Sacred Clowns (14 page)

SAMMIE YAZZIE seemed to be in charge of radio station KNDN when Chee pulled up off of Farmington’s Main Street into the parking lot. He was about Chee’s age, with a neat mustache, a short haircut, and a harassed look, if he had enjoyed the excitement of broadcasting a confession earlier in the day it had worn off long ago.

“I don’t know what else I can tell you. Like I told the deputy, and the Farmington police, and the state cops, and the tribal policeman who got here this morning, the guy just walked in and went to the open mike there and did his thing.”

“I’ve got the police report,” Chee said, displaying the copy he picked up at the Farmington police station. “It gives the facts: medium-sized, middle-aged male, probably Navajo, dressed in jeans and jean jacket and billed cap with CAT symbol on crown, wearing dark-rimmed glasses, driving a dirty green pickup, possibly Ford 150 or Dodge Ram. Parked in front, walked in, went to the open mike, said he wanted to broadcast an announcement. Was told to wait until end of record. Waited. Was given signal. Then he made his statement, walked out. Drove away. Right?”

“Right,” Yazzie said. “That’s what happened. Except I think Ellie told the officers that she couldn’t read the license plate when she went to the window to look. And the bumper sticker.”

“Yeah. That’s in here.” He read again: “’License obscured by dirt. Witness noticed sticker on tailgate: ernie is the greatest.’ That’s a funny thing to put on a sticker. You have any idea where it’s from?”

Yazzie shrugged. “That’s a new one to me. Maybe it’s one of those you get made up. Like, ‘My kid’s an honor student at Farmington High.’ Or ‘My kid can whip your honor student at Farmington High.’”

“Maybe,” Chee said. “How about shoes? Boots?”

“You better talk to Ellie,” Yazzie said. “She got the best look at him.”

Ellie looked like she was about a year out of high school and was still enjoying talking to cops—especially a good-looking young cop.

“Boots?” she said, and closed her eyes to show that she was thinking hard and had long, pretty eyelashes. “No. He had on high-top work shoes. I remember because I noticed he had tracked in dirt and I looked.”

“Anything else? That might be useful?”

“How would the boots be useful?”

“Well,” Chee said. “What if he was wearing tall lace-up boots? That might tell us he worked for the telephone company. Or the power company. A lineman. Pole climber.”

“Oh,” Ellie said. “Or if he wore those big heavy shoes with the steel cap in the toe, maybe for the pipeline company.”

“Right,” Chee said, returning her grin. “Now if we’re lucky you’ll remember he had a patch on his jacket that said member san juan county sheriff’s posse, or lions club. Something easy like that.”

Ellie displayed her eyelashes again, deep in thought. “No,” she said. “I just remember he looked sort of nervous and scared, but that’s not unusual. Lot of people are nervous when they pick up the mike. You know. About to broadcast on the radio. And he was kind of old.”

Chee looked at the report. “It says middle-aged here. Was he older than middle-aged?”

“That’s kind of old,” she said, and shrugged. “You know. Maybe past thirty. And nervous.”

It would be natural to be nervous, Chee was thinking, when you’re going to tell the world you killed somebody.

“Nervous, you said. But he didn’t ask anybody how to use the microphone? How to turn it on? How far to hold it from his face? Any of that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He just picked it up and seemed to know how to do all the right things?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t think about that. Some of the people who come in to make announcements need to be told. You know, they’re from out in the country. Wanting to announce a funeral, or a sing, or a Girl Dance, or a meeting of the grazing committee at their chapter house. Something like that. And they don’t know anything about using a microphone.”

“One other thing,” Chee said. “I understand these open mike announcements are taped while they’re broadcast.”

“That’s a government requirement,” Ellie said. “We have to do that. It’s automatic.”

“Could I get a copy?”

“We already made one for the sheriff,” Ellie said. “And for the Farmington cops.”

“How about for me?”

Ellie inspected him, and giggled. “Why not?” she said. “You’ll have to wait a minute.”

While he waited, Chee peered out into the parking lot at his pickup and the other vehicles there. Through the glass at this range he couldn’t read the courteous driving saves lives or the buckle up, it’s the law stickers on his own bumper. He made out the National Rifle Association membership sticker on the adjoining truck only because it was familiar, if Ellie had read the Ernie sticker on the suspect’s truck it must have been printed large. He’d ask about that when she got back, which was at that very moment.

