Sacred Clowns (9 page)

JIM CHEE noticed a neat stack of papers in his in-basket when he walked into his office. He ignored them for a moment to stand staring out his window. The window was why he’d picked the office over a slightly larger one when he was transferred from Shiprock to Window Rock. From it he could look eastward at the ragtag southern end of the Chuska Range, the long wall of sandstone along which Window Rock had been built and which, because of the great hole eroded through it, gave the capital of the Navajo Nation its name.

He looked out today into a windless autumn afternoon. No traffic was moving on Navajo Route 3 and a single pickup truck was ambling northward up Route 12 past the Navajo Veterans Cemetery. The trees at Tse Bonito Park were yellow, the roadsides were streaked with the purple of the last surviving October asters, and overhead the sky was the dark, blank blue. Chee exhaled a great sigh. Would she go to Gallup with him tonight? She had neglected to answer that question. Or, worse, avoided it. Or, worse still, forgotten it.

He sat behind his desk and fished the papers out of the basket. They were clipped together under a memo sheet which bore the lieutenant’s neat script and the initials J.L.

I’m going on an extended leave at the end of next week. Attached find items I’d like you to clean up before then.

The first item was the file on the Todachene hit-and-run case. It was relatively old now, old enough normally to be dumped into the suspense file. This one was alive twenty-five percent because of the inhuman callousness involved and seventy-five percent because it had caught the chief’s eye. Chee remembered most of it but he flipped glumly through the attached reports to see if the patrol officers had found anything new. Nothing had been added to what Leaphorn had told him.

He put that aside and picked up the next one. Offering sergeant stripes for solving that one was sort of like the offers you heard about in fairy stories. You can marry the princess if you do something impossible—like putting a mountain in a pea pod. How in hell could you solve a hit-and-runner with no clues, no broken headlight glass, no scraped paint, no witnesses, no nothing? He thought of another parallel. How in hell could he expect to win the princess, a full-scale city girl lawyer, if he couldn’t make sergeant?

He’d heard of the second case, too. Theft of an antique saddle and other artifacts from the Greasy Water Trading Post. Under that was one he hadn’t heard of—a series of fence cuttings and cattle thefts around Nakaibito. He flipped through the rest hoping for something unique or interesting. No such luck.

The final item in the stack was another memo sheet, initialed J.L.

Don’t forget to find the Kanitewa boy.

Chee made a rude noise and dropped the memo back on the stack. Trying to find Kanitewa was typical of the whole list. What do you do? First, you let everybody you can think of know you want a call if they see the kid. If he shows up at school, they call you. Well, he’d done that. What else can you do? The same with the vehicular homicide. It was just drone work. Call every place that fixes cars and tell ’em to tip you if somebody comes in for body work. Stake out the auto supply stores for somebody buying the right kind of right front headlight. Then, for the cow stealing, you do about a thousand miles of back-road driving around Nakaibito finding out who saw what and when, and who was eating fresh beef or drying cowhides, and—

The telephone rang.

“Jim Chee,” Chee said.

“This is Blizzard,” the voice said. “You still interested in that kid?”

“Kanitewa? Sure.” Chee felt a mixture of surprise and pleasure. Blizzard wasn’t quite as hardassed as he’d thought. “What do you hear?”

“He’s back at school,” Blizzard said.

Chee let that sink in for an unhappy moment. So much for promises. That principal said he’d call just as soon as the boy showed up. Chee could still see the man, shaking his hand, saying, “Yes sir. I sure will. I’ve got your number right here on the blotter.” The secretary had promised, too. So much for promises.

“How’d you know?” Chee asked, trying not to sound bitter.

“I’m calling from the school,” Blizzard said. “Just dropped the little bastard off there. I found him near the bus station at Grants and I gave him a ride.”

Chee didn’t ask how Blizzard knew Kanitewa would be at the bus station at Grants. The Cheyenne had staked out all the bus stations where the kid might show up. Chee hadn’t thought of doing that. Maybe that’s why the Cheyennes beat Custer.

“He was headed back to school?”

“He said he was,” Blizzard said, sounding sour. “That’s about all he did say.”

Chee looked at his watch. “So he was going back to live with the Navajo side of his family. With his father? That what he said?”

“Yep.”

