Sacred Clowns jlajc-11

by Tony Hillerman

  "Sleeping in that bed there. Where we both used to sleep when we were boys."

  "That would be a hard loss," Leaphorn said. He thought of telling the man of Emma's death, comparing the loss of the wife of your lifetime to the loss of a brother. But he could see no consolation in that. For either of them. Instead he said:

  "The FBI agent's report indicates that you had no idea what your nephew brought over here that night to give to Francis. Is that correct?"

  "No idea," Teddy Sayesva said. "The man told me it was supposed to be something long and narrow and wrapped in a newspaper. Like I said, I wasn't here when Delmar came with it. And I didn't see anything like that when I got back from the kiva. In fact, I didn't see anything different at all."

  He gestured, taking in the small, cluttered room. "Where would you put something in here where I wouldn't notice it? Right here in my own house. Anyplace he might have put it, we've looked. We didn't find anything."

  "We think it might have been something made of wood. Of a heavy dark wood," Leaphorn said.

  "Oh," Teddy Sayesva said. His tone indicated that this interested him.

  "Your nephew said this object, whatever it was, had religious significance," Leaphorn added. "That it had something to do with the ceremonial."

  "Delmar told you that?" Sayesva's expression showed his shock. "He shouldn't—" He let the sentence hang.

  Leaphorn cleared his throat. "Actually, he told the officer that he couldn't talk about what was in the package. He said he couldn't talk about it at all because he was not supposed to talk about anything involving his religion to anyone not initiated into his kiva."

  "Oh," Teddy Sayesva said. He looked relieved. "That's right. He couldn't talk about it if it concerned his religious duties."

  "And he didn't talk about it," Leaphorn said. "When the BIA officer told him he would have to take him in to Albuquerque to be questioned by the FBI if he didn't tell them what it was, then Delmar ran away."

  Sayesva nodded, approving both Delmar's action and this Navajo's understanding of it. He got up, walked quickly to the door, opened it, and stood for a moment looking out into the cold autumn sunlight. A pickup truck rolled down the alley past the porch. Teddy Sayesva waved, and shouted something unintelligible to those who don't speak the language of Tano. Then he looked up and down the street again, shut the door, and sat down.

  "You're Navajo," he said. "Do you have a wife from any of the pueblos? Are any of your family married into our people?"

  Leaphorn said no.

  "I will have to tell you a little bit about our religion then," Sayesva said. "Nothing secret."

  He produced a wry smile. "Just former secrets—things that the anthropologists have already written about."

  He got up, poured coffee from the steaming pot, handed a mug to Leaphorn, and sat again.

  "You know my brother was the leader of our koshare society. Do you know about the koshares?"

  "A little," Leaphorn said. "I've watched them at kachina dances. The clowns, with the striped body paint, making people laugh. I know their duties are more than just to entertain."

  "In our pueblo, and in some of the others, men who have jobs in towns and live away from us can't be members of the most sacred societies, the kachina societies. They can't spend enough time in the kivas. So they become koshares, and that is sacred too, but in a different way." He paused, seeking a way to explain. "To outsiders, they look like clowns and what they do looks like clowning. Like foolishness. But it is more than that. The koshare have another role. I guess you could say they are our ethical police. It's their job to remind us when we drift away from the way that was taught us. They show us how far short we humans are of the perfection of the spirits."

  He paused, an opportunity for a question. Leaphorn said, "An old friend of mine, a Hopi, told me their koshares are like policemen who use laughter instead of guns and scorn instead of jails."

  Sayesva nodded.

  "You've been to kachina ceremonials," he said. "Lots of Navajos like to come to them."

  "Sure," Leaphorn agreed. "We are taught to respect your religion."

  "Then you've seen the koshare doing everything wrong, everything backward, being greedy, reminding us of how badly we behave. That's the purpose. If you had been to this last one, you would have seen the clowns come in. They work with the clown team, to help teach the lesson. This time one of the clowns pulled in a wagon, and one of my cousins was there with the big billfold and the big dollars playacting, pretending to buy sacred things. That's what my brother had decided to warn the people about that day.

  Selling things they shouldn't sell. What Delmar brought him in that package, I don't know.

  But I think it must have been something to put into the little wagon. Something symbolic."

  Teddy Sayesva looked at Leaphorn over his glasses. Shrugged. Sipped his coffee.

  "Something made of dark wood and silver?" Leaphorn said.

  Sayesva looked up from his cup, shook his head, produced a wry smile. "Silver, too?

  Black wood and silver?"

  "We think so. We found a form for casting something in metal. About this big." Leaphorn made a small, round shape with his hands. "And with letters in it."

  "Found it where?"

  "In the school crafts shop at Thoreau."

  "Where that man was killed?"

  Leaphorn nodded. "Do you know what it was?"

  Sayesva's expression said he knew, and that the knowledge hurt. But he didn't answer the question.

  "Whatever it was, it seems to have been made in the shop that morning. We think Mr.

