Sacred Clowns

“Oh, no,” Miss Pete said. “Nothing for me.” But she sat in the chair he indicated. “I can only stay a moment. Just long enough to represent a client.”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said, and sat across from her, thinking this was his week for guessing wrong. “Which client?”

“I represent Eugene Ahkeah,” she said.

“So I heard.”

“We had a long talk today,” Janet said. “Over at Crownpoint.” She hesitated.

She will tell me something, or ask me a favor. Or perhaps both, Leaphorn thought. But she’s making this visit on an impulse. Worst possible time, right at supper. She hasn’t thought it through. She may change her mind.

“Does Mr. Ahkeah have something to tell me?” Leaphorn said.

“No,” she said. “Well, not exactly. I guess I do.” She laughed, shook her head. “Your assistant, Officer Chee, suggested that I tell you my client is i

“Chee said you should tell me Ahkeah was i

“He was just joking,” she said, surprised at the intensity of his tone. “It was last week.”

“Not something he knew, then,” Leaphorn said, making a gesture of dismissal. “We’ve been working on separate things and I haven’t seen him for a few days. I thought perhaps you were bringing me a dispatch from wherever Chee is spending his time these days.”

Miss Pete looked faintly alarmed. “I think he has some days off,” she said.

“Correct,” Leaphorn said. “And he’s taking them.”

Miss Pete had collected herself. “This may sound unprofessional – my coming to you instead of going through the usual legal cha

Leaphorn waited.

“I realize you have a lot of circumstantial evidence,” Janet said. “The stolen materials under his house, principally, although no search warrant was issued as far as I can find out so far and that probably won’t be admitted in court. I guess you can probably place him at the scene of the homicide at about the right time, and perhaps you have some other evidence. But given time I think I’ll be able to show he was set up, that the crime was actually done by the man who made that anonymous telephone call about the box under Ahkeah’s house.”

She paused, awaited a Leaphorn reaction to all this, received a smile and a nod instead of the argument she’d expected, and hurried on.

“There’s simply no motive for Ahkeah to have done it. The prosecution will argue that the motive was theft. He needed to get money to buy whiskey. But he didn’t sell the stuff. He didn’t buy whiskey.”

She paused, waiting again for the counterargument.

Leaphorn nodded.

Miss Pete flushed slightly. She picked up the purse and put it on the chair beside her and cleared her throat.

“Totally aside from his i

Miss Pete stopped, looked at him, waited for a response.

“What would you like me to do?”

“I came to ask you if you would ask Mr. Streib to recommend to the court that Mr. Ahkeah be released on his own recognizance.”

Leaphorn thought a moment. “All right,” he said.

Miss Pete looked startled. She picked up the purse and put it down again. “All right? You mean you’ll do it?”

“I’ll call him this evening.” Leaphorn looked at his watch. “I’ll give him time to eat his supper. I think he’ll go along with it. Mr. Streib is usually pretty reasonable.”

He was watching Miss Pete, who was struggling to replace the amazement on her face with something less revealing. She won the battle, and then produced a nervous laugh.

“You know,” she said, “Jim said: ‘Tell the lieutenant Ahkeah is i

“He was,” Leaphorn said, smiling at her. “It just happens that I agree with you. Even if Ahkeah did it, he isn’t going to run anywhere that we can’t find him. And you may be right about him being not guilty.”

Miss Pete had recomposed herself. “I wish the police would concentrate on finding who it was who set Ahkeah up. I think that’s what happened. Whoever killed Mr. Dorsey saw Ahkeah at the Bonaventure Mission. They noticed he was drunk and decided he’d be perfect as the fall guy.”

“Possibly,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking, I like this young woman. I like the way she works for her client, and maybe I will be needing a lawyer myself if they decide to charge me with concealing evidence of an illegal wiretap. And he was thinking that he could see now why she appealed to his assistant.

“Do you know where I can find Jim Chee?”

Miss Pete looked surprised. “No.”

“Or how to get a message to him?”

“No.”

Leaphorn allowed himself to look disappointed, which was easy, because he was.

“I thought you might,” he said. “I have gotten the impression that Jim counts his time wasted when you are not nearby.”

It seemed to Leaphorn that Miss Pete looked sad to hear this.

“We’ve been friends a long time,” she said. “He tells me his troubles. I tell him mine.” She dismissed all this with a shrug, but her expression canceled that.

“It’s good to have someone you can talk to like that,” Leaphorn said. “I apologize. I must be sounding like an overaged cupid. I guess I read Jim all wrong. We have an old hit-and-run case – totally hopeless – but the chief wants it solved and there’s probably a promotion there for whoever can nail the guy. I think Chee’s working on it hard because he thinks with sergeant stripes he would look to you more like a worthy marriage prospect.”

Miss Pete’s expression, if Leaphorn read it right, went from irritation, to surprise, to sorrow.

She exhaled, picked up the purse again, and put it down.

“I don’t normally behave like this,” Leaphorn said. “Normally I’m pretty good at minding my own business. ‘Herd your own sheep,’ as my mother used to teach us. I’m Jim’s boss and I like him, and I worry about him sometimes.”

“I worry about him too,” she said. “But I think you have sort of misinterpreted things.” She produced a weak smile. “So did I. I was thinking in terms of Romeo and Juliet. The wrong families and all that.”

It took Leaphorn a moment to understand. “Clans,” he said, and made a wry face.

“Well, actually I think the clan business is all very ambiguous. Only my father was a Navajo. And it’s hazy on his side, too. But Jim, you know, I think maybe he’s not the marrying kind. So, even a hazy, ambiguous clan taboo can be useful.”

“Ummm,” Leaphorn said. What in the world was he doing, he thought, behaving just as Emma would behave, trying to be a matchmaker? This was absolutely none of his business. But he had found that he liked Janet Pete. He hadn’t expected to like her. And when you looked past his various flaws, you had to like Jim Chee, too. So, to hell with it, he would continue interfering. Emma wouldn’t believe he was doing this, but she would certainly approve.

“There’s something hard for normal people to understand about Jim Chee,” he said. “He’s an odd sort of idealist. He wants to become a practicing hataalii. He wants to be a bona fide traditionalist. To be a singer of the curing ceremonials. Not just to be a shaman, but to be a really effective one.” Leaphorn paused, looking for some general statement to sum this up, and his own attitude toward it. “It makes any sort of taboo more powerful than it would be to me – and probably to you. Officer Chee wants to save his people from the future.”