Sacred Clowns (8 page)

“No,” Chee said. “No. Just interested.”

The Applebee smile disappeared. “Well,” he said, and hesitated, caught his lip between his teeth, released it, exhaled. “I’ll give you a rundown first. The bad, and then the good. From what we hear in Washington, everything is go in the Interior Department. Continental has its well-placed buddies, and your friend Zeck went back there last week to join in the lobbying. We’re told that the Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw the acreage they hold from grazing—with a payoff to the leaseholders of course. That’s bad, but it’s what we expected. That leaves the Navajo Nation and Tano.”

He paused, acknowledged the waitress standing beside him, and ordered a hamburger.

“Coffee?”

“What kind of tea do you have?”

The waitress was a plump Navajo teenager from Two Grey Hills who had often waited on Chee since his transfer to Window Rock. She raised her eyebrows, puzzled. “Iced,” she said. “Iced tea.”

“No. No. I mean what kind of herb tea. Do you have Lemon Zinger? Almond Sunset? Or any of those Celestial flavors? And hot tea. Just bring me a cup of hot water and the tea bag.” Applebee looked back at Janet. “We also think we have some hope in Tano. Governor Penitewa is still favoring the idea as far as we can tell, but they have their election coming up in January and a lot of people in that pueblo don’t want that dump on Pueblo land. The governor can be beaten. There’s a way we can beat him.”

Applebee paused. The waitress was still standing there, looking indecisive. “Just bring me a cup, and a pot of hot water, and any tea bag you can find in the kitchen,” he said.

“How about here?” Chee asked. “Will the Tribal Council approve moving that toxic stuff across our land?”

“Not so good, here, by the looks of it,” Applebee said. “Councilman Chester is working hard for the dump. We’re worried about that.”

Chee was watching Janet. She said nothing, which pleased him. That was properly polite Navajo. Like Blizzard, she was an urban product. City bred, city raised, Navajo only by her father’s blood. She had to learn what it was like to be one of the Dineh. He would help teach her. Happily. Lovingly. If she would let him.

Applebee decided he wasn’t getting the expected sounds of support and approval. “Well,” he said, “let’s talk about Mr. Chester.” He looked at Chee. “Do you know him?”

“From Horse Mesa Chapter?” Chee asked. “Jimmy Chester? I know him a little.”

“What do you think of him?”

Chee shrugged. “I’m a policeman,” he said. “We don’t have opinions about politicians.”

“How about your aunt?” Janet asked. “The councilwoman.”

“She’s a former councilwoman now,” Chee corrected. “It’s allowed to have opinions about kinfolks.”

“I just didn’t want to say the wrong thing if Chester was a friend. Or something,” Applebee said.

“Nope,” Chee said. “I can say I know he’s a big operator in the cattle business out in the Checkerboard. And the people I knew when I was working out of Crownpoint thought Chester was a jerk.”

Applebee seemed relieved to hear this.

“Well,” he began, voice lowered, “We hear . . .” He stopped, and waited silently while the waitress deposited cup, saucer, tea bag, a large coffee thermos from which steam was rising, and a slice of lemon. He read the label on the tea bag, frowned, and made tea. “We hear that Councilman Chester is a consultant for Continental.”

He looked at Janet and then at Chee. Clearly this was the reason for this meeting, the message to be delivered. It seemed to Chee more of a firecracker than a bombshell. But Applebee was checking their faces, looking for reaction. “Taking money,” he explained.

“It’s probably legal enough,” Janet said. “But it can be bad politics and he’s up for reelection in the spring.”

Applebee looked surprised. “Really? You think it’s legal?”

“I’d have to check the tribal code. It prohibits councilmembers from voting on anything in which they have a personal financial interest. I doubt if it goes beyond that, but I’ll check.”

Applebee looked disappointed. “So it would just mean Chester couldn’t vote on the dump issue. I was hoping we could put the son-of-a-bitch in jail.”

“You have some evidence?” Janet asked. “Do you know how much they’re paying him? Any details? He’ll be trying to get the Horse Mesa Chapter to pass a resolution backing the dump. The Tribal Council usually goes along with whatever the local chapters want in their own district. And if the people out at Horse Mesa know he’s being paid to sell them on the dump—well, it makes them suspicious.”

“I don’t have anything on paper,” Applebee said. He gestured disappointment with his hands. “Nothing you’d call concrete evidence.”

“Nothing he can’t deny?” Janet asked. “What’s your source of information?”

Applebee examined his teacup and ignored both questions. “I think I can get something,” he said. He sipped, thoughtful.

