“The
“Was it a news story about his being killed? Shot? Or in an accident?”
“I don’t know,” Elandra said. “But I don’t think so. I THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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think the man said it was one of those little pieces where they tell where you’re going to be buried, and who your relatives are, for sending flowers, all that.”
“An obituary item, I guess,” Garcia said.
“Well, since we know within a year or two when that was printed, I guess we can track that down,” Leaphorn said.
As he said it, he was wishing that Sergeant Jim Chee and Officer Bernadette Manuelito were not off somewhere on their honeymoon. Otherwise, retired or not, he could talk Chee into going down to Gallup and digging through their microfiche files of back copies until he found it. Or maybe Chee could talk Bernie into doing it for him. She’d get it done quicker, and not come back with the wrong obituary.
11
Back in Flagstaff, back in his own car, with farewells said to Sergeant Garcia, an agreement reached that they had pretty well wasted a tiresome day and a lot of the sheriff’s department’s gasoline budget, Leaphorn again pulled into the Burger King parking lot. He sat. Organized his thoughts.
Was he too tired to drive all the way back to Shiprock tonight? Probably. But the alternative was renting a cold and uncomfortable motel room, making futile and frustrating efforts to adjust the air conditioner, and generally feeling disgusted. Then he’d have to awaken in the morning, stiff from a night on a strange mattress, and do the long drive anyway. He went in, got a cup of coffee and a hamburger for dinner. Halfway through that meal, and halfway through the list of things he had to do before he went back and told Mrs. Bork that he had absolutely no good news for her about her missing husband, he got up 86
TONY HILLERMAN
and went back out to his pickup. He extracted the cell phone from the glove box, returned with it to his waiting hamburger, and carefully punched in Jim Chee’s home number. Maybe Chee and Bernie would be back from their honeymoon. Maybe not.
They were.
“Hello,” Chee said, sounding sort of grumpy.
“Chee. This is Joe Leaphorn. How busy are you?”
“Ah. Um. Lieutenant Leaphorn? Well, um. Well, we just got back and . . .”
This statement trailed off unfinished, was followed by a moment of silence and then a sigh and the clearing of a throat.
“What do you want me to do?” Chee asked.
“Ah, um. Is there any chance you’d be going down to Gallup pretty soon?”
“Like when?”
“Well, maybe tomorrow?”
Chee laughed. “You know, Lieutenant, this reminds me of old times.”
“Too busy, I guess,” Leaphorn said, sadly.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I know you and Bernie are newlyweds,” Leaphorn said. “So why don’t you take her along.”
“I probably would,” Chee said. “But to do what?”
“It takes a while to explain,” Leaphorn said, and explained it, Navajo style, starting at the beginning. And when he finished he waited for a reaction.
“That’s it?” Chee asked, after waiting a polite moment to be sure he wasn’t interrupting.
“Yes.”
“You want me to prowl through back issues of the THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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“Or mailed it in. Or called it in,” Leaphorn said. “But I’ll bet Miss Manuelito would be good at all that.”
“Probably better than me, because she’s organized and patient. Yes. But Lieutenant, she’s not Miss Manuelito now, she’s Mrs. Bernadette Chee.”
“Sorry,” Leaphorn said.
“And it was probably published years ago after that fire at Totter’s Trading Post. There’d be a story about finding the burned man who was a star figure on the FBI bad boy list, I guess. I could look for that story, and then skip ahead a few months to make sure I didn’t miss it, and then keep looking for a couple of years. Right?”
“Well, I think they have it on microfiche. You know.
You just push the button and it gives you the next page, and skip the full-page ads, and the sports pages.”
