Sacred Clowns (4 page)

“Okay,” Chee said.

“What isn’t in the file is the chief’s interested in this one.” Leaphorn still seemed to be looking at something through the glass. “He was out at the Shiprock office when it got reported and he went out with the investigating officer. It was an unusually bad case.”

“How?” In his relatively short tenure as a Navajo Tribal Policeman Chee had seen an infinite variety of vehicular homicide. All ugly. All bad. Badness was measured by the number of bodies.

“Well,” Leaphorn said, “bad in a sense. The victim was a pedestrian. The vehicle sort of sideswiped him and then backed up—apparently to see what had happened—and then drove away and Mr. Todachene spent about two hours bleeding to death before the next driver came along.”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“I don’t think the chief has done a lot of work out on the road. I think it sort of shocked him.”

It shocked Chee, too. Driving away turned an accident into murder. The worst sort of murder. Murder with no motive except keeping oneself out of trouble.

“The Shiprock office has done all the regular stuff,” Leaphorn said. “Checking car repair places, sale of car paint, that sort of thing. It dead-ended. But the chief thinks we ought to solve it.”

“So do I,” Chee said. “But we probably can’t.”

“I guess you know that I think this job you got deserves the rank of sergeant,” Leaphorn said. “I haven’t been able to sell that yet. But the way the chief feels, if you solve this hit-and-run problem, making sergeant is a dead cinch.”

Chee had no comment to that. He had been a sergeant once. Acting sergeant. But he hadn’t liked it much and it hadn’t lasted. He and the captain at Crownpoint hadn’t agreed on how an investigation should be handled.

“Yes sir,” Chee said.

“But first find the Kanitewa boy.”

“Yes sir.”

“Remember, the Sayesva homicide is absolutely none of our business.”

Chee nodded and headed for the door, which, in Lieutenant Leaphorn’s office, was always open.

“One more thing,” the lieutenant said. “Stay off of roofs.”

“THE FACT IS,” said Sergeant Harold Blizzard, “this Sayesva thing is none of your business. Your business ends at the Navajo Reservation boundary.”

Blizzard was wearing his Bureau of Indian Affairs Law and Order uniform with a New York Yankees cap. He was talking slowly and looking straight over the steering wheel and out the windshield. Jim Chee had been reading a book of Margaret Atwood’s short stories he’d borrowed from Janet Pete, thinking it might impress her. He decided Miss Atwood would call Blizzard’s expression either “bleak” or “stolid.” Or maybe “wintry.” That fit the weather, too. It was cold for November, but Robin Marshment had assured them on her KRQE weathercast last night that the snowstorm hitting Utah would stay a little to the north.

“I know the Sayesva thing is none of my business,” Chee said. “In fact, my lieutenant just told me that. He said to find the Kanitewa kid. Nothing else. He’s the grandson of a member of our Tribal Council. A woman. The lieutenant said get that woman off his back. Told me to keep my nose out of everything else and just find the kid.”

Blizzard devoted his attention for a while to guiding the patrol car into that section of the gravel road in which the washboarding was the least severe. Even so, the jolting rattled his clipboard, and the radio mike, and everything not fastened down. “The thing is,” Blizzard said, “the feds want to talk to the kid, too. So your nose is right in the middle of it. Both nostrils.” This caused Blizzard to chuckle.

Chee had lost patience with Blizzard about fifty miles ago—maybe even before they’d left the parking lot at Blizzard’s BIA office in Albuquerque. There was no reason for Blizzard to act like this. He knew how the feds worked. The kid’s name was on the FBI list along with everybody known to have talked to Sayesva in the day or so before he was killed. That included just about everybody at Tano Pueblo and a lot of other people. There was no reason for Blizzard to be such a hardass over this, and Chee was tempted to tell him so. But he didn’t. He was in Blizzard’s jurisdiction, but that wasn’t what inhibited him. Blizzard was a Cheyenne. And even with the Yankees cap on, he looked like a Cheyenne. He had that hard, bony face. Profile like a hatchet. Chee had grown up seeing the Cheyennes and the Sioux with their war bonnets and lances, fighting the cavalry in the drive-in movie at Shiprock. Even when the movie had been made south of Gallup and you knew the Cheyennes were actually Navajos making some beer money as extras, they took on the aura of warriors under those war bonnets. When Chee and his friends at boarding school played cowboys and Indians, the Indians were always Cheyenne. It was a hang-up Chee hadn’t quite grown out of. To Jim Chee the man, as to Jim Chee the boy, the Cheyenne was the Indians’ Indian.

