Sacred Clowns

He had put it on the dashboard, pushed himself erect, looked at Chee and then at his watch. “I see you’re operating on Navajo time,” he said.

Chee had let it pass and let Blizzard tell him what had happened. That hadn’t taken long. Blizzard had told the boy to wait at his car while he made his telephone call to Albuquerque. When he finished talking to his agent-in-charge and came back to the car, the boy was gone.

“The school buses were loading up and leaving when I went in to use the phone. So I found out which one he’d take to get home, and chased it down, but he wasn’t on it. Then I found out where he lived and went out to his daddy’s place. His stepmother was there but she said she hadn’t seen him since, he took off the first time.”

“So he didn’t go home,” Chee said. “That’s fu

“Maybe not,” Blizzard said. “When I picked him up there at Grants he was walking out toward the interstate. I didn’t ask him where he was going. I just let him in the car, and he was in before he knew I was a cop, and then I told him I’d give him a ride back to his school.”

“So maybe he was actually headed somewhere else.”

“I should have found out,” Blizzard said, sounding repentant. “He told me he’d gone in the bus station to buy a ticket but he didn’t have enough money. I figured the ticket was just to Thoreau.”

“Probably right,” Chee said.

“Maybe,” Blizzard agreed. “He acted nervous. I think I told you that.”

“His stepmother. Did she give you any guesses about where he might be staying? Kinfolks? Friends?”

“She said she had no idea. Didn’t have a clue. She wasn’t very talkative.”

That hadn’t surprised Chee. He had stopped thinking of Blizzard as a Cheye

“Let’s go find the school bus driver,” Chee said.

That had proved easy. His name was Platero, he lived less than a mile from the school, and, yes indeed, he could tell them who was Delmar’s best friend. It was a boy named Felix Bluehorse. “Sometimes Felix gets off at his place, and sometimes vice versa,” Platero said. “Bluehorse used to go to school here, before he switched over to Thoreau, and we still give him a ride sometimes. They’re good buddies.”

Even better, Felix Bluehorse’s mother worked for the Navajo Communications Company and lived in Crownpoint. Better yet, Felix was home when they got there and was anxious to talk to somebody. But first, he wanted to see their police identification. Felix was small and about sixteen, with enough white blood mixed with his Navajo genes to make him vulnerable to acne. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s mobile home looking down on them. Obviously, he was enjoying this.

“I’ve got to be careful who I talk to,” Felix said. “Somebody’s after Delmar.” He looked at Blizzard, then at Chee, savoring their reaction.

Chee waited. They were in Navajo country, but it was Blizzard’s case.

“Who?” Blizzard asked. “Why?”

“The man who killed Mr. Dorsey,” Felix said.

Abruptly, it wasn’t Blizzard’s case. Now it was Chee’s case.

“You know what,” Chee said. “I think you have some very important information. Can we come in and sit down and talk about it?”

In the crowded Bluehorse living room it developed that Felix Bluehorse did have quite a bit of information, if one could only calculate what it meant.

Chee was thinking of that now, going over it in his mind, reading through the report he’d typed for Lieutenant Leaphorn, wondering if he’d left anything out. If he had, it was too late to do anything about it. There was a tap on the door, it opened, and the lieutenant looked in at him. The lieutenant looked old and tired.

“Virginia said you were looking for me.”

“Yes sir,” Chee said. He stood, handed Leaphorn the file folder.

“You find him?”

“No sir,” Chee said. “Well, not exactly. Blizzard found him…”

Leaphorn’s expression stopped Chee. It was a broad, happy grin.

Chee hurried on. “… at Grants, and he picked him up and took him to Crownpoint.” Chee swallowed. “But he got away again.”

Leaphorn’s grin disappeared. He tapped the folder. “It all in here?”

“Yes sir.”

“I’ll read it,” Leaphorn said. His tone suggested to Chee that reading it would not have high priority.

“It co

Leaphorn took his hand off the doorknob, flipped the report open, sca

But before they talked, Leaphorn eased himself into the chair behind his desk, put on his glasses, slowly reread Chee’s report, placed it on the desk top, restored his glasses to their case, put the case in his shirt pocket, and looked at Chee for a long moment.

“What’d you think of the Bluehorse boy?”

“He seemed like a nice kid,” Chee said. “He wanted to cooperate. Enjoying the excitement, somebody paying attention to him. Liking being important.”

“He said he had no idea where Kanitewa was hiding out. You think that’s true?”

“Maybe,” Chee said. “I doubt it. I’d bet he could give us two or three guesses if he wanted to.”

Leaphorn nodded. “He told you that Kanitewa thought the man who killed Dorsey would be after him?”

“Right,” Chee said.

“And the man was a Navajo?”

“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed. “I think he actually said Kanitewa told him it was a man he’d seen at Saint Bonaventure Mission. You know, you’re dealing with a hearsay, secondhand description. He said Kanitewa said this man was medium-sized and kind of old. I think we just took for granted we were talking about a Navajo because he didn’t say ‘white,’ or ‘Chinese,’ or ‘Hispanic.’”

Leaphorn produced an affirmative grunt. He extracted his glasses, reread part of the report.

“You say here Bluehorse said he didn’t know whether Kanitewa had actually witnessed the crime.”

“We pressed him on that. He said he wasn’t sure. Maybe Kanitewa had actually seen it. But he didn’t tell him he had. I’d say if Delmar had seen it, he’d have said so. And he would have yelled. Reported it.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said.

“I’d guess that when he heard the radio broadcast about Dorsey being killed, he remembered seeing this guy going into the shop and put two and two together.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Could it be Eugene Ahkeah?” Chee asked.

Leaphorn said, “Big. Kind of old. That could be just about anybody. Could be Ahkeah. He’s not much older than you. But for a teenager, ‘kind of old’ is anybody over twenty.”

“And Ahkeah was there that day,” Chee said. “Other people saw him?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. He sighed, got up, walked to the window, and stood, hands in his pockets, looking out. “We’ve got our man in jail,” he said, finally. “We’ve got him at the scene. There’s no question he had the opportunity. We’ve got a good motive – theft plus drunke

“Why?”

Leaphorn shook his head, laughed. “Be damned if I know why. I used to think I was logical. Usually I am. It’s just that this Ahkeah seemed wrong for it.” He walked around behind the desk, rummaged in the drawer, and took out a box of pins. “Ever have that happen to you? Your brain tells you one thing. Your instinct another.”

“Sure,” Chee said. “I guess so.”

“And which one is right?” In the map on the wall behind his desk he put a pin at Tano Pueblo, and another between Crownpoint and Thoreau, about where Kanitewa had stayed with his father. Chee noticed they had pink heads, the same color as the pins already stuck in the map at Thoreau, and at the place in Coyote Canyon where Ahkeah’s family lived. Leaphorn dropped the surplus pins back into the box. “Did you ever wonder why I fool with those pins?”