He started his account with the letter from Mel Bork.
He skipped through all that happened next rapidly, skipping a lot of it, and being stopped several times by her questions about the rug. By the time he’d finished his recitation, he found himself forced back to his conclusion of the previous night—that he had wasted a lot of time and accomplished nothing useful.
But Louisa’s interest, naturally, was in the culturally significant rug. The history of that weaving fit pre-cisely into her professional preoccupation with tribal cultures. What did Leaphorn think had happened to it? That led up and down the list of questions that Leaphorn had been asking himself, and he couldn’t answer a single one of them with anything better than guesses. Louisa’s curiosity eventually, over the second cup of coffee, settled on Jason Delos. One of her graduate students at NAU had done some landscape work at 120
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his place, had become an acquaintance of Tommy Vang, and had regaled one of her graduate student sessions with Vang’s stories of life among his fellow tribesmen in the mountains along the Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos borders.
“It all seemed totally authentic,” she said, “and interesting. But what we were hearing, of course, was second-hand. So I sent Mr. Vang an invitation to come in and talk to our little seminar. But he didn’t come.”
“Did he say why?” Leaphorn asked. “I’d love to know how he got connected with Mr. Delos.”
“He just said he couldn’t do it,” Louisa said. “Our landscaping grad student said he had the impression that Tommy’s family had been some of the tribesmen who worked with the CIA in the latter phases of the Vietnam War, about the time we were poking into Cambodia. This student of mine was sort of edgy about it. He told me, more or less privately, that he thought Tommy’s family had been sort of wiped out during all that back-and-forth fighting, that Delos had been with the CIA and had sort of rescued him as a boy and brought him back to the States.”
“Well, now,” Leaphorn said.
“Does that sound sensible? Based on what you know?”
“It sounds as sensible as anything else I know about Delos. Which is damned near nothing,” Leaphorn said.
“About all I know for almost certain is that he is a dedicated big-game hunter, likes to collect antiques; and if you’d like to have that old tale-teller rug, he says he’s thinking about getting rid of it.”
“I’ve heard he’s fairly new to Flagstaff,” Louisa said.
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“Certainly not old family. And I gather he doesn’t mix much socially.”
Leaphorn nodded. “That fits,” he said.
Louisa had been studying him during this conversation.
“Joe,” she said, “you seem sort of down. Depressed.
Tired. Is this business of being retired getting to you?
From what you said, this rug affair sort of ties in with one of your old cases. So it doesn’t sound like being retired has stopped you from acting like a detective.” Leaphorn laughed. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out the utility bills, and handed them to her.
“Perfect time for this. Here what it’s costing you for this unorthodox, possibly even un-American arrangement we’ve been having. But I’ll let you do the figuring of the percentages.”
She took the slips, glanced at them.
“I was just going to remind you about that,” she said, smiling at him. “I will turn them over to my accountant at the university to make sure you’re not cheating. I will also remind you that I am behind on our room rental deal.
Remember, I stayed up here about three times during the summer.”
During all this Leaphorn had been studying her, remembering Emma.
“You know, Louisa, we could save this paperwork, this sort of thing, if you would just go ahead and marry me.” She smiled at him. “You have probably just established a Ripley’s Believe It or Not record for the most un-romantic proposal ever made.”
“It wasn’t intended to be romantic,” Leaphorn said.
“It was intended to be just downright practical.” 122
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She looked down at her coffee cup, picked it up, held it, replaced it in the saucer, smiled at him ruefully.
“Do you remember what I said the first time you came up with this idea? Let’s see. About nineteen—”
“Several years ago,” Leaphorn said, interrupting her.
“I remember exactly every word of it. You said. ‘Joe, I tried being married once. I didn’t care for it.’ ”
“Yep,” she said, looking at him fondly. “That’s exactly the way I put it.”
“Have you since changed your mind? Found me more attractive?”
That brought a thoughtful silence. A sigh. Another picking up and putting down of the coffee cup. Then:
“Joe, I’ll bet you remember that adage—I’m sure you do because I think you are the very first person I heard using it. It’s about how hard it is for old dogs to learn new tricks. Or something like that. Anyway, how do I say it? I guess I’ll use something an old lady once told me in one of my oral history interviews. She said, ‘Don’t marry a really good friend ’cause they’re a lot better than a husband.’ ”
Leaphorn let that hang there. He was noticing that his reaction to her reaction was a sort of relief.
She was watching him, looking sort of penitent. “Or maybe I got that wrong. Maybe she said it would spoil the friendship.”
“However she worded it,” Leaphorn said, “I damn sure don’t want that to happen to us.”
“Nor me either,” Louisa said, and got up and carried her plate, cup, saucer, and cutlery to the sink. “And just to make sure you don’t think I might be willing to revert to full-time housekeeper, I will leave this in the sink for you THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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to wash, while I collect my stuff and head south toward my great stack of midterm papers waiting to be graded.” She started to add his plate to her load, but stopped. Instead, she smiled at him.
“Good friends are too hard to collect,” she said.
15
The good mood Louisa’s attitude had left with Joe Leaphorn lasted only about half an hour. While he was watching the professor drive away, with a mixture of sadness and relief, he heard his telephone ringing. It would be Grace Bork, he thought, calling to tell him that Mel Bork was, just as he suspected, the man found dead in the wreck. It would lead to a conversation he’d expected, something he dreaded. What could he tell her ? Only that he had wasted his time. But the voice on the telephone was Sergeant Kelly Garcia’s.
“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Garcia said. “I want you to tell me how you knew that body would be Mel Bork?”
“I was just guessing,” Leaphorn said. “That’s all I’ve been doing lately. So it was him? What was the cause of death?”
Garcia snorted. “Wasn’t it obvious? You’re not satisfied with tumbling your car down into a canyon, landing 126
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upside down in what’s left of it, broken bones, multiple concussions and contusions, general bodily trauma?
That’s what we have. And you still want an autopsy.”
“Don’t you?”
That produced a moment of silence.
“Well, I guess I have to admit it would relieve my mind,” Garcia said. “I’d like to know what caused him to be so damned careless on that curve.”
“Have you asked about an autopsy?”
“Yeah, sort of suggested to Saunders that I’d like one.
And he said, What for ? And I said an old retired Navajo cop I used to know is sort of vaguely suspicious about it and asked me to check on the cause of death. And Saunders said the only problem about that is deciding which of his nineteen or so auto crash trauma injuries actually did the job. He offered to take me in there to look at the body and let me take my pick.”