Sacred Clowns (16 page)

“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.

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 Della 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 Sam 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?”

“I would,” Leaphorn said. He glanced at his watch.

Penitewa hoisted himself out of the chair, took the black cane from the wall, and handed it to Leaphorn.

The weight surprised Leaphorn. Ebony was a heavy wood indeed. He ran his hand down the smooth surface, looked at the tip—which seemed to be made of steel—and then at the head. Silver, inscribed a. lincoln, pres. u.s.a. and 1863.

Above that was the name of the pueblo. He ran his thumbnail under the L and examined the nail. What it had scraped away looked a little like wax but it was probably something more professional than that. Probably some sort of molding putty sold in art supply houses for just this purpose.

Penitewa was watching him. “Are you checking whether I’m a neat housekeeper?”

“No sir,” Leaphorn said. He got up and showed Penitewa first the head of the cane and then the residue on his thumbnail. “I think someone stuck the head down into some sort of molding clay. I think they made an impression of it to make the copy. Could that be possible?”

Penitewa looked surprised. “Who could it have been?” He sat again, put the cane on the table in front of him. “Lot of people, I guess.”

‘It’s always left on the wall like that?” Leaphorn said. “Or do you lock it up somewhere?”

“It’s the governor’s symbol,” Penitewa said. “Whoever is governor, it hangs on the wall in his office. It’s the tradition. When I was a little boy, my great-grandfather was governor. It hung on the wall in his house.”

Leaphorn wanted to ask if anyone had ever stolen it, which would have been a stupid question since there it was, in the governor’s hand. But Penitewa seemed to sense the thought.

“I think President Lincoln sent nineteen of them out from Washington—one for each of the pueblos. The Spanish started it in 1620.” He pointed to the heavier cane. “Some of the pueblos got another one—three canes altogether—one from the Mexican government when Mexico won its independence. And a couple of pueblos, so I’m told, don’t have any anymore.”

“Stolen?”

Penitewa shrugged. “Disappeared,” he said. “Who knows what happened to them. But nobody has ever tried to steal ours.”

“If someone made a molding of the head of this one, it probably happened fairly recently. Have you had any unusual visitors this month? Anyone you left alone in here long enough for that to be done? Anyone suspicious?”

Penitewa considered, shook his head.

“How about Delmar Kanitewa? We think he brought the replica from Thoreau to his uncle.”

“Delmar,” Penitewa said. He thought. “No. He’s been away living with his dad.”

“How about Francis Sayesva?”

If the governor had needed to think about that, it had been long ago. His answer was instant.

“Francis was my friend.”

“I heard that,” Leaphorn said. “But I was told you disagreed about a lot of things. Where to put the grade school when it was built. Whether the pueblo should lease the old Jacks Wild Mine for a dump. Where to locate the new housing when the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted it built. Things like that.”

Penitewa laughed. “Francis loved to argue,” he said. “Somebody would want to do something, Francis was always the one to tell the council why not. Somebody wanted to stop something, Francis was there saying why to do it. But he was a good man. He was one of the valuable people.”

“You don’t think he had the copy made?”

“No. Not Francis.”

“Teddy Sayesva said that Francis told Henry Agoyo to put the Lincoln Cane in the wagon. Teddy said this would be a terrible insult to you and that Agoyo didn’t want to do it, but Francis told him to. Did you know that?”

“Of course I knew it. One of my nephews was the other clown helping with the wagon.” The governor smiled. “Tano is a small place, Lieutenant. Not many interesting things happen. Everybody was talking about that cane.”

“Was it an insult? You said Francis was your friend. Why did he do it?”

The governor smiled again. “If you had known Francis you would know the answer. He must have thought I was going to sell the cane. That would be terrible. So he was willing to do whatever he could do to stop it. Even if it was against an old friend. He was what you call ‘an honorable man.’”

Leaphorn considered this. It demanded another question that was hard to ask. He cleared his throat.

