Sacred Clowns

This aroused Streib’s interest. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe Father Haines would know. Maybe he was lonely.” She made a wry face and changed the subject. “I’ll be glad to get that information for you,” and while she was writing a reminder on her notepad, she added, “Eric Dorsey was a good man.” She looked up, at Streib and then at Leaphorn, as if challenging them to deny it. “A kind man. And gentle. And talented, too.”

“The students liked him?” Leaphorn asked.

She nodded. “Everybody liked him. He wasn’t a Catholic, you know, but I think he was a saint. Everybody loved him.”

“Not quite everybody,” Streib said. “Do you have any idea who didn’t?”

“I really don’t,” she said. “And I’ve thought about it, and thought about it, but I just don’t.” She tapped the list Lieutenant Toddy had given them with a plump finger. “I thought you thought somebody killed him to steal this stuff.”

“Maybe that was it,” Leaphorn said. “But we used to think maybe he was killed over a woman.”

“Well,” Mrs. Montoya said. “It wouldn’t be that.”

“You sound sure of that,” Leaphorn said.

Mrs. Montoya looked flustered.

“Could you tell us something that might bear on who killed Eric Dorsey?” Streib asked. “If you can, it’s your duty to tell us.”

“I talk too much,” Mrs. Montoya said. “I gossip. I shouldn’t gossip about the dead.”

“My mother used to say the only thing gossip can’t hurt is live sheep or dead people,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe it would help us find who killed the man.”

“You sounded awful sure no woman was involved. Is there some reason for that?” Streib asked.

“Well,” Mrs. Montoya said. She moved a letter from the out-basket back into the in-basket, and then reversed the process. She looked around the tiny, cluttered office, searching for something to guide her. “Well,” she repeated, “I think maybe Mr. Dorsey was gay.”

Dilly Streib, who had been looking only moderately interested, now looked extremely interested.

“Homosexual?”

She shrugged. “That’s what people thought.”

“Was Eugene Ahkeah his boyfriend?”

Mrs. Montoya looked shocked. “Of course not,” she said.

“You sound like you know,” Streib said.

“Well, Gene had a wife.” She laughed. “Once, anyway. And maybe a couple of girlfriends, too. I know Eugene isn’t gay.”

Leaphorn became aware that he was tired. Streib had occupied the only visitor chair. Leaphorn leaned a hip against Mrs. Montoya’s filing cabinet. It had been a long day. He cleared his throat.

“Do you know if Mr. Dorsey had a boyfriend?”

“No. I don’t think so. Not here, anyway. Maybe back where he came from.”

Back where he came from, if the report Streib had showed him was correct, was Fort Worth, Texas. Eric Dorsey, laboratory equipment maintenance technician, Texas Christian University, single, next of kin: Mr. and Mrs. Robert Dorsey, Springfield, Illinois. Cause of death: Blow to base of the skull.

“Maybe you could help with something that puzzled me,” Leaphorn said. “The investigating officer’s report showed he had an envelope full of gasoline credit card receipts in his room. Several hundred gallons. All bought at the station here at Thoreau, so he wasn’t going very far. You have any ideas where he was going?”

Mrs. Montoya looked surprised. “No,” she said. “He was usually around here. He had an old Chevy but…” A sudden thought interrupted the sentence. “Oh,” she said. “You know what I’ll bet? I’ll bet he paid for the gas for the water truck. He drove that on weekends. That’s when we did the deliveries. That would be just like him. Father Haines would know.”

“Water truck?” Streib asked.

“He taught during the weekdays, and drove the bus. But on weekends and some evenings he drove the water truck. Took water and food out to the hogans. Hard to get water a lot of places out here so people haul it in. But people get old, or they get sick, or their pickup breaks down and they don’t have any way.”

“That sure made for a long work week,” Streib said.

Mrs. Montoya thought she detected skepticism. Her smile went away.

“Yes,” she said. “You don’t leave your job and come out here and live in an old mobile home for that three hundred dollars a month Father pays you if you don’t want to work.”

“Is that what Dorsey was making?” Leaphorn asked. “Three hundred a month?”

“And he brought his own truck. And you have to pay for your own food out of it, of course.” She stared at Streib. “And he paid for the gas, too, I guess. Out of his own pocket.”

“Sounds like a rich guy,” Streib said. “You know anything about his family?”

“I don’t think he was rich. He told me once that his dad had retired from the fire department.”

“Couple more questions,” Streib said. “The first one is, Why do you think he was homosexual if he didn’t have any boyfriends?”

“I think he told Father Haines he was,” she said. “Ask Father.”

Streib frowned. “I want to come back to that, but the second question is, Why don’t you think he had a boyfriend?”

Mrs. Montoya shrugged her plump shoulders. “How big is Thoreau?” she asked. “If anybody has a boyfriend on Tuesday, or a girlfriend, or anything else, then everybody knows it by Wednesday.”

Streib nodded. “If Father Haines knew, wouldn’t he have a problem having a homosexual teaching these kids?”

Mrs. Montoya’s expression, which had shifted from friendly to bleak a few moments earlier, now turned wintry.

“I can’t speak for the Father,” she said. “But I know him pretty well. I’d say he’d have exactly the same problem with a gay fooling around with the students as he’d have with a heterosexual fooling with the students. He keeps an eye on that sort of thing.”

“It wasn’t happening?” Streib asked.

“It was not,” she said.

Back in the car, Streib summed up their progress for the day. “Nothing,” he said. “Nada. Except maybe we can rule out an indignant husband. We seem to be dealing here with a man beloved by all – the wrongful death of a chaste and saintly homosexual clown.”

Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He was thinking that Francis Sayesva, in his role as a koshare for his people, was also a sacred clown.

Chapter 6

JANET WAS WEARING a blue skirt, a white shirt that looked to Jim Chee’s unpracticed eye like some sort of silk, and a little jacket that matched the skirt. The total effect was to make Miss Pete look chic, sophisticated, and beautiful. All of this caused in Chee strong but ambiguous feelings – on the one hand a soaring joy at the beauty of this young woman, and on the other a leaden sense of doubt that she would ever, ever, ever settle for him. She slid into the booth with the autumn sunlight reflecting through her glossy black hair.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, dazzling him with a rueful smile. She looked at her watch. So did Chee. It looked expensive. A gift, he guessed, from the lawyer she had worked with in Washington. And lived with and, presumably, loved. Being the token redskin, as she had told him herself, in the Washington, D.C., firm of Dalman, MacArthur, White, and Hertzog.

“Eight minutes late,” she said. “In Washington, I could blame it on the traffic. In Window Rock, no traffic to blame it on, so that won’t work.”

“Eight minutes you don’t mention,” Chee said. “You have to be a lot later than that to claim you’re working on Navajo time.” He noticed that his voice sounded perfectly natural.

“I have an excuse, though. The phone rang just as I was leaving. It was Roger Applebee. He’s staying at the i

“Sure,” Chee said. “The Nature First guy. I’d like to talk to him. We got a glimpse of him there at Tano. What’s he doing in Window Rock?”

“What everybody’s doing in Window Rock,” she said. “He’s lobbying.” She gestured around the room. The tables in the coffee shop of the Navajo Nation I