much of her time. It was probably the book. Friendship and the book. She needed Pinto free to finish it. But maybe there was something deeper. If he asked her, she would simply ^repeat that Pinto was innocent, that Pinto was a friend.
“Well, Officer Chee met a car when he was driving toward the crime scene. This car might have driven past the scene. Perhaps not, but most likely it did. Maybe the driver saw something. Probably not, but I would have found him and asked.”
“Of course,” Bourebonette said. “You mean nobody did.”
“I hear they didn’t.”
“But why not?”
“Why not? Because they had their case. Smoking gun. Motive. No denial. They have other work to do, stacked on their desks.” He made an illustrative gesture at his own desk. Except for the single folder it was uncharacteristically, point-defeatingly clean.
“Too much trouble running him down. Too much trouble finding the car. When an old man is being tried for murder.” Her voice was bitter.
“We found the car,” Leaphorn said. “It belongs to a schoolteacher at Ship Rock. I’m going to talk to him today.”
“I’ll go with you,” Bourebonette said.
“I’m afraid that?” Then he stopped. Why not? No damage to be done. It wasn’t his case anyway. If the Bureau got mad, it would get no madder because this woman was along. And he wanted to know what she was after. This business was interesting him more and more.
They took the road that wanders over Washington Pass via Red Lake, Crystal, and Sheep Springs. Winding down the east slope of the Chuskas, Leaphorn stopped at an overlook. He pointed east and swept his hand northward, encompassing an immensity of rolling tan and gray grasslands. Zuni Mountains to the south, Jemez Mountains to the east, and far to the north the snowy San Juans in Colorado.
“Dinetah,” he said. She would know the meaning of the word. “Among the People.” The heartland of the Navajos. The place of their mythology, the Holy Land of the Dinee. How would she react?
Professor Bourebonette said nothing at all for a moment. Then: “I won a bet with myself,” she said. “Or part of a bet. I bet you would stop here and enjoy the view. And I bet you’d say something about naming this pass after Washington.”
This wasn’t what Leaphorn had expected.
“And what would I have said?”
“I wasn’t sure. Maybe something angry. I would be bitter if I was a Navajo to have anything in my territory named after Colonel John Macrae Washington. It’s like naming a mountain pass in Israel after Adolf Hitler.”
“The colonel was a scoundrel,” Leaphorn agreed. “But I don’t let the nineteenth century worry me.”
Bourebonette laughed. “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s typically Navajo. You stay in harmony with reality. Being bitter about the past isn’t healthy.”
“No,” Leaphorn said. “It’s not.”
He thought: Professor Bourebonette is flattering me. Why? What will she want from this?
“I would be thinking of the insult,” Bourebonette said. “Every time I took this route it would rankle. I would think, why does the white man do this? Why does he honor the man who was our worst enemy and rub our noses in it? The colonel who murdered Narbona, that honorable and peaceable man. The colonel who broke treaty after treaty, and protected the people who captured your children and sold them into slavery in New Mexico and argued for a policy of simply exterminating your tribe, and did everything he could to carry it out. Why take such a bastard and name a mountain pass right in the middle of your country after him? Is that just the product of ignorance? Or is it done as a gesture of contempt?”
There was anger in Bourebonette’s voice and in her face. This wasn’t what Leaphorn had expected, either.
“I would say ignorance,” Leaphorn said. “There’s no malice in it.” He laughed. “One of my nephews was a Boy Scout. In the Kit Carson Council. Carson was worse in a way, because he pretended to be a friend of the Navajos.” He paused and looked at her. “Washington didn’t pretend,” he said. “He was an honest enemy.”
Professor Louisa Bourebonette showed absolutely no sign that she sensed the subtle irony Leaphorn intended in that.
The sun was halfway down the sky when they started down the long slope that drops into the San Juan River basin and Ship Rock town. They had discussed Arizona State University, where Leaphorn had been a student long ago, whether the disease of alcoholism had racial/genetic roots, the biography-memoir-autobiography of Hosteen Ashie Pinto the professor had been accumulating for twenty years, drought cycles, and law enforcement. Leaphorn had listened carefully as they talked about the Pinto book, guiding the conversation, confirming his thought that the Pinto effort was the top priority in this woman’s life but learning nothing more. He had noticed that she was alert to what he was noticing and that she had no problem with long silences. They were enjoying such a silence now, rolling down the ten-mile grade toward the town. The cottonwoods along the river formed a crooked line of dazzling gold across a vast landscape of grays and tans. And beyond, the dark blue mountains formed the horizon, the Abajos, Sleeping Ute, and the San Juans, already capped with early snow. It was one of those still, golden days of high desert autumn.
Then Leaphorn broke the mood.
“I told the captain in charge of the Ship Rock subagency I’d let him know when I got here,” he said, and picked up the mike.
The dispatcher said Captain Largo wasn’t in.
“You expect him soon?”
“I don’t know. We had a shooting. He went out on that about an hour ago. I think he’ll be back pretty quick.”
