The Shape Shifter Part 15

"So I've heard."

"That means you are a very important person to this man who calls himself Shewnack. The only one left who could identify him with that double murder."

"If he wasn't already burned up," Delonie said.

"You believe that?"

"Well, should I believe you or the famous old Federal Bureau of Investigation?"

"We'll give you a choice," Leaphorn said, and began connecting the dots of time and place between a man calling himself Shewnack leaving Handy's store with the loot, and a man who called himself Totter appearing back in the high, dry Four Corners Country and buying himself an old trading post and gallery. Then the fire destroying a man Totter had hired, who the FBI decided was Shewnack. Then Totter cashing in, disappearing.

"Then," Leaphorn continued, but Delonie held up his hand.

"And then we learn that Mr. Totter is dead, too," he said. "How does that work in this blueprint of yours?"

"It didn't, but then we checked on the obituary notice, turns out it was false. The man who called himself Totter didn't die."

"Still alive? Where?"

"Just outside Flagstaff now, if we're right. We think he's a man who used to be a CIA agent in Vietnam. Mr. Vang here knew him when he was calling himself George Perkins. The way this funny trail leads, he got caught stealing CIA bribery money, got b.u.mped out of the CIA, took Tommy Vang here out of a Hmong refugee camp, settled-if we can call it that-in San Francisco. As Tommy told you, he was gone a lot on trips. He was gone, for example, in the long period before the Handys were killed, and he was gone again for a long time when Totter was taking over that trading post and doing his business from there. Then-"

Delonie held up his hand again.

"Let me finish that for you. Then, when those of us doing time for the Handys started getting out on parole, he decided we'd see him and turn him in. So he hired himself a helper, burned him up, left evidence to persuade the FBI this was Shewnack, thereby eliminating that problem. That it?"

"Just about," Leaphorn said.

"Pretty weak connection, seems to me. You want me to think this Jason Delos is Shewnack?"

Leaphorn nodded.

"You left out that rug," Tommy Vang said. "And you left out how Totter stole that pinyon sap so the fire wouldn't look like arson."

"Pinyon sap?" Delonie said. "And a rug?" He was grinning. "I know this Shewnack sort of proved I'm stupid, but I've learned some from that. What are you trying to sell me here?"

Leaphorn explained the rug, explained-rather lamely-the sap, the lard buckets, the very hot fire without any sign of those fire-spreading chemicals the arson investigators are trained to look for.

Delonie thought about it, nodded. "If I was the grand jury, I'd guess maybe I'd be interested in all this. But I think I'd be asking for more evidence. Isn't this all pretty much just circ.u.mstantial?" He laughed. "Notice that language I'm using. We learn that doing time in prison. Lots of guard-house lawyers in there. But I think I'd be wondering what you are trying to accomplish with all this."

Leaphorn was wondering, too. Wondering what he was doing here. He was tired. His back hurt. He was supposed to be retired. Delonie was right. If they had Delonie on the witness stand ready to swear Jason Delos was actually Ray Shewnack, the defense attorney would note Delonie was a paroled convict and repeatedly note the total, absolute, utter lack of any concrete evidence.

To h.e.l.l with it, Leaphorn thought.

"I guess you'd have to say we're trying to save your life, Mr. Delonie. To keep this 'raised from the ashes' Ray Shewnack from erasing you as the only threat left."

He pulled the little gift box from his jacket pocket. Handed it to Delonie. "Here's the present he sent you."

"What do you mean, save my life?" Delonie asked.

He took the little box, held it gingerly, turned it over, read the note on it, tapped it with his finger.

"Who wrote this?"

"I wrote it," Tommy said. "Mr. Delos spoke it to me and told me to write it down."

"Who is it supposed to be from? From this Delos man?"

"I don't know," Tommy said. "It's a little bottle of cherries. The big ones he uses in the bourbon drinks he likes to make."

Delonie tore open the wrapping, pulled the box apart, extracted the bottle, examined it carefully.

"Nice thing to send somebody," Delonie said. "If I thought this Delos was actually that Ray Shewnack, I'd be very surprised. I never did think he had any use for me. He smiled at everybody, and slapped your back, but you could tell."

"It won't have any Delos fingerprints on it," Leaphorn said. "Neither that slick paper wrapping nor the bottle, nor the bottle top. n.o.body handled it, except Mr. Vang here. Delos even had Tommy press his thumb down on the 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 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 gla.s.s 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 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 gla.s.s 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 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 pa.s.sed. 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 gra.s.s 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 apparently acted to affect his driving within a relatively few minutes. Bork weighed maybe two hundred pounds. A crow would be a matter of ounces. Did a crow have a craw, as chickens did, in which foods were ground before being dumped into the stomach? Leaphorn didn't know. But while he was pondering that, Tommy Vang touched his shoulder.

