Sacred Clowns (24 page)

Leaphorn was saying something about linkages.

“Hey,” Chee said, loudly. He got down from the tailgate and stood facing Leaphorn. “I think I know why Applebee would have wanted that Lincoln Cane made.”

Leaphorn looked at him, waiting.

“Just a second,” Chee said, thinking it through. “I’m beginning to see why you want all those details in your reports.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Leaphorn said.

“And why you use those pins on your map, linking things together. If you can find the link everything makes sense.”

“All right,” Leaphorn said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Why did Applebee get the cane made?” Chee said. “For the same reason he got Chester’s telephone tapped.”

Leaphorn considered. “Maybe. Chester was up for reelection. So was the governor. I see where you’re going but you have some problems with it.”

“I do,” Chee said. “But now I understand why the crowd got so silent when the cane went by in the clown’s wagon. Those Tano people weren’t seeing an artifact for sale. They were seeing the cane as a symbol of the governor’s authority. They saw the koshare accusing the governor of corruption, of selling them out on the toxic dump issue, I’ll bet.”

Leaphorn was smiling slightly now. “Of course,” he said. “That makes sense. But we still have problems.”

“I know it,” Chee said. “Like who killed the koshare. We know it wasn’t Applebee. I guess Janet and I are both his alibi. I know we both saw him out there in the crowd on the plaza about when Sayesva was being killed. She pointed him out to me. Going to introduce us, because I’d just written that letter to the
Navajo Times
about the waste dump plan. I didn’t put anything about Applebee in my report.”

“Well, there was no reason to do that,” Leaphorn said. “You can’t provide an inventory of the crowd. Now we can see it matters. Can you think of anything else that might matter, knowing what we know now?”

“Nothing,” Chee said.

“Applebee and Davis were both at the Tano ceremonial,” Leaphorn said. “Along with a few thousand other people. But did you see anything that might connect them?”

“Wait,” Chee said. “Sure. Davis told us they were old friends.” He stopped, remembering. And Leaphorn stood, willing to wait. Patient again.

And Chee extracted, from a memory trained by a culture which had kept its past alive without a written language, an almost exact account of what Asher Davis had told them of the Applebee-Davis friendship.

Leaphorn considered, shook his head. “Another link,” he said. “Can you see how it helps?”

“No,” Chee said. “Not yet.”

“I guess we’re finished here, anyway,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll take care of reporting this to Dilly Streib. He might have some ideas. You can get back on that hit-and-runner and the other stuff on your list.”

Chee was backing out of the parking area when he stopped. “One thing I might add to that report from Tano,” he said. “We can’t provide an alibi for Asher Davis there. He was off buying stuff. But as far as I know he could have gone back down that alley and done the job.”

“We have all the wrong alibis for the wrong people in the wrong places,” Leaphorn said.

“And one more thing,” Chee added. “I remember when I met Applebee in the coffee shop, he mentioned he sometimes collects old Navajo stuff.”

“But no mention of collecting Lincoln Canes, I guess,” Leaphorn said.

And Jim Chee drove away, smiling and happy. But that, Leaphorn understood, had nothing at all to do with canes or inconvenient alibis.

BACK IN DORSEY’S cramped quarters Leaphorn called Dilly Streib. He explained he was once again officially in the law enforcement business, officially unsuspended. He told Streib of the poster and what they had learned in Dorsey’s quarters.

“Uh-huh,” Dilly said. “I don’t see making much out of that. It could have come from anywhere. It doesn’t look to me like it’s going to be much help.”

“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. But it was all the help they had. And when Dilly was off the line, he called the Santa Fe office of Nature First. A woman answered, sounding young and Eastern. Yes, that was an attractive poster, and yes, Nature First had produced and distributed it. That boycott was one of their more successful ventures. Stonewashed jeans had declined in popularity and the market for Jemez Mountains perlite had significantly diminished.

