Sacred Clowns (23 page)

Ernie reached across Janet, took the sticker, and inspected it. “Grandfather’s teaching me to read,” Ernie said. “But I don’t do it yet.”

“It’s hard,” Janet said. “You really have to work at it.”

“Now here’s what you have to tell your grandpa. Tell him he has to take off the bumper sticker that’s on his truck now or put this one on over it. It would be better to scrape off the ‘Ernie is the greatest’ sticker, though.”

Ernie looked sad. “I like it,” he said.

“Can’t leave it on, though, and this new one is better. It says you’re the champion.” Chee reached across Janet and took Ernie’s hand. “Now this is important, Ernie. Remember this. Tell your grandpa he might get arrested if he has that old sticker on his tailgate. Tell him a lot of people saw it at the radio station. You got that?”

“Get arrested because a lot of people saw it at the radio station,” Ernie said.

“Right,” Chee said. “Will you tell him that?”

“Okay,” Ernie said. “You want to see the truck now?”

“Maybe later, Ernie,” Chee said. “Now we’ve got to go to Aztec.”

They drove up the hill and over it in silence. Then Janet said, “Fetal alcohol syndrome, wasn’t it?”

“Looks like it to me.”

“When did you get the bumper sticker made?”

“Yesterday.”

Silence again.

“I asked you what you found out from the three shamans about me. You said ‘just a second.’”

“They didn’t know.”

“So maybe I’m taboo?”

“I told you how they were. I got the history of my clans and the history of your dad’s clan, with nobody knowing of any linkage. But since they didn’t know there wasn’t one, maybe there was. It was that kind of thinking. And Janet, you know, I don’t care what they think.” He was looking straight ahead, gripping the steering wheel. “Not if you don’t. I mean if you’re taboo for me, I’m taboo for you. I know you’re not my sister because if you were I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you, and I wouldn’t be thinking about you all the time, and longing for you, and—”

“You said there was an old, old, old woman there. The wise woman. What did she say?”

“Well,” Chee said, and laughed. “We were talking all the time about your dad’s clan, of course, since your mother isn’t Navajo. And she said we were wasting everybody’s time because only the maternal clan really mattered.”

“Stop the car,” Janet said.

Chee pulled off on the shoulder. “What?” he said.

“I want to go back to that ‘what to do’ question. About which justice you use on your hit-and-run case. I want to talk about that.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “What?”

“First, I want to tell you I decided I’m a Navajo. And I love you for how you handled that. And second I want to tell you I called my mother. And she told me that her clan, and my clan, is MacDougal, and we have this funny red and green and black tartan, and the MacDougals are in no way linked to anybody named Chee.”

“Not yet,” Chee said, and pulled her to him.

NORMALLY JOE LEAPHORN was good at waiting, having learned this Navajo cultural trait from childhood as many Navajos of his generation learned it. He’d watched his mother’s flocks on the slopes above Two Grey Hills, and waited for roads to dry so he could get to the trading post, and waited for the spring to refill the dipping pool with the water he would carry to their hogan, and waited for the nuts to ripen on the piñon where his parents had buried his umbilical cord, thereby tying him forever to the family home of Beautiful Mountain. But this morning he was tired of being patient and especially tired of being patient with Officer Jim Chee.

He paced back and forth across the grounds of the Saint Bonaventure Mission School, fully reinstated and wearing his Navajo Tribal Police uniform again. At least Chee was finally following orders to keep his whereabouts known. Chee had called to inform the night shift dispatcher that he’d be reachable at the San Juan Motel in Aztec. Indeed, he had answered the phone there when Leaphorn called him at six
A.M.
That had been a pleasant surprise.

“Chee,” Leaphorn had said. “I’m driving over to Thoreau. To the Bonaventure Mission. Come on down and meet me there and we’ll see if we can find something to wrap up this Dorsey business.”

Chee had said yes sir, but where the hell was he now? It was maybe a hundred and thirty miles down from Aztec—two and a half hours’ driving time if Chee kept to the speed limit, which Leaphorn doubted. Give him fifteen minutes to dress and check out and he should have reached Thoreau an hour ago. Leaphorn had watched the school’s teachers arrive—mostly healthy-looking whites who looked like they were just a year or so out of college. He’d watched the mission’s small fleet of castoff and recommissioned school buses discharge their loads of noisy Navajo kids. He’d watched relative silence descend as classes began. He had read every word in last night’s edition of the
Navajo Times.
The top headline read:

COUNCILMAN DENOUNCES LOBBYIST
Chester Claims Nature First Lawyer Aired Illegal Tape

The story beneath it said that employees at Navajo Tractor Sales had tentatively identified Roger Applebee, Santa Fe attorney and lobbyist for the environmental group, as the man who had walked in and broadcast the troublesome telephone call. It quoted Captain Dodge as saying that the investigation was continuing. Dodge said that a photograph of the lobbyist had been shown to employees at Navajo Tractor Sales, where the broadcast had originated. He said that the man who broadcast the tape “generally resembled the photograph of Applebee” except for the hair.

