Sacred Clowns (13 page)

THE VERY FIRST thing Jim Chee intended to do when he reached his office the next morning was call Tribal Councilwoman Bertha Roanhorse. The memos Virginia had left on his blotter asked him to return calls from Lieutenant Toddy at Crownpoint and Captain Largo at Tuba City. They could wait. So could the manila envelope Virginia had dropped in his in-basket. As it turned out, so could Jim Chee. The Navajo Communications Company telephone book listed a Roanhorse number among the nineteen telephones served by the Toadlena exchange, but a stern feminine voice on an answering machine instructed Chee to leave a message. He did. Then he called the Legislative Secretary’s Office. Another blank. None of the Tribal Council committees on which Mrs. Roanhorse served was meeting today. He left another message. Next, he called the Navajo Nation Inn. Yes, Councilwoman Roanhorse was registered. She didn’t answer the room phone. Chee left a third message.

Having exhausted all possibilities he could think of, he returned the call to Captain Largo. Largo was out, but the Tuba City dispatcher had a message for him: “Tell Chee we have drawn a blank on front end repairs here in his hit-run case.”

He called for Lieutenant Toddy at Crownpoint. The lieutenant was in. “I just wanted you to know we didn’t forget you guys in the Navajo Nation’s Capital City,” Toddy said. “We haven’t forgotten, but if your vehicular homicide suspect was somebody around here nobody seems to know about it.”

So much for that. The day was off to a bad start. He’d call Blizzard and tell him that he’d deduced that Councilwoman Roanhorse was hiding Delmar. That should impress Blizzard. But naturally Blizzard wasn’t in. Chee took the manila envelope out of the in-basket. He’d see what Virginia had left for him.

The envelope had for officer chee printed across it in big letters, but nothing else. He tore it open and poured out an audiotape cassette. He turned it over. Nothing on either side to suggest what it held. He dialed Virginia to ask her who had left it. Virginia wasn’t at her desk. The radio on the shelf behind Lieutenant Leaphorn’s desk included a tape player. He’d borrow that.

But the lieutenant, like Virginia, and Blizzard, and Roanhorse, was not in. Chee left the door open behind him, turned on the radio, and slipped in the tape.

It produced the buzzes and clicks characteristic of amateur taping, then ringing sounds, and then a voice saying, “You have reached the office of Councilman Jimmy Chester. I can’t come to the phone now but leave a message after the beep and I’ll call you back.” A brief silence followed, then a beep, and then a second voice:

“Jimmy, this is Ed Zeck. If you’re there pick it up. I need to talk to you. Otherwise, call me down at the motor inn. It’s room 217 and I’ll be there until—”

“I’m here, Ed. What do you need?”

“I need your opinion. I hear some things that worry me.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe the American Indian Movement is going to mix into this. You hear that?”

“Forget it. AIM doesn’t amount to anything out here. They’re city Indians. Besides, far as Navajos are concerned, they always get on the wrong side of the argument.”

Chee stopped the tape. What the devil was this? Obviously, a telephone conversation. He recognized the scratchy voice of Zeck. Presumably the man responding to Jimmy Chester’s answering machine was, as advertised, Jimmy Chester. But should he be eavesdropping? And who had sent him this? The Nature First guy? What was his name? Applebee.

On Leaphorn’s telephone, he buzzed Virginia’s desk. Now she was there.

“What package?” Virginia asked.

“Actually, a manila envelope.”

“Not me,” Virginia said. “Somebody must have just dropped it on your desk. None of you guys ever lock a door or anything. You don’t even close them, half the time. You think nobody steals from you because you’re policemen. Well, I’ll tell you what. People walk right in here and steal your purse off your chair. Steal your jacket. I had that happen. I’ve been telling the chief for years he should have a rule about keeping the doors locked. When you’re out. Or at least closing them.” Virginia paused for a breath, giving Chee an opportunity.

“It makes everything more efficient,” Chee said, wondering why he was arguing about this. “When you need to talk to someone, you can look in and see if he’s there, or if he’s busy. That’s the way they did it at Crownpoint, too. When I was stationed there. And that’s the way it was at Tuba City.”

“Well, don’t blame me, then,” Virginia said, thereby ending the conversation and leaving Chee staring at Joe Leaphorn’s radio.

Maybe the tape itself would tell him who had brought it. He pushed the play button. The memo he’d written for Leaphorn yesterday was still in the lieutenant’s in-basket. Maybe Leaphorn was out working the Eric Dorsey case, or another crime of some importance. Or maybe he had assigned himself a drive over to Flagstaff. According to the department scuttlebutt, he was supposed to have something going with a woman professor over there. The tape stopped whirring, clicked, and abruptly began speaking in a rumbling male voice with a West Texas accent.