“Well, thanks,” Chee said. “Appreciate the call. I owe you one. Anytime I can be helpful.” He picked up the memo, wadded it, flipped it toward the wastebasket. It hit the rim and dropped on the floor.

“Yeah,” Blizzard said. “How about right now?”

“Like what?” Chee said.

“I’m city In-dun,” Blizzard said, picking up the Navajo pronunciation. “I don’t understand these sheep camp In-duns yet. Polite as I am known to be, I think I must say the wrong things sometimes. Not come on just right.” Blizzard paused, awaiting a comment, and, getting none, went on.

“Back at the Kanitewa house at the pueblo, you got his mama to talking. You think you could get the boy to talk?”

“I don’t know,” Chee said. “Not if it’s anything to do with his religion.”

“I don’t care about his damn religion,” Blizzard said. “What I want to know about is what his mama told us. About why he was in such a sweat to see his uncle, and why he had to go back and see him the second time, and what he had in that package he brought for him.”

“It must have been something long and narrow. Maybe something rolled up in a tube. Didn’t you guys find anything like that in Sayesva’s place?”

“Nothing,” Blizzard said. He paused. “Well, hell, there was plenty of long narrow stuff in his house, you know. It could have been anything.”

“And the boy wouldn’t tell you?”

“Just shut totally up,” Blizzard said.

“You asked him specifically? About what he’d brought for his uncle in the newspaper?”

“He said it had to do with his kiva. His religious outfit. Said he couldn’t talk about it.”

“He won’t tell me, either, then,” Chee said. “I don’t think you Cheyennes have that philosophy. We don’t either. Our religion is family and the more that take part in a ceremony the better it is. But the Pueblo people, it diminishes the power if people who shouldn’t be involved in ritual are told about it. Or see what they shouldn’t. Or photograph it. He’s not going to tell me.”

There was a long silence. Then Blizzard said, “Uh-huh,” in a tone which said a lot more than that. “Well, then, thanks a lot and to hell with it.”

“Wait a minute,” Chee said. “I’ll have to get out there anyway.” He delivered a self-deprecatory laugh. “I’m supposed to get him to call his grandmother. So when I get out there, I’ll see if I can get anything out of him. If I do, I’ll call you.”

“Yeah,” Blizzard said. “Good.” A long pause followed. “Anything I can provide you?” Blizzard finally asked.

“I don’t think so,” Chee said, sounding puzzled.

“You got my phone number?”

“Oh,” Chee said. “No.”

“I didn’t think so,” Blizzard said, and gave it to him.

Chee copied it, read it back. “I’ll call,” he said.

“Like about when, you think?” Blizzard said. “Maybe today?”

“What’s the hurry?”

“The hurry is my agent-in-charge. I told him about the two visits, and the package. And that got him all heated up. He hasn’t got another damn thing to work on in this case. So then when I found the boy and let him off at the school, I called the son-of-a-bitch. And I told him what the boy said. About it just being religious business. The package and all. And he wants to know exactly what was in the package.”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“Or bring the kid back to Albuquerque for him to question him.”

“Fat lot of good that will do,” Chee said. He was thinking of the Grandmother Councilwoman, who would be plenty pissed off, and would pass it along to Leaphorn, who would—Would what? He had just worked for the man a few days. How would Leaphorn react? “But I guess you don’t have much choice,” Chee concluded.

“Well, some,” Blizzard said. “While I was talking to the feds in Albuquerque, the kid took off again.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “Not again.” He was silent a moment, absorbing the disappointment. Back to square one. It didn’t surprise him much. But it was interesting. So was Blizzard. Chee found himself thinking of the man not as a Cheyenne but as a cop new to the territory, not knowing the people, lost. For Chee that was a familiar role.

“Tell you what,” he said. “You get yourself something to eat in that diner by the gas station, and then get over to the Crownpoint police station. I’ll meet you there. The lieutenant in charge is a man named Toddy. Try to be nice to him. It’ll take me maybe two hours, and if anything hangs me up, I’ll call you there.”

“Done,” Blizzard said, and hung up.

Chee put on his cap, his gun belt, and his jacket. He called the dispatcher and told her he would be driving to the subagency office at Crownpoint. He sat for a moment, thinking, then picked up the phone book and extracted the number of radio station KNDN.

