Sacred Clowns (3 page)

“I found the two boys who were with him,” Janet said. “They didn’t know where he was. Anyway they claimed they didn’t. But they did confirm that their friend was our elusive Delmar.”

“I found what the little boy shot his arrow at,” Cowboy said. “Nothing.”

“Let’s try again,” Chee said.

The kachinas were gone now and much of the crowd had shifted from the plaza to the sales area. Chee spotted one of the boys who had been with Kanitewa, paper cup in one hand and a slab of fry bread in the other, leaning against a wall. He saw Asher Davis leaning over a table where a Navajo was selling sand-cast silver belt buckles, laughing about something. He saw a Bureau of Indian Affairs cop he’d met once at a briefing in Albuquerque inspecting a basket at an Apache woman’s booth. He saw two red shirts, but a young woman was wearing one and an old man the other.

Chee climbed down the ladder again. He patrolled the narrow streets, took another look through the sheep pens, horse corrals, and hay storage area, and prowled through the ranks of parked vehicles, peering through windows. He didn’t see Kanitewa, but he ran into Cowboy, who was buying another snow cone. Janet joined them.

“The kachinas will be back in thirty minutes or so, and there’ll be more dancing,” Cowboy said. “Probably the kid’ll come back then for the second act. Or after the dance, he’ll go home and we can catch him there.”

“Maybe,” Chee said, trying not to sound skeptical. “But his mother is probably hiding him out. She told the BIA he hadn’t come home.” This was not proving to be a good day and Chee was not optimistic about it getting better.

“There’s Applebee again,” Janet said. “The guy with the hot dog in his hand, buying something at that booth. You want to meet him?”

To their right, at the mouth of an alleyway from which the koshares had come, there was a sudden flurry of sound and excitement. The clown who had ridden the stick horse emerged, running frantically, hat missing now but still wearing the costume. He was shouting something. It sounded like “get the ambulance.” It was “get the ambulance.”

“Somebody must be hurt,” Cowboy said.

Two men and a woman emerged from the alley, the woman sobbing.

“They killed him,” she was saying. “They killed him.”

“YOU WERE SITTING on the roof?” Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn kept the tone of the question neutral.

“Yessir,” Jim Chee said. “You can see the whole plaza from up there.”

That was the advantage, of course. The disadvantage being that you couldn’t catch the kid once you saw him. But Leaphorn didn’t press that point. It was obvious from Chee’s slightly abashed expression that he was aware of it. Instead, Leaphorn put the first page of Chee’s report facedown on his desk and reread the second and terminal page. It was neatly typed but—by Leaphorn’s standards—sadly incomplete.

“When you heard the woman shouting you say here that you presumed the person killed was the Kanitewa boy. Why did you presume that?”

“Well, I had him on my mind. We were looking for him. Trying to figure out where he had gone.”

Leaphorn looked up from the report over his horn-rimmed glasses. “We?”

Chee hesitated. “I had Deputy Sheriff Dashee with me,” Chee said. “From the Apache County Sheriffs Office.” He hesitated. “And Janet Pete. You know her. The lawyer with DNA.”

“I know her,” Leaphorn said. In her role as public defender in the federally funded legal aid office, Miss Pete had sometimes been a thorn in the side of the Navajo Tribal Police. DNA, they called it, short for
Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agadithe,
which translated to English as something like “People who talk fast to help people out.” But it seemed to Leaphorn that the people being helped out were usually the people the tribal police were chasing, and never the tribal police.

“You made a sort of outing out of it, then,” Leaphorn said. “Sort of a picnic. The three of you?”

“Four,” Chee said. “Asher Davis went along. You know, the big—”

Leaphorn violated his own custom and Navajo tradition by interrupting. This day wasn’t starting well. “The trader? Great big guy from Santa Fe?”

Chee nodded. His week was off to a terrible start. The first week on this new job, and maybe it would be the last week, too. And what if it was? He’d go back to being a patrolman. He never had been confident he could work with this guy. This supercop.

“Sounds like you sort of formed a posse? To catch the kid?” Leaphorn’s expression was totally bland.

Chee tried to match that, but he could feel his face flushing. Cops who had worked under Leaphorn before the lieutenant had been shifted into this new Special Investigations Office had warned Chee that the man could be an arrogant son-of-a-bitch.

“No sir,” Chee said. “It just happened that way. You told me to find him. I was going to start by seeing if he’d show up at his home. For the ceremonial. If he did, I’d catch him and talk to him, and find out where he was staying, and tell him to call his grandma. As instructed. Miss Pete wanted to see the kachina dance, and she asked Dashee if he wanted to ride along, and then . . .” He let the explanation trail off.

