Sacred Clowns

Chapter 9

“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.

“Kanitewa told Bluehorse he was calling from the pay phone out in front of the mission. He said he had Bluehorse’s bracelet, he couldn’t wait for his dad to come back from Gallup, and could Bluehorse come and get him. Pick him up, but not at the mission but at that little place by the highway where they rent videotapes. Kanitewa was very excited. It was very important. Don’t let me down, friend. That sort of thing. So Bluehorse borrowed his mother’s pickup truck and drove over to Thoreau and pulled up at the video place. But Kanitewa wasn’t just sitting there waiting for him. So Bluehorse went inside to look for him, and when he came out, Kanitewa was sitting in the cab of his pickup.”

Leaphorn paused, studying Chee.

“You remember what I was saying the other day about putting in the details? Your report reads: ‘When Bluehorse came out Kanitewa was sitting in his pickup.’ But was he crouched down out of sight, or sitting up? That’s an example. If we knew that it would tell us something about how scared the boy was at that point.”

Chee allowed himself to make a minuscule nod. He was not in the mood for a lesson in report writing.

“Kanitewa gives Bluehorse the bracelet,” Leaphorn continued. “That seems to mean that he had to have seen Dorsey. He must have given Dorsey the note from Bluehorse – the receipt for the bracelet. Otherwise Dorsey wouldn’t have turned it loose. Right?”

“I’d think so. As far as we know, Dorsey had never met Kanitewa.”

“Now you need to know some things,” Leaphorn said. “That bracelet was probably in a cabinet in a little storeroom between the shop and Dorsey’s office. That’s where Dorsey kept his supply of silver ingots, and turquoise, and the more valuable stuff the kids were working on. To get it for Kanitewa he’d have to leave the shop, or his office if the boy had found him in his office.”

Leaphorn paused, checked Chee’s expression to determine if he understood the implication of this. Chee understood. It meant Kanitewa would have had an opportunity to steal something. Perhaps something to be taken away, wrapped in a newspaper, and delivered to his uncle, the koshare.

“The cabinet was unlocked when they found Dorsey’s body?” Chee asked. “Is that right?”

“Unlocked,” Leaphorn said, looking thoughtful. “And a lot of stuff that had been in it was missing. The silver and the other stuff found in the box under Ahkeah’s place, all of that came out of the cabinet.”

“All of it?” Chee asked.

“That’s a good question,” Leaphorn said. “I think Toddy was jumping to that conclusion. But I don’t know for sure.”

“It probably doesn’t matter,” Chee said.

“No. But how do we know whether it does or not?”

They thought about that for a moment. For the first time, Chee found himself feeling comfortable with the lieutenant. Leaphorn had swiveled again and seemed to be looking at the map. Now he made a dismissive gesture, and turned back.

“Bluehorse told Kanitewa he didn’t have enough gas to take him all the way to Tano, but he could take him down to the Giant Truck Stop on Interstate 40 and he could get a ride there,” Leaphorn said. “That correct? And Bluehorse didn’t see the package until Kanitewa got out?”

“Right.”

“But it was already wrapped in the newspaper? Whatever it was?”

Chee nodded. “And Bluehorse asked what it was and Kanitewa said he couldn’t tell him. It was religious.”

“Something from Dorsey’s office?” Leaphorn said.

“Probably.”

They thought about that.

The telephone rang. Leaphorn lifted one end of the receiver with a finger to break the connection. “You see any other possibility? You think maybe he brought it with him when he came from his home?”

“He could have,” Chee said. “But I think somehow that whatever it was, it was the object that caused all the excitement. The big excited call to Bluehorse. That ‘can’t wait for dad’ business. All the game playing.”

Leaphorn considered that. The telephone rang again. He picked up the receiver, broke the connection with his forefinger, laid the receiver on the desk. “Yes,” he said. “I think you’re right. And how about chronology now. Was Dorsey alive and well when Kanitewa left him?”

“I’d say yes.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, nodding. “But when Kanitewa was leaving, he saw somebody coming in. I’m guessing now, but am I right? Maybe Ahkeah. Maybe somebody else.”

“I think you’re right. And they saw him. And he knew it,” Chee said.

Leaphorn considered that, nodded. “So when the boy heard the radio broadcast, when he heard Dorsey had been killed, then everything clicked. He rushed off to warn his uncle about it.”

“Maybe,” Chee said. “At least I can’t think of anything better.”

“So what did the koshare do then? As far as we know, he ignored the warning. Did nothing.”

Chee was remembering the kachina dance, the koshare performance. “He did his duty,” Chee said. “From what little I heard at Tano, and mostly from what Blizzard picked up and passed along, I think he was that kind of a man. Blizzard said everybody he interviewed liked him. He said it was more than just ‘don’t speak bad of the dead,’ more than just the usual everybody being nice you get when somebody gets killed. Blizzard said they really respected him. Admired him. He must have been a good man.”

“The kind they’d call a ‘valuable man,’” Leaphorn said. He stood up, put the telephone receiver back on the hook, looked at the map again. “You know,” he said. “Maybe we’ve got another connection here. This Dorsey was also a valuable man.” He smiled at Chee. “How do you like the idea of a serial killer who hates valuable men?”

“Bluehorse told us Dorsey’s gay,” Chee said. “Or supposed to be gay. He said he drove the water truck. The one the mission runs to refill water barrels for old people who can’t get around. He took them meals. All that.”

“That’s right. You better read the file on it,” Leaphorn said. He dug it out of the basket on his desk, handed it to Chee. “See if what you know about the Sayesva case connects with anything at Thoreau.”

“Okay.”

“And one more thing. I still want you to find Delmar Kanitewa.”