Sacred Clowns

Chapter 8

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.