The woman who took the call was cooperative. She put him on hold for a few moments, and then read him the transcript of the six
P.M.
news of three nights ago. It included five items: the change in schedule of a rodeo at Tuba City, a plan to improve the runway of the landing strip at Kayenta, the death in the hospital at Gallup of the former chairwoman of the Coyote Pass Chapter, the replacement of the retired principal of the Toadlena school, and the murder of Eric Dorsey at the Saint Bonaventure Indian Mission.

Chee took two steps toward the door. Then he turned and sat, cap, jacket, and gun belt on, typing a memo for Lieutenant Leaphorn. He had worked for the lieutenant long enough now to make it a long one.

“HE SHOULD BE in just about any time,” said Virginia Toledo, examining Chee over her glasses. “He went to Flagstaff yesterday and he called a little while ago and said he’d be late.”

“Called from here?” Chee asked. “Or called from Flag? Or radioed in from somewhere?” He was holding a folder in his right hand and his uniform cap in his left.

Virginia Toledo had not yet decided what her relationship would be with Officer Jim Chee and did not like the sound of this abrupt questioning. For the past twenty-three years her job title had been Administrative Assistant, Navajo Department of Public Safety, and she was, in fact, the workaday nerve center of the Window Rock operation. What’s going on? Ask Virgie. Why’s Desbah not in his office? Virgie will know. What happened at that meeting last night? Get Virgie to tell you. Virgie knew exactly how to deal with everybody in the building, including Joe Leaphorn, Chee’s boss. But now this young Jim Chee was holding down that little office upstairs. She didn’t know him. She’d heard he was sometimes something of a screwup. She inspected him over her glasses. His tone had struck her as unduly demanding. He was a college man. Maybe he’d been around white men so long he’d lost his good manners. Maybe he’d picked up the
bilagaana
attitude about women. She checked his expression, looking for some sign of irritation or arrogance. She saw only excitement. That was all right. He was young. If you’re going to get excited, that was the age for it.

“He called from his house,” she said. “Just about ten minutes ago.”

“If he calls again,” Chee said, heading for the stairs, “would you tell him I’ll be waiting in my office? And I need to see him.” He stopped, turned, and smiled at Administrative Assistant Virginia Toledo. “Please,” he said. “And thank you.”

The door to Leaphorn’s office was about fifteen feet from Chee’s door. He tapped on it on his way past, got no response, tapped again, and turned the knob. Of course it wasn’t locked. He’d heard it wouldn’t be—that one of the lieutenant’s several idiosyncrasies was a refusal to lock his office. “If you have to lock your door in the police station,” Leaphorn would say, “then it’s time to get new policemen.” But that attitude seemed to be common in the department. Nobody locked doors at the Tuba City station either. Nor, come to think of it, at Crownpoint when he’d worked out of there.

Chee said, “Lieutenant?” in a loud voice, and looked around. Neat, tidy, the desk top clear. No sign of dust. Dust wouldn’t dare.

In his own office, Chee reread his newly revised report.

Blizzard had been waiting in the parking lot outside the Crownpoint station—sprawled across the front seat of his car, long legs dangling out the open door, head resting on his jacket folded against the passenger door, reading a book. The book, Chee noticed, had a dust jacket that looked science fictionish and bore the name Roger Zelazny.

He had put it on the dashboard, pushed himself erect, looked at Chee and then at his watch. “I see you’re operating on Navajo time,” he said.

Chee had let it pass and let Blizzard tell him what had happened. That hadn’t taken long. Blizzard had told the boy to wait at his car while he made his telephone call to Albuquerque. When he finished talking to his agent-in-charge and came back to the car, the boy was gone.

“The school buses were loading up and leaving when I went in to use the phone. So I found out which one he’d take to get home, and chased it down, but he wasn’t on it. Then I found out where he lived and went out to his daddy’s place. His stepmother was there but she said she hadn’t seen him since, he took off the first time.”

“So he didn’t go home,” Chee said. “That’s funny.”

“Maybe not,” Blizzard said. “When I picked him up there at Grants he was walking out toward the interstate. I didn’t ask him where he was going. I just let him in the car, and he was in before he knew I was a cop, and then I told him I’d give him a ride back to his school.”

“So maybe he was actually headed somewhere else.”

