Read Online Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 12] by The Fallen Man (v1) [html] - Free Book Online

at that angle would require some careful adjustment of the sights to avoid an overshot. Whoever shot Nez knew what he was doing.
    The next stop was at the Canyon de Chelly park office on the way in. He chatted with the rangers there and picked up the local gossip. Relative to Hosteen Nez, the speculation was exactly what Leaphorn had heard from Deke. The old man had been shot because he was tipping the cops on the car break-ins. How about enemies? No one could imagine that, and they knew him well. Nez was a kindly man, a traditional who helped his family and was generous with his neighbors. He loved jokes. Always in good humor. Everybody liked him. He’d guided in the canyon for years and he could even handle the tourists who wanted to get drunk without making them angry. Always contributed something to help out with the ceremonials when somebody was having a curing sing.
    How about eccentricities? Gambling? Grazing rights problems? Any odd behavior? Well, yes. Nez’s mother-in-law lived with him, which was a direct violation of the taboo against such conduct. But Nez rationalized that. He said he and old lady Benally had been good friends for years before he’d met her daughter. They’d talked it over and decided that when the Holy People taught that a son-in-law seeing his mother-in-law caused insanity, blindness, and other maladies, they meant that this happened when the two didn’t like each other. Anyway, old lady Benally was still going strong in her nineties and Nez was not blind and didn’t seem to be any crazier than anyone else.
    Indeed, Nez seemed to be feeling pretty good when Leaphorn found him.
    “Pretty good,” he said, “considering the shape I’m in.” And when Leaphorn laughed at that, he added, “But if I’d known I was going to live so damn long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
    Nez was sprawled in a wired-together overstuffed recliner, his head almost against the red sandstone wall of a cul-de-sac behind his hogan. The early afternoon sun beat down upon him. Warmth radiated from the cliff behind him, the sky overhead was almost navy blue, and the air was cool and fresh, and smelled of autumn’s last cutting of alfalfa hay from a field up the canyon. Nothing in the scene, except for the cast on the Nez legs and the bandages on his neck and chest, reminded Leaphorn of a hospital room.
    Leaphorn had introduced himself in the traditional Navajo fashion, identifying his parents and their clans. “I wonder if you remember me,” he said. “I’m the policeman who talked to you three times a long time ago when the man you’d been guiding disappeared.”
    “Sure,” Nez said. “You kept coming back. Acting like you’d forgot something to ask me, and then asking me everything all over again.”
    “Well, I was pretty forgetful.”
    “Glad to hear that,” Nez said. “I thought you figured I was maybe lying to you a little bit and if you asked me often enough I’d forget and tell the truth.”
    This notion didn’t seem to bother Nez. He motioned Leaphorn to sit on the boulder beside his chair.
    “Now you want to talk to me about who’d want to shoot me. I tell you one thing right now. It wasn’t no car burglars. That’s a lot of lies they’re saying about me.”
    Leaphorn nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The police at Chinle told me you weren’t helping them catch those people.”
    Nez seemed pleased at that. He nodded.
    “But you know, maybe the car burglars don’t know that,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they think you’re telling on ’em.”
    Nez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know better. They’re my kinfolks.”
    “You picked a good place to get some sunshine here,” Leaphorn said. “Lots of heat off the cliff. Out of the wind. And—”
    Nez laughed. “And nobody can get a shot at me here. Not from the rim anyway.”
    “I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.
    “I figured you had.”
    “I read the police report,” Leaphorn said, and recited it