somewhere except my youngest daughter. She had come home on the school bus and she’d gone out to catch her horse and go help with the sheep and she saw dust from the car.”
“It wasn’t Pinto’s car?”
Mrs. Keeyani laughed. “Hosteen Pinto’s car broke a long time ago,” she said. “The chickens sleep in it.” Her amusement left as quickly as it had come. “She was up on the side of the hill with the horse and all she saw was the dust and maybe just a glimpse. It had come from Hosteen Pinto’s shack. The road, it runs right by my mother’s hogan and past our house and then out toward Twentynine Mile Canyon and connects up with the road to Cedar Ridge Trading Post. She said it might be a light-colored car, or maybe a pickup, or maybe it was just dusty.”
“When was this?”
“It was the evening before Hosteen Pinto got arrested over in New Mexico.”
Leaphorn flipped back through the report. He found nothing about any of this.
“Did a policeman come to talk to you?”
“A young white man,” she said. “With those little spots on his face. And a Navajo to translate for him.”
Freckles, Leaphorn thought. A culture unafflicted with freckles has no noun for them. “What did they want to know?”
“They asked about the pistol. They asked about what Hosteen Pinto was doing over there. Where did Pinto get the pistol? Where did he get the two fifty-dollar bills he had in his pocket? Did Hosteen Pinto know Delbert Nez?the man they say he shot? They asked questions like they thought Hosteen Pinto was bootlegging wine. Like how did Hosteen Pinto act when he was drunk? Did he get into fights? How did he make a living? Was he a bootlegger?” Mrs. Keeyani had been looking down at her hands. Now she looked up. “They seemed to think for sure he was a bootlegger.” She shook her head.
“How did you answer?”
“I said maybe the fifty-dollar bills were his fee. From the one who came and got him.”
“Fee?”
“He had his crystals with him,” Mrs. Keeyani said. “When he was younger he used to work finding things for people. When I was a little girl they would come from as far away as Tuba City, and even Kayenta and Leupp. He was pretty famous then.”
“He was a crystal gazer,” Leaphorn said. He leaned forward. If this man was working as a shaman, maybe there was more to this than just another senseless, sordid whiskey killing. “He still worked at it?”
“Not much.” She thought about it. “Last year he found a horse for a man who works over at Copper Mine, and then he did a little work for a white man. And he would work with Dr. Bourebonette.” She nodded at the professor. “That was about all I know about.”
“What had the white man lost?”
“I think he was hunting old-time stories.”
Leaphorn wasn’t sure what she meant. He waited for an explanation. None came.
“Was Hosteen Pinto someone the anthropologists came to see to learn the old stories? Like Professor Bourebonette?”
“Yes. Many times in the old days. Not so much now. He learned most of them from Narbona Begay I think. The brother of his mother.”
“You think it was this white man looking for stories who came for him the day before the shooting?”
Mrs. Keeyani shook her head. “I don’t know who it was. Maybe.”
Or maybe not, Leaphorn thought. And how does it help anyway? His mind kept returning to Dr. Bourebonette’s reason for being here. She knew the man, obviously. She said she liked him, had worked with him. But being here involved a lot of time and effort if you worked in Flagstaff. And she also seemed ready to pay for the expense of a private investigator.
“Are you still working with Hosteen Pinto?” he asked her. “I mean something current? Going on right now?”
She nodded. “We have been collaborating on a book,” she said.
“About mythology?”
“About the evolution of witchcraft beliefs,” she said. “Ashie Pinto had noticed it himself. How the stories had changed since his boyhood. He went to Albuquerque with me and we listened to the tapes.
“ She paused. Decided this needed explanation. “The oral history tapes in the University of New Mexico collection. Interviews with elderly Navajos. And not just Navajos. With the other Native American cultures and the Spanish-American old people. Tapes that were made back in the thirties and forties that were recording memories that go way back into the 1880s. And if you allow secondhand, second-person memories?what we call grandfather stories?some of the memories went back before the Long Walk. We’d listen to these and look at the transcripts and that would refresh Hosteen Pinto’s memories of the tales he had been told.”
Dr. Bourebonette had an austere face. The only expressions Leaphorn had identified in it were skepticism, anger, and determination?the face of a woman used to getting her way who doubted she would get it from him. Now Bourebonette’s face had changed. As she talked of this book there was animation and enthusiasm.
Leaphorn decided he might know what motivated Dr. Bourebonette.
“
It’s remarkable,” she was saying.
“What Hosteen Pinto can remember. How well he commands the little nuances of those old stories. The differences in attitudes of the teller toward the witch, for example. The shift in importance if the variation came from outside the Navajo culture. For example, from the Zuni sorcery tradition. Or the Hopi’two-heart’ legends, or?”