So there was the possible connection, nebulous and insignificant as it was, between two Lincoln Canes and two murders and Roger Applebee.

But Applebee couldn’t be the killer. Chee was watching him in the Tano Plaza at the moment Sayesva was being killed.

Davis could have killed the koshare. But he was away on the Hopi Reservation with Cowboy Dashee when Eric Dorsey died.

Think. Applebee and Davis were lifelong friends, if you could call such a relationship friendship. How about some sort of a conspiracy?

Joe Leaphorn sat in the chair Eric Dorsey no longer needed and considered. A bell rang somewhere. A door opened and was slammed. The air smelled of dust and of the long, dark days of winter. Leaphorn methodically worked his way through a variety of possibilities and hit a variety of dead ends. He got up, stretched, glanced at his watch. About quitting time. He’d missed lunch but he wasn’t hungry. He pulled back the curtain on Dorsey’s tiny window to inspect the weather. Clouds building up. Tonight it might snow. Just about now, Louisa would be in Honolulu. He let the curtain fall and sat down again. Concentrate. Work out the possibilities one at a time. And start with Dorsey, where his own jurisdiction was involved. Forget the koshare for a moment. Without that, the solution to the Dorsey homicide seemed clear enough. But even as he was thinking that, Leaphorn’s lifelong Navajo conditioning to look for harmony in all things bore its fruit. Abruptly, he saw the connections, how it had happened, and why it had happened. The irony of it produced a brief, bleak smile.

Leaphorn picked up the telephone Eric Dorsey would never need, called Virginia, and got the number of Councilwoman Roanhorse. She was at home.

“No,” Leaphorn told her. “I’m not going to ask you where your grandson is. I’m asking you if you have a copy of today’s
Navajo Times.”

She did.

“Now,” Leaphorn said. “All I want you to do is ask the boy to take a look at that photograph of Roger Applebee on the front page. Ask him if he saw that man going into the woodworking shop at Saint Bonaventure when he was at the mission. I’ll give you my telephone number here and I just ask you to call me back and let me know. That’s all I’m asking.”

Leaphorn listened.

“If Delmar recognizes Applebee, then we arrest Applebee. Delmar identifies him formally on the record before Applebee can get released on bond. And then you don’t have to worry about Delmar’s safety anymore.”

Leaphorn listened.

“He’ll be safe because we’d already have the formal identification from him. There’d be no reason to do away with Delmar then. Nothing to be gained, a lot to lose.”

Leaphorn listened.

“If he doesn’t recognize Applebee, then you just keep on hiding the boy if you want to.”

Councilwoman Roanhorse said, “Just a minute.”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll hold on.”

Leaphorn held on. He glanced at his watch. A minute passed. Two more. The next voice he heard was a boy’s.

“That’s the man,” Delmar Kanitewa said. “That’s him. I was coming out. He was going in. I held the door open for him and he said thanks.”

“You had the cane? Did he see it?”

“It was wrapped up in newspapers.”

“Why did the teacher give it to you?”

“Well, I went in to get a bracelet this friend of mine—Felix Bluehorse—had made for his girl, and I saw the Lincoln Cane. The teacher was wrapping it up but he left it on the bench there when he went to get the bracelet and I looked at it, and I saw it was our cane. Or maybe a copy of it. And so when he came back with the bracelet, I asked him about it, and he said he was making it for a guy, and I asked what the guy was going to do with it, and he said he didn’t know, and then when I explained to him what it was, he got mad.”

“Mad?”

“He got furious. Hit his fist on the bench. Said ‘dirty lying son-of-a-bitch.’ Things like that. It was scary. Then he finished wrapping the cane and handed it to me and told me to take it and give it to the people at my pueblo. So I took it to Tano and gave it to Uncle Francis.”

“I’m going to send a patrol car out to your grandmother’s house to give you a ride,” Leaphorn said. “We want you to identify this guy for us.”

“Sure,” Delmar said. “Like in a police lineup?”

