Sacred Clowns

Chapter 14

“WHERE ALL did you look?” Dilly Streib asked. He was standing in the door of the Saint Bonaventure School shop, looking across the clutter.

“Where?” said Lieutenant Toddy. He waved his arms in a gesture that encompassed the cosmos. “I guess you’d have to say everywhere.”

“So I guess that’s where we have to look again,” Streib said. “How about you, Joe? You got any ideas about where to start?”

Leaphorn shrugged.

“It would help me if I knew what the hell we’re supposed to be looking for,” Toddy said. He started examining the array of chisels, awls, punches, hammers, nail sets, files, and planes racked on the wall.

Streib maintained his position, leaning against the doorjamb. “If you ask Lieutenant Leaphorn that question, he’ll tell you to look for clues. Then you ask him how you know it’s a clue, and he’ll give you a wise look.”

“I’m in favor of just looking,” Leaphorn said. “You never know what you’ll find.”

“That’s Joe’s theory,” Streib said. “You don’t look for anything in particular. You just look and if you look long enough you reach retirement age.”

“At exactly the same speed as you do leaning in doorways,” Leaphorn said.

“How about this?” Lieutenant Toddy asked. He showed Leaphorn a mallet. “Could that be blood?”

Leaphorn looked at it, scraped with a thumbnail, showed the result to Toddy.

“Dried paint,” Toddy said.

“I’ll tell you what we’re looking for,” said Streib. “We hope to discover a Polaroid photo of Eugene Ahkeah with his bludgeon raised, about to hit Mr. Dorsey on the back of the head. See if he left it in the wastebasket.”

Toddy was not enjoying Streib’s humor. “We went through the wastebaskets. Went through everything.”

“I was just kidding,” Streib said. He pushed himself off from the doorjamb and began opening drawers. “I wonder what these things could be for.” He displayed a small, shallow wooden box.

“They’re forms for sand-casting metal,” Toddy said. “You put wet sand in and make the shape in it that you want and then you pour in the molten silver – or whatever you’re working with. That one looks like the size you’d use to cast a belt buckle.”

“How about this one?” Streib handed Toddy a much deeper box, almost a cube. “Maybe some sort of jewelry?”

“No idea,” Toddy said. He put it on the workbench.

Leaphorn picked it up. It was newer than the more standard casting forms and looked carefully made. The sand inside it was packed hard and crusted by the intense heat of the metal it had formed. He stared at the indentation. An odd shape. What could it have been? One of those fancy desk cigarette lighters maybe. But it looked too round for the Aladdin’s lamp shape favored for those. In fact, the shape pressed into the sand must have been close to a perfect hemisphere. Maybe just a little ovoid. But Leaphorn now saw it had had lettering on it. He could make out the shape of what might have been a one, and a clear eight next to it. Eighteen. But what next? Beyond the eight was a mostly erased shape that might have been a six, but the sand was too disturbed to keep a legible imprint. He placed the form carefully in the drawer of the workbench. He’d waste a little time later trying to find out which student was working with it and what sort of object the box was forming.

They spent almost an hour in the shop before Toddy declared the press of duty at Crownpoint and left. Streib decided he should question Mission volunteers again. He disappeared toward the living quarters. Leaphorn remained. Except for the sand-cast form, he had found nothing that provoked interest except some shavings from a wood much heavier and darker than the oak, fir, and pine that almost everyone seemed to be using. Nor did it match the various half-finished tables, benches, table-lamp bases, rolling pins, and kitchen shelves racked in the workshop storeroom. Leaphorn put a sample of it in an envelope and into his pocket. Later he would find someone to explain it. Or perhaps he would simply forget it. It had more relevance to his personal curiosity than to this homicide investigation.

It had always seemed to Leaphorn that the question without a satisfactory answer in this affair was why it had happened. If a man was drunk enough, not much motive was required. But Ahkeah had to have had some reason. Dilly suggested that he’d run out of whiskey money, had come here to borrow from Dorsey, had been turned down, and had killed Dorsey in the resulting rage. And if a drunk Ahkeah’s reason had been money, why hadn’t he sold the silver ingots he’d taken? It would have been easy enough to cash them in. Why stash them away in a box under his house? Any pawnshop in Gallup or Grants, or any of the places that sold supplies to jewelers, would buy them. Or, if he was worried about the sale being traced, Ahkeah probably knew a dozen Navajos or Zunis or Acomas or Lagunas – white people, too, for that matter – who were making silver stuff and who wouldn’t ask questions if the price was right.

Leaphorn still had motive on his mind as he worked his way methodically through the grade books he’d found in a workbench drawer. He was reading the man’s notes on class projects when he heard Father Haines. The priest was standing hesitantly at the door, a thin, gray man, slightly bent.

“Any luck?”

“None,” said Leaphorn, who had never believed in luck. He motioned Haines toward the chair beside him and carefully removed the cube-shaped form from the drawer. “You have any idea what this form is for?”

Father Haines inspected it, frowned, shook his head. “It looks like there might have been some writing pressed down in there. Maybe it was some sort of medal. A trophy for something.”

“It looks like the wrong shape,” Leaphorn said. “I think it must have been something sort of round – like a small billiard ball. A silver ball.”

“He always tried to get the kids to make useful things. Or things they could sell.” Haines laughed. “I think Bonaventure School is flooding the market with authentic Navajo sand-cast silver belt buckles and bracelets and so forth.”

“And it sounds like-” Leaphorn tapped Dorsey’s class notes. “ – these kids were making pretty good stuff.”

Haines laughed. “Actually, some of them were. Some of these kids are really talented. But Eric had this policy of trying to make these youngsters feel a little more artistic than they actually were. I don’t think he ever saw a student-made belt buckle he couldn’t find something good to say about.”

“There wasn’t much turquoise here,” Leaphorn said. “Was it all accounted for?”

“Probably. He didn’t ever have much. No budget for it. If one of the boys was doing something special, he’d usually just dig up some money and buy some stones in Gallup.” Haines paused. “You don’t think Eugene did it, do you?”

“I don’t know. You saw the box they found under his place. It looks like he was the one.”

They thought about it. Father Haines had been on the reservation long enough to have learned from the Dineh something that some whites never learn in a lifetime – that there’s nothing wrong with mutual silence. The clock above the door made one of those sounds that old electric clocks sometimes make. The high notes of a shout and a dog barking drifted faintly through the glass. All the smells of a high-school crafts shop were in the air around them – machine oil, wood shavings, resin, turpentine, wax, paint, sawdust. Healthy smells, Leaphorn thought, that covered up the smell of a good man’s blood.

“Last winter Eric and some of the rest of us had gone down to that big Giant Truck Stop beside Interstate 40. We were having di