“Ah,” she said, and held the crystal so that Agnes Tsosie could see what she was seeing.
Then she questioned Agnes Tsosie about what they had seen.
It was sundown when Nancy Yabenny emerged from the brush arbor. She talked to Tsosie’s husband and daughter and to Rollie Yellow. She told them Agnes Tsosie needed a Yeibichai to be restored to harmony and beauty.
Rollie Yellow had half expected that, but still it was a blow. White men call it the Night Chant, but the ceremonial was named for its principal participant—Yeibichai, the great Talking God of Navajo metaphysics. As the maternal grandfather of all the other gods, he often serves as their spokesman. It is an expensive ceremony, nine days and nights of feeding the audience of clansmen and friends, and providing for the medicine man, his helpers, and as many as three teams of yei dancers. But much worse than the expense, in the mind of Rollie Yellow, was that what Yabenny had told them meant the belagaana doctor was probably right. Agnes Tsosie was very, very sick. No matter the cost, he would have to find a singer who knew how to do the Night Chant. Not many did. But there was time. The Yeibichai can be performed only after the first frost, after snakes have hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps.
Chapter Three
« ^ »
I heard you decided not to quit,” Jay Kennedy said. “That right?”
“More or less,” Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn said.
“Glad to hear it. How busy are you?”
Leaphorn hesitated, his eyes flicking over the pile of paperwork on his desk, his mind analyzing the tone of Kennedy’s voice on the telephone.
“Nothing unusual,” he said.
“You heard about this body out east of Gallup?”
“I heard a something-or-other,” Leaphorn said—which meant a secondhand report of what had been overheard by the radio dispatcher downstairs. Just enough to know it wasn’t a routine body find.
“It may not be Bureau business,” Kennedy said. “Except technically. But it’s interesting.”
Which was Kennedy’s way of saying he thought it soon would be his business. Kennedy was Gallup area Federal Bureau of Investigation, and had been a friend of Leaphorn's long enough so that such things no longer had to be exactly said.
“The way I heard it, they found him beside the railroad,” Leaphorn said. “That would be off the reservation. None of our business either.”
“No, but it might get to be,” Kennedy said.
Leaphorn waited for an explanation. None came.
“How?” he asked. “And is it a homicide?”
“Don’t know the cause of death yet,” Kennedy said. “And we don't have an identification. But it looks like there's some sort of connection between this bird and a Navajo.” He paused. “There was a note. Well, not really a note.”
“What’s the interesting part? Is that it?”
“Well, that’s peculiar. But what interests me is how the body got where it is.”
Leaphorn’s face relaxed slightly into something like a smile. He looked over the work on the desk. Through the window of his second-floor office in the Navajo Tribal Police Building he could see puffy white autumn clouds over the sandstone formation which gave Window Rock, Arizona, its name. A beautiful morning. Beyond the desk, out through the glass, the world was cool, clear, pleasant.
“Leaphorn. You still there?”
“You want me to look for tracks? Is that it?”
“You’re supposed to be good at it,” Kennedy said. “That's what you always tell us.”
“All right,” Leaphorn said. “Show me where it is.”
The body was under the sheltering limbs of a clump of chamisa, protected from the slanting morning sun by an adjoining bush. From where he stood on the gravel of the railroad embankment, Leaphorn could see the soles of two shoes, their pointed toes aimed upward, two dark gray pant legs, a white shirt, a necktie, a suit coat, still buttoned, and a ground’s-eye view of a pale narrow face with oddly pouched cheeks. Under the circumstances, the corpse seemed remarkably tidy.
“Nice and neat,” Leaphorn said.
Undersheriff Delbert Baca thought he meant the scene of the crime. He nodded.
“Just luck,” he said. “A fellow running a freight engine past here just happened to notice him. The train was rolling so he couldn’t get down and stomp around over everything. Jackson here—” Baca nodded to a plump young man in a McKinley County deputy sheriff's uniform who was standing on the tracks “—he was driving by on the interstate.” Baca gestured toward Interstate Highway 40, which was producing a faint rumble of truck traffic a quarter-mile to the west. “He got out here before the state police could mess everything up.”
“Nobody’s moved the body then?” Leaphorn asked. “What about this note you mentioned? How did you find that?”
“Baca here checked his pockets looking for identification,” Kennedy said. “Reached under him to check hip pockets. He didn’t find a billfold or anything, but he found this in the handkerchief pocket of his coat.” Kennedy held out a small folded square of yellow paper. Leaphorn took it.
“You don’t know who he is then?”
“Don’t know,” Kennedy said. “The billfold is missing. There wasn't anything in his pockets except some change, a ballpoint pen, a couple of keys, and a handkerchief. And then there was this note in his coat pocket.“
Leaphorn unfolded the note.
“You wouldn’t think to look in that coat pocket if you were stripping somebody of identification,” Baca said. “Anyway, that's what I think was happening.”
The note was written with what might have been a ballpoint pen with a very fine point. It said: “Yeabechay? Yeibeshay? Agnes Tsosie (correct). Should be near Windowrock, Arizona.”
Leaphorn turned the square over. “Stic Up” was printed across the top, the trade name of the maker of notepads which stick to bulletin boards.
“Know her?” Kennedy asked. “Agnes Tsosie. It sounds familiar to me.”
“Tsosie’s like Kennedy in Boston,” Leaphorn said. He frowned. He did know one Agnes Tsosie. Just a little and from way back. An old lady who used to serve on the tribal council a long time ago. Elected from the Lower Greasewood district, if he remembered it right. A good woman, but probably dead by now. And there must be other Agnes Tsosies here and there around the reservation. Agnes was a common name and there were a thousand Tsosies. “Maybe we can find her, though. We can easy enough, if she's associated with a Yeibichai. They're not having many of those anymore.”
“That’s the ceremony they call the Night Chant, isn't it?” Kennedy asked.
“Or Nightway,” Leaphorn said.
“The one that lasts nine days,” Kennedy said. “And they have the masked dancers?”
’That's it,“ Leaphorn said. But who was this man with the pointed shoes who seemed to know an Agnes Tsosie? Leaphorn moved past the chamisa limbs, placing his feet carefully to erase nothing not already erased in Baca's search of the victim's pockets. He squatted, buttocks on heels, grunting at the pain in his knees. He should exercise more, he thought. It was a habit he'd dropped since Emma's death. They had always walked together—almost every evening when he got home from the office. Walked and talked. But now—
The victim had no teeth. His face, narrow as it was, had the caved-in, pointed-chin look of the toothless old. But this man wasn’t particularly old. Sixty perhaps. And not the sort to be toothless. His suit, blue-black with an almost microscopic gray stripe, looked old-fashioned but expensive, the attire of that social class with the time and money to keep its teeth firmly in its jaws. At this close range, Leaphorn noticed that the suit coat had a tiny patch by the middle button and the narrow lapel looked threadbare. The shirt looked threadbare, too. But expensive. So did a simple broad gold ring on the third finger of his left hand. And the face itself was an expensive face. Leaphorn had worked around white men for almost forty years, and Leaphorn studied faces. This man's complexion was dark—even with the pallor of death—but it was an aristocratic face. A narrow, arrogant nose, fine bones, high forehead.