“I am a stranger to Tano culture,” he said, “but it would seem to me that if Francis was your old friend, and an honorable man, he wouldn’t insult you that way in public if he didn’t think it was true. Do you really believe he thought you were going to sell the Lincoln Cane?”

“He must have believed it,” he said. “That bothered me, too. It still does. I don’t think he would have done it if he didn’t believe I was about to betray the people.”

Another hard question. “What would have caused him to think that?”

“I don’t know,” Penitewa said. “I am trying to find out.” He looked at Leaphorn. “It hurts when you think an old friend like Francis died thinking you were a traitor.”

THE NAVAJO Agricultural Industries project tended to affect Jim Chee in different ways— depending on his mood. If he drove past it in a “patriotic Navajo mood” it filled him with both pride and regrets. He was proud of what the tribe had done with its water rights from the San Juan River and an expanse of once-worthless sagebrush hills. His regrets focused on what might have been had not the whites wrested all the good rich bottom land away from the tribe.

On the north side of Highway 44, the ocean of sagebrush stretched away into the Angel Peak badlands. On the south side of the highway where the NAI held domain, the black-gray-silver of the sage had been replaced by mile after mile of green, the shade depending on the crop and the season. Dense stands of cornstalks alternated with thousands of acres of potato fields, followed by great circles of kelly green alfalfa, and incredible expanses of onions, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, sugar beets, whatever crop the market demanded. And all of this had been made, possible by a rare and seemingly small Navajo victory over white land-grabbers. Chee had found an account of it in the depths of the Zimmerman Library while a student at the University of New Mexico and had read it happily. Way back in Civil War times, and maybe before, the Navajos had built a header dam in the San Juan River to divert waters and irrigate their cornfields. Whites had already driven the Navajos off most of their rich bottom-land farms along the river and seized it for themselves. They moved in on this irrigated land as well, even though it was part of what had by then been declared Navajo Reservation. But when the Navajos prepared to fight for their homes, the U.S. Army moved in and—for the first and only time—sided with the tribe and made the squatters move out. The old Cornfield Ditch was expanded into the Fruitland Canal in the 1930s, irrigating almost 1,500 acres. More important, it maintained Navajo legal rights to the river water. While the whites had taken nearly all the good bottom land, the Navajos still owned the water and an infinity of worthless high desert hills. Now, from planting season until harvest, that water was showered out over the desert through elaborate mobile sprinkler systems. It turned the hills lush and green and produced jobs for hundreds of Navajos.

When Jim Chee was feeling patriotic, he was proud of this—proud that his people were using their water and not letting it drain down into the Colorado to produce golf courses in Las Vegas and fill the hot tubs of Beverly Hills.

Today, however, he was feeling religious. When he felt that way, the NAI bothered him. He had stopped at the NAI administrative offices and gotten directions from a puzzled clerk, who obviously wondered about this policeman’s interest in the processing of the onion crop. He turned off Highway 44 southward on the road to the warehouse complex where marketing and shipping were handled. He looked out at the stubble fields of autumn, at millions of dollars’ worth of mobile irrigation pipes parked for the winter and already being buried under the tumbleweeds blowing in from the desert; at the power lines that made it all work, and beyond this to the hills sloping southward toward the Bisti Badlands and the De-Na-Zin Wilderness. The hills were still black and silver with sage—as nature had made them before the NAI bulldozers had ripped away plant life, and the insects and mammals that fed upon it, and the birds that fed upon them. He saw the hills as the great spirit Changing Woman must have seen them. She who had taught that the earth was our nurturing mother and that earth, and all She produced, must be treated with respect. Was this business of reducing nature to great irrigated circles becoming the Beauty Way of the Navajos? This and the immense scar of the Navajo Mine, and the sawmill operations in the Chuska Mountains, and—

What was wrong with him? Why this lousy mood? He knew why. Her name was Janet. But what was her clan? And what the hell was he going to do about it? He didn’t know that. He couldn’t decide what he would do until he knew for certain that he had to decide. First he was going to catch this hit-and-run son-of-a-bitch and then he was going to drive back to Frank Sam Nakai’s place and find out what his uncle had learned. And if his uncle had learned nothing yet—had not yet gone to find the old man who was supposed to know—then he would take Hosteen Nakai to find the old man. Or if his uncle wouldn’t go, he would go himself. He didn’t want to wait.