“The suspect might have been wearing a wig,” Captain Dodge said. Applebee, of course, “could not be reached for comment.”

Leaphorn examined the Applebee photograph that accompanied the story. He had caused Leaphorn a hell of a lot of trouble, but he was a decent-looking fellow. The only thing certain was that Dodge was doing his job, which was to get Councilman Chester cooled down and defused. Leaphorn was very much in favor of that. He also approved Dodge’s silence on the matter of the tape left in his tape player, on Leaphorn’s brief suspension, and on Jim Chee’s boneheadedness. Let the department lick its wounds away from the public gaze.

With even the want ads read, he’d unlocked Dorsey’s office and spent thirty minutes planning the methodical search he and Chee would make of everything Dorsey owned. But where was Chee?

Here was Chee now, driving onto the gravel of the visitors’ parking area, looking sheepish.

“I guess you stopped off for breakfast,” Leaphorn said. “Or had car trouble.”

“No sir,” Chee said.

Leaphorn looked at his watch.

“I had to detour over to Window Rock,” Chee said.

“Why?”

Chee hesitated. “I had to drop somebody off.”

“You pick up hitchhikers?”

“This was a lawyer,” Chee said. “Had some business at the courthouse in Aztec.”

“Which—” Leaphorn began, and then decided he didn’t need to ask which lawyer. He kept his expression absolutely neutral. “Let’s get to work,” he said, and ushered Chee into Dorsey’s cramped quarters.

“Dorsey’s trailer was originally searched by Dilly Streib and Lieutenant Toddy. They were looking for nothing in particular, just anything that would shed a little light. Then Toddy and I took a second look at it. We were specifically looking for anything that would explain why Dorsey made that Lincoln Cane. Here’s what we found.”

He handed Chee the sketch of the cane. “This was on top of Dorsey’s ‘unfinished business’ basket.”

Chee examined it, glanced up at Leaphorn. “Interesting,” he said.

Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve had time to do some checking. The genuine Pojoaque Pueblo cane seems to have disappeared back in the nineteenth century. So I’m told it could be sold to a collector if you found one whose conscience wasn’t too well developed.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Chee said. “Is that why you were thinking of Asher Davis?”

“But as you pointed out, he has an airtight alibi for the killing,” Leaphorn said. “And I’m told he has a gilt-edged reputation for integrity. His word is his bond. A lifetime of being the trustworthy trader.”

“All too rare,” Chee said. “As rare as the cane.”

“Which makes it valuable,” Leaphorn said. “The second one makes it all the more curious. It seems to have been a copy of the Tano cane. I guess you can sell anything, but the buyer would know it was stolen or, worse, a fake.”

“What we’re looking for in here is anything that will give us any hint of who hired Dorsey to make those things?” Chee asked. “No question it was the same man?”

“No question in my mind,” Leaphorn said. “You’d have to put more faith in coincidence than I can muster.”

Chee examined the sketch again. He saw nothing that Leaphorn hadn’t explained. He turned the sheet over. Dorsey had made his sketches on the back of an eight-by-eleven-inch poster, which proclaimed the Save the Jemez movement. It asked one and all to join a boycott of stonewashed blue jeans. The printed material explained that such jeans were faded with perlite from strip mines, and said strip mines were ruining the Jemez Mountain forests and the Jemez River. Nothing had been written in the margins unless the writer used invisible ink.

“You go through everything on the desk,” Leaphorn said. “See if I missed anything. I’ll start on the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and work upward.”

They worked. Twenty-five minutes passed. A bell rang somewhere followed by the sounds of kids running, yelling, laughing. Another bell. Silence descended. Chee had finished with the desk top, with Dorsey’s briefcase, with a careful shakedown of Dorsey’s meager wardrobe of shirts, jeans, underwear, and sweaters. Leaphorn was sitting beside the file cabinet, the middle drawer open.

“Nothing so far,” Chee said. “How about you?”

“Did you find that hit-and-runner?” Leaphorn asked.

“What?”

“The Todachene case. You told me you thought you had a line on him.”

“Oh, yeah,” Chee said. He laughed, and it sounded almost natural. “The witness at the radio station, the one who had a good look at his pickup truck, she said he smelled like onions. I went out to the onion warehouse at Navajo Agricultural Industries. But no such truck.”

Leaphorn leaned back in his chair, grunted, stretched his back, looked at Chee. “Onions. Did you try that produce place in Farmington? Or the grocery stores?”

“I checked the produce place.”

“Keep trying,” Leaphorn said. “That funny bumper sticker you told me about ought to make it easy.”

“Right,” Chee said. “If he doesn’t get the truck painted. Or something.”

Leaphorn arose and stretched. “Let’s take a break. Did you bring any coffee?”

Chee shook his head, which was aching from lack of sleep and caffeine deprival. He hadn’t had a cup of coffee since dinner last night. Dinner with Janet. Dinner with—

“You look happy,” Leaphorn said.

