Sacred Clowns

“I don’t have anything on paper,” Applebee said. He gestured disappointment with his hands. “Nothing you’d call concrete evidence.”

“Nothing he can’t deny?” Janet asked. “What’s your source of information?”

Applebee examined his teacup and ignored both questions. “I think I can get something,” he said. He sipped, thoughtful.

“Something?” Janet asked.

Applebee smiled. “Something useful,” he said. “I think I know how I can get something he can’t deny.”

Chapter 7

THE WAITER in the Dowager Empress had long since abandoned hope of freeing his best table for another set of diners. He was outside the kitchen door, leaning on the wall, sneaking a smoke and enjoying Flagstaff’ s cold autumn air and the dazzle of stars overhead. At the table inside, Joe Leaphorn and Professor Louisa Bourebonette sat side by side. The assorted dishes of Chinese food on which they had dined were gone, replaced by a clutter of maps.

“How about this,” Bourebonette was saying. “We take the American flight to Hong Kong, transfer to Air China to Beijing. I want to do some work in the library there. About two days, maybe. Or three. You could either do the tourist thing, sort of get used to China and Chinese food and their way of doing things, or you could take a flight north from Beijing and see what you could find out about contacts in Mongolia. And I could join you because I have some stuff I want to get copies of there. Now these Chinese airline schedules are from when I was there three years ago, but it looks like…”

Leaphorn found himself only half-listening to Bourebonette’s recitation of flight schedules to places that sounded totally unreal. He was looking at the top of her head, bent over the schedules. He was thinking that the hair was gray but looked alive. Clean and healthy. (Emma’s hair to the very end had remained a glossy black.) He was thinking, Louisa needs to get her bifocal prescription changed. She is bending too low over the maps. Emma always balked at getting her eyes examined. He was thinking of how being alone in China’s interior held no terrors for him. It would be strange. Speaking not a word of Chinese would be a problem. But it would be exciting. Louisa had said arranging an interpreter would be no problem. Easy but expensive. So what? What else did he have to spend his savings on?

Professor Bourebonette looked up at him and smiled. “That sound all right? We can always change it.”

“Sounds fine,” Leaphorn said, thinking, Dilly Streib was right. She is a lovely lady.

Thinking of what Dilly had implied about sex with her. Thinking of all the things she was doing for him – taking him along as dead weight on this trip. What did he owe her for that? What would she expect?

The waiter appeared at Leaphorn’s shoulder, smelling of cigarette smoke. “Anything else I can get you? Refill on the coffee?”

“Not for me,” Leaphorn said. “Louisa?”

Professor Bourebonette gathered up her maps. “I think we’d better go,” she said. “If you’re driving back tonight. Do you have to?”

“I have a lot of work to do,” Leaphorn said. Actually, he didn’t intend to go home. He’d spent four hours on the highway this afternoon. That was enough. He was tired. There was a Motel 6 on the way out that always had a vacancy once the tourist rush was over.

“I have a guest room,” Bourebonette said. She laughed. “Or something I call a guest room. Anyway, you’re welcome to use it. You’re tired. That’s almost two hundred miles from here to Window Rock.”

“Two hundred and eighteen,” Leaphorn said.

She was studying his expression. Her own was whimsical. “I guess-” she began, then shook her head. “Think how badly I’ll feel if you go to sleep on the interstate and run into somebody and kill yourself.”

“I could get a motel room,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Thirty-five bucks. Or probably forty-five these days. Just think how much that money would buy out there in Mongolia.”

And so Joe Leaphorn’s GMC Jimmy followed Professor Louisa Bourebonette’s little Honda Civic to her house.

It stood on a narrow street only four blocks from the campus of Northern Arizona University, a brick bungalow, aged and small. The guest room was also small – very small, and crowded with a small couch, a work table, chair, computer, printer, supplies, books, odds and ends. Everything, it seemed to Leaphorn, except a bed.

“The couch folds out. Just grab those tabs at the bottom and pull. I think it’s already made up,” she said, disappearing back into the hall. “But I’ll have to get you a pillow.”

Leaphorn pulled. The couch converted itself into a thin, narrow bed. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable under a fresh white sheet.

Professor Bourebonette’s voice came through the doorway. “How about a glass of wine first? Make you sleep.” There was the sound of things being moved. “Sorry. I forgot. How about a cup of tea then? I have a box here of something called ‘Sleepytime.’”

“Fine,” Leaphorn said. “Although I don’t think I’ll need it.”

He sat in a well-worn recliner in the living room and looked at a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape on the wall across from him – a landscape of red and black erosion. Probably near Abiquiu, he thought, but it could have been done a thousand places on the Big Rez. He shifted in the recliner, relaxing, comfortable, glad he hadn’t gone to a motel. What would be would be. In the kitchen, a teakettle began to whistle. Cups clattered. Leaphorn found his mind settling into an old, old groove. This was when he did his best thinking – just before sleep. He would review whatever puzzle was bothering him, turn the facts over and over, look at all sides of them, knock them together, and then explain it all to Emma – as much to organize it in his own mind as to ask her opinion. But her opinion was often wise.

Louisa Bourebonette appeared carrying a tray. Two saucered cups, a steaming teapot, a little pitcher of cream. She put the tray on the table beside Leaphorn’s recliner, handed him his cup, dropped a tea bag into it, poured in hot water.

“I would have offered you coffee, but I’m out of decaf. And you shouldn’t be drinking the high-octane stuff this late.”

“This is fine,” Leaphorn said. “Better for me.”

“It really is,” she said, perching on the sofa across from him with her own cup. “Especially this herbal stuff.”

“How are you with puzzles?” Leaphorn said, and found himself surprised as he said it.

“Puzzles?”

“I’m working with an officer named Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “You met him last summer.”

“I remember Jim,” she said.

“He’s my assistant now. Brand new. Just started. We’re working on an odd case together.”

He paused, watching her expression. “It’s a homicide. Somebody killed a teacher out at a mission school on the Checkerboard Reservation.” He paused again.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m waiting for the puzzle.”

“It may not really be a puzzle,” he said. “Just a little oddity, probably. But, being a Navajo-” He gri

“The perfect place,” she said.

“Two cases,” he said. “Two incidents. Unco

He told her first of the death of Eric Dorsey, the telephone tip, the circumstances that had led to the arrest of Eugene Ahkeah, and his denial of the crime.

“Sounds like no mystery there,” she said.

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds typical of the homicides we work on on the reservation. Too much whiskey.”

“And that, I’ve guessed, is why you don’t drink wine,” she said.

Leaphorn sipped his tea. “Then, a day later and a long ways off at the Tano Pueblo, we have another homicide.”

“I read about that one,” she said. “The koshare killed at his kiva right in the middle of a kachina ceremonial. Created quite a sensation. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”