for this man? Brought you over from Asia when you were a boy, did he? That would have been close to thirty years ago. Did you already know English then?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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Vang laughed. “I was just nine or ten, I think. Just talked Hmong, and a little bit of Vietnamese, and some words of Chinese. But I studied English on the television in San Francisco. On the programs they had for children.” Vang laughed. “Funny stuff. Clowns and puppets and little things supposed to be like animals. But it taught you numbers and if you paid attention you could get the meaning of the words they were saying.”
“Never went to any regular school then,” Delonie said, sounding incredulous.
“But you learn a lot on television. Like you watch
The only ones we had when I was a boy were the rifles the Americans brought for us, and some my uncles had taken from the Vietcong and the Pathet Lao.” Delonie considered that, now looking grim. “Are you telling me that miserable bastard never put you into any regular school? You never did really have anybody teaching you anything?”
“Oh, no,” Vang said, looking shocked. “Mr. Delos put me in a cooking school. I helped in the kitchen and the people there taught me how to make bread, and cookies, and soups, and . . . well just about everything.”
“But nobody taught you how to read. Or write, or anything like that?”
“Well, not sit behind a desk in a regular classroom like I see they do on television. Not anything like that.
But I learned all sorts of other things. Mr. Delos and the woman who ran the food place where I was learning how to cook, they got me into a dry cleaner’s place. Where 222
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they work on making clothing fit better.” Thinking of that caused Vang to smile.
“I learned how to mend, and patch, and iron, and do what they called ‘destaining.’ I was very good at that.” Delonie was looking somber. “Never did send you to a regular sort of school then,” he said. “Just kept you home and you worked for him. Did his cooking, and was sort of like a housekeeper.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “I guess that’s about what you were telling me, wasn’t it. But I wasn’t taking it seriously.”
“Well, that’s the way it was,” Leaphorn said. “Mr. Vang was Mr. Delos’s cook, housekeeper, and sort of secretary, too. Arranged his trips. Things like that.”
“Worked for the bastard about twenty-five years or so, then, I’d estimate. What kind of wages did he pay you?”
“Wages?” Vang asked. “Nothing much when I was just a boy, I guess, but later on when I went out to do the shopping for things, Mr. Delos told me to just use the charge for stuff I needed.”
“For stuff you needed,” Delonie said. “Like what?” Vang shrugged. “Like socks and underwear, and when I got older, razor blades, and that deodorant for under your arms. Sometimes I would buy chewing gum, or candy bars, things like that. Mr. Delos didn’t seem to mind.”
Delonie recovered the pencil and began jotting figures on the corner of the map.
“I’m figuring minimum wage at an average of $5 an hour in California ’cause it goes up and down. Higher now. Lower then. Figure him a forty-hour, five-day week, even though he was working full time and seven days, just figure it at forty. That would be two hundred bucks a THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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week. Now maybe we should cut that in half because he got room and board. Make it a hundred per week. That fair?”
Without waiting for Vang or Leaphorn to answer, Delonie was doing the math.
“I’m calling it twenty years—knocking off those years before Vang was in his late teens. Then knocking two weeks off each year for vacation time, even though Vang didn’t get any vacation. That gives us an even thousand weeks. Right? Multiply that by a hundred dollars a week, and it comes out Delos owes Vang a hundred thousand dollars. Right? Now if we figure in some interest, compounded annually, then it means that Mr. Delos—” Leaphorn, who almost never interrupted anyone, interrupted. “Mr. Delonie,” he said. “We see your point. But don’t you think we should be sort of changing the subject and getting back to what we’ve got to do tomorrow?” Delonie stared at Leaphorn. Put down the pencil.
Picked it up again.
“All right. I guess so. I can’t get it in my mind though, that this Delos is really going to be Ray Shewnack. If I see him, and it really is Shewnack, what I think I’m going to do is just shoot him.”
“You do that, you’ll be right back in prison again,” Leaphorn said. “And not just for parole violation.” Delonie nodded. “I know. But it would damn sure be worth it.”
“Trouble is, I’d be going in there with you. Me and Tommy Vang here.”
“You think you can go up there, catch him, take him in, and get him convicted of anything? Damned if I see how. Me, a convicted felon, as your only witness.” 224
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“Let the jury decide,” Leaphorn said. “Anyway, you can’t cook the rabbit until you catch it.” Delonie made a wry face, bent over the map again.
“Well,” he said. “If Delos wants to meet Mr. Vang right here where he marked that spot, it must mean he’d have his hunting stand pretty close. I guess we can drive up there, though. He must know that area pretty well.”
“Mr. Delos has been there before,” Tommy Vang said. “He took me once, when I was a lot younger.” He smiled at the thought. “I got to learn how to cook on the woodstove. Mostly just frying meat and boiling stuff and mixing drinks for people. But the cooking wasn’t easy until you know how to control the heat. Be way too hot, or then too