  Dorsey probably made it. We think it was taken about the time he was killed. Maybe before, maybe after, but about that time. A friend of Delmar's says Delmar went to the shop about that time to pick up something the friend had made. When the friend came to pick up Delmar, Delmar had the package with him."

  Sayesva shook his head, rejecting what he was hearing. He looked very tired. "You think Delmar killed this teacher?"

  Leaphorn shook his head. "We have a suspect in jail at Crownpoint," he said. "He's a Navajo named Eugene Ahkeah, a maintenance man at the school. He was seen around the school about the time of the homicide. A box full of items stolen from the shop turned up under his house."

  Sayesva looked relieved. "So you just want to know what was in the package?"

  "Whatever you can tell us," Leaphorn said.

  "I guess it was the Lincoln Cane," Sayesva said.

  The Lincoln Cane. It took only a second for Leaphorn's memory to process that. President Lincoln had ordered ebony and silver canes made and sent them to the leaders of the New Mexico Indian pueblos during the dark days of the Civil War. They were intended, as Leaphorn remembered that episode in history, as a signal that Lincoln recognized tribal authority, and to reward them for their neutrality and to keep them neutral. One of the Spanish kings, probably King Charles if Leaphorn's memory served, had done the same two hundred years earlier.

  "Not the cane itself, of course," Sayesva said. "I mean a copy of it." He nodded, agreeing with his own guess. "I guess my brother had a replica made. I guess he must have sent Delmar to get it for him."

  Leaphorn waited. Teddy Sayesva was thinking, considering the implications of what he had concluded. Leaphorn gave him time to think. And then he said, "You think your brother had it put in the wagon? I heard that when the wagon was pulled around the plaza, past the crowd, the people quit laughing when it went by. I heard they got quiet. Serious."

  "Yes," Sayesva said.

  Leaphorn waited. "I thank you for what you've told me so far," he said. "Now we know what we're looking for. Sometimes that helps you find something, but it may not help this time. Whoever killed your brother may have taken it."

  Sayesva acknowledged that with an absent nod.

  "Your brother was killed for some reason. Could it be because he put the cane in the wagon? Would that suggest that it was being sold?"

  Sayesva rose. "I do
n't think I know anything else to tell you," he said. He moved toward the door but stopped short of opening it. "No," he said. "No. Francis wouldn't have got someone to make a copy of that cane." He shook his head, hand still on the doorknob.

  Leaphorn, who had been rising, sat down again.

  "Why not?" he asked.

  For a moment Leaphorn thought Teddy Sayesva hadn't heard the question. He waited, aware of the autumn smells in this small, closed kitchen—the aroma of chili drying somewhere, of cornhusks, of sacks of pinto beans and onions.

  Sayesva left the door and sat down across the table. "Why not? Well, he and Bert Penitewa—Bert's the governor—they were friends. They disagreed on a lot of things but they respected one another. He wouldn't insult the governor like that. Putting that cane in the wagon like it was for sale was the worst kind of insult."

  "Officer Chee said the wagon was full of things to be sold," Leaphorn said. "He thought it was sort of a general protest against people selling artifacts with religious value."

  "Sure," Sayesva said. "The koshare have done that before. Warned against selling sacred things, I mean. But the cane was another matter. There aren't any rules, exactly, about what the clowns can do, or what they can ridicule. But they do follow traditions. And traditionally, the clowns don't get involved in politics and they don't get personally insulting. Putting that cane in there was like accusing Bert of being willing to sell it—and God knows what some collector would pay for something that old and sent out by Abraham Lincoln himself. It would be a personal insult because the governor is the keeper of the cane. A sort of a sacred trust."

  "So that broke with tradition? I mean putting the cane in the wagon?"

  Sayesva nodded. "Everybody's been talking about it. Maybe as much about that as about what happened to my brother. Francis was a valuable man. He didn't do foolish things.

  People wonder what he was telling them."

  "If your brother didn't have that cane made, do you have any idea who might have done it?"

  Sayesva thought, shook his head. "No idea."

  They sat, with Teddy Sayesva considering what he now knew along with what he had known before—considering how a cane taken from a murdered man's shop came to be made part of the symbolic cargo of a clown's toy wagon. Leaphorn was content to give him time. He let his eyes wander.

  Sayesva's kitchen was the kitchen of a man who lived alone. Leaphorn saw the same untidy clues he saw in his house since Emma's death, the grimy stove, the cluttered sink, the unkempt shelves. He saw the sad look of loneliness.

  "I talked to Henry Agoyo," Sayesva said, finally. "Henry is the chief clown—the one in charge of the team that does the skit." Sayesva hesitated, looked at Leaphorn, made a wry face, and continued. "I'm talking too much. About things we don't talk about. But something very strange has happened here. I think we should try to understand it. I talked to Henry. I asked him what he knew about putting the cane in the wagon. Why in the world did they do that? He said it wasn't planned that way. He said Francis brought it to him that morning—just a little while before the ceremonial started. He said Francis told him to put it in the wagon, and he didn't want to do it. But he said Francis seemed very upset.

