Sacred Clowns

“Before I went broke paying the overdue rental fees,” Davis said. “I owe you a favor for that.”

As it had happened, the jailer’s wife had been pla

“I really need to talk to this Applebee guy,” Leaphorn said. “You have any idea where I could find him?”

Davis frowned. “I know he’s here to lobby against that waste dump thing, but I don’t know who he’d be working on this evening. No idea.”

“I always wondered how you got stuck in that rental car situation. What happened?”

“Well,” Davis said, and looked past Leaphorn out across the parking lot. He shook his head. “That was a long time ago. Roger was getting his Nature First thing off the ground and he found out these big environmentalists from Frisco were coming out to see some Indian Country. Things were going well and he didn’t want to break off the talks, so he rode down to Flagstaff with ’em and went on back to California so they could introduce him to some other rich folks.”

“I meant, What happened next? Did you break his arm or what?”

Leaphorn thought then that perhaps Davis’s reputation as an honest Indian trader was due to his face. It was an honest face, not practiced at stealth or secrecy. Now it showed a flash of anger, which faded into bitterness, which faded into something like sorrow.

“Old friends,” he said. He thought about that a moment, shook his head, and produced a sardonic chuckle. “He’s done worse to me.”

Leaphorn extracted his card from his billfold and handed it to Davis. “If you find him before I do, would you ask him to contact me? At the home number.”

Davis glanced at the card, and back at Leaphorn, and back at the card. When he looked up again his honest face was no longer revealing anything at all. He nodded, banged on the door of 127 again, and walked away.

Leaphorn arrived at Saint Bonaventure School a little early and found Lieutenant Toddy waiting. He was sitting on the little foldout doorstep of the dilapidated little trailer that had been Dorsey’s home and office – drinking a Pepsi and looking bored. He broke the seal that secured the door, unlocked it, and held it open for Leaphorn.

“You know Streib already searched this place,” Toddy said. “I don’t think he found anything interesting.”

“He didn’t know what to look for,” Leaphorn said.

Toddy suppressed a grin and restored his expression to almost neutral. “That’s supposed to be better, isn’t it? Didn’t I hear somebody saying that just a little while back? ‘If you know what you’re looking for, then you look for something specific and you don’t see something that might be more important.’ Somebody was saying that.”

“Well,” Leaphorn said, gri

“Or the cane itself?”

“That’d be nice. But apparently the Kanitewa boy got his hands on it and took it to Tano and gave it to his uncle,” Leaphorn said. He was looking around the tiny room, barely high enough to stand in and not much longer than the foldout cot against the opposite wall. Everything was tidy, everything neat, nothing relaxed, nothing comfortable. A tiny table, a single chair, the cot with a filing cabinet at its foot, a small desk. On the wall, a framed family photograph – mother, father, three boys, and a girl. Beside it, another framed photo of a bearded young man with a sweatband holding back longhair. Down the wall a bit, a picture of St. Francis of Assisi. Leaphorn paused to read the poem under it.

He had conversations with the crows,

This brother to the moon

All he asked of his Lord

Was to be God’s fool.

“This shouldn’t take long,” Toddy said, “searching this place.”

It didn’t. Leaphorn started at the desk, which he guessed Dorsey must have made himself. It was fitted carefully in the area between the entrance and the sliding door which opened into a space that held a shower, a toilet stool, and a wash basin. Four wooden desk-organizer boxes stood in an exact line on the desk top, labeled unfinished business, graded, ungraded and to be filed. The “graded” and “ungraded” boxes were empty but the other two held neat stacks of papers.

If anything relating to the cane was here at all (and suddenly that seemed unlikely), it should be in the “unfinished business” box. After all, when Eric Dorsey left this tiny room never to return, the business of the cane was in fact unfinished. But if there was nothing there, Leaphorn would sort through the gray metal three-drawer filing cabinet that occupied the space at the foot of the narrow bed. He would search everywhere. It was the only lead he had, the only chance.

He found what he wanted right on top of the stack in the “unfinished business” box, as if Dorsey might have dropped it there just before he left for his shop. Streib must have looked at it, but then it would have meant absolutely nothing.

It was a sheet of poor-quality typing paper. On one side a poster advertising a meeting had been printed. On the other someone had neatly penciled in sketches of the Lincoln Cane and had scribbled a scattering of explanatory notes on dimensions and tapering and a line of jottings on the margin.

“I think this is what we’re looking for,” he told Toddy, displaying the sheet. He sat on Dorsey’s neat bed to study it.

The drawings were the sort Leaphorn had himself once made in woodworking shop long ago when he was a student in a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Little lines marked margins, and numbers between arrows marked dimensions in inches. One sketch was of the cane itself. The other was of the head, with the details of the legend carefully drawn in: A. LINCOLN, PRES. U.S.A., 1863, and TANO. Across the page was written “Misc. File.” Notes, in tidy handwriting that Leaphorn presumed was Dorsey’s, ran down the right margin of the paper:

ebony – get dark as possible

tip – cast iron. neat fit. try farrier at Farmington. grind.

head – buff. avoid dust.

$450, $250 advance.

delivery on/before Nov. 14.

November fourteenth. The day Eric Dorsey died.

Leaphorn handed the paper to Toddy. “It looks like Dorsey got cheated out of his last two hundred,” he said.

There was nothing else related to the cane in either of the baskets. The contents of the file cabinet dealt mostly with classwork, warranties on power tools, operating instructions, and orders for supplies. Leaphorn checked through those, sorting out invoices from Albuquerque Specialty Woods. An invoice on a September 13 shipment listed “One ebony, 2 x 2 x 36.”

He showed it to Toddy. “Here’s when he bought the wood,” Leaphorn said.

Toddy grunted.

There were other Specialty Woods invoices in the file. Leaphorn checked through them, backward in time, in his advertised mode of just looking without knowing for what.

“Be damned,” he said. “Look at this.”

“Well, now,” Toddy said. “It looks like Mr. Dorsey was in the cane-making business.”

The form principally covered an order of walnut, mahogany, and clear white pine. But the last item read, “No. 1 ebony blank 2 x 2 x 36.”

Leaphorn looked at the date. The shipment had been made more than two years ago.

No more ebony purchases showed up in the other invoices. Leaphorn found the “Misc. File” folder in the back of the bottom drawer. In it was a thick packet of letters secured with a rubber band, copies of correspondence about an overdue VISA card payment, notes that seemed to deal with Christmas presents, and assorted sheets of paper bearing notes. One bore a neat pencil sketch of a Lincoln Cane.