“Here it is,” she said, handing him a cassette. “No charge to a policeman.”

“Thanks,” Chee said. “You remember where the man’s pickup was parked?”

“Right there,” she said, pointing. “The nearest spot.”

“You’re certain about what the bumper sticker said? The report says the truck was muddy. There was dirt on the license plate.”

“Not on the sticker,” Ellie said. “It looked brand-new. And it was great big. The letters, I mean.”

“Well,” Chee said, “thanks a lot.” He handed her two cards, one identifying him as a Navajo Tribal Policeman and giving his office number, the other identifying him as a
hataalii
and a singer of the Blessing Way and giving the number of the telephone in his trailer. “Home and office,” he explained. “Would you give me a call if you think of anything else? Anything at all that might help me find this guy.”

“The only other thing I can think of that was funny was the cap he had on.” Ellie blinked at him, exposing eyelashes against a smooth cheek.

“Funny like how?”

“I don’t mean ha-ha funny. Funny strange. It was one of those baseball caps like everybody wears but it looked like somebody had sat on the bill. It went out straight from the crown and then it was bent up, like this.” Ellie raised her right hand to her forehead. She recreated with her fingers the oddly bent cap bill. “It looked like the bill was broken.” She made a disapproving face.

“That was a good thing to notice,” Chee said, smiling at her. “It’s the sort of unusual thing which might help us find him. Can you think of anything else?”

Ellie’s expression said she was trying. She thought of something, considered it, looked doubtful, went back to thinking.

“You thought of something,” Chee said. “What was it?”

She giggled. “I don’t see how this will help. But I remember the funny way he smelled.” She wrinkled her nose, and laughed. “He smelled like onions.”

“I’ll bet he’d been eating a hamburger,” Chee said. “Maybe a Lottaburger. They have lots of onions.” Which was the reason Chee favored them himself.

“No,” she said. “It was morning. And it was his clothing, I think. Strong enough to make your eyes water.” She was looking at the cards he’d given her. “You’re a
hataalii,”
she said, looking up at him. “Really? I didn’t know you can be a medicine man and a policeman at the same time.”

“I’m beginning to think you can’t,” Chee said.

ON HIS WAY out to his pickup Chee decided his next step would be to check places in Farmington where bumper stickers were printed. Probably he’d find no more than one or two. He’d ask at the city police station and check the telephone book. And when he’d found the one that had printed the ernie is the greatest business he would have another shot at finding the cold-blooded bastard he was looking for. Then he’d complete this investigation. He’d make the arrest. He would impress Lieutenant Leaphorn, sew on his sergeant stripes, and add about five hundred bucks to his monthly income. Then he would be in much better shape to persuade Janet to marry him. In better shape, that is, if the Hunger People Clan didn’t link with one of his own and make her his sister and therefore sexually taboo. And if Janet would forgive him for the clumsy way he’d handled that. If he’d done it as badly as he remembered, that didn’t seem likely. Finally, there was the original question of whether a sophisticated, urbane graduate of Stanford Law School and member of the bar would marry a sheep camp boy turned cop, under any circumstances.

And what if she was a clan sister? What would he do then? Chee didn’t want to think about it. He drove down Main toward the police station deliberately not thinking about it. Instead, he got himself better organized mentally on the Lieutenant Leaphorn front. Leaphorn had made it abundantly clear that his help would not be welcomed by the BIA nor by the Albuquerque FBI in the Sayesva homicide. “Stay away from Tano” was the lieutenant’s final instruction.

And then there was the matter of the Councilman Chester bribery business. He had rushed off without leaving Leaphorn any explanation of that tape he’d left in the tape player on the lieutenant’s desk. Not that much explanation would be needed. It would be clear enough to Leaphorn. Someone had tapped Jimmy Chester’s telephone—or maybe Ed Zeck’s. Ed Zeck was an old-time Indian Country lawyer—a regular lobbyist at tribal council meetings. So you had a tape of Chester dunning Zeck for his bribe money. A very businesslike arrangement, so it sounded. It sounded as if Chester was accumulating interest on his twenty-grand payoff. And apparently Chester had borrowed it from the bank to be paid back when Zeck delivered the money. Sort of an advance, or maybe a way to launder it. Such high finance, the way banks operated, was far, far from Chee’s zone of expertise.