“It violates a rule,” Leaphorn said.

“Yessir,” Chee said.

“You understand the reason for the rule?”

“Sure,” Chee said.

Leaphorn pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the window. He stood with his back to Chee, looking out.

Thinking how he’s going to tell me he’s suspending me,
Chee thought.
Thinking how to put it.

“It’s clouding up,” Leaphorn said. “Looks like they might be getting rain over on the Hopi Reservation.”

Chee let that pass. The silence stretched.

“Or maybe some snow. I’ve gotten out of the habit of working with anyone since they put me in this office,” Leaphorn said, still talking to the window. “One-man operation, until now. Now there’s two of us. I guess we’re going to have to have some rules.” He sat behind the desk again. “Or call them policies.”

“In addition to department policies?”

“Just our own. Sort of above and beyond,” Leaphorn said. “Like now. You did a job. I want a full report. To do that for me, you have to tell me some things you wouldn’t normally tell your district captain.”

Leaphorn paused, studying Chee. “Like you’d just as soon not tell the boss that you made a social event out of an assignment,” he continued. “That gets you, maybe, in a jam. Trouble. Some days off without pay. Easy enough to just sort of forget some of the details. Maybe you remember it a little different. Like you met Miss Pete and Dashee and Asher Davis there at the kachina dance. That would have sounded perfectly plausible. I’m glad you decided not to handle it that way.” He studied Chee. “You must have thought about it.”

Leaphorn paused, waited for a response.

Chee, who hadn’t thought about it, just shrugged. He was guessing what the lieutenant was driving at. He was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.

“My point is that when we’re working on something, I want you to tell me everything. Everything. Don’t leave out stuff you think is trivial, or doesn’t seem to bear on what we’re interested in. I want it all.”

Chee nodded, thinking:
Right. Officer Chee as eyes, ears, and nose. Collector of data. The lieutenant as brain, doing the thinking. Well, I have my application filed with the BIA Law and Order people and with the Apache County Sheriff’s Office and the Arizona State Police. Good résumé. Good record. Well, pretty good.

Leaphorn was studying his expression. “Now,” he said. “Tell me everything Francis Sayesva did.”

It took a moment for Chee to connect the name with the plump man he had watched yesterday clowning on the roof. The man with his body painted with the stripes of the koshare. The man who somebody had clubbed to death just about forty yards from where Chee had been sitting. “Everything?” Chee said. And he began describing everything he could remember.

When he had finished, Leaphorn digested it.

“Same with the boy,” Leaphorn said, “Everything you can remember from where he was when you first saw him to the last glimpse.”

That didn’t take long.

“Anything to connect the boy and Sayesva? Anything like a signal? Anything like that?”

Chee thought. “Nothing,” he said. “The boy, he seemed to be just another spectator.”

“Sayesva was his uncle,” Leaphorn said. “Maternal uncle.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “I didn’t know that.”
Maternal uncle meant a special closeness. At least to Navajos. Would it be the same for the Tano people?

“I just found out a minute ago,” Leaphorn said.

Which means on the telephone. On the call he took just as I came in. But who would be calling to tell him something like that? Who else but somebody Leaphorn had called to get just that information for him? Why would he do that?

“You thought they might be kinfolks?” Chee asked.

“You look for connections,” Leaphorn said. “Two homicides.” He reached behind him and tapped the big map on the wall behind him. “One out at Thoreau on the Checkerboard Reservation and one way over at Tano Pueblo. Nothing to link them, right?”

Chee could think of nothing, and said so. “To tell the truth, about all I know about that Thoreau homicide is what I heard on the radio.”

Leaphorn detected something that might have been resentment in the voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.” He handed Chee a file folder. “We’ll be running errands for the FBI on it.”

The file so far included only two sheets of paper, on which were the preliminary report from the investigating officer at the Navajo Tribal Police office in Crownpoint. It didn’t tell Chee much he hadn’t already heard. Eric Dorsey, aged thirty-seven, wood- and metal- work teacher, school bus driver, and maintenance man at Saint Bonaventure Indian Mission. Found dead on the floor of his shop by students arriving for their afternoon class. Apparent cause of death: a blow on the back of the head. Apparent motive: theft. The door of a supply cabinet usually locked was found open. An unknown quantity of silver ingots believed missing. No witnesses. No suspects.

“I can’t see anything to connect them,” Chee said.

“Sayesva was a koshare? That right?”

“Right,” Chee said, baffled.

“Do you see anything in that Dorsey homicide report about a koshare?”