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said.

He called Dilly then. While he hadn’t really expected Dilly to be overjoyed with a speculative theory about Lincoln Canes, he did expect Dilly to be happy with a witness who could put a suspect at the scene of the crime, up close and personal. He was right.

“I’ll call Albuquerque,” Dilly said. “They’ll get the warrant and pick up Applebee. And we’ll take the kid off your hands, too.”

“Applebee might still be in Window Rock,” Leaphorn said.

“If he is, I’ll go get him myself,” Dilly said. “If he’s gone back to Santa Fe, they’ll handle it there.”

“You might tell ’em to hurry. Applebee might be feeling the walls closing in on him. He might run.”

“Run where?” Dilly said. “You been watching too many TV movies.”

True, Leaphorn thought. Bona fide criminals, the professionals, can run and get away. For a lawyer with all sorts of connections, and possessions, running successfully would take weeks of planning.

“If I were you I’d give Eugene Ahkeah a look at Applebee, too,” Leaphorn added. “I guess Ahkeah was drunk, but Applebee must have seen him since he picked him for the frame. And so Ahkeah—”

“Must have been around there, too,” Dilly said. “And before you suggest it, yes we will indeed dig out the various fingerprints we collected from the shop, and from the stuff under Ahkeah’s place, and check them against Applebee’s, and so forth.”

“And don’t forget to read him his rights.”

“What would we do without you,” Dilly said. “You ought to get into police work.”

“Now it’s your turn to do some detecting. You tell me who killed the koshare.”

“Applebee,” Streib said. “What do you mean? Doesn’t the cane tie ’em right together?”

“Applebee has a perfect alibi for the Sayesva homicide,” Leaphorn said. “He was in plain view out in the ceremonial crowd when it happened.”

“Oh,” Dilly said. A long pause. “Who do you think did it, then?”

“I think I’m glad that one happened outside my jurisdiction,” Leaphorn said. “You and I can let your Albuquerque office and the BIA cops worry about that one.”

Why waste time saying more than that? He had no evidence and no way he could think of to get any. Maybe it would surface, maybe it wouldn’t. But Leaphorn wanted to understand it. So he sat in Dorsey’s chair, surrounded by Dorsey’s silence, and Dorsey’s loneliness, and worked out how it had probably happened.

Asher Davis, the trader with the gilt-edged reputation, needed money. Or received an offer. Or saw an opportunity to make some really big money. Davis knew Dorsey. Cowboy Dashee had told Chee that Davis had gotten better prices for artifacts Dorsey wanted to sell for his old people. Davis would have won Dorsey’s approval. Now, would Dorsey make Davis an ebony cane with a cast-iron tip and a silver head with “A. Lincoln,” the date, and “Pojoaque Pueblo” inscribed upon it?

A sudden thought struck Leaphorn. The date that first cane was ordered would have been just a few days after Tano’s Governor Penitewa announced he favored the deal for the Continental Collectors dump site. Applebee again. Applebee seeing a need to destroy Penitewa when the governor’s election time neared. Applebee suggesting to his old friend, Davis, his cat’s-paw since boyhood, the idea of having a Lincoln Cane made. Let’s see if the shop teacher can actually make a credible Lincoln Cane. We’ll get him to make us a Pojoaque cane. If it looks right, you sell it. We split. And thus, when the time was ripe to have a Tano cane made, the groundwork would be laid.

What had Davis told Chee about his relationship with Applebee? Roger had all the great ideas, but Davis was the one who got suspended. And from what else Davis had told Chee, that seemed to have been the pattern. Certainly, it fit with borrowing Davis’s credit card and leaving the poor bastard stuck with an abandoned rental car.

So the Pojoaque cane is made, delivered, and sold. Asher Davis puts his solid gold reputation on the gaming table. Nothing goes wrong. Not yet. It goes wrong later.