“Um,” Chee said. “If there’s a place to get a coffee in Thoreau I’ve never noticed it.”

“I should have brought my thermos,” Leaphorn said.

“They probably have a teachers’ lounge or something where they have a coffeepot and—” Chee’s voice trailed off. He turned back to the desk, recovered the sheet bearing the Lincoln Cane sketches, looked at it again, and handed it to Leaphorn.

“Was Dorsey an environmentalist?”

Leaphorn looked at the poster, and at Chee. “By God,” he said. “Do you know when this Save the Jemez thing was going on?”

“A couple of years ago,” Chee said. “I’d say about the right time.”

Leaphorn picked up the telephone, dialed the intercom office number. “Mrs. Montoya,” Leaphorn said. “Do you know if Eric Dorsey belonged to any environmental groups? Nature First, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, any of those?”

He listened. “Do you know if he had any interest in that sort of thing?” Listened again. “Okay, thanks. Yes, I’d like to talk to him.”

Leaphorn waited. “Father Haines?” he said. “It’s Joe Leaphorn. I’d like to talk to you if you have the time.”

The glass coffeepot on Father Haines’s hot plate was about two-thirds full. He motioned them to chairs and said, “What’s up?”

“We have some more questions about Eric Dorsey,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe you can help us.”

“Sure,” Haines said. He noticed that Chee was staring at the coffeepot, face full of yearning. “But how about a cup of coffee first?”

“Not a bad idea,” Leaphorn said.

It took a moment for Haines to rinse two cups and do the pouring.

“I guess you noticed that Eric’s parents still haven’t claimed his possessions,” Haines said. He sighed. “Those poor people. The world is indeed full of sin and sorrow.”

“I was going to ask you if Mr. Dorsey had any interest in environmental problems. Air pollution, saving whales, strip mining, water pollution, nuclear problems, anything like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Haines said. “All he cared about was people. Nurse the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked. That was Eric’s mission.”

“You’re pretty sure, I gather.”

Haines laughed. “I think you could say I’m certain. A lot of these volunteers here are socially active in various ways. I guess you have to be to work for three hundred bucks a month and live in the kind of housing we provide. And so you hear a lot of talk about such things. Pollution from the Four Corners Power Plant, and the damage done to the Taos Mountains by Molycorp, and how you can’t see across the Grand Canyon anymore because of the smog in the air, and the dangers of disposing of spent uranium fuel rods. All that. But Eric never seemed particularly interested. He wanted to talk about how to get a water supply out to the hogans, or get the kids inoculated. People things.”

“Do you remember if he showed any interest in that Save the Jemez movement?” Leaphorn asked. “That was when people were putting on the pressure to stop strip mining of perlite up above the Jemez Pueblo. They use the stuff to give blue jeans that worn-out look—stonewashed, they call it—so the plan was to get people to boycott stonewashed jeans.”

“Really?” Haines said, grinning broadly. “No,” he said, the grin developing into a chuckle. “I can just imagine Eric’s reaction to something like that. After he got over thinking it was just silly, he’d begin worrying about who would feed the miners’ kids if the boycott worked and they shut down the mines.”

“Did you ever see one of these before?” Leaphorn asked, handing Father Haines the poster.

Haines read it. “By golly,” he said. “They really do wear out those blue jeans before they sell them. I thought you were kidding.”

“Maybe some of the other volunteers were involved with this movement,” Leaphorn said. “Were any posters like this stuck up around here?”

“No.” He shook his head and laughed. “This one I would remember.”

“Would you have any idea how this got to Dorsey’s room? Or why he’d keep it?”

Father Haines had no Idea. They finished their coffee, walked back into the cool autumn sunlight, and stood beside Chee’s pickup, talking. Leaphorn stood beside the cab, his back as straight as the crease in his uniform trousers. Chee dropped the tailgate and sat on it. He was tired. And happy. Almost no sleep last night. Ah, Janet, he thought. Why did we waste so much precious time? But Leaphorn was reviewing things. He should be listening.

“Add it up and what do you think?”

“I think I’d get on the telephone and see if I could find out if Nature First was involved with the Save the Jemez venture,” Chee said. “And if it was, I would begin wondering why in the world Roger Applebee would be getting into the phony cane business.”

“Yes,” said Leaphorn. “Exactly. Why would he?”

They considered that. Chee had difficulty keeping focused. He would find his concentration broken by visions of Janet. Everything about her, top to bottom. Of Janet in his truck driving north from Hoski’s place, of Janet’s face while she weighed his solution of the Hoski problem against the
bilagaani
law school solution. Of her voice as she said, “I’m a Navajo.” His memory regressed to the drive-in theater at Gallup, to Janet sharing Blizzard’s puzzlement at the hilarity
Cheyenne Autumn
was causing among the assembled Navajos. Of Janet puzzled by a culture that was hers by blood but not by memory. He went back to the roof in Tano, Janet’s jeans-clad thigh pressed against his, Janet asking “What’s going on?” when the clown’s wagon brought silence to the crowd, and his own sense of shared puzzlement.