The Farmington police, it turned out, were way ahead of Chee. Chee was referred to Sergeant Eddie Bell.

“We handled that right after it happened,” Bell said. “There’re seven places in the yellow pages that do printing, and all but two will do bumper stickers if you want a thousand or so, and three of ’em would run off a single if you were willing to pay the preparation cost, and not a damn one of them remembered doing an ernie is the greatest job.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “You’d think somebody would remember an odd one like that. It would have to be one of those places that does singles, I’d think.” This concept was new to Chee. He had admired thousands of bumper stickers, from assurances that God loved him, to recommendations for saving the planet, to obscenities, to dire warnings about following too closely. Declarations of red power, and even one that simply said bumper sticker. But he’d never given a thought to where they came from.

“Do they do that?” he asked Bell. “You just walk in and tell them what you want and they print you one?”

“Sure,” Bell said. “Quikprint right down in the next block will run one off for you in five minutes. But it’s pretty expensive that way. Not like so much a thousand. So they don’t do many, and everyone we talked to says they thought they’d remember that ernie is the greatest. It’s sort of weird.”

“I guess he must have got it printed somewhere else,” Chee said.

Sergeant Bell’s expression said he thought that was a statement too obvious to need saying.

“We asked for checks of printers at Albuquerque, and Gallup, and Flagstaff, and Phoenix. So far they all came up blank. But you know how that is.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. People tended to be way too busy to do other people’s work. Or to do it well. He was disappointed and Bell saw it.

“Look. If you’re going to keep working on this sticker business, be careful with it. It’s an easy one to spot. If he finds out we’re watching for it, he’ll scrape it off. And if he doesn’t scrape it off, we’re going to have him sooner or later.”

Now Bell also had said something too obvious to need saying. They were even.

And Chee was back to square one. The only thing he had that probably hadn’t been worked by the state cops, or the Farmington police, or the San Juan County Sheriff, was the smell of onions. The man must have smelled strongly—not just onion breath. And it was, as Ellie had said, too early to be eating hamburgers. She’d said it seemed like the odor came from his clothing, and it must have been powerful.

Chee drove down to the Garden Spot Produce Company on West Main, checked the vehicles parked there without scoring a green pickup with an ernie is the greatest sticker, and parked himself. He’d scanned through the typed copy of his man’s confession which Bell had given him. Now he got out the taped copy he’d gotten at KNDN and stuck it in his player.

The voice was that of a young woman, talking in halting Navajo. Chee frowned. They’d given him the wrong tape. The woman was reporting the death of her maternal aunt, obviously reading something that had been written for her in English and stumbling over the translation. The family was getting together at the home of the deceased in Mexican Water to talk about what to do with her horses, and her grazing lease, and other property, and there was going to be a funeral service at the Assembly of God Mission at Kayenta. The halting voice told Chee that the woman was born to the Streams Come Together People and born for the Towering House Clan. But, Chee thought, whatever her clans, she had gone onto the Jesus Road. Before he could ponder that and whether it would affect the incest taboo, another voice came on.

“I tell the family of Hosteen Todachene that I am sorry. I heard the truck hit something, but I was drunk. I went back and I didn’t see anything. I don’t drink hardly ever so when I did drink that night I got drunk. I would have helped him if I knew he was there. Now I am sorry. I will send money every two weeks to help make up for the help he gave you. I want you to know I am sorry.” End of tape. Chee rewound it and played it again. The words rushed out—a man tense with emotion and, understandably, in a hurry. He played it again. The speech sounded memorized, as if the man had written it out. He must have thought about it a lot. In this third time through Chee was impressed with the emotion. The man sounded as if he were holding back tears.

