Cabot handed Chee the photographs, smiling. “You might want these for your scrapbook,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-four
As was his lifelong habit, Joe Leaphorn had gone to bed early.
Professor Louisa Bourebonette had returned from her Ute-myth-collecting expedition late. The sound of the car door shutting outside his open window had awakened him. He lay listening to her talking to Conrad Becenti about some esoteric translation problem. He heard her coming in, doing something in the kitchen, opening and closing the door to what had been Emma’s private working space and their guest bedroom, then silence. He analyzed his feelings about all this: having another person in the house, having another woman using Emma’s space and assorted related issues. He reached no conclusions. The next thing he knew the sunlight was on his face, he heard his Mister Coffee making those strangling sounds signaling its work was done, and it was morning.
Louisa was scrambling eggs at the stove.
“I know you like ’em scrambled,” she said, 'because that’s the way you always order them.”
'True,” Leaphorn said, thinking that sometimes he liked them scrambled, and sometimes fried, and rarely poached. He poured both of them a cup of coffee, and sat.
“I had a fairly productive day,” she said, serving the eggs. “The old fellow in the nursing home at Cortez told us a version of the Ute migration story I’ve heard before. How about you?”
“Gershwin came to see me.”
“Really? What did he want?”
“To tell the truth, I’ve been wondering about that. I don’t really know.”
“So what did he say he wanted? I’ll bet he didn’t come just to thank you.”
Leaphorn chuckled. “He said he’d had a threatening telephone call. Someone accusing him of tipping off the police. He said he was scared, and he seemed to be. He wanted to know what was being done to catch them. If the police had any idea where they were. He said he was going to move into a motel somewhere until this was over.”
“Might be a big motel bill,” Louisa said. “Those two guys from the 1998 jobs are still out there, I guess. I hear the FBI has quit suggesting they’re dead.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He drank coffee, buttered his toast, ate eggs that were scrambled just a bit too dry for his taste and tried to decide what it was about Gershwin’s visit that was bothering him.
“Something’s on your mind,” Louisa said. “Is it the crime?”
“I guess. It’s none of my business anymore, but some things puzzle me.”
Louisa had consumed only toast and was cleaning up around the stove.
“I’m heading south to Flagstaff,” she said. “I’ll go through all these notes. I’ll take this wonderful old myth that has been floating around free as the air all these generations and punch it into my computer. Then one of these days I will call it up out of the hard disk and petrify it in a paper for whichever scholarly publication will want it.”
“You don’t sound very eager,” Leaphorn said. “Why not let that wait another day and come along with me?”
Louisa had made her speech facing the sink, where she was rinsing his frying pan. Pan in hand, she turned.
“Where? Doing what?”
Leaphorn thought about that. A good question. How to explain?
“Actually doing what I do sometimes when I can’t figure something out. I drive off somewhere, and walk around for a while, or just sit on a rock and hope for inspiration. Sometimes I get it, sometimes not.”
Professor Bourebonette’s expression said she liked the sound of that.
“Being a social scientist, I think I’d like to observe that operation,” she said.
And so they left the professor’s car behind and headed south in Leaphorn’s pickup, taking Navajo Route 12 south, with the sandstone cliffs of the Manuelito Plateau off to their right, the great emptiness of Black Creek Valley on the left, and clouds lit by the morning sun building over the Painted Cliffs ahead of them.
“You said some things were bothering you,” Louisa said. “Like what?”
“I called an old friend of mine up at Cortez. Marci Trujillo. She used to be with a bank up there that did business with the Ute Casino. I told her I thought that our-hundred-and-something-thousand-dollar