“Something?” Janet asked.

Applebee smiled. “Something useful,” he said. “I think I know how I can get something he can’t deny.”

THE WAITER in the Dowager Empress had long since abandoned hope of freeing his best table for another set of diners. He was outside the kitchen door, leaning on the wall, sneaking a smoke and enjoying Flagstaff’ s cold autumn air and the dazzle of stars overhead. At the table inside, Joe Leaphorn and Professor Louisa Bourebonette sat side by side. The assorted dishes of Chinese food on which they had dined were gone, replaced by a clutter of maps.

“How about this,” Bourebonette was saying. “We take the American flight to Hong Kong, transfer to Air China to Beijing. I want to do some work in the library there. About two days, maybe. Or three. You could either do the tourist thing, sort of get used to China and Chinese food and their way of doing things, or you could take a flight north from Beijing and see what you could find out about contacts in Mongolia. And I could join you because I have some stuff I want to get copies of there. Now these Chinese airline schedules are from when I was there three years ago, but it looks like . . .”

Leaphorn found himself only half-listening to Bourebonette’s recitation of flight schedules to places that sounded totally unreal. He was looking at the top of her head, bent over the schedules. He was thinking that the hair was gray but looked alive. Clean and healthy. (Emma’s hair to the very end had remained a glossy black.) He was thinking,
Louisa needs to get her bifocal prescription changed. She is bending too low over the maps. Emma always balked at getting her eyes examined.
He was thinking of how being alone in China’s interior held no terrors for him. It would be strange. Speaking not a word of Chinese would be a problem. But it would be exciting. Louisa had said arranging an interpreter would be no problem. Easy but expensive. So what? What else did he have to spend his savings on?

Professor Bourebonette looked up at him and smiled. “That sound all right? We can always change it.”

“Sounds fine,” Leaphorn said, thinking,
Dilly Streib was right. She is a lovely lady.

Thinking of what Dilly had implied about sex with her. Thinking of all the things she was doing for him—taking him along as dead weight on this trip. What did he owe her for that? What would she expect?

The waiter appeared at Leaphorn’s shoulder, smelling of cigarette smoke. “Anything else I can get you? Refill on the coffee?”

“Not for me,” Leaphorn said. “Louisa?”

Professor Bourebonette gathered up her maps. “I think we’d better go,” she said. “If you’re driving back tonight. Do you have to?”

“I have a lot of work to do,” Leaphorn said. Actually, he didn’t intend to go home. He’d spent four hours on the highway this afternoon. That was enough. He was tired. There was a Motel 6 on the way out that always had a vacancy once the tourist rush was over.

“I have a guest room,” Bourebonette said. She laughed. “Or something I call a guest room. Anyway, you’re welcome to use it. You’re tired. That’s almost two hundred miles from here to Window Rock.”

“Two hundred and eighteen,” Leaphorn said.

She was studying his expression. Her own was whimsical. “I guess—” she began, then shook her head. “Think how badly I’ll feel if you go to sleep on the interstate and run into somebody and kill yourself.”

“I could get a motel room,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Thirty-five bucks. Or probably forty-five these days. Just think how much that money would buy out there in Mongolia.”

And so Joe Leaphorn’s GMC Jimmy followed Professor Louisa Bourebonette’s little Honda Civic to her house.

It stood on a narrow street only four blocks from the campus of Northern Arizona University, a brick bungalow, aged and small. The guest room was also small—very small, and crowded with a small couch, a work table, chair, computer, printer, supplies, books, odds and ends. Everything, it seemed to Leaphorn, except a bed.

“The couch folds out. Just grab those tabs at the bottom and pull. I think it’s already made up,” she said, disappearing back into the hall. “But I’ll have to get you a pillow.”

Leaphorn pulled. The couch converted itself into a thin, narrow bed. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable under a fresh white sheet.

Professor Bourebonette’s voice came through the doorway. “How about a glass of wine first? Make you sleep.” There was the sound of things being moved. “Sorry. I forgot. How about a cup of tea then? I have a box here of something called ‘Sleepytime.’”

“Fine,” Leaphorn said. “Although I don’t think I’ll need it.”