But it is a policeman’s fate to wait. The working day had not yet ended at the produce warehouses. He cruised slowly through the gravel parking lot, looking for a dark green pickup truck with an ernie is the greatest bumper sticker. There were seven greens among the ranks of trucks and cars, three of them about the right vintage to match the description. If any of them had ever worn the bumper sticker, they weren’t wearing it now.

Chee parked his own pickup where it was partly concealed by an old Chevy conversion van, then glanced at his watch. Seven minutes until five, when the warehouse closed. He sat, not thinking of Janet Pete. He switched on the radio, still tuned to KNDN. A group Chee remembered hearing at a Tuba City Girl Dance was singing a lament about a woman who loved them, but loving them or not, had still stolen their Chevy Blazer. All was in Navajo except the truck’s trade name. The reader of the commercial that followed had a similar problem—there are no Navajo nouns for Purina Pig Chow.

A door at the side of the warehouse slid open. A man emerged wearing coveralls, followed by a procession of other men. Still more men emerged from around the building, with a scattering of women. Chee scanned them, studying them without knowing what he was looking for. A medium-sized, middle-aged, Navajo male. That narrowed it a little. It left out the women, and the very tall, and the very round, and the young bucks whom Ellie would definitely have been able to describe in more detail. Eight or ten fit the medium-middle category—probably more. One of them was standing beside the warehouse door, holding a clipboard, discussing something with two younger workers. Another was walking almost directly toward Chee. He gave Chee a glance and then climbed into the van and started the engine. Chee looked back at the man with the clipboard. Probably a foreman. He was wearing jeans and a jean jacket and a long-billed cap. The bill seemed to be bent sharply upward as if the cardboard stiffener in it had been broken.

“Aah,” Chee said. He leaned forward. Staring. Too far away. He started the pickup engine and eased it forward into the stream of vehicles leaving the lot, then turned out of the traffic flow to coast past the door. The man was still talking to the two, his back turned. Chee drove past the doorway, circled, and parked again where he could watch Clipboard. The man was still talking, his cap still met the description. But a bent-billed cap is scanty proof. The truck would be crucial to any chance of getting a conviction. Where had the man parked it?

At the warehouse door, the conversation ended. Clipboard disappeared inside. The two young men split. One disappeared around the warehouse and the other walked along the wall toward Chee. He was grinning. Chee got out of his pickup, glad he wasn’t wearing his uniform.

“That guy you were talking to,” he said. “With the clipboard. Was that Billy Tsossie?”

“You mean the foreman?” He looked back toward the warehouse door, now closing. “No. His name’s Hoski. Clement Hoski.”

“Clement Hoski,” Chee said. “Yeah, I thought he looked familiar. I need to talk to him. You know where he parks his truck?”

“I think he’s in a carpool,” the man said. “He comes in with a bunch who live out in NAI housing.”

Clement Hoski emerged from the warehouse, shut the door behind him, and trotted to a white Dodge Caravan. He climbed into the back and it pulled away, spraying gravel.

“Thanks,” Chee said. “I’ll try to catch him.”

The Caravan delivered the first two of its riders at a cluster of frame-and-plaster houses built for NAI on the hillside north of the marketing center. It pulled back onto the asphalt road. Chee gave it almost a quarter-mile start. The empty road made undetected following difficult but it also made losing someone almost impossible. About three miles later the van pulled off on the shoulder. Chee slowed. Hoski emerged, waved at the departing van, and walked up the hill where, Chee guessed, his house must be located.

Right. As Chee drove past, Hoski was walking up a dirt road toward a plank house with a pitched tin roof. An outhouse stood some fifty yards down the hill, proclaiming that unlike the NAI houses this one lacked plumbing. A pole supporting a power line behind the house declared that it did have electricity. A pile of firewood against the wall suggested that it wasn’t served by a gas line. But where was the green pickup?