“I should have found out,” Blizzard said, sounding repentant. “He told me he’d gone in the bus station to buy a ticket but he didn’t have enough money. I figured the ticket was just to Thoreau.”

“Probably right,” Chee said.

“Maybe,” Blizzard agreed. “He acted nervous. I think I told you that.”

“His stepmother. Did she give you any guesses about where he might be staying? Kinfolks? Friends?”

“She said she had no idea. Didn’t have a clue. She wasn’t very talkative.”

That hadn’t surprised Chee. He had stopped thinking of Blizzard as a Cheyenne and was thinking of him as a city man. Chee had concluded years ago that not many city people knew how to talk to country people. Delmar Kanitewa’s Navajo stepmother would definitely be country people. Blizzard had probably offended her.

“Let’s go find the school bus driver,” Chee said.

That had proved easy. His name was Platero, he lived less than a mile from the school, and, yes indeed, he could tell them who was Delmar’s best friend. It was a boy named Felix Bluehorse. “Sometimes Felix gets off at his place, and sometimes vice versa,” Platero said. “Bluehorse used to go to school here, before he switched over to Thoreau, and we still give him a ride sometimes. They’re good buddies.”

Even better, Felix Bluehorse’s mother worked for the Navajo Communications Company and lived in Crownpoint. Better yet, Felix was home when they got there and was anxious to talk to somebody. But first, he wanted to see their police identification. Felix was small and about sixteen, with enough white blood mixed with his Navajo genes to make him vulnerable to acne. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s mobile home looking down on them. Obviously, he was enjoying this.

“I’ve got to be careful who I talk to,” Felix said. “Somebody’s after Delmar.” He looked at Blizzard, then at Chee, savoring their reaction.

Chee waited. They were in Navajo country, but it was Blizzard’s case.

“Who?” Blizzard asked. “Why?”

“The man who killed Mr. Dorsey,” Felix said.

Abruptly, it wasn’t Blizzard’s case. Now it was Chee’s case.

“You know what,” Chee said. “I think you have some very important information. Can we come in and sit down and talk about it?”

In the crowded Bluehorse living room it developed that Felix Bluehorse did have quite a bit of information, if one could only calculate what it meant.

Chee was thinking of that now, going over it in his mind, reading through the report he’d typed for Lieutenant Leaphorn, wondering if he’d left anything out. If he had, it was too late to do anything about it. There was a tap on the door, it opened, and the lieutenant looked in at him. The lieutenant looked old and tired.

“Virginia said you were looking for me.”

“Yes sir,” Chee said. He stood, handed Leaphorn the file folder.

“You find him?”

“No sir,” Chee said. “Well, not exactly. Blizzard found him . . .”

Leaphorn’s expression stopped Chee. It was a broad, happy grin.

Chee hurried on. “. . .  at Grants, and he picked him up and took him to Crownpoint.” Chee swallowed. “But he got away again.”

Leaphorn’s grin disappeared. He tapped the folder. “It all in here?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll read it,” Leaphorn said. His tone suggested to Chee that reading it would not have high priority.

“It connects the Kanitewa boy to the homicide at Thoreau,” Chee said.

Leaphorn took his hand off the doorknob, flipped the report open, scanned it, looked up at Chee. “Let’s talk in my office,” he said.

But before they talked, Leaphorn eased himself into the chair behind his desk, put on his glasses, slowly reread Chee’s report, placed it on the desk top, restored his glasses to their case, put the case in his shirt pocket, and looked at Chee for a long moment.

“What’d you think of the Bluehorse boy?”

“He seemed like a nice kid,” Chee said. “He wanted to cooperate. Enjoying the excitement, somebody paying attention to him. Liking being important.”

“He said he had no idea where Kanitewa was hiding out. You think that’s true?”

“Maybe,” Chee said. “I doubt it. I’d bet he could give us two or three guesses if he wanted to.”

Leaphorn nodded. “He told you that Kanitewa thought the man who killed Dorsey would be after him?”

“Right,” Chee said.

“And the man was a Navajo?”

“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed. “I think he actually said Kanitewa told him it was a man he’d seen at Saint Bonaventure Mission. You know, you’re dealing with a hearsay, secondhand description. He said Kanitewa said this man was medium-sized and kind of old. I think we just took for granted we were talking about a Navajo because he didn’t say ‘white,’ or ‘Chinese,’ or ‘Hispanic.’”