He sat in a well-worn recliner in the living room and looked at a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape on the wall across from him—a landscape of red and black erosion. Probably near Abiquiu, he thought, but it could have been done a thousand places on the Big Rez. He shifted in the recliner, relaxing, comfortable, glad he hadn’t gone to a motel. What would be would be. In the kitchen, a teakettle began to whistle. Cups clattered. Leaphorn found his mind settling into an old, old groove. This was when he did his best thinking—just before sleep. He would review whatever puzzle was bothering him, turn the facts over and over, look at all sides of them, knock them together, and then explain it all to Emma—as much to organize it in his own mind as to ask her opinion. But her opinion was often wise.

Louisa Bourebonette appeared carrying a tray. Two saucered cups, a steaming teapot, a little pitcher of cream. She put the tray on the table beside Leaphorn’s recliner, handed him his cup, dropped a tea bag into it, poured in hot water.

“I would have offered you coffee, but I’m out of decaf. And you shouldn’t be drinking the high-octane stuff this late.”

“This is fine,” Leaphorn said. “Better for me.”

“It really is,” she said, perching on the sofa across from him with her own cup. “Especially this herbal stuff.”

“How are you with puzzles?” Leaphorn said, and found himself surprised as he said it.

“Puzzles?”

“I’m working with an officer named Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “You met him last summer.”

“I remember Jim,” she said.

“He’s my assistant now. Brand new. Just started. We’re working on an odd case together.”

He paused, watching her expression. “It’s a homicide. Somebody killed a teacher out at a mission school on the Checkerboard Reservation.” He paused again.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m waiting for the puzzle.”

“It may not really be a puzzle,” he said. “Just a little oddity, probably. But, being a Navajo—” He grinned at her. “I have to start at the beginning.”

“The perfect place,” she said.

“Two cases,” he said. “Two incidents. Unconnected. But are they?”

He told her first of the death of Eric Dorsey, the telephone tip, the circumstances that had led to the arrest of Eugene Ahkeah, and his denial of the crime.

“Sounds like no mystery there,” she said.

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds typical of the homicides we work on on the reservation. Too much whiskey.”

“And that, I’ve guessed, is why you don’t drink wine,” she said.

Leaphorn sipped his tea. “Then, a day later and a long ways off at the Tano Pueblo, we have another homicide.”

“I read about that one,” she said. “The koshare killed at his kiva right in the middle of a kachina ceremonial. Created quite a sensation. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”

“That one’s not our case and I don’t know everything about it. But from what I do know, they don’t have a suspect, or a motive, or anything much to go on. Just somebody showed up at the little building off the plaza where the koshares dress and rest and so forth. He hit this guy on the head and nobody saw a thing.” Leaphorn paused again, watching her.

She sipped her tea, looked at him over the rim, put down the cup. “Go on,” she said. “If the story stopped there you wouldn’t be telling me.”

“It just happened that Jim Chee was there when the homicide took place,” he said. He told her about the effort to find the Kanitewa boy to keep his Navajo grandmother happy, and what had happened, and about Chee going back with Sergeant Blizzard, the cop from the BIA. Finally, he told her the connection Chee had made about the boy’s behavior after he’d heard the broadcast report of Dorsey’s murder.

Bourebonette picked up her cup again and sipped.

“What do you think?” Leaphorn asked.

“Don’t rush me,” she said. “You’ve had all day to think about it.”

“Take your time.”

“Right off the bat, I’d say you picked a smart assistant. Pretty smart, Chee. Good thinking. Making the connection with the radio broadcast.” She paused, thinking. “Or was it hearing the broadcast that caused the boy—what was his name—caused him to run back to see his uncle again?”

“Kanitewa,” Leaphorn said. “Tomorrow, when I get back on the job, we’ll see if we can find out.”

“He’ll tell you?”

“Why not? If we can find him. And unless it has something to do with his religion.”

“I was thinking that. He’s a teenager. Old enough to be initiated, I’d think. I don’t know much about Tano specifically. But I’d think they’d be like the other Pueblos.”

“So would I,” Leaphorn said. “But how do you think the two things connect? Kanitewa was going to school at Crownpoint. That’s maybe twenty-five miles from Thoreau.”

“What do you think could have been in that package? The one Chee mentioned, wrapped in the newspaper?”

“We’ll try to find out tomorrow,” Leaphorn said. “Probably will.”

“If it’s not something religious.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He felt an intense urge to yawn, stretch. Instead, he settled deeper into the chair. “The trouble is, we don’t have enough details to speculate.”

“We can speculate anyway,” Professor Bourebonette said. “Maybe the boy had some way of knowing what’s-his-name. The teacher who got killed. Maybe there was some connection between Kanitewa’s uncle and the teacher. What’s your theory?”

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn’t answer, having gone soundly to sleep in the recliner.