Hoski was out of sight now. In the house, Chee guessed. He continued past Hoski’s access road and up the next hill. He stopped there, turned the pickup around, and got his binoculars out of the glove box.

From here he had a better view across the fold of the hill. A basketball backboard and net had been mounted on the electric pole—suggesting that Hoski had school-age children. He seemed old for that. Maybe someone lived with him. A single-wide mobile home sat on blocks behind the house. It was windowless and empty as far as Chee could tell through the binoculars. The green truck might be parked between that and the house. If it was, there would be no way to see it short of driving in there and looking. Why wait?

Chee started the engine and drove down the hill. But at the access road he parked again. Where was the truck? If he alerted Hoski and the truck wasn’t there, he would never find it. The truck was the key. When a fender hits a human hard enough to kill, there’s always evidence. If he picked up Hoski without the truck, they’d have to release him. And if Hoski had any sense, he would then make sure that the truck would never be found. Chee thought about it.

A yellow van pulled up across the highway from him. It was small for a school bus but the legend on its side read bloomfield school district. A boy climbed out. He was about fourteen, Chee guessed, a tall, skinny boy wearing a black jacket and blue pants and carrying a blue backpack. He walked across the- asphalt toward Chee’s truck, smiling.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, mister.”

“Hello,” Chee said. What would he tell the boy he was doing, parked here? He’d say he was looking for someone.

“Is this your truck?” the boy asked, still smiling. “It’s pretty.”

The boy’s eyes were a little too far apart, the bone structure of his face just a little wrong. The smile a little too innocent for fourteen. The bus was for Special Education kids. The kids with damaged brains, or bodies, or emotions, or sometimes all of those. And Chee recognized this boy’s problem. He had seen this physical evidence before. Seen it too often. They called it fetal alcohol syndrome—the doom the mother imposes on her child when she drinks while pregnant. It was another of the reasons Chee hated alcohol, hated the people who made it, and advertised it, and sold it, and poisoned his people with it.

“It’s my truck,” Chee said. “But it looks prettier when I get all the mud washed off it.”

“I think it’s pretty now.”

“I think maybe I’ll get it painted. Would green be a good color?”

“Sure,” the boy said, his smile unwavering. “Green’s good.”

Chee was aware that he was not feeling good about this. But he said, “Do you know anybody who owns a pickup that’s green?”

“Sure. My grandfather. His pickup is green.”

“Where does your grandfather live?”

The boy pointed over the hood, at the house of Clement Hoski.

“Have you come to see your grandfather?”

“I live there,” he said. “Me and Grandfather Hoski, we live there.” The boy laughed, a sound full of absolute delight. “Sometimes he lets me do the cooking. I cook eggs in the morning. And I make oatmeal. And I make tortillas. And Grandfather Hoski is going to show me how to make a pumpkin pie, and mutton stew. And how to roast piñon nuts.”

“Your mother and dad? They live there, too?”

The boy looked puzzled. “They’re gone,” he said. “It’s just me and Grandfather. He’s my friend. He goes to work and I go to school and then when we get home he teaches me how to read, and about numbers, and then we play games, with cards, and at the end of the week we do things together. We hunt rabbits and sometimes we go look at things.”

“In his green pickup truck?”

The boy laughed, utterly delighted. “It’s green. He lets me drive it. When we are way out on the dirt roads. He says I’m going to be a great driver.”

“I’ll bet you will be,” Chee said. He took a deep breath. “Where does he keep it?”

The boy looked at Chee, puzzled.

“The truck. Where does he keep the truck?”

“Up there behind the house. It’s there between our house and the old empty place where we keep things. You want to go see it? I’ll show you. It’s pretty.”

“Your name’s Ernie, isn’t it?”

“Ernie,” he agreed, nodding. “Grandfather had my name printed and put it on the back of our truck. You want to see it?”

“Not now,” Chee said. “I want to think about it.”