It goes wrong with the second cane. Applebee handled this deal himself. Why? Why put himself at any risk? Because phase two was going to destroy that reputation so precious to Davis. Public knowledge was necessary for the plot to work. Even Davis, stupid as he seemed, would have seen that. There would be a fake Lincoln Cane out in the public eye as part of a political scandal. And even if the plot failed, even if the scandal wasn’t good enough to ruin the governor, it would ruin Davis. Whether or not the press jumped on it, the word would spread like prairie fire through the small world of collectors.

But was there a way destroying Davis could be avoided? Leaphorn looked for an answer to that, and found it. The answer was no. Of course not. Davis, as usual, was expendable.

Obviously, the purpose was to discredit Governor Penitewa. From what Sayesva’s brother had said, something had already made Sayesva suspicious of the governor. Something that fit the pattern of Applebee’s behavior. Like the faked phone call to the principal about a gas leak. Like the anonymous tip that sent Lieutenant Toddy searching under Ahkeah’s home. Perhaps a faked letter. Perhaps an anonymous telephone call, God knows what. With the suspicion planted, Applebee intended to pick up the cane and deliver it to Sayesva as proof of whatever he had already caused Sayesva to believe. That the governor intended to sell the real cane and replace it with the copy? That, and maybe more.

Had Applebee only known it, Dorsey had done him a favor by sending the cane home with Delmar. That must have made it over-whelmingly persuasive to Sayesva. Here was a copy of the symbolic cane, handed him by his nephew, along with the account of an honest man tricked into making the fake and wanting no part of such thievery. It was easy enough to see why Sayesva was convinced that the governor was a traitor.

But back to Applebee. Why the homicide? Because the angry Dorsey left alive would mean Dorsey exposing Applebee’s plot, discrediting the Nature First campaign, discrediting Roger Applebee himself. And so Dorsey had to die. And that left Applebee home free as always.

Leaphorn yawned hugely and shifted in the chair. Last night he couldn’t sleep and now he was feeling it. He was sleepy. He glanced at his watch—a matter of habit since he had no place to go, no place to be, no one waiting for him. He stretched out his legs, yawned again, and thought of the odd nature of friendship. He had known of cases like Applebee and Davis before—partnerships of giver and taker with both parties seemingly needing their roles. He wondered how long Davis would be willing to give, and how much he’d let Applebee take. This time it must have been quite a shock.

Slowly and sleepily Leaphorn recreated it. Davis learning that someone had killed Dorsey and then seeing the fake cane in the clown’s wagon. He might not have seen Applebee’s hand in this at first. But he would have known the reputation he had treasured was as dead as Dorsey if the fake cane came to public light. He had to get the cane, had to bury it somewhere so deep it would never be found. So he went to get it, and Sayesva resisted, and Sayesva died. Well, maybe he’d get away with the murder. Unless Applebee took him down. And Applebee was a goner. The FBI was slow sometimes, and burdened by its bureaucracy, but once it got pointed in the right direction it got the job done. They’d match prints, and find forensic evidence, and maybe more witnesses, and Applebee would do enough years to add up to life. Davis? Maybe. Applebee would name him, no doubt of that. Try to make him the fall guy. And even if Applebee was touched by an uncharacteristic attack of honor, the federals already knew where to look. They could easily tie Davis to the first cane through the buyer and start with a circumstantial case. Maybe, given the Bureau’s forensic skills and its persistence, the feds would find a way to put Davis in the narrow doorway where Sayesva had been killed. Davis would probably be indicted. Convicted? Leaphorn tried to figure the odds on that, working with imponderable ifs, and he found he didn’t really care. His mother would have told him not to worry, that the wind of life that blows through the minds of humans had turned dark inside Davis. Evil had controlled him. By the laws of Navajo metaphysics he would, inevitably, suffer for that. What did the white man’s thirst for vengeance matter? Anyway, the world would know the Honest Indian Trader had sold a fake Lincoln Cane. The Davis reputation would be forever ruined.