Leaphorn produced an affirmative grunt. He extracted his glasses, reread part of the report.

“You say here Bluehorse said he didn’t know whether Kanitewa had actually witnessed the crime.”

“We pressed him on that. He said he wasn’t sure. Maybe Kanitewa had actually seen it. But he didn’t tell him he had. I’d say if Delmar had seen it, he’d have said so. And he would have yelled. Reported it.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said.

“I’d guess that when he heard the radio broadcast about Dorsey being killed, he remembered seeing this guy going into the shop and put two and two together.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Could it be Eugene Ahkeah?” Chee asked.

Leaphorn said, “Big. Kind of old. That could be just about anybody. Could be Ahkeah. He’s not much older than you. But for a teenager, ‘kind of old’ is anybody over twenty.”

“And Ahkeah was there that day,” Chee said. “Other people saw him?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. He sighed, got up, walked to the window, and stood, hands in his pockets, looking out. “We’ve got our man in jail,” he said, finally. “We’ve got him at the scene. There’s no question he had the opportunity. We’ve got a good motive—theft plus drunkenness. And we have physical evidence tied to him. All that stolen stuff. Now it seems as if we have another witness who must have seen something incriminating.” He turned and looked at Chee. “The trouble is, I was thinking we had the wrong man.”

“Why?”

Leaphorn shook his head, laughed. “Be damned if I know why. I used to think I was logical. Usually I am. It’s just that this Ahkeah seemed wrong for it.” He walked around behind the desk, rummaged in the drawer, and took out a box of pins. “Ever have that happen to you? Your brain tells you one thing. Your instinct another.”

“Sure,” Chee said. “I guess so.”

“And which one is right?” In the map on the wall behind his desk he put a pin at Tano Pueblo, and another between Crownpoint and Thoreau, about where Kanitewa had stayed with his father. Chee noticed they had pink heads, the same color as the pins already stuck in the map at Thoreau, and at the place in Coyote Canyon where Ahkeah’s family lived. Leaphorn dropped the surplus pins back into the box. “Did you ever wonder why I fool with those pins?”

“Yeah,” Chee said. He’d heard of Leaphorn’s pin-littered map ever since he’d joined the force. Captain Largo, his boss when he worked the Tuba City district, told him Leaphorn used them to work out mathematical solutions to crimes that puzzled him. Largo couldn’t explain how that worked. Neither could Chee.

“I don’t know myself, exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I got into the habit years ago. It seems like sometimes it helps me think. It puts things in perspective.” He tapped the pin at Tano with a finger. “For example, we seem to have a connection now between two crimes. Or do we? About seventy miles apart on the map. Does the Kanitewa boy connect them? It sure as hell looks like it now.”

“It does to me. I’d bet a year’s pay on it,” Chee said.

Leaphorn made a tent of his hands and looked at Chee over it. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you so certain?”

“Because—”

The telephone on Leaphorn’s desk interrupted him. Leaphorn picked it up, said, “Call me back in ten minutes,” and hung up.

He looked at Chee, motioned for him to continue.

“Because of the package, mostly,” Chee said. “Because of the chronology.”

Leaphorn nodded. “Yes. I think so too. But what was in that package?” He was asking both of them the question. He looked at Chee. “Any ideas?”

“None,” Chee said. “Except Kanitewa must have thought it was in some way connected with his religion. That’s what he told Blizzard. And he took it to his uncle. To the koshare. We know that. And we think we know that he picked it up in Eric Dorsey’s shop.”

Leaphorn swiveled in his chair, looked at the map a moment and then back at Chee.

“The way your report reads, Kanitewa’s dad was driving in to Gallup. The boy had his dad drop him off at Thoreau because Bluehorse had been making a silver bracelet in Dorsey’s class. Bluehorse wanted to give it to his girlfriend that night and he’d asked Kanitewa to pick it up for him. We don’t know when his dad dropped him off. Probably midmorning and probably it doesn’t matter. The next thing we have an approximate time on is when Kanitewa called Bluehorse and asked him to come and get him. That was late in the noon hour because Bluehorse remembers he’d just finished eating lunch. Am I getting this right?”

“So far,” Chee said.