return of their stolen skeletons.”
It was now Leaphorn’s turn to look amused. “As a matter of fact, we are. The Navajo Tribe is asking the museum to send us our skeletons, if the museum has any of them. I think somebody in the tribal bureaucracy decided it was a chance to make a political point. A little one-upmanship on Washington.”
“Any reason to hear this again?” Rodney asked. He slipped the recorder into an evidence bag, sealed it, leaned heavily against the edge of the table, and sighed. He looked tired, Chee thought, and unhappy.
“I don’t enjoy being involved in things I don’t understand,” Rodney said. “I don’t have the slightest goddamn idea why somebody killed this Highhawk bird, or whether it ties in with that guard being killed, or whether this tape has a damned thing to do with anything. That tape sounds like the Smithsonian Museum might have a motive to knock him off.” Rodney rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead and made a wry face. “But I gather that museums tend to wait until you’re dead and then go after your skeleton. So I’d guess that tape doesn’t have much to do with this. And—”
“I’d guess it does,” Chee said.
Leaphorn studied him. He nodded, agreeing. “How?”
“I haven’t thought it through,” Chee said. “But think about it a minute. Highhawk goes to a lot of trouble to get to that Yeibichai to make this tape.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “He wrote to Old Lady Tsosie, didn’t he? He’d have to find a way to run down her address.”
“She was in that big Navajo Reservation article
“Then he goes all the way out there from Washington, and finds out how to find Lower Greasewood, and the Tsosie place, dreams up that bullshit story about wanting to be a Navajo, and—”
“Maybe not bullshit,” Leaphorn said. “From what you told me about him.”
“No,” Chee said, thoughtfully, “I think maybe not. I think now that might have been part of the genuine Highhawk package. But anyway, it involved a lot of trouble. He must have written that oration he gave we just heard, and then got it dubbed in on the tape. Now why? What's he going to do with it? I think it's obvious he was planting it in that mask exhibit, in his Talking God exhibit. The tape practically says that. And Highhawk has a track record of knowing how to get publicity. The kind to put the heat on the Smithsonian. That tape was sure well designed to do that. Zany enough to make the front page.”
“Did he have it with him when he left you in his office?” Leaphorn asked.
“He had a cardboard box. About three times the size of a shoebox. Anyway, it was big enough for the mask and all. He picked it up just as he was leaving.”
“And that tells us what?” Rodney asked. He shook his head, thinking about it.
Silence in the room. Rodney now slouched in Highhawk’s swivel chair; Chee leaning against the wall in the practiced slouch of a man who had done a lot of leaning against things, a lot of waiting for his age; Joe Leaphorn sitting on the edge of the desk, looking uncomfortable in his three-piece suit, his gray, burr-cut head bowed slightly forward, his expression that of a man who is listening to sounds inside his own head. The quiet air around them smelled of dust and, faintly, of decay.
“Officer Chee here, he and I, we have a problem,” Leaphorn said—half to Rodney and half to the desk. “We are like two dogs who followed two different sets of tracks to the same brush pile. One dog thinks there’s a rabbit under the brush, the other thinks it’s a bobcat. Same brush pile, different information.” He glanced at Chee. “Right?”
Chee nodded.
“As for my end of it, I see the body of a worn-out, toothless man who keeps his old shoes polished. His body is under a chamisa bush in New Mexico. And in the shirt pocket is a note mentioning Agnes Tsosie’s Yeibichai ceremony. When I get out to Agnes Tsosie’s place, I run into the name of Henry Highhawk. He’s coming out. I follow those pointed shoes back to Washington and I find a little den of Chilean terrorists—or, maybe more accurately, the victims of Chilean terror. And right in the next apartment to this den is a little man with red hair and freckles and the torso of a weightlifter who just happens to fit the description of the guy who probably killed Pointed Shoes with his knife. But I’ve come to a dead end. Good idea who killed my man, now. I think that surely the man’s widow, his family, they’ll tell me why. No such luck. Instead of that, they act like they never heard of him.”
Leaphorn sighed, tapped his fingers on the desk top, and continued without a glance at either of his listeners. “I get a make on Mr. Pointed Shoes’ identity from the FBI. It turns out he’s one of the big ones in one of the factions that’s sort of at war with the right-wing government in Chile. Turns out the ins have already killed one of his bunch earlier. So now the mystery is solved. I know who Pointed Shoes is. His name is Santillanes. I know who killed him —or I think I do—and I think I know why. But now I’ve got a new problem. Why were Santillanes’ kinfolks acting that way? It looked like they didn’t want anyone to know the man had been killed.”
Leaphorn’s droning voice stopped for several seconds. “Now why in the world would that be?” he said. He was frowning. He shook his head, looked at Rodney and Chee. “Either one of you want to break in here?”
Neither one did.
“So,” Leaphorn said. “So, I’m almost to the brush pile. Now my question is what the hell is going on here? And for some reason I can’t get Highhawk out of my head. He doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. I think I know how Santillanes found out he should go to the Navajo Reservation to find Highhawk. But I don’t understand why.”
Leaphorn paused again, looked at Chee. “Do you know about this? Right after Highhawk pulled that business of digging up the graves and mailing the bones to the museum, he got the big splash of publicity he wanted. But before anybody could serve a warrant on him, he had dropped out of sight. All his friends and his neighbors could tell anybody looking for him that he was going to Arizona to attend a Yeibichai ceremonial for some relative named Agnes Tsosie. I think Santillanes probably read about his exploits in the paper and went looking for him about the same time the police did. Santillanes got the word that Henry was heading west for the Yeibichai. But he didn’t know it was a month in the future.”
Leaphorn stopped again, inhaled hugely, exhaled, drummed his fingers against the desk top, thinking. Rodney made a sentence-opening sound but cut it off without actually saying anything. But he looked at his watch.
“Why would Chilean politicians want to meet with Henry Highhawk?” Leaphorn asked himself the question. “They had to want to contact him badly enough to send someone three thousand miles, and get him killed, and then send somebody else to complete the mission. And post his bail.” He glanced up at Chee. “That’s right, isn’t it? And Highhawk called that guy with the missing fingers his friend, didn’t he? Any idea how long they’d known each
