out on the West Coast,” Delonie said. “But after Ellie got to know him, she said he was actually from San Francisco. Great talker, though. Always smiling, always cheerful. Never said anything bad about anybody or anything.
Seemed to know just about everything.” Delonie stopped, shook his head, gave Leaphorn a wry smile. “For example, how to unlock a locked car, or jump-start it; how to avoid leaving fingerprints. He even showed me and Bennie Begay how to get out of those plastic cuffs highway patrol-men carry.”
“You think he had a record?” Leaphorn asked.
“I think maybe he used to be a policeman,” Delonie said. “He seemed to know so much about cops and law enforcement. But I don’t know. Then I thought maybe he had worked in a machine shop or something like that. He seemed to know a lot about construction and machinery.
But with him, I think most of what he was saying was just sort of talk intended to give you a phony idea of who he was. Or had been.” He shook his head and chuckled. “I remember a preacher we used to listen to when I was a boy.
He’d have called Shewnack the ‘Father of Liars.’” THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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“Like the devil himself,” Garcia said.
“Yep,” Delonie said, “exactly.”
“Did he ever talk about what he’d done for a living?” he asked. “Any mention at all?”
Delonie shook his head. “Not really. Anytime anyone got serious about things like that he’d say something about there being lots of easy ways to get money. Once he made a crack about how coyotes know you don’t have to raise chickens to eat them.”
“Quite a guy,” Garcia said. “Well, look, Mr. Delonie, if you do decide to look some more, and you find anything, I want you to give me a call.” He handed Delonie his card.
“And don’t forget to keep checking in with your parole officer.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, “and you should—” But he stopped. Why inject himself into this until he knew a lot more than he did. Delonie would know that parolees were not allowed to possess firearms.
10
It was quiet in the patrol car until it had rolled down the last hump of the old Totter’s Trading Post access track and was reaching the junction of the gravel road.
“If you do a left here, we could take a three-or-so-mile detour and get to Grandma Peshlakai’s place,” Leaphorn said. “Wouldn’t take long. Unless you have something else to do.”
Garcia glanced at him, looking surprised. “You want to do that?”
“I’d like to see if she ever got her pinyon sap back. Or found out who stole it. Or anything.”
“Well, why not? That would probably be as useful as anything we learned here.”
They came to a culvert bridging the borrow ditch beside the county road. Up the hillside beyond it was an old-fashioned dirt-topped hogan; a zinc water tank sat atop a platform beside it. Behind it was a slab-sided out-78
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house, a rusty-looking camping trailer, and a sheep pen with a loading ramp. Garcia slowed.
“That it?”
“Yep,” Leaphorn said.
“Probably nobody home,” Garcia said. “I don’t see any vehicles.”
“There’s that old tire hanging on the gate post though,” Leaphorn said, pointing. “Most people out here, they take that off when they leave the hogan.”
“Yeah. Some of ’em still do,” Garcia said. “But that old custom is sort of dying out. Tells the neighbors it’s safe to come in and see what they can steal.” Leaphorn frowned, and Garcia noticed it.
“Didn’t mean that as an insult,” Garcia said.
“Trouble is, it’s true.”
“Well, times change,” Garcia said, looking apologetic.
“It ain’t like it used to be.”
But it was at the Peshlakai place. As they drove up the track and stopped east of the hogan, a woman pulled back the carpet hanging across the doorway and stepped out.
Leaphorn got out of the car, nodded to her, said, “Ya eeh teh.”
She acknowledged that, nodded, looked surprised, and laughed. “Hey,” she said. “Are you that policeman that made Grandma so mad years and years ago?” Leaphorn grinned. “I guess so, and I came to apologize. Is she here?”
“No, no,” the girl said. “She’s gone off to Austin Sam’s place. He’s one of her grandsons, and she’s taking care of one of her great-grandchildren. She does that for him some when Austin is off doing political cam-THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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paigning. Running for the Tribal Council seat in his district.”
Leaphorn considered that a moment, wondering how old Grandma Peshlakai would be now. In her nineties at least, he was thinking, and still working.
“I’m sorry I missed her. Please tell her I said, Ya eeh teh.”
This very mature woman, he was thinking, must be Elandra, who had been a lot younger when he’d first met her.
“Elandra, this man here is Sergeant Garcia, a deputy with the sheriff’s office down in Flagstaff.” The glad-to-meet-yous were exchanged, and Elandra, looking puzzled, held back the doorway carpet and invited them in. “I don’t have anything ready to offer you,” she said, “but I could make some coffee.” Leaphorn was shaking his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “I just came by to see your grandmother.” He paused, looking embarrassed. “And I was wondering if anything new had come up in that burglary you had.” Elandra’s eyes widened. “Lots of years gone by since then. Lot of things happened.”