Sacred Clowns jlajc-11

by Tony Hillerman

  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 Sheriffs Office and the Arizona State Police. Good resume. 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, leather-work, 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 some-thing-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 sheriffs 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.

  "Okay," Chee said.

  "What isn't in the file is the chiefs 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."

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  3

  "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, b
ut 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.