Sacred Clowns (21 page)

“THE OLD BATTLE-AX did a lot of talking,” Harold Blizzard said. “She’d talk about absolutely everything except where she was hiding the kid.”

“I can see I’m going to have to go out there myself,” Chee said. “You just don’t seem to be catching on about how to interrogate people.”

“I can interrogate people all right,” Blizzard said. “Normal people, I have no problem. It’s you Navajos. You know that stereotype about us Indians being taciturn?” Blizzard raised a huge palm toward Chee and growled “Ugggh” to illustrate his point. “Well, that’s based on the rest of us Indians. Cheyennes, Cherokees, Choctaws, Comanches, Chippewas, Modocs, Kiowas, Seminoles, Potts, Hopis. Normal Indians. But whoever decided Indians were silent hadn’t run into you talkative Navajos.”

“You’re telling me she didn’t just flat-out deny she knew where Delmar could be located? Is that right? She just wasn’t willing to tell you?”

Blizzard used his big right hand to demonstrate lips flapping. “She’d just talk about what a lousy job we policemen did in protecting people, enforcing the laws and all that. And how would she know Delmar would be safe if we had him in our custody? And how she knew we wouldn’t post a guard on him, or anything like that. And on, and on.”

“Did you ask her why she thought he needed a guard?”

“Sure, I did. And she’d then just give me five more minutes about how lazy we cops were. And then I’d tell her she was judging us by the performance of you guys.” Blizzard cut off his own chuckle and Chee’s response to that by signaling the waitress and pointing to their coffee cups.

“Hey,” he said. “There’s your lawyer lady. We’re going to need another cup.”

There, indeed, was Janet Pete, standing in the entrance of the Navajo Nation Inn coffee shop, looking hesitant. She saw that Chee had seen her, and turned away. Pretending, it seemed to Chee, to be looking for someone.

“Hey, Janet,” Blizzard shouted. He stood, waving. Harold Blizzard was far too large, far too loud to be ignored.

Janet came. She looked at Chee and looked away. “Hello, Harold,” she said. “Hello, Jim.”

Chee stood and pulled back a chair for her.

“I met a friend of yours the other day,” Blizzard said. “Jim’s friend, too, I guess. Fellow named Asher Davis. He said if he wasn’t about sixty pounds overweight, you two could provide him a perfect alibi in that homicide over at Tano Pueblo.”

“Oh,” Janet said. She glanced at Chee, and away.

“He’s on the list the feds gave me of people to check out. About a thousand or so.”

“I guess he’s right,” Janet said. “He went there with Mr. Chee and Cowboy Dashee and me. And when we decided to watch the ceremony from the roof, he decided he was too heavy for it to hold him.”

“That was before the clowns came out with the wagonload of stuff?” Blizzard asked. “Or was it after?”

“I think it was before,” Janet said. “Yes, it was right at the very beginning.”

“That’s the way I remember it, too,” Chee said. He was thinking Leaphorn told Streib about the Lincoln Canes, and Streib told the Albuquerque FBI, and Blizzard knows his business better than I gave him credit for. “Are you thinking of Davis as maybe a suspect?”

Blizzard gave him a stern look. “Just my native curiosity,” he said.

“I understand Davis looked good for it after the business of the Lincoln Canes came out,” Chee said. “But it turns out he was with an Apache County deputy sheriff over on the Hopi Reservation when Eric Dorsey was killed.”

Blizzard looked surprised, then angry. “Goddammit,” he said. “Why don’t anybody ever tell anybody anything?”

“I had no idea Davis was a suspect,” Janet said. “And wait a minute. I thought you were talking about the Sayesva case. What’s the Dorsey killing have to do with that? Which one are you talking about?”

“Nobody tells me about anything either,” Chee said. “I’ve been out of touch. I just heard about the phony Lincoln Canes this morning.”

“Phony Lincoln whats?” Janet said. “I still haven’t heard about them.”

