Sacred Clowns

“But as you pointed out, he has an airtight alibi for the killing,” Leaphorn said. “And I’m told he has a gilt-edged reputation for integrity. His word is his bond. A lifetime of being the trustworthy trader.”

“All too rare,” Chee said. “As rare as the cane.”

“Which makes it valuable,” Leaphorn said. “The second one makes it all the more curious. It seems to have been a copy of the Tano cane. I guess you can sell anything, but the buyer would know it was stolen or, worse, a fake.”

“What we’re looking for in here is anything that will give us any hint of who hired Dorsey to make those things?” Chee asked. “No question it was the same man?”

“No question in my mind,” Leaphorn said. “You’d have to put more faith in coincidence than I can muster.”

Chee examined the sketch again. He saw nothing that Leaphorn hadn’t explained. He turned the sheet over. Dorsey had made his sketches on the back of an eight-by-eleven-inch poster, which proclaimed the Save the Jemez movement. It asked one and all to join a boycott of stonewashed blue jeans. The printed material explained that such jeans were faded with perlite from strip mines, and said strip mines were ruining the Jemez Mountain forests and the Jemez River. Nothing had been written in the margins unless the writer used invisible ink.

“You go through everything on the desk,” Leaphorn said. “See if I missed anything. I’ll start on the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and work upward.”

They worked. Twenty-five minutes passed. A bell rang somewhere followed by the sounds of kids ru

“Nothing so far,” Chee said. “How about you?”

“Did you find that hit-and-ru

“What?”

“The Todachene case. You told me you thought you had a line on him.”

“Oh, yeah,” Chee said. He laughed, and it sounded almost natural. “The witness at the radio station, the one who had a good look at his pickup truck, she said he smelled like onions. I went out to the onion warehouse at Navajo Agricultural Industries. But no such truck.”

Leaphorn leaned back in his chair, grunted, stretched his back, looked at Chee. “Onions. Did you try that produce place in Farmington? Or the grocery stores?”

“I checked the produce place.”

“Keep trying,” Leaphorn said. “That fu

“Right,” Chee said. “If he doesn’t get the truck painted. Or something.”

Leaphorn arose and stretched. “Let’s take a break. Did you bring any coffee?”

Chee shook his head, which was aching from lack of sleep and caffeine deprival. He hadn’t had a cup of coffee since di

“You look happy,” Leaphorn said.

“Um,” Chee said. “If there’s a place to get a coffee in Thoreau I’ve never noticed it.”

“I should have brought my thermos,” Leaphorn said.

“They probably have a teachers’ lounge or something where they have a coffeepot and-” Chee’s voice trailed off. He turned back to the desk, recovered the sheet bearing the Lincoln Cane sketches, looked at it again, and handed it to Leaphorn.

“Was Dorsey an environmentalist?”

Leaphorn looked at the poster, and at Chee. “By God,” he said. “Do you know when this Save the Jemez thing was going on?”

“A couple of years ago,” Chee said. “I’d say about the right time.”

Leaphorn picked up the telephone, dialed the intercom office number. “Mrs. Montoya,” Leaphorn said. “Do you know if Eric Dorsey belonged to any environmental groups? Nature First, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, any of those?”

He listened. “Do you know if he had any interest in that sort of thing?” Listened again. “Okay, thanks. Yes, I’d like to talk to him.”

Leaphorn waited. “Father Haines?” he said. “It’s Joe Leaphorn. I’d like to talk to you if you have the time.”

The glass coffeepot on Father Haines’s hot plate was about two-thirds full. He motioned them to chairs and said, “What’s up?”

“We have some more questions about Eric Dorsey,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe you can help us.”

“Sure,” Haines said. He noticed that Chee was staring at the coffeepot, face full of yearning. “But how about a cup of coffee first?”

“Not a bad idea,” Leaphorn said.

It took a moment for Haines to rinse two cups and do the pouring.

“I guess you noticed that Eric’s parents still haven’t claimed his possessions,” Haines said. He sighed. “Those poor people. The world is indeed full of sin and sorrow.”

“I was going to ask you if Mr. Dorsey had any interest in environmental problems. Air pollution, saving whales, strip mining, water pollution, nuclear problems, anything like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Haines said. “All he cared about was people. Nurse the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked. That was Eric’s mission.”

“You’re pretty sure, I gather.”

Haines laughed. “I think you could say I’m certain. A lot of these volunteers here are socially active in various ways. I guess you have to be to work for three hundred bucks a month and live in the kind of housing we provide. And so you hear a lot of talk about such things. Pollution from the Four Corners Power Plant, and the damage done to the Taos Mountains by Molycorp, and how you can’t see across the Grand Canyon anymore because of the smog in the air, and the dangers of disposing of spent uranium fuel rods. All that. But Eric never seemed particularly interested. He wanted to talk about how to get a water supply out to the hogans, or get the kids inoculated. People things.”

“Do you remember if he showed any interest in that Save the Jemez movement?” Leaphorn asked. “That was when people were putting on the pressure to stop strip mining of perlite up above the Jemez Pueblo. They use the stuff to give blue jeans that worn-out look – stonewashed, they call it – so the plan was to get people to boycott stonewashed jeans.”

“Really?” Haines said, gri

“Did you ever see one of these before?” Leaphorn asked, handing Father Haines the poster.

Haines read it. “By golly,” he said. “They really do wear out those blue jeans before they sell them. I thought you were kidding.”

“Maybe some of the other volunteers were involved with this movement,” Leaphorn said. “Were any posters like this stuck up around here?”

“No.” He shook his head and laughed. “This one I would remember.”

“Would you have any idea how this got to Dorsey’s room? Or why he’d keep it?”

Father Haines had no Idea. They finished their coffee, walked back into the cool autumn sunlight, and stood beside Chee’s pickup, talking. Leaphorn stood beside the cab, his back as straight as the crease in his uniform trousers. Chee dropped the tailgate and sat on it. He was tired. And happy. Almost no sleep last night. Ah, Janet, he thought. Why did we waste so much precious time? But Leaphorn was reviewing things. He should be listening.

“Add it up and what do you think?”

“I think I’d get on the telephone and see if I could find out if Nature First was involved with the Save the Jemez venture,” Chee said. “And if it was, I would begin wondering why in the world Roger Applebee would be getting into the phony cane business.”

“Yes,” said Leaphorn. “Exactly. Why would he?”

They considered that. Chee had difficulty keeping focused. He would find his concentration broken by visions of Janet. Everything about her, top to bottom. Of Janet in his truck driving north from Hoski’s place, of Janet’s face while she weighed his solution of the Hoski problem against the bilagaani law school solution. Of her voice as she said, “I’m a Navajo.” His memory regressed to the drive-in theater at Gallup, to Janet sharing Blizzard’s puzzlement at the hilarity Cheye