those?”
He listened. “Do you know if he had any interest in that sort of thing?” Listened again. “Okay, thanks. Yes, I’d like to talk to him.”
Leaphorn waited. “Father Haines?” he said. “It’s Joe Leaphorn. I’d like to talk to you if you have the time.”
The glass coffeepot on Father Haines’s hot plate was about two-thirds full. He motioned them to chairs and said, “What’s up?”
“We have some more questions about Eric Dorsey,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe you can help us.”
“Sure,” Haines said. He noticed that Chee was staring at the coffeepot, face full of yearning. “But how about a cup of coffee first?”
“Not a bad idea,” Leaphorn said.
It took a moment for Haines to rinse two cups and do the pouring.
“I guess you noticed that Eric’s parents still haven’t claimed his possessions,” Haines said. He sighed. “Those poor people. The world is indeed full of sin and sorrow.”
“I was going to ask you if Mr. Dorsey had any interest in environmental problems. Air pollution, saving whales, strip mining, water pollution, nuclear problems, anything like that.”
“I don’t think so,” Haines said. “All he cared about was people. Nurse the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked. That was Eric’s mission.”
“You’re pretty sure, I gather.”
Haines laughed. “I think you could say I’m certain. A lot of these volunteers here are socially active in various ways. I guess you have to be to work for three hundred bucks a month and live in the kind of housing we provide. And so you hear a lot of talk about such things. Pollution from the Four Corners Power Plant, and the damage done to the Taos Mountains by Molycorp, and how you can’t see across the Grand Canyon anymore because of the smog in the air, and the dangers of disposing of spent uranium fuel rods. All that. But Eric never seemed particularly interested. He wanted to talk about how to get a water supply out to the hogans, or get the kids inoculated. People things.”
“Do you remember if he showed any interest in that Save the Jemez movement?” Leaphorn asked. “That was when people were putting on the pressure to stop strip mining of perlite up above the Jemez Pueblo. They use the stuff to give blue jeans that worn-out look – stonewashed, they call it – so the plan was to get people to boycott stonewashed jeans.”
“Really?” Haines said, grinning broadly. “No,” he said, the grin developing into a chuckle. “I can just imagine Eric’s reaction to something like that. After he got over thinking it was just silly, he’d begin worrying about who would feed the miners’ kids if the boycott worked and they shut down the mines.”
“Did you ever see one of these before?” Leaphorn asked, handing Father Haines the poster.
Haines read it. “By golly,” he said. “They really do wear out those blue jeans before they sell them. I thought you were kidding.”
“Maybe some of the other volunteers were involved with this movement,” Leaphorn said. “Were any posters like this stuck up around here?”
“No.” He shook his head and laughed. “This one I would remember.”
“Would you have any idea how this got to Dorsey’s room? Or why he’d keep it?”
Father Haines had no Idea. They finished their coffee, walked back into the cool autumn sunlight, and stood beside Chee’s pickup, talking. Leaphorn stood beside the cab, his back as straight as the crease in his uniform trousers. Chee dropped the tailgate and sat on it. He was tired. And happy. Almost no sleep last night. Ah, Janet, he thought. Why did we waste so much precious time? But Leaphorn was reviewing things. He should be listening.
“Add it up and what do you think?”
“I think I’d get on the telephone and see if I could find out if Nature First was involved with the Save the Jemez venture,” Chee said. “And if it was, I would begin wondering why in the world Roger Applebee would be getting into the phony cane business.”
“Yes,” said Leaphorn. “Exactly. Why would he?”
They considered that. Chee had difficulty keeping focused. He would find his concentration broken by visions of Janet. Everything about her, top to bottom. Of Janet in his truck driving north from Hoski’s place, of Janet’s face while she weighed his solution of the Hoski problem against the
Leaphorn was saying something about linkages.
“Hey,” Chee said, loudly. He got down from the tailgate and stood facing Leaphorn. “I think I know why Applebee would have wanted that Lincoln Cane made.”
Leaphorn looked at him, waiting.
“Just a second,” Chee said, thinking it through. “I’m beginning to see why you want all those details in your reports.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Leaphorn said.
“And why you use those pins on your map, linking things together. If you can find the link everything makes sense.”
“All right,” Leaphorn said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Why did Applebee get the cane made?” Chee said. “For the same reason he got Chester’s telephone tapped.”
Leaphorn considered. “Maybe. Chester was up for reelection. So was the governor. I see where you’re going but you have some problems with it.”
“I do,” Chee said. “But now I understand why the crowd got so silent when the cane went by in the clown’s wagon. Those Tano people weren’t seeing an artifact for sale. They were seeing the cane as a symbol of the governor’s authority. They saw the koshare accusing the governor of corruption, of selling them out on the toxic dump issue, I’ll bet.”
Leaphorn was smiling slightly now. “Of course,” he said. “That makes sense. But we still have problems.”
“I know it,” Chee said. “Like who killed the koshare. We know it wasn’t Applebee. I guess Janet and I are both his alibi. I know we both saw him out there in the crowd on the plaza about when Sayesva was being killed. She pointed him out to me. Going to introduce us, because I’d just written that letter to the
“Well, there was no reason to do that,” Leaphorn said. “You can’t provide an inventory of the crowd. Now we can see it matters. Can you think of anything else that might matter, knowing what we know now?”
“Nothing,” Chee said.
“Applebee and Davis were both at the Tano ceremonial,” Leaphorn said. “Along with a few thousand other people. But did you see anything that might connect them?”
“Wait,” Chee said. “Sure. Davis told us they were old friends.” He stopped, remembering. And Leaphorn stood, willing to wait. Patient again.
And Chee extracted, from a memory trained by a culture which had kept its past alive without a written language, an almost exact account of what Asher Davis had told them of the Applebee-Davis friendship.
Leaphorn considered, shook his head. “Another link,” he said. “Can you see how it helps?”
“No,” Chee said. “Not yet.”
“I guess we’re finished here, anyway,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll take care of reporting this to Dilly Streib. He might have some ideas. You can get back on that hit-and-runner and the other stuff on your list.”
Chee was backing out of the parking area when he stopped. “One thing I might add to that report from Tano,” he said. “We can’t provide an alibi for Asher Davis there. He was off buying stuff. But as far as I know he could have gone back down that alley and done the job.”
“We have all the wrong alibis for the wrong people in the wrong places,” Leaphorn said.
“And one more thing,” Chee added. “I remember when I met Applebee in the coffee shop, he mentioned he sometimes collects old Navajo stuff.”