And so Chee explained, skipping—Navajo fashion—back to the very beginning with the Spanish King Charles sending canes to the Indian pueblos in the seventeenth century, from there to 1863, thence to Leaphorn’s discovery of the sketch on Dorsey’s desk. He concluded finally with the presumption that the package Delmar Kanitewa had taken to his koshare uncle was a copy of the Tano cane, and the koshare put it in the wagon to warn against selling pueblo artifacts.

“I’d never even heard of Lincoln Canes,” Janet said, looking thoughtful. “Is it your official ‘theory of the crime’ now that this cane ties the two homicides together? Same killer for the man who made it and the man who used it?”

“I’d say so,” Chee said. “More or less.”

“How’s it work?” Janet asked.

“Sort of like this,” Chee said, happy that Janet was once again talking directly to him and even looking at him. Maybe we’re almost back again to being old friends, he thought. And maybe that was all he could ever hope for. “Somebody hires Dorsey to make the Pojoaque cane, knowing he can sell it to a collector of Lincoln rarities because the cane from that pueblo disappeared generations ago. So he has Dorsey make such a cane, not telling Dorsey what it is or about the fraud. Then he decides to try again with the Tano cane and gets Dorsey to make it. Delmar Kanitewa shows up at the shop while Dorsey is finishing it. He shows it to the boy since he’s a Tano kid. Delmar tells Dorsey what it is.”

Chee paused, looked at Janet. “You have to understand this Dorsey is a genuine straight arrow. Into doing good. Now he figures something crooked must be going on and he’s being used. Probably he figures the real cane is going to be stolen and this one used to replace it so the theft won’t be noticed. So he gives it to Delmar to take to his uncle with a warning about the impending theft. And then the guy who commissioned it shows up to collect it, and Dorsey jumps on him about it and the guy kills Dorsey to protect his secret.”

Blizzard made a wry face. “It sounds too damned complicated,” he said. “I like ’em simpler. Like the janitor walks in drunk and tries to borrow money and gets turned down and gets mad and knocks off Dorsey and steals some stuff.”

“I don’t like that Blizzard theory at all,” Janet said. “But I don’t know about the other one either.” She thought. “How could this guy sell the second cane? Nobody would buy it. Collectors know about these things or they wouldn’t be collecting them. They’d know that Tano Pueblo still had its Lincoln Cane. And so they’d know that the one they’d bought was a fake, or, worse yet, the one they bought was stolen.”

“So they couldn’t brag about it. Or show it off,” Blizzard said. “So why buy it?”

“And why use Dorsey?”

“He had connections with some traders,” Chee said. “We know that because he was helping some of the Navajos out on the Checkerboard get better prices for their stuff.” He paused, remembering what the old woman with the ill husband had told him. “Including some old stuff that the real collectors go for.”

“Okay, but I still see holes in it,” Janet said.

“I have trouble with it, too,” Chee admitted.

The waitress arrived, bringing Janet a cup of coffee and a refill for Chee and Blizzard.

“You know,” Blizzard said. “I think maybe all three of us are in the same boat I was in at that
Cheyenne Autumn
movie the other night. I couldn’t understand why all the Navajos were hooting and blowing their car horns. Different culture. Different perceptions. There’s probably some Tano Pueblo connection here we just don’t fathom.” He made a wide, Blizzard-style gesture with his hands. “Different value systems, you know. Hard for us outsiders to comprehend.”

“Yes,” Janet said in a voice almost too low for Chee to hear. “Hard to comprehend.”

“Janet,” Chee said. He reached his hand toward her. “There’s something I’d like to explain.”

She put down her cup and sat back, not looking at him.

“Well, now,” Blizzard said, hastily. “I’ve got work to do.” He picked up the ticket. “You get the tip,” he said to Chee. “See you later, Janet.” And he was gone.

“Me too,” Janet said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where?” Chee said.

“First to Crownpoint. The federals are releasing Ahkeah and I have to do the paperwork.”

“I’m going that direction,” Chee said. “Could I give you a ride?”

“I have to go on from there up to Aztec. I have some business at the San Juan County courthouse.”

“That’s right on my way,” Chee said.

“I’d better take my own car,” she said. “You’d have to wait for me.” She got up, dropped a dollar on the table. “My share of the tip.”