“I’m not going to cause anybody any trouble,” Chee said. “Your FBI wants you to find the kid. My boss has ordered me to find Delmar Kanitewa. I’m just supposed to give his big-shot grandma a chance to talk to him about running away from school. So, like I said, if I can find him, I’ll tell you first, and then I’ll tell my boss. You tell the FBI in Albuquerque, and my boss tells the tribal councilwoman. Then I get to go back to doing something useful. Everybody’s happy.”

Harold Blizzard didn’t look happy. He said “Uh-huh,” filling the sound with skepticism, and turned the car onto the road into Tano Pueblo.
He didn’t hear a word I said,
Chee thought.
What a jerk.
But Chee was wrong about the first part. Blizzard had been listening.

“Trouble with all that is this boy is about name number sixty on the list the feds gave me,” Blizzard said, “and the list looks to me like they copied the son-of-a-bitch out of the Tano Pueblo census report. I think it’s everybody who’s been around Sayesva for the last month or so, plus his kinfolks. And I think everybody out here is kinfolks. And having a Navajo cop underfoot, and having to squire you around, is trouble. It’s both a pain in the butt and a time waster. You find the kid, and tell me, and I tell the feds, and by then they forgot what they wanted to ask him. So don’t try to tell me you’re going to make me happy.”

Mrs. Kanitewa didn’t look happy either. She was standing in the door of a fairly new frame-and-stucco house—one of twenty or thirty such houses built on the fringes of the pueblo to meet the specifications of Indian Service housing. She was holding a box of frozen green beans and a butcher-paper package which Chee guessed would be ground beef to be thawed for supper. Through the doorway behind her, Chee could see a great pile of shucked corn filling a corner of the room. Mrs. Kanitewa gave them the smile made mandatory by traditions of hospitality. She didn’t look like she meant it.

“Well, come on in then,” she said. “Delmar’s not home yet, but if you want me to tell you about it again, then come in.”

“In” did not prove to be in the frame-and-stucco Indian Service house. She led them across the hard-packed yard toward an adobe. It slouched under an immense cottonwood which looked almost as old as the building. A fringe of ragweeds and Russian thistle growing in its dirt roof gave it a disreputable, unshaven look. But paint on the window frames was a fresh turquoise blue and geraniums were blooming in boxes beside the door. Mrs. Kanitewa seated them in the front room, which served as parlor, living room, and dining room. They sat side by side on a sofa whose plastic upholstery creaked and crackled under their weight.

“I guess you haven’t found him yet, either,” she said. She looked worried now, as if maybe they had found him and were bringing sorrowful news.

“No ma’am,” Chee said.

Blizzard had been looking around the room. Its brick floor was uneven in places, but mostly covered with cheap made-in-Mexico throw rugs and one pretty good Navajo horse blanket. Its ceiling was that crisscross pattern of willow branches supported by ponderosa poles which New Mexicans call “latilla.” Its corners were obviously off square by three or four degrees and the white plaster covering its walls wavered with the irregular shapes of the adobe blocks behind it. Blizzard cleared his throat.

“That other house,” he said. “The new one. Does that belong to you?”

The question surprised Chee, and Mrs. Kanitewa too.

“Yeah. The government built it. We use it to store stuff. They put a big refrigerator over there.” She laughed. “They wanted us to live in it.”

Blizzard opened his mouth, and closed it, leaving the question unasked. Chee answered it for him. After all, this Cheyenne was new to adobe country.

“This one’s warm in the winter, and cool in the summer,” he said.

“This one’s home,” Mrs. Kanitewa added.

Chee waited a moment in deference to Blizzard. But Blizzard seemed to have assumed the role of spectator. After all, he had already gone through questioning Mrs. Kanitewa once before.

“When Sergeant Blizzard was here,” Chee began, “before the ceremonial, Delmar had just got home then. Is that right?”

Mrs. Kanitewa hesitated. “That’s right,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I didn’t say that when he first asked me because I thought it was just about his running away from school. I wanted to talk to Delmar before they took him back to his dad.” Clearly Mrs. Kanitewa lied reluctantly, even for her son.

“That day at the ceremonial, I saw Delmar at the kachina dance,” Chee continued. “Sergeant Blizzard told me he understood that Delmar had come back to the pueblo but he hadn’t had time to come by the house.”

Mrs. Kanitewa looked uneasy. She glanced at Blizzard. “It wasn’t quite like I told him,” she said. She sighed, the weight of motherhood heavy. “He got home the day before the ceremonial. And he told me he was going back to school right after the ceremonial. Robert Sakani was going to drive him back. That’s his cousin.”

Sergeant Blizzard was trying not to look impatient. He failed.

“But after what happened to Mr. Sayesva, you didn’t see him any more after that?” Chee asked. “He didn’t come home to get his extra clothes or anything like that?”

