used to build it a lifetime ago had shrunk and warped. Through the gaping cracks Leaphorn admired Pinto’s view while he urinated?a grand expanse of tan-silver grass and black-silver sage sloping down Blue Moon Bench toward the cliffs of the Colorado River Canyon. On the way back to the house he made another stop at the hogan that adjoined it. It was round and windowless, built of stone, its tarpaper roof insulated with a layer of earth. Leaphorn pulled open the board door and peered into the darkness. He saw an iron cot, boxes, an old icebox apparently used for storage, nothing that looked interesting.
Nor was there anything interesting under Ashie Pinto’s brush arbor?just an old bridle hanging from a crossbar, the bit rusted, the leather stiff and cracked. Leaphorn took it down, looked at it, hung it back where he’d found it, yawned. A wasted day, he thought. The only useful thing Leaphorn could think of that might be found here was something that would tell them how Pinto got from here on the western fringe of the Big Reservation over to Ship Rock territory. Probably at least two hundred miles. Someone with a vehicle must have taken him. Logically they would have sent word they were coming. Probably mailed to Pinto at the Short Mountain Trading Post. Possibly, as Mary Keeyani believed, this letter would have been saved in Pinto’s repository of documents.
“When you just get maybe one letter a year?or maybe just eight or ten your whole life?then probably you save them,” Mary Keeyani had explained. True enough. He walked back to the house.
In Leaphorn’s experience, men who lived alone tended to be either totally sloppy or totally neat?one extreme or the other. Ashie Pinto was neat. From his vantage point leaning against the doorjamb, Leaphorn could see everything in the living room-bedroom of Pinto’s two-room house. The bedstead stood on the cracked and worn linoleum, a blue-and-white J. C. Penney blanket folded across it; beside the single window, a three-drawer chest, beside the chest an armchair, the upholstery of its back and seat water-stained; a metal-and-Formica table, two wooden chairs; a tall cabinet with double doors which, since the room had no closet, must hold Pinto’s spare clothing. There was nothing on the table, nothing on the chairs, nothing on the bed, but the top of the chest held a cigar box; a framed photograph which seemed, from Leaphorn’s viewpoint, to be of Pinto himself; a large wash basin of white ceramic; and something flat, black, and metallic.
Mary Keeyani was looking through the drawers of the chest and Professor Bourebonette was making clattering noises in the kitchen.
“A tin box?” she said. “Square or round?”
“Round,” Mary Keeyani said. “I think a fruitcake came in it. Maybe cookies.”
Leaphorn struggled with his sense of official decorum on one hand and his curiosity on the other. What was that atop the chest? He reached a compromise.
“Mrs. Keeyani. What’s that black thing on top of the chest there? Beside the cigar box.”
“It’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She retrieved it, came to the door, and handed it to him with a plastic sack containing five cassettes. “My uncle did a lot of that.
Taping stuff for those biligaana he worked for.”
Professor Bourebonette appeared in the kitchen door. She displayed a round tin can with a cluster of red roses decorating the lid.
“That’s it,” Mary Keeyani said.
The tape recorder was of the bulky, heavy sort sold about twenty years ago. It contained a cassette. Leaphorn pushed the play button. He heard the faint sound of friction recorders make when running over blank tape. He pushed Stop, and Rewind, waited for the reversing process to stop and pushed Play again.
The speaker produced an old man’s voice, speaking in Navajo.
“They say Coyote is funny, some of those people say that. But the old people who told me the stories, they didn’t think Coyote was funny. Coyote was always causing trouble. He was mean. He caused hardship. He hurt people. He caused people to die. That’s the way the stories go that I was told by my uncles when I was a boy. These uncles, they say
“
Professor Bourebonette was standing beside him. Leaphorn pushed the stop button, looked up at her.
“He was doing that for me,” she said. “I asked him for that story. I wonder how far he got.”
“Ashie Pinto? For your book?”
“Not really. He told me he knew the original correct version of one of the Coyote myths. The one about the red-winged blackbirds and the game they play with their eyeballs. Throwing them up in the air and catching them, and Coyote forcing them to teach him the game.” She glanced at Leaphorn, quizzical. “You know the story?”
“I’ve heard it,” Leaphorn said. He looked at the tin she was holding. “Are you going to open Mr. Pinto’s box?”
Bourebonette read into Leaphorn’s tone some hint of disapproval. She looked at the box and at Leaphorn and said, “I’ll just give it to Mary. She’s his niece.”
Mary Keeyani had no qualms. She worked off the lid. Inside Leaphorn could see a jumble of papers: envelopes, receipts, what seemed to be a car title, odds and ends. She put it on the table where she and Bourebonette sorted through it.
“Here’s a letter from me,” Bourebonette said, extracting an envelope. “And another one.” She glanced at Leaphorn. “That’s all of them. We didn’t do much business by mail.”
Mary Keeyani stopped sorting. “Here’s all he has in here for this year,” she said. She displayed two envelopes. “No use going back any further than that.” She extracted a single sheet of notepaper from one envelope, read it, slipped it back into the envelope, and dropped it back into the box. She repeated the process, put the lid on the box, and stood, looking disappointed.
“Nothing helpful?” Bourebonette said.
Nothing helpful, Mrs. Keeyani had agreed. Nothing that would tell them who had driven out here over this awful rocky track and hauled an old man across the Reservation to commit a murder. Leaphorn drove carefully over that rocky track now, sorting out his reaction to this. It was what he had expected, or should have, and yet he felt disappointed. Why? He hadn’t thought a search through Pinto’s documents, if he had any, would be revealing. But if you give luck a chance, sometimes it rewards you.