"Look," he said, pointing.

The crow that had carried its prize into the pinyon was moving its wings. It seemed to fall from one branch to a lower one, recover itself, flap its wings, and begin a sort of frantic flight. A very short flight. Abruptly its effort stopped, and it dropped behind the wall.

"Poisoned, I guess," said Tommy Vang. "I guess you were right about those little puncture holes."

Delonie was standing beside them now, watching.

"That one on the ground there, too," he said. "Look at that."

The crow was on the gra.s.s, trying to stand, trying to get its wings moving. Dying.

"I guess that would have been me," Delonie said. "I guess I owe you gentlemen a thank-you or something."

"What we need from you," Leaphorn said, "is to tag along with us to visit Mr. Delos, make sure he is the man you remember as Ray Shewnack so we can get him arrested and indicted and get him put away."

But even as he said it, Leaphorn was thinking he'd need a lot of luck to make any of those things happen.

"Where we going to get me a chance to look at him?" Delonie asked. "That means driving to Flagstaff, I guess."

"Mr. Vang is going to help us with that," Leaphorn said. "Mr. Delos left home to go hunting. Hunting elk. He was going after a big trophy bull elk up on one of those hunters' ranch places along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Vang's supposed to drive up there tomorrow and give him a bunch of information about you. About where you live, alone or what, where you work, your habits, what your vehicle looked like. Stuff like that."

Delonie was studying Vang while receiving this information. "Supposed to get acquainted, sort of, or just snoop around?"

"He said better if you didn't see me," Vang said. "I was supposed to just find out when you weren't home and leave those cherries in your mailbox, or by your front door, and then go away."

Delonie considered this. "That son of a b.i.t.c.h," he said. "He sure had me all figured out, didn't he? He figured I'd be eating those cherries while I sat there wondering who the h.e.l.l had sent them. He was right, too. I wouldn't have had the brains to stop and think about it."

Leaphorn shrugged. "Why would you? You didn't have any reason to be suspecting anything. You knew Shewnack was dead. Formally certified by the Federal Bureau of Identification."

Delonie nodded. "Now let's figure out how we're going to nail him. If we want to catch him out hunting, we'll need to get there early. That's when the elk and the deer are coming out of the cover to get themselves a wake-up drink of water. And that's when those hunting-camp-type hunters are all set up waiting for them. We need to start getting ourselves ready for this. It's a long drive up there."

18.

Getting ready for the venture first involved cleaning off enough of the table so that Tommy Vang could spread out his old road map, let them inspect the marks Delos had drawn on it, and expose the notes of instruction he had written for Tommy. They sat in the three straight-backed chairs, with Delonie in the middle.

Delonie tapped the area Delos had circled.

"That's where he's doing his hunting? Is that it?" he asked. "If it is, then our best bet would be to drive over to Cuba on 550." He paused, shook his head. "But there we got a choice. Either the long way on pavement on 537 through the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, or take the short way. Just keep going north out of Cuba to La Jara on old Highway 112 straight up to Dulce. Both get you to the same place. The first way is a lot longer, but it's all paved road. That county road 112 gets you going over a lot of dirt."

Leaphorn was trying to remember the shorter route. Terrible when snow was melting, but probably not bad this time of year. While he was pondering this, Delonie muttered something negative about the old Delos map, got up, disappeared into what was probably a bedroom, and emerged with other maps. One was a bound volume of reproductions of U.S. Geological Survey section surveys, another was an oil field pipeline route map that Leaphorn didn't recognize, and the third was a copy of the AAA Indian Country map like the one Leaphorn used himself. Delonie put them all on the table, pushed aside the USGA volume and the pipeline maps, and folded the Indian Country version to expose the pertinent portion of the Colorado-New Mexico border. On it, he carefully pencil-sketched the circle from Delos's map. Checked his work with the Delos map, made some slight corrections, and stared at the Delos notes.

"Can you read this scribbling here," he asked Tommy Vang.

Vang leaned over the map, looking surprised. He picked up the pencil Delonie had dropped on the map.

"Sure," he said, and tapped a scribble with the pencil tip. "Right here he says 'Wash cuts across road here. Park in wash. Wait in car. I come.' And this right here that sort of looks like a big M. Those lines beside it is 'Lazy W.'" Vang laughed. "I think lazy because it's not an M but a W laying on its back."

"It's probably the rancher's cattle brand," Delonie said, studying Vang, frowning. "How long you been working 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?"

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 Law and Order Law and Order, and NYPD Blue NYPD Blue, and those other ones, and you learn a lot about how policemen like Mr. Leaphorn here do their work. And you learn about different kind of guns. 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 n.o.body taught you how to read. Or write, or anything like that?"

"Well, not sit behind a desk in a regular cla.s.sroom 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 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.