Sacred Clowns

“That one’s not our case and I don’t know everything about it. But from what I do know, they don’t have a suspect, or a motive, or anything much to go on. Just somebody showed up at the little building off the plaza where the koshares dress and rest and so forth. He hit this guy on the head and nobody saw a thing.” Leaphorn paused again, watching her.

She sipped her tea, looked at him over the rim, put down the cup. “Go on,” she said. “If the story stopped there you wouldn’t be telling me.”

“It just happened that Jim Chee was there when the homicide took place,” he said. He told her about the effort to find the Kanitewa boy to keep his Navajo grandmother happy, and what had happened, and about Chee going back with Sergeant Blizzard, the cop from the BIA. Finally, he told her the co

Bourebonette picked up her cup again and sipped.

“What do you think?” Leaphorn asked.

“Don’t rush me,” she said. “You’ve had all day to think about it.”

“Take your time.”

“Right off the bat, I’d say you picked a smart assistant. Pretty smart, Chee. Good thinking. Making the co

“Kanitewa,” Leaphorn said. “Tomorrow, when I get back on the job, we’ll see if we can find out.”

“He’ll tell you?”

“Why not? If we can find him. And unless it has something to do with his religion.”

“I was thinking that. He’s a teenager. Old enough to be initiated, I’d think. I don’t know much about Tano specifically. But I’d think they’d be like the other Pueblos.”

“So would I,” Leaphorn said. “But how do you think the two things co

“What do you think could have been in that package? The one Chee mentioned, wrapped in the newspaper?”

“We’ll try to find out tomorrow,” Leaphorn said. “Probably will.”

“If it’s not something religious.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He felt an intense urge to yawn, stretch. Instead, he settled deeper into the chair. “The trouble is, we don’t have enough details to speculate.”

“We can speculate anyway,” Professor Bourebonette said. “Maybe the boy had some way of knowing what’s-his-name. The teacher who got killed. Maybe there was some co

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn’t answer, having gone soundly to sleep in the recliner.

Chapter 8

JIM CHEE noticed a neat stack of papers in his in-basket when he walked into his office. He ignored them for a moment to stand staring out his window. The window was why he’d picked the office over a slightly larger one when he was transferred from Shiprock to Window Rock. From it he could look eastward at the ragtag southern end of the Chuska Range, the long wall of sandstone along which Window Rock had been built and which, because of the great hole eroded through it, gave the capital of the Navajo Nation its name.

He looked out today into a windless autumn afternoon. No traffic was moving on Navajo Route 3 and a single pickup truck was ambling northward up Route 12 past the Navajo Veterans Cemetery. The trees at Tse Bonito Park were yellow, the roadsides were streaked with the purple of the last surviving October asters, and overhead the sky was the dark, blank blue. Chee exhaled a great sigh. Would she go to Gallup with him tonight? She had neglected to answer that question. Or, worse, avoided it. Or, worse still, forgotten it.

He sat behind his desk and fished the papers out of the basket. They were clipped together under a memo sheet which bore the lieutenant’s neat script and the initials J.L.

I’m going on an extended leave at the end of next week. Attached find items I’d like you to clean up before then.

The first item was the file on the Todachene hit-and-run case. It was relatively old now, old enough normally to be dumped into the suspense file. This one was alive twenty-five percent because of the inhuman callousness involved and seventy-five percent because it had caught the chief’s eye. Chee remembered most of it but he flipped glumly through the attached reports to see if the patrol officers had found anything new. Nothing had been added to what Leaphorn had told him.

He put that aside and picked up the next one. Offering sergeant stripes for solving that one was sort of like the offers you heard about in fairy stories. You can marry the princess if you do something impossible – like putting a mountain in a pea pod. How in hell could you solve a hit-and-ru

He’d heard of the second case, too. Theft of an antique saddle and other artifacts from the Greasy Water Trading Post. Under that was one he hadn’t heard of – a series of fence cuttings and cattle thefts around Nakaibito. He flipped through the rest hoping for something unique or interesting. No such luck.

The final item in the stack was another memo sheet, initialed J.L.

Don’t forget to find the Kanitewa boy.

Chee made a rude noise and dropped the memo back on the stack. Trying to find Kanitewa was typical of the whole list. What do you do? First, you let everybody you can think of know you want a call if they see the kid. If he shows up at school, they call you. Well, he’d done that. What else can you do? The same with the vehicular homicide. It was just drone work. Call every place that fixes cars and tell ’em to tip you if somebody comes in for body work. Stake out the auto supply stores for somebody buying the right kind of right front headlight. Then, for the cow stealing, you do about a thousand miles of back-road driving around Nakaibito finding out who saw what and when, and who was eating fresh beef or drying cowhides, and -

The telephone rang.

“Jim Chee,” Chee said.

“This is Blizzard,” the voice said. “You still interested in that kid?”

“Kanitewa? Sure.” Chee felt a mixture of surprise and pleasure. Blizzard wasn’t quite as hardassed as he’d thought. “What do you hear?”

“He’s back at school,” Blizzard said.

Chee let that sink in for an unhappy moment. So much for promises. That principal said he’d call just as soon as the boy showed up. Chee could still see the man, shaking his hand, saying, “Yes sir. I sure will. I’ve got your number right here on the blotter.” The secretary had promised, too. So much for promises.

“How’d you know?” Chee asked, trying not to sound bitter.

“I’m calling from the school,” Blizzard said. “Just dropped the little bastard off there. I found him near the bus station at Grants and I gave him a ride.”

Chee didn’t ask how Blizzard knew Kanitewa would be at the bus station at Grants. The Cheye

“He was headed back to school?”

“He said he was,” Blizzard said, sounding sour. “That’s about all he did say.”

Chee looked at his watch. “So he was going back to live with the Navajo side of his family. With his father? That what he said?”

“Yep.”

“Well, thanks,” Chee said. “Appreciate the call. I owe you one. Anytime I can be helpful.” He picked up the memo, wadded it, flipped it toward the wastebasket. It hit the rim and dropped on the floor.

“Yeah,” Blizzard said. “How about right now?”

“Like what?” Chee said.