“—what I hear. But I’ll take your word for it. The other thing. You have any push with the people at the
Navajo Times?”

“Not much. I know the reporter who covers council meetings. He interviewed me last month. That’s about it.”

“I didn’t want to get a big argument going in the press about the dump. Silence is golden sometimes. Especially when you’re dealing with tree huggers. But the paper started running letters bitching about the project. They had one in there from a tribal cop. You think we should react? You know, see if we can put a stop to getting politics mixed in with the Tribal Police. Lot of people would feel strongly about that, Jimmy.”

“No,” Chester said.

“Just hope for the best, you mean? Hope nothing gets stirred up.”

“Yes,” Chester said. “Let’s talk about my money.”

The speakers emitted the tinny sound of Zeck’s laughter. “The check’s in the mail,” he said. “Just like I keep telling you.”

“I’m not laughing,” Chester said. “The bank’s not laughing. I’ve got to pay off that note. Remember, it was me that signed the paper.”

For a moment the only sound was the tape running.

“All right then,” Zeck said. “Twenty-two thousand something. I’ll have to do some transferring around. Tell ’em you’ll have it for ’em Monday.”

“And none of this ‘check in the mail’ crap,” Chester said.

“I’ll make it a cashier’s check,” Zeck said.

“And what do you hear from Tano?”

“Nothing much. I think we’re all right there. Bert Penitewa’s for it. He’s a popular man there and Tano pretty well does what the governor wants. It’s not split like your Navajo council. There, the governor’s also the big man in one of the religious kivas.”

“I know,” Chester said.

“We should just leave that alone then, you think? Anything else going on I ought to know about?”

“Nothing,” Chester said. “You go on down and get that money transferred. And it’s not twenty-two thousand something. It’s twenty-two thousand five hundred and thirty. Maybe those banks don’t charge anything to loan money to you
bilagaana
guys, but us Navajos have to pay interest. Twenty-two thousand five hundred and thirty.”

“And some-odd cents, which we’ll round off. So
yaa’ eh t’eeh
for now.”

There was a click, and then only the sound of the tape running.

Chee let it run until it shut itself off. Then he rewound it, replayed the conversation, and rewound it again. He had decided where it must have come from. Who else but Roger Applebee? The environmentalist had said he knew a way to get some evidence proving Jimmy Chester was corrupt. And he had gotten it. Probably with an illegal wiretap. Actually, not a wiretap these days. More likely one of those gadgets that pick up mobile telephone conversations. He’d seen one in an electronics supply store in Farmington. But still, the tape wouldn’t be usable in court or even before a grand jury. If it was illegal, and it probably was, how could it be used?

He was thinking about that when the telephone rang.

“Joe Leaphorn’s office.”

“Joe? Is Jim Chee still working on that hit-and-run vehicular homicide case?” It was the voice of the Window Rock dispatcher. “The one where—”

“This is Chee,” Chee said. “The lieutenant’s away from his office.”

“Hey, man. You lucked out. Your suspect just confessed. Right over the radio.”

“Confessed? What d’ya mean?”

“He drove up to KNDN in Farmington, and walked in where they have that open mike for the public to make announcements on, and he said he did it, and he was sorry, and he was going to make restitution. He said he was drunk. Said he didn’t know he’d hit the man.”

“Who was it?”

“We haven’t got him yet. He walked out and drove away.”

“Wonderful,” Chee said. “Didn’t they call the cops? The people at the station?”

“I guess so. Everybody’s looking for him. Farmington police, New Mexico state cops, San Juan Sheriff’s Department. Our people at Shiprock. Everybody.”

“Well,” Chee said. “I guess I’ll go join ’em.” It was three hours over the mountain to Farmington, but the hit-and-run was his baby. Jimmy Chester would have to wait.

“WHERE ALL did you look?” Dilly Streib asked. He was standing in the door of the Saint Bonaventure School shop, looking across the clutter.

“Where?” said Lieutenant Toddy. He waved his arms in a gesture that encompassed the cosmos. “I guess you’d have to say everywhere.”

“So I guess that’s where we have to look again,” Streib said. “How about you, Joe? You got any ideas about where to start?”

Leaphorn shrugged.

“It would help me if I knew what the hell we’re supposed to be looking for,” Toddy said. He started examining the array of chisels, awls, punches, hammers, nail sets, files, and planes racked on the wall.

Streib maintained his position, leaning against the doorjamb. “If you ask Lieutenant Leaphorn that question, he’ll tell you to look for clues. Then you ask him how you know it’s a clue, and he’ll give you a wise look.”

“I’m in favor of just looking,” Leaphorn said. “You never know what you’ll find.”