He switched off the tape, turned on the radio, punched the AM button. At the moment, KNDN was broadcasting a singer asking, “Why did you leave me, Lucille, with three little children and a crop in the field.” He turned the volume down a notch, and sat trying to visualize the man. Medium-sized, middle-aged, Ellie had said, wearing jeans and a jean jacket and a baseball cap with a long bill bent up in the middle like somebody had sat on it. On the tape he sounded like a childhood Navajo speaker—probably not boarding school. A lot of middle-aged Navajos had a limited vocabulary in their language because in those days the BIA wouldn’t let them speak it in school and that was the age period when you grow out of your childhood vocabulary. This man spoke it well. He knew the verbs to convert an English-language situation into fluent Navajo. Chee switched off the radio and went into the produce store. The clerk pointed him to a telephone. He called the Farmington Police number. Yes, Sergeant Bell was in.

“You know in that broadcast, the man said he was going to send money to the Todachene family,” Chee said. “Do you know if he’s done it?”

“He did,” Bell said. “At least somebody did.” He laughed. “Unfortunately, he forgot to put his return address on the envelope.”

“Was it mailed around here?”

“Farmington postmark,” Bell said. “Apparently he mailed it two days after he ran over the guy.”

“How much?”

“Six twenties, two tens, and a five,” Bell said. “Wish he’d sent a check.”

“That’d be a hundred and forty-five dollars,” Chee said. “Does that mean anything to you? The amount?”

“Not a damn thing,” Bell said. “At least he didn’t spend it getting drunk again.”

“Well,” Chee said, “thanks. If I learn anything I’ll let you know. But I haven’t got much hope.”

“Hey, by the way, did you hear it happened again? Down at your place this time?”

“What happened?”

“Somebody showed up at that open mike KNDN operates down at Kirtland. Down at the Navajo Tractor Company beside the highway. This guy walked in and broadcast a tape of one of your tribal councilmen talking about a bribe.”

Chee sucked in his breath. “Did what?”

“I didn’t hear it,” Bell said. “But we got a bunch of calls about it and somebody went down to see about it. They told him this guy walked into the dealership there and got in line with the people waiting to broadcast their announcements. The microphone’s in a little box on the wall in the lobby and you just wait your turn. He said, ‘What you are about to hear is telephone talk between tribal councilman so-and-so and such-and-such, the lobbyist for some company or other.’ And then he played this conversation. Held his little tape recorder up to the mike.”

“Be damned,” Chee said. “Who was it?”

“Who knows. People come in every day during the noon hour to make announcements and nobody paid much attention. It happened a lot like the last one at the station in Farmington.”

“Did you get a description?”

“Not much of one. White man. Maybe five-eight or -ten. Maybe forty or forty-five. Had a jacket on and a hat. Nothing on what he was driving, or how he got there. The manager said there’s always a line of Navajos coming in to use the mike during that period for making announcements. The people working there are selling tractors, farm equipment, and stuff, and not paying attention to the mike. It’s just a public service gimmick with the station. Probably they get a trade-out on their radio advertising or something.”

“That description doesn’t narrow it down much,” Chee said. It didn’t need to be narrowed down for him. The man would be Roger Applebee. Applebee had found a way to use an illegal tape that couldn’t be used in court.

He hung up and stood with his hand still on the telephone, considering his next step. Applebee’s broadcast would stir up a lot of trouble, he had no doubt of that. But it wasn’t his trouble. Not unless the lieutenant changed his mind and let him investigate what was going on with the toxic-waste-dump business. That wasn’t likely. His trouble was the Todachene hit-and-run. Chee’s thoughts turned to the six twenties, two tens, and one five, and to the voice of a man promising to send money every two weeks.

“Thanks for the telephone,” he said to the clerk. “Could I ask you something sort of semi-personal?”

The clerk looked doubtful.

“Do you people working here get paid once a month, or once a week, or every two weeks, or what?”

“Once a week,” the clerk said.

That took care of that.

The bins beside him were stacked with fruit. Oranges, then three varieties of apples, then pears, then bananas, then grapes. Bins along the wall held a mountain of potatoes, then yams, then lettuce, then cabbage, then carrots, then onions, then—

The clerk was counting out change for a customer.

“Where do you get your onions?” Chee asked.

“Onions?” the clerk asked.

Chee pointed. “Onions,” he repeated.

“I think they’re local,” the clerk said. “Yeah, we get them from NAI.”

“From Navajo Agricultural Industries?” Chee said. “Right over across the river?”

“That’s right,” the clerk said, but Chee was already heading for the door. Why hadn’t he thought of that?