Sacred Clowns

“I know her,” Leaphorn said. In her role as public defender in the federally funded legal aid office, Miss Pete had sometimes been a thorn in the side of the Navajo Tribal Police. DNA, they called it, short for Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agadithe, which translated to English as something like “People who talk fast to help people out.” But it seemed to Leaphorn that the people being helped out were usually the people the tribal police were chasing, and never the tribal police.

“You made a sort of outing out of it, then,” Leaphorn said. “Sort of a picnic. The three of you?”

“Four,” Chee said. “Asher Davis went along. You know, the big-”

Leaphorn violated his own custom and Navajo tradition by interrupting. This day wasn’t starting well. “The trader? Great big guy from Santa Fe?”

Chee nodded. His week was off to a terrible start. The first week on this new job, and maybe it would be the last week, too. And what if it was? He’d go back to being a patrolman. He never had been confident he could work with this guy. This supercop.

“Sounds like you sort of formed a posse? To catch the kid?” Leaphorn’s expression was totally bland.

Chee tried to match that, but he could feel his face flushing. Cops who had worked under Leaphorn before the lieutenant had been shifted into this new Special Investigations Office had warned Chee that the man could be an arrogant son-of-a-bitch.

“No sir,” Chee said. “It just happened that way. You told me to find him. I was going to start by seeing if he’d show up at his home. For the ceremonial. If he did, I’d catch him and talk to him, and find out where he was staying, and tell him to call his grandma. As instructed. Miss Pete wanted to see the kachina dance, and she asked Dashee if he wanted to ride along, and then…” He let the explanation trail off.

“It violates a rule,” Leaphorn said.

“Yessir,” Chee said.

“You understand the reason for the rule?”

“Sure,” Chee said.

Leaphorn pushed himself out of his chair and walked to the window. He stood with his back to Chee, looking out.

Thinking how he’s going to tell me he’s suspending me, Chee thought. Thinking how to put it.

“It’s clouding up,” Leaphorn said. “Looks like they might be getting rain over on the Hopi Reservation.”

Chee let that pass. The silence stretched.

“Or maybe some snow. I’ve gotten out of the habit of working with anyone since they put me in this office,” Leaphorn said, still talking to the window. “One-man operation, until now. Now there’s two of us. I guess we’re going to have to have some rules.” He sat behind the desk again. “Or call them policies.”

“In addition to department policies?”

“Just our own. Sort of above and beyond,” Leaphorn said. “Like now. You did a job. I want a full report. To do that for me, you have to tell me some things you wouldn’t normally tell your district captain.”

Leaphorn paused, studying Chee. “Like you’d just as soon not tell the boss that you made a social event out of an assignment,” he continued. “That gets you, maybe, in a jam. Trouble. Some days off without pay. Easy enough to just sort of forget some of the details. Maybe you remember it a little different. Like you met Miss Pete and Dashee and Asher Davis there at the kachina dance. That would have sounded perfectly plausible. I’m glad you decided not to handle it that way.” He studied Chee. “You must have thought about it.”

Leaphorn paused, waited for a response.

Chee, who hadn’t thought about it, just shrugged. He was guessing what the lieutenant was driving at. He was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.

“My point is that when we’re working on something, I want you to tell me everything. Everything. Don’t leave out stuff you think is trivial, or doesn’t seem to bear on what we’re interested in. I want it all.”

Chee nodded, thinking: Right. Officer Chee as eyes, ears, and nose. Collector of data. The lieutenant as brain, doing the thinking. Well, I have my application filed with the BIA Law and Order people and with the Apache County Sheriff’s Office and the Arizona State Police. Good resume. Good record. Well, pretty good.

Leaphorn was studying his expression. “Now,” he said. “Tell me everything Francis Sayesva did.”

It took a moment for Chee to connect the name with the plump man he had watched yesterday clowning on the roof. The man with his body painted with the stripes of the koshare. The man who somebody had clubbed to death just about forty yards from where Chee had been sitting. “Everything?” Chee said. And he began describing everything he could remember.

When he had finished, Leaphorn digested it.

“Same with the boy,” Leaphorn said, “Everything you can remember from where he was when you first saw him to the last glimpse.”

That didn’t take long.

“Anything to connect the boy and Sayesva? Anything like a signal? Anything like that?”

Chee thought. “Nothing,” he said. “The boy, he seemed to be just another spectator.”

“Sayesva was his uncle,” Leaphorn said. “Maternal uncle.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “I didn’t know that.” Maternal uncle meant a special closeness. At least to Navajos. Would it be the same for the Tano people?

“I just found out a minute ago,” Leaphorn said.

Which means on the telephone. On the call he took just as I came in. But who would be calling to tell him something like that? Who else but somebody Leaphorn had called to get just that information for him? Why would he do that?

“You thought they might be kinfolks?” Chee asked.

“You look for connections,” Leaphorn said. “Two homicides.” He reached behind him and tapped the big map on the wall behind him. “One out at Thoreau on the Checkerboard Reservation and one way over at Tano Pueblo. Nothing to link them, right?”

Chee could think of nothing, and said so. “To tell the truth, about all I know about that Thoreau homicide is what I heard on the radio.”

Leaphorn detected something that might have been resentment in the voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.” He handed Chee a file folder. “We’ll be running errands for the FBI on it.”

The file so far included only two sheets of paper, on which were the preliminary report from the investigating officer at the Navajo Tribal Police office in Crownpoint. It didn’t tell Chee much he hadn’t already heard. Eric Dorsey, aged thirty-seven, wood- and metal- work teacher, school bus driver, and maintenance man at Saint Bonaventure Indian Mission. Found dead on the floor of his shop by students arriving for their afternoon class. Apparent cause of death: a blow on the back of the head. Apparent motive: theft. The door of a supply cabinet usually locked was found open. An unknown quantity of silver ingots believed missing. No witnesses. No suspects.

“I can’t see anything to connect them,” Chee said.

“Sayesva was a koshare? That right?”

“Right,” Chee said, baffled.

“Do you see anything in that Dorsey homicide report about a koshare?”

Chee picked up the report, reread it. “Nothing.”

“There’s no reason there should be,” Leaphorn said. “When I got through I noticed all sorts of stuff was stacked in the shop where Dorsey taught. The sort of things his students were making. Some sand-cast silver, leatherwork, woodwork projects, and two or three half-finished kachina dolls. One of them was a koshare. About a foot tall. It still needed some work. No mention of it in the report.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “The Tano homicide hadn’t happened yet. The investigating officer couldn’t know and you wouldn’t want to list all that…” Chee let it trail off. He saw the point Leaphorn was making. Unreasonable, but a point. Put everything in even if it seemed irrelevant.

“You could think of ten thousand explanations for the koshare,” Leaphorn said. “Kids in an arts and crafts shop trying to make stuff they could sell. The koshare’s an interesting figure. Easy to paint. And so forth.”

“Pretty weak link,” Chee agreed. “I can’t see it.”