'So now you go out and dig `em up?'
'That's against the law,' Nakai said, grinning. 'You're a policeman. I bet you knew that. With me, it's once in a long while people bring `em in. Several times at revivals I mentioned that fella who gave me the pot, and how it bought gasoline for a week, and the word got around among the born-again people that pots would give me some gasoline money. So now and then when they got no money and want to offer something, they bring me one.'
'And the Friedman-Bernal woman buys them?'
'Mostly no. Just a time or two. She told me she wanted to see anything I got when I was preaching over around Chinle, or Many Farms -- any of that country over around Chinle Wash. And out around here in the Checkerboard, and if I get up into Utah--Bluff, Montezuma Creek, Mexican Hat. Up in there.'
'So you save them for her?'
'She pays me a little fee to take a look at them, but mostly she doesn't buy any. Just looks. Studies them for a couple of hours. Magnifying glass and all. Makes notes. The deal is, I have to know exactly where they came from.'
'How do you manage that?'
'I tell the people, `You going to bring in a pot to offer to the Lord, then you be sure you tell me where you found it.'' Nakai grinned his small, neat grin at Leaphorn. 'That way, too, I know it's a legal pot. Not dug up off of government land.'
Leaphorn didn't comment on that.
'When's the last time you saw her?' The answer should be late September, or something like that. Leaphorn knew the date he'd seen on Friedman's calendar, but it wasn't something Nakai would be likely to remember.
Nakai extracted a well-worn pocket notebook from his shirt and fingered his way through its pages. 'Be last September twenty-third.'
'More than a month ago,' Leaphorn said. 'What did she want?'
Nakai's round face filled with thought. Behind him, the Reverend Tafoya's voice rose into the high tenor of excitement. It described an old preacher at a revival tent in Dulce calling Tafoya to the front, laying on his hands, 'right there on the place where that skin cancer was eating into my face. And I could feel the healing power flowinga?S'
'Well,' Nakai said, speaking very slowly. 'She brought back a pot she'd gotten from me back in the spring. A piece of a pot, really. Wasn't all there. And she wanted to know everything I knew about it. Some of it stuff I had already told her. And she'd written it down in her notebook. But she asked it all again. Who I'd got it from. Everything he'd said about where he'd found it. That sort of stuff.'
'Where was it? I mean where you met. And what did this notebook look like?'
'At Ganado,' Nakai said. 'I got a place there. I got home from a revival over by Cameron and I had a note from her asking me to call, saying it was important. I called her there at Chaco Canyon. She wasn't home so I left a message when I'd be back at Ganado again. And when I got back, there she was, waiting for me.'
He paused. 'And the notebook. Let's see now. Little leather-covered thing. Small enough to go in your shirt pocket. In fact that's where she carried it.'
'And she just wanted to talk to you about the pot?'
'Mostly where it came from.'
'Where was that?'
'Fella's ranch between Bluff and Mexican Hat.'
'Private land,' Leaphorn said, his voice neutral.
'Legal,' Nakai agreed.
'Very short visit then,' Leaphorn said. 'Just repeating what you had already told her.'
'Not really. She had a lot of questions. Did I know where she could find the person who had brought it? Could he have gotten it from the south side of the San Juan instead of the north side? And she had me look at the design on it. Wanted to know if I'd seen any like it.'
Leaphorn had discovered that he was liking Nakai a little, which surprised him. 'And you told her he couldn't have found it south of the San Juan because that would be on the Navajo Reservation, and digging up a pot there would be illegal?' He was smiling when he said it and Nakai was smiling when he answered.
'Didn't have to tell Friedman something like that,' Nakai said. 'That sort of thing, she knew.'
'What was special about this pot?'
'It was the kind she was working on, I guess. Anasazi pot, I understand. They look pretty much alike to me, but I remember this one had a pattern. You know, sort of abstract shapes painted onto its surface. That seemed to be what she was interested in. And it had a sort of mixed color. That's what she always had me watching out for. That pattern. It was sort of an impression of Kokopelli, tiny, repeated and repeated and repeated.'
Nakai looked at Leaphorn quizzically. Leaphorn nodded. Yes, he knew about Kokopelli, the Humpbacked Flute Player, the Watersprinkler, the fertility symbol. Whatever you called him, he was a frequent figure in strange pictographs the Anasazi had painted on cliffs across the Colorado Plateau.
'Anytime anyone brought one in like that-- even a little piece of the pot with that pattern on it--then I was to save it for her and she'd pay a minimum of fifty dollars.'
'Who found that pot?'
Nakai hesitated, studied Leaphorn.
'I'm not out hunting pot hunters,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm trying to find this woman.'
'It was a Paiute Clan man they call Amos Whistler,' Nakai said. 'Lives out there near south of Bluff. North of