“Janet,” Chee said. “I want to talk to you.”

“I’m not sure I’d care for that.”

Chee sat looking up at her. He could think of nothing to say. But his expression must have said something to her.

“What could we talk about?” she asked. “Do you think we can go back to being friends?”

Chee shook his head. “I doubt it. I don’t think I could.”

He put his hand out. She looked at it. Then took it. Her fingertips felt soft and warm against his skin.

“Just a few hours,” he said.

“What do we talk about?”

“The weather. The landscape. Old times, maybe, if we’re careful how we handle it. And I think maybe I want you to help me make up my mind about something.”

She extracted her hand.

“Not about Navajo clans,” he said. “About something you must have studied in law school. Justice. Retribution. Social revenge. Ethics. All that.”

She managed a smile. “I’m good at that kind of talk.”

In fact, they talked very little on their way to Crownpoint. East of Gallup, Chee pointed to the places along the red sandstone cliffs of Mesa de los Lobos where various movies had been shot. He explained that Thoreau was pronounced “threw” because the village had been named after a railroad engineer and not the poet-essayist. He pointed southward to Little Haystack Mountain and told her how a Navajo prospector named Paddy Martinez had found a vein of radioactive pitchblende near there and opened the great Ambrosia Lake uranium mining district. He told her, finally, about the chain of events that had gotten Leaphorn suspended, and had caused the lieutenant to miss his trip to China.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “Leaving that tape in there, I mean. Leaphorn didn’t make much out of it, but I feel terrible about it.”

“I didn’t think I would like that man at first,” Janet said. “But I really do. I think he’s a kind person. I used to just think he was smart.”

“He’s smart, all right.”

“That’s what he thinks about you, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The way he talked about you.”

“What do you mean? When did you talk to him?”

“I went to see him about Ahkeah. Exactly like you told me to do.”

Chee took his eyes off the road to stare at her. She was looking amused. “I told you to go see Leaphorn? When did that happen?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you Eugene Ahkeah was not guilty. You said go tell Lieutenant Leaphorn that and he’d turn him loose. So I did. And he did.”

“Did you really,” Chee said. “Wow.”

“I think it was just good timing. He’d figured out someone else had done it.”

“But what makes you think he has this high opinion of me?” Chee said. “I don’t often get that impression.”

“The hit-and-run case. He thinks you can solve it.”

“No he doesn’t. Or he didn’t. He doesn’t think anyone can solve it.”

“He told me that, too,” Janet said. “No clues. But really, he thinks you can do it.”

Chee took his eyes off the road again. She was looking straight ahead so all he could see was her profile. Hard to understand, but a beautiful profile.

She spent only a few minutes in the Crownpoint station and emerged with Eugene Ahkeah in tow. Ahkeah looked tired and disheveled. “I told Mr. Ahkeah we’d give him a ride home,” she said. They did, dropping him off at his mobile home.

“Blizzard was kidding me about Navajos being talkative,” Chee said. “He should meet your client.”

“He’s resentful,” Janet said. “He thinks he was arrested just because he was handy.”

“Well, now,” Chee said, feeling a touch resentful himself, “there was the matter of finding all that stolen stuff under his house.”

“Yes, but—” Janet said, and stopped. “Let’s not argue.”

They drove in silence through the rolling, autumn grassland. It is a hundred and five miles from Thoreau to Farmington and there were days when Chee had made the drive without seeing another vehicle. Today they had met a car and two pickups before they were ten miles north of Crownpoint.

“Heavy traffic day,” Chee said, hoping to restart a conversation.

“You wanted to ask me about something. Remember?”

“I do,” Chee said. He fished the tape out of his glove box and put it into the tape player and pushed the play button. “But first I want you to listen to this.”

Janet listened.

“That doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “I heard about this but it didn’t seem real. Did he send any money?”

“Six twenties, two tens, and a five,” Chee said. “In the U.S. mail.”

She thought about that. Shrugged. “And nobody recognized him of course, or he’d be in jail by now. How about the description?”