“That’s Joe’s theory,” Streib said. “You don’t look for anything in particular. You just look and if you look long enough you reach retirement age.”

“At exactly the same speed as you do leaning in doorways,” Leaphorn said.

“How about this?” Lieutenant Toddy asked. He showed Leaphorn a mallet. “Could that be blood?”

Leaphorn looked at it, scraped with a thumbnail, showed the result to Toddy.

“Dried paint,” Toddy said.

“I’ll tell you what we’re looking for,” said Streib. “We hope to discover a Polaroid photo of Eugene Ahkeah with his bludgeon raised, about to hit Mr. Dorsey on the back of the head. See if he left it in the wastebasket.”

Toddy was not enjoying Streib’s humor. “We went through the wastebaskets. Went through everything.”

“I was just kidding,” Streib said. He pushed himself off from the doorjamb and began opening drawers. “I wonder what these things could be for.” He displayed a small, shallow wooden box.

“They’re forms for sand-casting metal,” Toddy said. “You put wet sand in and make the shape in it that you want and then you pour in the molten silver—or whatever you’re working with. That one looks like the size you’d use to cast a belt buckle.”

“How about this one?” Streib handed Toddy a much deeper box, almost a cube. “Maybe some sort of jewelry?”

“No idea,” Toddy said. He put it on the workbench.

Leaphorn picked it up. It was newer than the more standard casting forms and looked carefully made. The sand inside it was packed hard and crusted by the intense heat of the metal it had formed. He stared at the indentation. An odd shape. What could it have been? One of those fancy desk cigarette lighters maybe. But it looked too round for the Aladdin’s lamp shape favored for those. In fact, the shape pressed into the sand must have been close to a perfect hemisphere. Maybe just a little ovoid. But Leaphorn now saw it had had lettering on it. He could make out the shape of what might have been a one, and a clear eight next to it. Eighteen. But what next? Beyond the eight was a mostly erased shape that might have been a six, but the sand was too disturbed to keep a legible imprint. He placed the form carefully in the drawer of the workbench. He’d waste a little time later trying to find out which student was working with it and what sort of object the box was forming.

They spent almost an hour in the shop before Toddy declared the press of duty at Crownpoint and left. Streib decided he should question Mission volunteers again. He disappeared toward the living quarters. Leaphorn remained. Except for the sand-cast form, he had found nothing that provoked interest except some shavings from a wood much heavier and darker than the oak, fir, and pine that almost everyone seemed to be using. Nor did it match the various half-finished tables, benches, table-lamp bases, rolling pins, and kitchen shelves racked in the workshop storeroom. Leaphorn put a sample of it in an envelope and into his pocket. Later he would find someone to explain it. Or perhaps he would simply forget it. It had more relevance to his personal curiosity than to this homicide investigation.

It had always seemed to Leaphorn that the question without a satisfactory answer in this affair was why it had happened. If a man was drunk enough, not much motive was required. But Ahkeah had to have had some reason. Dilly suggested that he’d run out of whiskey money, had come here to borrow from Dorsey, had been turned down, and had killed Dorsey in the resulting rage. And if a drunk Ahkeah’s reason had been money, why hadn’t he sold the silver ingots he’d taken? It would have been easy enough to cash them in. Why stash them away in a box under his house? Any pawnshop in Gallup or Grants, or any of the places that sold supplies to jewelers, would buy them. Or, if he was worried about the sale being traced, Ahkeah probably knew a dozen Navajos or Zunis or Acomas or Lagunas—white people, too, for that matter—who were making silver stuff and who wouldn’t ask questions if the price was right.

Leaphorn still had motive on his mind as he worked his way methodically through the grade books he’d found in a workbench drawer. He was reading the man’s notes on class projects when he heard Father Haines. The priest was standing hesitantly at the door, a thin, gray man, slightly bent.

“Any luck?”

“None,” said Leaphorn, who had never believed in luck. He motioned Haines toward the chair beside him and carefully removed the cube-shaped form from the drawer. “You have any idea what this form is for?”

Father Haines inspected it, frowned, shook his head. “It looks like there might have been some writing pressed down in there. Maybe it was some sort of medal. A trophy for something.”

“It looks like the wrong shape,” Leaphorn said. “I think it must have been something sort of round—like a small billiard ball. A silver ball.”

“He always tried to get the kids to make useful things. Or things they could sell.” Haines laughed. “I think Bonaventure School is flooding the market with authentic Navajo sand-cast silver belt buckles and bracelets and so forth.”

“And it sounds like—” Leaphorn tapped Dorsey’s class notes. “—these kids were making pretty good stuff.”

Haines laughed. “Actually, some of them were. Some of these kids are really talented. But Eric had this policy of trying to make these youngsters feel a little more artistic than they actually were. I don’t think he ever saw a student-made belt buckle he couldn’t find something good to say about.”

