She took the slips, glanced at them.
“I was just going to remind you about that,” she said, smiling at him. “I will turn them over to my accountant at the university to make sure you’re not cheating. I will also remind you that I am behind on our room rental deal.
Remember, I stayed up here about three times during the summer.”
During all this Leaphorn had been studying her, remembering Emma.
“You know, Louisa, we could save this paperwork, this sort of thing, if you would just go ahead and marry me.” She smiled at him. “You have probably just established a
“It wasn’t intended to be romantic,” Leaphorn said.
“It was intended to be just downright practical.” 122
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She looked down at her coffee cup, picked it up, held it, replaced it in the saucer, smiled at him ruefully.
“Do you remember what I said the first time you came up with this idea? Let’s see. About nineteen—”
“Several years ago,” Leaphorn said, interrupting her.
“I remember exactly every word of it. You said. ‘Joe, I tried being married once. I didn’t care for it.’ ”
“Yep,” she said, looking at him fondly. “That’s exactly the way I put it.”
“Have you since changed your mind? Found me more attractive?”
That brought a thoughtful silence. A sigh. Another picking up and putting down of the coffee cup. Then:
“Joe, I’ll bet you remember that adage—I’m sure you do because I think you are the very first person I heard using it. It’s about how hard it is for old dogs to learn new tricks. Or something like that. Anyway, how do I say it? I guess I’ll use something an old lady once told me in one of my oral history interviews. She said, ‘Don’t marry a really good friend ’cause they’re a lot better than a husband.’ ”
Leaphorn let that hang there. He was noticing that his reaction to her reaction was a sort of relief.
She was watching him, looking sort of penitent. “Or maybe I got that wrong. Maybe she said it would spoil the friendship.”
“However she worded it,” Leaphorn said, “I damn sure don’t want that to happen to us.”
“Nor me either,” Louisa said, and got up and carried her plate, cup, saucer, and cutlery to the sink. “And just to make sure you don’t think I might be willing to revert to full-time housekeeper, I will leave this in the sink for you THE SHAPE SHIFTER
123
to wash, while I collect my stuff and head south toward my great stack of midterm papers waiting to be graded.” She started to add his plate to her load, but stopped. Instead, she smiled at him.
“Good friends are too hard to collect,” she said.
15
The good mood Louisa’s attitude had left with Joe Leaphorn lasted only about half an hour. While he was watching the professor drive away, with a mixture of sadness and relief, he heard his telephone ringing. It would be Grace Bork, he thought, calling to tell him that Mel Bork was, just as he suspected, the man found dead in the wreck. It would lead to a conversation he’d expected, something he dreaded. What could he tell her ? Only that he had wasted his time. But the voice on the telephone was Sergeant Kelly Garcia’s.
“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Garcia said. “I want you to tell me how you knew that body would be Mel Bork?”
“I was just guessing,” Leaphorn said. “That’s all I’ve been doing lately. So it was him? What was the cause of death?”
Garcia snorted. “Wasn’t it obvious? You’re not satisfied with tumbling your car down into a canyon, landing 126
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upside down in what’s left of it, broken bones, multiple concussions and contusions, general bodily trauma?
That’s what we have. And you still want an autopsy.”
“Don’t you?”
That produced a moment of silence.
“Well, I guess I have to admit it would relieve my mind,” Garcia said. “I’d like to know what caused him to be so damned careless on that curve.”
“Have you asked about an autopsy?”
“Yeah, sort of suggested to Saunders that I’d like one.
And he said, What for ? And I said an old retired Navajo cop I used to know is sort of vaguely suspicious about it and asked me to check on the cause of death. And Saunders said the only problem about that is deciding which of his nineteen or so auto crash trauma injuries actually did the job. He offered to take me in there to look at the body and let me take my pick.”
“Is the pathologist still Roger Saunders?” Leaphorn asked. “I’ve always heard tales of how testy he was. Did he say you’d have to get a court order, or what?” Garcia chuckled. “You know about Roger then, don’t you? He told me he is backed up with work on actual homicide cases. But when I whined a little, he said that if we can arouse his
