Free Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 05] by The Dark Wind (v1.1) [html]

name?"
    "Gaines," Chee said.
    "What did he want to know?" West asked.
    "He wanted to know what happened."
    "Hell," West said. "Easy enough to see what happened. Fellow ran his airplane into a rock."
    Chee shrugged.
    "He wanted to know more than that?" West persisted.
    "He wanted to find the car. The one that drove away after the crash."
    "He figured it was still out there somewhere, then?"
    "Seemed to," Chee said. He wanted to change the subject. "Either one of you heard any gossip about a witch killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?"
    Cowboy laughed. "Sure," he said. "You remember that body was picked up last July—the one that was far gone?" Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.
    "John Doe?" Chee asked. "A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?"
    "And it was one of your Navajo witches," Dashee said. "Not one of our
powaqa
."

Chapter Ten
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    C owboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.
    "Struck gold," Cowboy said. "We go to Shi-paulovi."
    "Find where the report started?" Chee asked.
    "Better than that," Cowboy said. "We found the man who found the body."
    Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. "There's been a lot of gossip about this man," Dashee said, speaking in English, "but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts."
    Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, "It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore." Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. "They all acted just like
bahanas
," Lomatewa said. "Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people." Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.
    "We weren't told to do it that way," Lomatewa said. "The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The
kikmongwi
, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a
bahana
idea."
    Chee allowed the pause to