“To tell the truth, I’d thought of that myself,” Leaphorn said.
“I could tell he was interested in Ellie right from the start. Sat down, talked about how much he admired our part of the country, said he was going to move out here, wanted to know where we lived. Where we worked. You couldn’t imagine anybody being any friendlier.” Delonie took a drink of his coffee, slammed the cup down on the table. “If I’d just been smart enough to see what was coming. If I just had a gun with me and been that smart, I’d a killed the bastard. Would’ve been a lot better off.” The sound of rage in this produced a moment of silence. Leaphorn noticed that Tommy Vang’s expression went from startled to nervous.
“But how can anyone read the future?” Leaphorn asked. “Here you are, being friendly to a stranger.” 208
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“Yeah,” Delonie said, and laughed. A bitter sound.
“So what happened next?”
“He keeps showing up at the Handys’ place. Driving a pale blue Cadillac four door. Bought gasoline the first time and got out and checked his tire pressure and his oil.” Delonie produced a wry smile. “Remember when people did that? I mean ask the gasoline pumper to do it for them? Well, he did it himself. That’s how friendly he was. And then he went in, got himself some cigarettes, talked to Ellie and Handy. Did a lot of smiling, being friendly. That kept on happening for a while.” Delonie stopped. Stared out the window. Shook his head. “Pretty soon, dumb as I am, I could see Ellie was a hell of a lot more interested in Shewnack than she was in me. And pretty soon he’d be coming about quitting time, and we’d go down the road a ways, or maybe back over to the Acoma tribes casino, and eat something and so-cialize. Sometime play a little poker. And Shewnack was filling us in on his career as a policeman, mostly talking about how really dumb criminals made the job so easy for the cops. He was full of stories about that. Then he would tell us how easy it would be out here in the wide open country to get a lot of money by pulling stuff off. Not so many cops out here. Not well trained. Not all that smart, either. Said the secret was knowing how to not leave any evidence behind. So on, so forth. Full of good yarns about how it happened, and how cops really weren’t all that interested in doing the work to catch people. Underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. We heard that a lot from Shewnack. Just let nature take its course and the dumb criminals will catch themselves. Anyway, I admit it was kind of interesting, and Ellie got real caught up in THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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it. One day she asked him how he would organize one if he wanted to rob a place, and he said, you mean like where you guys work, and she said yeah, how would you do that? And he said, well the real pros we run into now and then in California do a lot of planning. First, will there be enough profit involved for it to be worth the time. And he said Handy’s store wouldn’t be a prospect, because the day’s take would just be a few hundred bucks.” Delonie stopped, drank coffee, stared out the window at the bird activity.
“Knowing what I know now, I’m sure he knew better even when he said that, but Ellie fell for it. She told him that Handy never takes his money into the bank more than once a week, and sometimes it’s a whole month before he drives it into the bank in Gallup. Told him he keeps the money in a hidden safe. So forth. Anyway, sweet Ellie wasn’t deceptive at all. Any question Shewnack had, she answered.
And then, when the time came, what does he do to her?” Delonie left that question hang, staring out the glass door into the patio.
“Those birds get even livelier than that in the spring,” he said. “Birds get to thinking about nesting, pairing up.
Even the Gambel quails are coming in, laying their eggs under the heavy brush out there. And after the hatch, they bring the young ones into the patio sometimes.
Daddy quail sits on the wall and keeps an eye out for cats or hawks or anything he thinks looks dangerous. And the mama quail sort of herds them around. Teaches ’em to run into the bushes or hide under things when she gives
’em the danger warning.”
Delonie’s lips had curved into a sad smile now, remembering this.
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“I used to get Ellie to come out here sometimes and watch them with me.” He shook his head. “Very good company, Ellie was. She should have married me like I asked her. I think she would have if Shewnack hadn’t come along.”
“I talked to the police who handled that case,” Leaphorn said. “They told me how nice they thought she was.”
“Prison changed her, I guess,” Delonie said. “Did me, too. When I finally got out, I tried to find her, but she didn’t want to see me anymore. I finally gave up. Then, just a while back, I heard she was dead.”
“You knew Bennie Begay is dead, too?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“That means you are a very important person to this man who calls himself Shewnack. The only one left who could identify him with that double murder.”
“If he wasn’t already burned up,” Delonie said.
“You believe that?”
“Well, should I believe you or the famous old Federal Bureau of Investigation?”
“We’ll give you a choice,” Leaphorn said, and began connecting the dots of time and place between a man calling himself Shewnack leaving Handy’s store with the loot, and a man who called himself Totter appearing back in the high, dry Four Corners Country and buying himself an old trading post and gallery. Then the fire destroying a man Totter had hired, who the FBI decided was Shewnack. Then Totter cashing in, disappearing.
“Then,” Leaphorn continued, but Delonie held up his hand.
“And then we learn that Mr. Totter is dead, too,” he said. “How does that work in this blueprint of yours?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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“It didn’t, but then we checked on the obituary notice, turns out it was false. The man who called himself Totter didn’t die.”
“Still alive? Where?”
“Just outside Flagstaff now, if we’re right. We think he’s a man who used to be a CIA agent in Vietnam. Mr.
Vang here knew him when he was calling himself George Perkins. The way this funny trail leads, he got caught stealing CIA bribery money, got bumped out of the CIA, took Tommy Vang here out of a Hmong refugee camp, settled—if we can call it that—in San Francisco. As Tommy told you, he was gone a lot on trips. He was gone, for example, in the long period before the Handys were killed, and he was gone again for a long time when Totter was taking over that trading post and doing his business from there. Then—”
Delonie held up his hand again.
“Let me finish that for you. Then, when those of us doing time for the Handys started getting out on parole, he decided we’d see him and turn him in. So he hired himself a helper, burned him up, left evidence to persuade the FBI this was Shewnack, thereby eliminating that problem. That it?”
“Just about,” Leaphorn said.
“Pretty weak connection, seems to me. You want me to think this Jason Delos is Shewnack?” Leaphorn nodded.
“You left out that rug,” Tommy Vang said. “And you left out how Totter stole that pinyon sap so the fire wouldn’t look like arson.”
“Pinyon sap?” Delonie said. “And a rug?” He was grinning. “I know this Shewnack sort of proved I’m stupid, 212
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but I’ve learned some from that. What are you trying to sell me here?”
Leaphorn explained the rug, explained—rather lamely—the sap, the lard buckets, the very hot fire without any sign of those fire-spreading chemicals the arson investigators are trained to look for.
Delonie thought about it, nodded. “If I was the grand jury, I’d guess maybe I’d be interested in all this. But I think I’d be asking for more evidence. Isn’t this all pretty much just circumstantial?” He laughed. “Notice that language I’m using. We learn that doing time in prison. Lots of guard-house lawyers in there. But I think I’d be wondering what you are trying to accomplish with all this.” Leaphorn was wondering, too. Wondering what he was doing here. He was tired. His back hurt. He was supposed to be retired. Delonie was right. If they had Delonie on the witness stand ready to swear Jason Delos was actually Ray Shewnack, the defense attorney would note Delonie was a paroled convict and repeatedly note the total, absolute, utter lack of any concrete evidence.