Mrs. Kanitewa had raised her defenses. Her expression was blank. “No,” she said, “he didn’t.”

Chee was looking past the woman into the kitchen, letting some time pass. He heard Blizzard shifting uneasily on the sofa. Blizzard, he thought, must be a city Cheyenne. With a clock for a brain. What the hell was the hurry?

“I ran away from boarding school myself once,” Chee said. “The man was waiting for me to take me back when I got home. But it worried my mother.”

“It does,” Mrs. Kanitewa said. “It worries you.”

“I guess you thought maybe he’d gone on back to school with his cousin. But that would worry you, too. Because why wouldn’t he come home and say good-bye? It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Where was he? He wouldn’t just go like that. He would stay for the funeral.”

“You would want to bury Mr. Sayesva right away,” Chee said. “Isn’t that the rule of the Pueblo? You want to do the burial before sundown.”

“That’s the way it is supposed to be. But they wouldn’t let us do it. There was a deputy sheriff here when it happened, and Mr. Blizzard was here. And the police said they had to take him into Albuquerque to get an autopsy done to find out what killed him.” Mrs. Kanitewa’s expression suggested she considered this hard to understand. “He’d been hit on the head and his head broke, but they said they had to let the doctor see him anyway, to get it all down on paper, and they would try to get him back in time.”

“They didn’t, though,” Chee said, making it a statement rather that a question. It would have been clearly impossible. Chee had seen a funeral at Zuni Pueblo. The body would have to be washed and dressed, the hair combed out, everything made ready for Sayesva’s four-day journey through the darkness toward his eternal joy. A Tano child of God going home. And he was probably a Roman Catholic as well. The parish priest would also send him on his way with another blessing.

“It takes too long to get the body back,” she said. “Then his wife and some of his people had to go there and get him. To make sure they didn’t embalm him. They do that if you’re not careful. The undertaker gets a lot of money for it.”

“We Navajos have that trouble, too,” Chee said. “If you’re not there to stop it, the funeral home people will get the body and mutilate it and charge you a lot of money for doing it. Like they do with white people.”

“They charge you a lot of money,” Mrs. Kanitewa agreed. “I read in the papers that the funeral home people even got a law passed so you can’t have the corpse incinerated. Even if you say so yourself, you got to get all the kinfolks to sign papers.” She rubbed her fingers together—society’s universal metaphor for the greed of its predator class. “They want to squeeze that money out of the widow.”

Blizzard shifted his weight on the plastic sofa, creating a round of crackling and signaling his impatience with this philosophizing. “Well,” he said. “You got about all you want?”

Chee ignored him.

“I’m not supposed to be asking anything about Mr. Sayesva because they handle that out of Albuquerque,” he told Mrs. Kanitewa. “I’m just interested in talking with Delmar. Do you know why he came home?”

“Yes,” she said. “He said he had to talk to his uncle.”

Ahh, Chee thought. He glanced at Blizzard to see if he’d noticed this, if he was aware that Sayesva was the kid’s uncle. Blizzard was. Too late now.

“To your brother?” Chee asked.

She nodded. “Yes. To my brother.”

“He came to tell your brother something?”

She nodded.

Blizzard ceased being the stoic Cheyenne sitting motionless on the couch waiting for Chee to finish wasting his time. He cleared his throat and leaned forward.

“We’re talking about Mr. Sayesva now,” he said. “What did your boy tell him? What did he want to see him about?”

“It was religious business,” she said. “He didn’t tell me.”

Sergeant Blizzard looked skeptical. “So how did you know it was religious if he didn’t tell you?”

The question surprised Mrs. Kanitewa. “Because he didn’t tell me,” she explained. “If it wasn’t religious, he would have told me.”

Blizzard’s expression changed from skeptical to blank. He said, “I don’t quite . . .” and then stopped. Chee considered interrupting to explain things. To give Blizzard a little lecture on how the Tano people, and most of the other Pueblos, kept their religious duties very much to themselves. Neither the boy nor any other citizen of the pueblo would ever discuss the business of his particular religious society with anyone not initiated into its kiva. Not even with his mother. Nor would she ask him to. If Delmar’s discussion with his uncle was religious, only his uncle would know about it. Chee respected that. To hell with Blizzard. Let the sergeant handle this himself.

It took a little longer that way, but Blizzard eventually got it straightened out. Delmar had arrived at the pueblo the afternoon before the ceremony. He had dropped off his backpack and gone to the house of Sayesva. Then he had come home, eaten supper, talked to his mother about school. He had told her he would go back after the ceremony. Then, before he went to bed, he’d gone to see his uncle again.

“Saw him again?” Blizzard asked. “Why?”