“I’m not sure. Maybe twenty-five, thirty dollars an hour.”
Mrs. Keeyani sucked in her breath. She looked stricken. Dr. Bourebonette put a comforting hand on Mrs. Keeyani’s arm.
“That’s about what I’d expected,” Professor Bourebonette said, in a stiff, unnatural-sounding voice. “We can pay it. Who would you recommend?”
“It would depend,” Leaphorn said. “What do you?”
Professor Bourebonette interrupted him.
“One would expect, or should expect if she didn’t know better, that you people would take care of this yourselves. That the family wouldn’t have to hire someone to find out the facts in a murder case.”
The anger left Leaphorn with nothing to say. So he said the obvious.
“In a case like this, a felony committed on a reservation, the jurisdiction
“
She held up her hand. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has the jurisdiction. We know that. We’ve already been told, and we knew it already, being reasonably intelligent. But after all, one of your own men was killed.” A trace of sarcasm crept into Bourebonette’s tone. “Aren’t you a little bit curious about who actually killed him?”
Leaphorn felt himself flushing. Surely this arrogant white woman didn’t expect him to answer that. Not in the presence of the murderer’s niece.
But the professor was waiting for an answer. Let her wait. Leaphorn waited himself. Finally he said: “Go on.”
“Since you don’t seem to be investigating, and since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is content to simply bring Ashie Pinto to trial without any effort to find the actual criminal, we hope you can at least give us some advice about who to hire. Somebody honest.”
Leaphorn cleared his throat. He was trying to imagine this haughty woman in the beautifully finished office of the agent-in-charge at Albuquerque. Nothing but politeness and good manners there, he was sure.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what we were discussing. And to give you that advice I must know some things. What do you have to tell this private detective? What can you give him to work on? Would it be leads he’d be following on the Reservation - around where Hosteen Pinto lived? Or around Ship Rock and Red Rock where the - where it happened? In other words, what do you know that can help? What do you know that would help him find a witness, something to prove, for example, that Hosteen Pinto was somewhere else when this crime happened? What can you give him to give him a place to start looking?”
Leaphorn paused, thinking he shouldn’t pull himself into this. It was not his case, not his business. Interfering was certain to cause offense in a department that wanted the death of a brother officer balanced with a conviction of his killer. He shouldn’t open the door he was about to open. He should simply tell these women he couldn’t help them. Which just happened to be the sad truth. Still, Mary Keeyani was Emma’s kin. And, still, there were some unanswered questions in that Nez business?as much as he knew about it.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “if you have any useful information?any witnesses, anything that would lead to concrete evidence that the FBI wouldn’t listen to?you can tell me. I’ll see to it that the Bureau pays the proper attention. Anything you know.”
“We know he didn’t do it,” Bourebonette said. But the anger was used up now. She attempted a small, wan smile. “All we can tell you is why we know he couldn’t have killed the policeman, and that’s nothing more concrete than telling you about the kind of man Ashie Pinto is. Always has been.”
But he did kill a man, Leaphorn was thinking, a long time ago. If I remember -what I read in that report, he was convicted, years ago, went to prison for killing a man.
“Are you a relative?” he asked Bourebonette.
“I am a friend,” Bourebonette said.
Leaphorn looked at her over his glasses, waiting for more than that.
“For twenty-five years,” she added. “At least.”
“Ah,” Leaphorn said.
Professor Bourebonette looked impatient, as if it probably wasn’t worth her time to explain. But she decided to.
“My interest is in comparative mythology. The evolution of myth inside cultures. The evolution of myth as cultures meet and intermix. The relationship of a society’s mythology with its economic base. Its environment. Mr. Pinto has been one of my informants. For years.” She paused.
Leaphorn glanced at her. Was she finished? No. She was remembering.
“He wouldn’t kill anyone,” she added. “He has a great sense of humor. A great memory for the funny things. A great memory for everything.” She looked into Leaphorn’s eyes and said it slowly, as if he was the judge. As if he was the jury. Could whiskey not make a killer out of a funny man, just as it did of sad men and angry men?
“He has a great sense of humor,” Bourebonette repeated.
It didn’t prove anything, Leaphorn thought. But it was interesting. It was also interesting that she was telling him this. A long way to come, a lot of time used, a lot of money to be spent if she was serious about hiring an investigator. And a very flimsy explanation of why she was doing it.
And so Leaphorn had asked the Turning Mountain woman and the professor to wait. He called downstairs and asked for the file marked HOMICIDE; DELBERT NEZ.
He had been away when it happened, waiting in a motel room in Phoenix to be called as a witness in a case being tried on appeal in the federal court there. Even so, he remembered a lot of it. He had read about it every day in the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Republic, of course. He had called the Ship Rock subagency station and talked to Captain Largo about it. The Navajo Tribal Police included only about 110 sworn officers, making the murder