Chee picked up the report, reread it. “Nothing.”

“There’s no reason there should be,” Leaphorn said. “When I got through I noticed all sorts of stuff was stacked in the shop where Dorsey taught. The sort of things his students were making. Some sand-cast silver, leatherwork, woodwork projects, and two or three half-finished kachina dolls. One of them was a koshare. About a foot tall. It still needed some work. No mention of it in the report.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “The Tano homicide hadn’t happened yet. The investigating officer couldn’t know and you wouldn’t want to list all that . . .” Chee let it trail off. He saw the point Leaphorn was making. Unreasonable, but a point. Put everything in even if it seemed irrelevant.

“You could think of ten thousand explanations for the koshare,” Leaphorn said. “Kids in an arts and crafts shop trying to make stuff they could sell. The koshare’s an interesting figure. Easy to paint. And so forth.”

“Pretty weak link,” Chee agreed. “I can’t see it.”

Leaphorn rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. He looked glum. “I can’t either, but I always look. It’s an old habit. Wastes time, usually. All we have here is two men hit on the head. Same method. The kid runs away the same day as the Thoreau killing. If he had been a student of Dorsey’s we would be very, very interested. But he went to school over at Crownpoint. About twenty-five miles away. Nothing there.”

“Nothing,” Chee said.
But you are thinking that if I hadn’t let the kid get away maybe he could explain all this.

“I don’t like coincidences,” Leaphorn said. “Even if this isn’t much of one. I guess I’ll find out which student was making the koshare.”

“I have a thought about the Sayesva thing,” Chee said. “I hear he was a certified public accountant. I heard he worked for that savings and loan outfit in Phoenix that went belly up. I heard that maybe a grand jury down there was interested in something-or-other. Maybe Sayesva knew something damaging.”

For the first time, Leaphorn’s expression shifted into something close to a smile.

“You get a ‘he was’ and a ‘he did’ and an ‘I hear that too’ and a ‘maybe so’ on all that,” Leaphorn said. “But the trouble is, Sayesva is none of our business. That case is way out of our jurisdiction. It’s strictly Bureau of Indian Affairs and FBI work. The late Eric Dorsey is our business because he was killed on the reservation.”

Leaphorn swiveled in his chair, stared at his map. It was freckled with clusters of pins in a variety of colors. Someday, Chee thought, he’d learn what they signified. If he stuck around long enough. Now he was only conscious that Leaphorn hadn’t been interested enough in his Sayesva theory to pursue it. He wasn’t going to enjoy this job.

“Like what?” Leaphorn said. “What do you think he might have known? About what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing specific. It’s just that an accountant, you know, would know things. Like maybe somebody’s stealing. Or cheating on taxes. Things like that. So you’d want to know who he was working for. The people he was auditing.”

Leaphorn was studying Chee.

“We wouldn’t want to know that,” Leaphorn said. “The FBI might. Or the sheriff’s office. But you and I wouldn’t have any interest in that at all.”

“Not unless it tied in with something that was our business,” Chee said.

Leaphorn scratched his ear. “If, for example, he’d been auditing the Thoreau school, for example,” he said finally. “If that was true we’ll find out because the feds will tell us. Meanwhile, I want you to find the Kanitewa boy.”

The tone of that said this conversation was ended, but Chee stopped at the door.

“Lieutenant. You know that business with Continental Collectors wanting to establish the waste dump out in the Checkerboard? I’ve been hearing some things about that.”

Leaphorn was shuffling through his file cabinet. He didn’t look up. “You mentioned that before,” he said. “And I told you our business in this office is crime, not politics.”

“Sometimes they mix.”

Leaphorn still didn’t look up. “What have you been hearing? It better be more than some old gossip about somebody from Continental bribing tribal councilmen. There’s always gossip about somebody bribing somebody.”

“I guess that’s all I know.”

“Do you know which councilmen? Or where you can get a witness? Or any kind of evidence at all?”

“No sir.”

“Then we’ve got plenty of other stuff to work on,” Leaphorn said. “Find the kid. That’s the thing that’s pressing on us right now.” He got up and stood looking out the window, hands clasped behind him.

“When we get that out of the way,” he said, talking to the glass, “I’d like to see what you can do with a vehicular homicide case. I’ll give you the file on it and you’re going to see it looks pretty hopeless.”

“Which one?” Tribal law prohibited sale or possession of alcohol on the reservation, but bars flourished in the border towns and deaths caused by drunk drivers were common fare for the Navajo Tribal Police.

“The victim was an old man named Victor Todachene. Lived near Crystal. Details are in the file,” Leaphorn said.