  Disturbed. He said put it in and Henry said, 'Do you know what you're doing,' or something like that, and Francis said he wasn't sure, and maybe he was wrong, and he hoped he was wrong, but to put the cane in the wagon."

  Sayesva picked up his coffee cup, saw it was empty, put it down again. "Henry knew my brother real well," Sayesva said. "They were in the same class in school and they both drove trucks at the Jacks Wild Mine, before Francis went to the university to become an accountant."

  "What does Agoyo do now?" Leaphorn asked.

  "He runs a road grader for the county."

  "He said Francis hoped he was wrong," Leaphorn repeated.

  Sayesva nodded.

  "Anything else? Could he tell you where the cane is now? What happened to it after the ceremonial?"

  "He said Francis came when the clowns left the plaza and said he had to have the cane, and took it out of the wagon."

  Leaphorn connected his memory of what Chee had described with this new fact. There had been very little time between the end of the clowning skit and the death of Francis Sayesva in the room where he had gone to remove his costume. Only the few minutes Chee had spent running around looking for Delmar. Francis must have had the cane with him when he was killed.

  He thought: Find the cane, find the killer.

  "So putting the cane in the wagon was a last-second addition," Leaphorn said. "They hadn't planned it that way."

  "That's what Henry Agoyo told me."

  "You think probably your brother didn't know about the cane until Delmar brought it to him?"

  "That's what I think," Sayesva said.

  "So what was that shop teacher's motive for making it?" Leaphorn asked, as much to himself as to Sayesva. "And why was the shop teacher killed?"

  Neither of them could think of an answer.

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

  18

  NOR COULD Bert Penitewa, the governor of Tano Pueblo.

  Leaphorn had walked from Sayesva's house, across the plaza and around a corner and down a narrow street walled with adobe houses. As Sayesva had told him, the governor's home was the third on the left.

  A middle-aged woman answered the door, with a jacket on and a shawl over her head.

  Yes, Governor Penitewa was home. She was his daughter and she had to run to see about something a neighbor had asked her to do. But she ushered him in, invited him to sit on the sagging sofa, called her father, and left.

  The governor of Tano Pueblo was a short, heavy-bodied man, probably in his late seventies. But like many of his race, he didn't show his age. His hair was thick and black, his face hardly lined, and while his belly bulged over the belt of his jeans, his back still resisted the slump of the aged.

  "I'm sorry Delia had to leave in such a hurry," he said. "She makes much better coffee than I do and I want to offer you a cup."

  "I'm afraid I've already had my quota for the day," Leaphorn said.

  Penitewa gestured him back onto the sagging sofa by the front window and seated himself behind a table that seemed to also serve as his desk. Behind the desk, Leaphorn could see into the bedroom from which the governor had emerged. To his left, a doorway opened into the kitchen. To his right, he could see into what seemed to be another bedroom. This living room was small, crowded with worn furnishings, its plank floor covered with a good Navajo rug, its walls decorated with photographs and a framed print of Christ crucified. Beside the kitchen door a shelf held three kachina figures, a seed basket, two good examples of Acoma pottery, and a plastic clock made to represent a coyote howling. On the wall behind the table where Penitewa sat, two canes hung side by side. One was made of a light wood with a head of heavy ornate silver tied with a black cord and dangling a black tassel. The other was a simple ebony stick with a round silver head. The Lincoln Cane.

  "How about iced tea? I should offer you something," Penitewa said. "I presume this is an official visit from a representative of the Navajo Nation. That hasn't happened at this pueblo for many, many years."

  Leaphorn wasn't quite sure how that remark was intended. As he remembered history, Tano had been hostile to the Navajos during what Frank Sani Nakai called "the Kit Carson wars." But then, just about all the Pueblos had joined the Americans in that campaign.

  Only Jemez Pueblo had remained forever friendly.

  "I think the best we could call this visit is semiofficial," Leaphorn said. "We had a teacher killed on our reservation a little while ago." He explained the evidence that the victim had made a copy of the Tano Lincoln Cane, that a Navajo suspected of the homicide was in custody, and that Delmar Kanitewa had apparently brought the cane to Tano and had given it to Francis Sayesva, and that it had subsequently been taken when Sayesva was killed.

 
Penitewa listened in silence, motionless, face impassive. But his eyes betrayed surprise and interest.

  "So, that's it," he said. "I wondered where it came from."

  "Apparently, that's it," Leaphorn said. "The evidence is circumstantial. But it's strong. We found shavings of what looks like ebony wood in the teacher's shop, and what seemed to be a mold to cast the silver head. The Kanitewa boy was there at the right time. He brought a package of the proper shape and gave it to Francis Sayesva. But, of course, we haven't actually had our hands on it."

  "I saw it in the wagon," Penitewa said. "It was quite a shock. At first I thought it was the real one. I thought someone had come in here and got it down off the wall."

  "Could that have happened?"

  Governor Penitewa smiled at him. "It could have, but it didn't. I came right home to look and it was still on the wall." He turned and pointed. "There's the original. Would you like to see it?"