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Leaphorn nodded.
Delos sighed. “But being well into my seventh decade, I have learned that it usually takes more than a generous spirit to send one on such a long trip. Normally some trade-off is involved. Some sort of tit-for-tat exchange. Am I right about that?”
“You are,” Leaphorn said. “I have a whole list of things I hope to get from you, Mr. Delos.” He held up a finger. “Most important, I hope you can provide some information that will help me find out what happened to a friend of mine. Mel Bork. He seems to have disappeared.
Second, I hope you’ll let me take a look at that tale-teller rug shown in that magazine. I admired that rug many years ago, and I haven’t seen it for years. Finally, I hope you will let me know where you obtained it.” Delos sat a moment, looking at his hands, apparently thinking. He shook his head, looked up. “That’s all?” Leaphorn nodded.
“And what do you deliver to me in return?” Leaphorn shrugged. “Not a lot, I’m afraid. About all I can do is tell you what I remember of the hogan stories as a boy. Some of them were about the ‘rug woven from sorrows.’ And I could tell you how to get in touch with some of the old weavers who could tell you more.” He produced a wry smile. “But I expect you could do that with your own resources.”
“Perhaps I could,” Delos said. “Some of it anyway. But only you can tell me why you thought I could help you find this friend of yours. This Mel Bork.”
Leaphorn noticed Delos had put his hope of help in finding Bork in the past tense.
“I still hope you can help me with that,” he said. “I 98
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hope you will tell me where he said he was going when he left here. And everything he said. Some of that might give me at least a hint of where he was going.” Delos threw up his hands, laughed. “I can tell you but if it’s helpful then it means you are indeed what my friends have told me about you. That you are a very shrewd detective.” Delos was smiling.
Leaphorn, registering that Delos hadn’t denied that Bork had been here, returned the smile.
“That causes me to ask another question: What prompted you to ask your friends about me? And which friends advised you?”
The Delos smile faded.
“I exaggerated. It was only Mr. Bork.”
“Another question then. Why did Mr. Bork get me into his conversation with you?”
Delos didn’t answer that. He shook his head. “I’ve led us off into a digression,” he said. “Let me start at the beginning. Mr. Bork called, asked for an appointment.
He said, or perhaps just implied, that he was working in an insurance fraud investigation involving my tale-teller rug. He asked if he could see it. I said yes. He came out.
I showed him the rug. He compared it to the photograph from the magazine. He said something like the photo and the rug looking identical.” Delos paused, awaiting reaction.
“What did you say to that?”
“I agree they looked very similar.”
A tap at the office portal interrupted the answer.
Tommy Vang stood there, a tray cart in front of him, smiling and waiting.
Delos waved him in. Vang deposited a tray on a serv-THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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ing table beside Delos’s desk, slid it into reachable position between the two men, poured coffee into two saucered cups, removed the lids from a silver sugar bowl and a container of cream. Then, with a flourish and a broad smile, he whipped away a white cloth that had been covering a plate of cake slices and a bowl of nuts.
“He makes that cake himself,” Delos said. “Fruitcake.
It’s downright delicious.”
“It looks very good,” Leaphorn said, admiring the cherry on top. He reached for his coffee cup.
“But back to your question,” Delos said. “I told Bork that old rugs look a lot alike to me, so he showed me a white spot in the rug. Said it was a bird feather woven in. And a rough place. He said that was from some sort of bush that grows out at the Bosque Redondo camp where the Navajos were held captive. And he showed me the same spots on the photograph. I couldn’t argue with that. Then he asked me if I knew the rug was supposedly burned in a trading post fire. I said I’d heard about that, but figured it must have been another rug. And he said it looked to him like a hard rug to copy, and asked me where I had gotten it. He said the man who owned the trading post had collected insurance on it, and it looked like an insurance fraud case.”
Leaphorn nodded. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I had bought it at the Indian market, or whatever they call it, in Santa Fe several years ago.
Anyway, I got it from an Indian under that sidewalk sales area on the plaza.”
“Not in a gallery? That sidewalk at the Palace of the Governors?”
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“Right,” Delos said.
“Who sold it to you?” Leaphorn asked, thinking he was wasting his breath. He was.
Delos frowned, looked thoughtful. “It was an Indian name,” he said. “Spanish-sounding, but I’m almost sure he was from one of the pueblos. Two of the women sitting just up from him against the wall were from San Felipe Pueblo, I remember that.”
“Did the salesman tell you where he got it?”
“Said it was an old Navajo rug. His mother had bought it years ago. Either at a tribal fair on the Navajo Reservation, or maybe at that rug auction the weavers have at the Crownpoint Elementary School gymnasium.
He said when she died, she left it to him.”
“No names then.”
Delos shook his head. “Afraid it’s not much help.”
“Oh, well,” Leaphorn said, and sipped his coffee. Excellent. He sipped again. “At least it tells me that this isn’t the rug destroyed in that fire.” But as he said it, he was thinking he hadn’t phrased that well. He should have said it proved that the tale-teller rug hadn’t been burned. But actually, it hadn’t really proved anything.
“Try that fruitcake,” Delos said. “Tommy’s a damn fine cook, and that cake is his pride and joy. Everything’s in it. Apricots, apple, cherries, six kinds of nuts, just the right spices, all measured out just right. World’s best fruitcake.”
“It sure looks good,” Leaphorn said. “Trouble is, I never did learn to like fruitcake.” He dipped into the nut dish. “I’ll eat more than my share of those walnuts and pecans instead.”
Delos shrugged. “Well, I’ll guarantee you that you’d THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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like Tommy’s version of it. I’ll have him make you a little snack package to take with you. If you don’t like it, toss it out for the birds. Now, let’s go see what you think of this famous rug.”
The rug was displayed on the wall in a little sitting room adjoining the office, mounted on a hardwood frame.
Leaphorn stared at it, trying to remember the time before the fatal fire when he examined it in Totter’s little gallery. It looked the same. He found the brilliant red spots formed by the liquid taken from the spider’s egg sacs, the little white spots formed by the dove’s feathers, other feathers from birds of different colors, and places where fibers from cactus, snakeweed, and other flora of eastern New Mexico grew. He found the sign of the trickster coyote, and of witchcraft, of the silver dollar, and of other assorted symbols of greed, the ultimate evil in the Dineh value system. And, sickening to Leaphorn, all of that evidence of sorrow and disharmony was surrounded by the enfolding symbol of Rainbow Man, the guardian spirit of Dineh harmony. That made it all an ultimate irony. The weaving, as his grandmother had always told them, was the work of an artist. But it was easy to understand why the shamans who saw it condemned it and put their curse on it.