Coyote Waits by Tony Hillerman

Keeyani. What’s that black thing on top of the chest there? Beside the cigar box.”
    “It’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She retrieved it, came to the door, and handed it to him with a plastic sack containing five cassettes. “My uncle did a lot of that. Taping stuff for those
biligaana
he worked for.”
    Professor Bourebonette appeared in the kitchen door. She displayed a round tin can with a cluster of red roses decorating the lid.
    “That’s it,” Mary Keeyani said.
    The tape recorder was of the bulky, heavy sort sold about twenty years ago. It contained a cassette. Leaphorn pushed the play button. He heard the faint sound of friction recorders make when running over blank tape. He pushed Stop, and Rewind, waited for the reversing process to stop and pushed Play again.
    The speaker produced an old man’s voice, speaking in Navajo.
    “
They say Coyote is funny, some of those people say that. But the old people who told me the stories, they didn’t think Coyote was funny. Coyote was always causing trouble. He was mean. He caused hardship. He hurt people. He caused people to die. That’s the way the stories go that I was told by my uncles when I was a boy. These uncles, they say . . 
.”
    Professor Bourebonette was standing beside him. Leaphorn pushed the stop button, looked up at her.
    “He was doing that for me,” she said. “I asked him for that story. I wonder how far he got.”
    “Ashie Pinto? For your book?”
    “Not really. He told me he knew the original correct version of one of the Coyote myths. The one about the red-winged blackbirds and the game they play with their eyeballs. Throwing them up in the air and catching them, and Coyote forcing them to teach him the game.” She glanced at Leaphorn, quizzical. “You know the story?”
    “I’ve heard it,” Leaphorn said. He looked at the tin she was holding. “Are you going to open Mr. Pinto’s box?”
    Bourebonette read into Leaphorn’s tone some hint of disapproval. She looked at the box and at Leaphorn and said, “I’ll just give it to Mary. She’s his niece.”
    Mary Keeyani had no qualms. She worked off the lid. Inside Leaphorn could see a jumble of papers: envelopes, receipts, what seemed to be a car title, odds and ends. She put it on the table where she and Bourebonette sorted through it.
    “Here’s a letter from me,” Bourebonette said, extracting an envelope. “And another one.” She glanced at Leaphorn. “That’s all of them. We didn’t do much business by mail.”
    Mary Keeyani stopped sorting. “Here’s all he has in here for this year,” she said. She displayed two envelopes. “No use going back any further than that.” She extracted a single sheet of notepaper from one envelope, read it, slipped it back into the envelope, and dropped it back into the box. She repeated the process, put the lid on the box, and stood, looking disappointed.
    “Nothing helpful?” Bourebonette said.
    Nothing helpful, Mrs. Keeyani had agreed. Nothing that would tell them who had driven out here over this awful rocky track and hauled an old man across the Reservation to commit a murder. Leaphorn drove carefully over that rocky track now, sorting out his reaction to this. It was what he had expected, or should have, and yet he felt disappointed. Why? He hadn’t thought a search through Pinto’s documents, if he had any, would be revealing. But if you give luck a chance, sometimes it rewards you.
    His real hope was in finding a witness. The FBI seemed to have decided its case was made and hadn’t looked for one. And strange vehicles came so rarely down these tracks — which were really little more than miles and miles of shared driveways — that people remembered them. A visit from a stranger to anyone on your side of the mountain was exciting. But, unfortunately, Ashie Pinto’s place, even though it was four miles from the road, was the first place on this track. Mary Keeyani’s outfit, where he was about to park now,