'I don't think so,' Iron Woman said. 'Long as I been here, he only got one letter.'
Chee felt a stir of excitement. Something at last. 'You remember anything about it? Who it was from?' Of course she would remember. The arrival of any mail on this isolated outpost would be something to talk about, especially a letter to a man who never received letters and who couldn't read them if he did. It would lie in the little shoebox marked MAIL on the shelf above Iron Woman's cash register, the subject of conjecture and speculation until Endocheeney came in, or a relative showed up who might be trusted to deliver it to him.
'Wasn't from anybody,' Iron Woman said. 'It was from the tribe. There in Window Rock.'
The excitement evaporated. 'One of the tribal offices?'
'Social Services, I think it was. One of those that are always messing around with people.'
'How about his pawn?' Chee asked. 'Anything unusual in that?'
Iron Woman led him behind the counter, fished a key out of the folds of her voluminous reservation skirt, and unlocked the glass-topped cabinet where she kept the pawn.
The Endocheeney possessions held hostage for credit included one belt of heavy, crudely hammered conchas, old-fashioned and heavily tarnished; a small sack containing nine old Mexican twenty-peso coins, their silver as tarnished as the belt; two sand-cast rings; and a belt buckle of sand-cast silver. The buckle was beautiful, a simple geometric pattern that Chee favored, with a single perfect turquoise gem set in its center. He turned it in his hand, admiring it.
'And this,' Iron Woman said. She thumped a small deerskin pouch on the countertop and poured out a cluster of unset turquoise nuggets and fragments. 'The old man made some jewelry now and then. Or he used to. Guess he got too old for it after the old woman died.'
There was nothing remarkable about the turquoise. It was worth maybe two hundred dollars. Add another two hundred for the belt and maybe one hundred for the buckle and probably fifteen or twenty dollars each for the old pesos. They were once standard raw material for belt conchas on the reservation, and cheap enough, but Mexico had long since stopped making them, and the price of silver had soared. Nothing remarkable about any of this, except the beauty of the buckle. He wondered if Endocheeney had cast it himself. And he wondered why some of his kin had not claimed these belongings. Once, tradition would have demanded that such personal stuff be disposed of with the body. But that tradition was now often ignored. Or perhaps Endocheeney's relatives didn't know about this pawn. Or perhaps they didn't have the cash to redeem it.
'How much do you have on the old man's bill?' Chee asked.
Iron Woman didn't have to look it up. 'One hundred eighteen dollars,' she said. 'And some cents.'
Not much, Chee thought. Far less than the stuff was worth. Someone without any cash could raise that much by selling a few goats.
'And then there's them,' Iron Woman said. She tilted her head toward a corner behind the counter. There stood a posthole digger, two axes, a pair of crutches, a hand-turned ice cream freezer, and what seemed to be an old car axle converted into a wrecking bar.
Chee looked puzzled.
'The crutches,' Iron Woman said impatiently. 'He wanted to pawn them too, but hell, who wants crutches? They loan 'em to you free, up there at the Badwater Clinic, so I didn't want to get stuck with 'em as pawn. Anyway, he just left 'em there. Said give him half if I could sell 'em.'
'Was he hurt?' Chee asked, thinking as he did that he could have found a smarter way to ask the question.
Iron Woman seemed to think so too. 'Broke his leg. Fell off of something and they had to put a cast on it over at the clinic and he came back with the crutches.'
'And then he climbed right back on the roof,' Chee said. 'Sounds like he was a slow learner.'
'No, no,' Iron Woman said. 'Broke his leg way last autumn doing something else. Think he fell off of a rail fence. Leg caught.' Iron Woman broke an imaginary stick with her fingers. 'Snap,' she said.
Chee was thinking of relatives who didn't come in and collect pawn. 'Who buried the old man?' he asked.
'They got a man that works on those old well pumps out there.' Iron Woman made a sweeping gesture with both hands to take in the entire plateau. 'White man. He does that sometimes for people. Doesn't mind about corpses.'
'This witch talk. You hear that a long time or just now?'
Iron Woman looked uneasy. From what Chee had heard about her, she had gone to school over at Ganado, at the College of Ganado, a good school. And she was a Jew, more or less, raised in that religion. But she was also a Navajo, a member of the Halgai Dinee, the People of the Valley Clan. She didn't like talking about witches in any specific way with a stranger.
'I heard about it just now,' she said. 'Since the killing.'
'Was it just the usual stuff? What you'd expect when somebody gets killed?'
Iron Woman licked her lips, caught the lower lip between her teeth, looked at Chee carefully. She shifted her weight and in the silence the creak of the floorboard plank under her shoe was a loud groaning sound. But her voice was so faint when she finally spoke that, even in the silence, he had to strain to hear.
'They say that when they found him, they found a bone in the wound—where the knife had gone in.'
'A bone?' Chee asked, not sure that he'd heard it—Iron Woman held her thumb and forefinger—an eighth of an inch apart. 'Little corpse bone,' she said.
She didn't need to explain it more than that. Chee was remembering the bone bead he'd found in his trailer.
Chapter 7
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dr. randall jenks held a sheet of paper in his fist. Presumably it was the laboratory report on the bead, since Jenks's office had called Leaphorn to tell him the report was ready. But Jenks gave no sign he was ready to hand it