“There wasn’t much turquoise here,” Leaphorn said. “Was it all accounted for?”

“Probably. He didn’t ever have much. No budget for it. If one of the boys was doing something special, he’d usually just dig up some money and buy some stones in Gallup.” Haines paused. “You don’t think Eugene did it, do you?”

“I don’t know. You saw the box they found under his place. It looks like he was the one.”

They thought about it. Father Haines had been on the reservation long enough to have learned from the Dineh something that some whites never learn in a lifetime—that there’s nothing wrong with mutual silence. The clock above the door made one of those sounds that old electric clocks sometimes make. The high notes of a shout and a dog barking drifted faintly through the glass. All the smells of a high-school crafts shop were in the air around them—machine oil, wood shavings, resin, turpentine, wax, paint, sawdust. Healthy smells, Leaphorn thought, that covered up the smell of a good man’s blood.

“Last winter Eric and some of the rest of us had gone down to that big Giant Truck Stop beside Interstate 40. We were having dinner at the coffee shop there. Eric got a phone call. Some kid—one of Eugene’s nephews—was calling from here to tell him that Eugene was having car trouble. So Eric wraps his hamburger and his fries in a napkin and says he has to go. I remember I said, ‘Eugene can wait a little while. Sit down and finish your supper.’ And I said, ‘He’s probably half-drunk anyway—feeling no pain.’ And Eric said, ‘Yeah, that’s why I’ve got to hurry.’”

“So you don’t think Eugene killed him.”

“I don’t know,” Haines said. “With whiskey involved, you can’t tell. Mothers kill their children when they’re drunk. Or drink when they’re pregnant, which is about as bad as killing them.”

But, Leaphorn was thinking, even with whiskey there has to be some sort of reason. Something to ignite the lethal rage. He extracted the envelope from his pocket, shook the shaving onto his palm, and showed it to the priest. “Any idea what that’s from?”

“It looks like it came off a table leg or something like that. It looks like a shaving from a lathe.”

“What kind of wood?”

Haines inspected it. “Dark and tough,” he said. “I know what it’s not. It’s not any kind of pine, or fir, or cedar, or oak unless there’s some species that has a darker color. It’s not redwood. I’m pretty sure it’s not mahogany and I know it’s not maple.”

“Something exotic,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe teak or ebony or something like that.”

“I guess so,” Haines said. “I have an idea that ebony is real black and teak’s lighter. Maybe ebony. But I’m no expert.”

“How often is this room swept out? Cleaned?”

“Every evening,” Haines said. “Dorsey did it himself. He was a very neat man.” He made a gesture taking in all the room. “Normally if you walked in here when a class wasn’t in session you’d find it slick as a whistle. No sawdust anywhere. Working surfaces all clear. Everything in its place. Not like this.” He made a disapproving face at the cluttered room. “But after we found Eric’s body, and the police came, they asked us to lock the room and not touch anything until the investigation was finished.”

Leaphorn laid the shaving on the desk. “There was quite a bit of this dark stuff over by the lathe and some more of it over on the bench with the woodworking vise. So I guess it had to get there the morning he was killed.”

“Yes,” Haines said. “Eric always swept up. And he used one of those shop vacuums and a dust cloth. He said that was one of the things he wanted to teach the kids. You want to be a craftsman, or an artist, you have to be organized. You have to be neat.”

“Did he allow some of the students to take out the projects they were working on?”

Haines looked surprised. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe if they were sanding something. Something they could do at home. But the silversmithing projects, we kept them locked up in the storeroom.”

Leaphorn touched the shaving with his finger. He said, “I searched through the storeroom, and every place in here I can think of. I can’t find anything that looks like this wood.”

“Oh,” said Father Haines. He considered. “Maybe one of the students was working on—” He left the sentence unfinished.

“Maybe,” Leaphorn said. “We’ll talk to the students and find out what everybody was doing in woodworking. But Dorsey kept a list of what the kids were making. Nothing looked like it would be using a fancy wood.”

“So you’re thinking that maybe—”

“I’m thinking I’ll take another look around Eugene Ahkeah’s place to see if I can find it there.”

And he was also thinking that he would do a little crossing of jurisdictional lines. Dilly Streib could arrange it for him. They’d make a trip to Tano Pueblo just as Jim Chee had suggested in that memo he’d left. Leaphorn had decided as soon as he’d read it that he wanted to find out what was in the wagon the clown was pulling. What was it that had caused the people of Tano to quit laughing and suddenly become serious? And he wanted to see if he could find something made of heavy, dark wood in the place where Francis Sayesva stayed when he came home to Tano. Came home to educate his people, or maybe to warn them about something. And to die.