bottle cap. Perfect place for a thumbprint.” Delonie twisted the cap open, laid it aside, looked into the bottle, sniffed it.
“Smells fine,” he said.
Tommy Vang was looking extremely nervous, leaning forward, reaching toward Mr. Delonie. “Don’t eat it.”
“We think it’s poison,” Leaphorn said.
Delonie frowned. “These cherries?”
He reached into his pocket, took out a jackknife, opened it, pried out a cherry, and let it roll onto the table.
He stared at it, said, “Looks good.”
“I think if you take a real close look at it, you’re going to find a little puncture hole in it someplace. Where a needle gave it a shot of something like strychnine. Something you wouldn’t want in your stomach.” Delonie used the knife to roll the cherry onto a piece 214
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of paper, picked it up, studied it. Put it down, frowned at Leaphorn. “Little bitty hole,” he said.
“A Flagstaff private investigator, former cop named Bork, went to see Mr. Delos about this rug we told you about. Asked a bunch of questions about how Delos got it when it was one of the art things supposed to be burned up in Totter’s fire. Delos gave him a little lunch to take home with him. It had a slice of fruitcake with it, and Mr.
Delos had put one of these very special cherries on the top of the slice. Hour or so later on the way home Mr. Bork died of poisoning.”
“Oh,” Delonie said.
“Then I came along to find out what had happened to Bork. I asked Mr. Delos a lot of questions about that rug, how he came to have it, so forth. He had Mr. Vang make me a little lunch, too. Put a slice of fruitcake in it, put one of these cherries on top.”
“I didn’t,” Tommy said. “Mr. Delos did that always.
Used them as decorations. Just for somebody special, he would say. And put it on top. I didn’t know he was punching those holes in them.”
“Why didn’t it poison you?” Delonie asked.
“I don’t like fruitcake and I didn’t get around to stealing the cherry off the top, and finally Vang here heard what had happened to Mr. Bork. It made him nervous. So he found me and tried to take the lunch back.” Delonie rolled two more cherries out of the bottle, looked at them, then looked out the sliding glass door, considering the activity among the birds.
“About this time of day, we usually have a bunch of crows showing up. If I’m not home, they crowd out the smaller birds and pig out on the bird food. Not just eat THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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it, they scatter it all around. I run ’em off. Used to have a shotgun I could thin them out with, but the probation officer wouldn’t let me keep that.”
“You thinking about poisoning them?” Leaphorn asked.
“Crows will eat just about anything. They’d gobble these up. If they really are poison, that would be fewer crows around to steal the eggs out of other birds’ nests.
Looks like a way to show whether you’re telling the truth.”
And so Delonie put the cherries back into the jar, slid open the glass door, and walked out into the patio. Some of the bigger birds fled, but Leaphorn noticed that most of the smaller ones seemed to recognize him as harmless.
He placed four of the cherries in a line atop the wall, and one on each of the roofs of four of the bird feeders, came back through the door, turned to survey his handiwork, then hurried back out again. He retrieved the cherries from the feeder roof, put them back into the bottle, came in, and slid the door shut, and stood far enough inside to be invisible to the birds, watching.
“In case you wondered why I wanted those cherries back,” he said. “While them cherries would be way too big for the wrens, and finches, and the little ones to handle, putting them right on the feeders might tempt the doves, or the bigger ones. Them birds have to deal with all sorts of predators. Hawks, crows, snakes, rats, stray cats. Killing a few crows just does my birds a favor, but I didn’t want to kill any of the good ones.”
Leaphorn looked at his watch. “How long would you guess we’ll be waiting to see if this works?” Delonie laughed. “Not long,” he said. “Crows are 216
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smart. They watch. In fact, there was a little flock of the local crows up in the trees back there watching when I came out. They’re not here all the time because they know I have those feeders rigged so they can’t get their big heads into most of them. But when they see me come out carrying something that looks like it might be food, they start flying in a hurry. They want to beat the little birds to it.”
Even as Delonie was saying that, two crows arrived, landing in a pinyon just beyond the wall. Three others followed. One noticed the cherries, landed on the wall.
Picked up a cherry, found it a little too large to swallow, and flew back into the pinyon with it. Minutes passed. The sight of the cherries attracted another crow to the wall. It speared a cherry and stayed on the wall and worked away at getting it torn up enough to swallow. Then he pecked another one, knocked it off the wall, and flew down into the patio to find it. A third crow grabbed the remaining cherry, held it in his beak briefly. Put it back on the wall, pecked at it. It fell into the grass below, and the crow flew down looking for it.
Leaphorn checked the time. How long had it taken the poison to kill Bork? No way of knowing, but it had
