7
JOE LEAPHORN, UNEASILY CONSCIOUS
that he was now a mere civilian, had given himself three excuses for calling on Hosteen Nez and thereby butting into police business.
First, he’d come to like the old man way back when he was picking his brain in the Breedlove missing person case. Thus going to see him while Nez was recuperating from being shot was a friendly thing to do. Second, Canyon de Chelly wasn’t much out of his way, since he was going to Flagstaff anyway. Third, a trip into the canyon never failed to lift Joe Leaphorn’s spirits.
Lately they had needed a lift. Most of the things he’d yearned to do when retirement allowed it had now been done—at least once.
He was bored. He was lonely. The little house he and Emma had shared so many years had never recovered from the emptiness her death had left in every room. That was worse now without the job to distract him. Maybe he was oversensitive, but he felt like an intruder down at the police headquarters. When he dropped in to chat with old friends he often found them busy. Just as he had always been. And he was a mere civilian now, no longer one of the little band of brothers.
Good excuses or not, Leaphorn had been a policeman too long to go unprepared. He took his GMC Jimmy with the four-wheel drive required in the canyon both by National Park Service rules and by the uncertain bottom up Chinle Wash. He had stopped at the grocery in Ganado and bought a case of assorted soda pop flavors, two pounds of bacon, a pound of coffee, a large can of peaches, and a loaf of bread. Only then did he head for Chinle.
Once there, he made another stop at the district Tribal Police office to make sure his visit wouldn’t tread on the toes of the investigating officer. He found Sergeant Addison Deke at his desk. They chatted about family matters and mutual friends and finally got around to the shooting of Amos Nez.
Deke shook his head, produced a wry grin. “The people around here have that one all solved for us,” he said. “They say old Nez was tipping us off about who was breaking into tourists’ cars up on the canyon lookout points. So the burglars got mad at him and shot him.”
“That makes sense,” Leaphorn said. Which it did, even though he could tell from Deke’s face that it wasn’t true.
“Nez hadn’t told us a damn thing, of course,” Deke said. “And when we asked him about the rumor, it pissed him off. He was insulted that his neighbors would even think such a thing.”
Leaphorn chuckled. Car break-ins at several of the Navajo Nation’s more popular tourist attractions were a chronic headache for the Tribal Police. They usually involved one or two hard-up families whose boys considered the salable items left in tourist cars a legitimate harvest—like wild asparagus, rabbits, and sand plums. Their neighbors disapproved, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one would get a boy in trouble over.
Leaphorn’s next stop was seven-tenths of a mile up the rim road from the White House Ruins overlook—the point from which the sniper had shot Nez. Leaphorn pulled his Jimmy off into the grass at the spot where Deke had told him they’d found six newly fired 30.06 cartridges. Here the layer of tough igneous rock had broken into a jumble of room-sized boulders, giving the sniper a place to watch and wait out of sight from the road. He looked directly down and across the canyon floor. Nez would have been riding his horse along the track across the sandy bottom of the wash. Not a difficult shot in terms of distance for one who knew how to use a rifle, but shooting down at that angle would require some careful adjustment of the sights to avoid an overshot. Whoever shot Nez knew what he was doing.
The next stop was at the Canyon de Chelly park office on the way in. He chatted with the rangers there and picked up the local gossip. Relative to Hosteen Nez, the speculation was exactly what Leaphorn had heard from Deke. The old man had been shot because he was tipping the cops on the car break-ins. How about enemies? No one could imagine that, and they knew him well. Nez was a kindly man, a traditional who helped his family and was generous with his neighbors. He loved jokes. Always in good humor.
Everybody liked him. He’d guided in the canyon for years and he could even handle the tourists who wanted to get drunk without making them angry. Always contributed something to help out with the ceremonials when somebody was having a curing sing.
How about eccentricities? Gambling? Grazing rights problems? Any odd behavior? Well, yes. Nez’s mother-in- law lived with him, which was a direct violation of the taboo against such conduct. But Nez rationalized that. He said he and old lady Benally had been good friends for years before he’d met her daughter. They’d talked it over and decided that when the Holy People taught that a son-in-law seeing his mother-in-law caused insanity, blindness, and other maladies, they meant that this happened when the two didn’t like each other. Anyway, old lady Benally was still going strong in her nineties and Nez was not blind and didn’t seem to be any crazier than anyone else.
Indeed, Nez seemed to be feeling pretty good when Leaphorn found him.
“Pretty good,” he said, “considering the shape I’m in.” And when Leaphorn laughed at that, he added, “But if I’d known I was going to live so damn long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
Nez was sprawled in a wired-together overstuffed recliner, his head almost against the red sandstone wall of a cul-de-sac behind his 19 of 102
15/03/2008 19:57
TheFallenMan
file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Floop/Local%20Settings/Te...
hogan. The early afternoon sun beat down upon him. Warmth radiated from the cliff behind him, the sky overhead was almost navy blue, and the air was cool and fresh, and smelled of autumn’s last cutting of alfalfa hay from a field up the canyon. Nothing in the scene, except for the cast on the Nez legs and the bandages on his neck and chest, reminded Leaphorn of a hospital room.
Leaphorn had introduced himself in the traditional Navajo fashion, identifying his parents and their clans. “I wonder if you remember me,” he said. “I’m the policeman who talked to you three times a long time ago when the man you’d been guiding disappeared.”
“Sure,” Nez said. “You kept coming back. Acting like you’d forgot something to ask me, and then asking me everything all over again.”
“Well, I was pretty forgetful.”
“Glad to hear that,” Nez said. “I thought you figured I was maybe lying to you a little bit and if you asked me
