Sacred Clowns

“I can’t see anything to co

“Sayesva was a koshare? That right?”

“Right,” Chee said, baffled.

“Do you see anything in that Dorsey homicide report about a koshare?”

Chee picked up the report, reread it. “Nothing.”

“There’s no reason there should be,” Leaphorn said. “When I got through I noticed all sorts of stuff was stacked in the shop where Dorsey taught. The sort of things his students were making. Some sand-cast silver, leatherwork, woodwork projects, and two or three half-finished kachina dolls. One of them was a koshare. About a foot tall. It still needed some work. No mention of it in the report.”

“Well, hell,” Chee said. “The Tano homicide hadn’t happened yet. The investigating officer couldn’t know and you wouldn’t want to list all that…” Chee let it trail off. He saw the point Leaphorn was making. Unreasonable, but a point. Put everything in even if it seemed irrelevant.

“You could think of ten thousand explanations for the koshare,” Leaphorn said. “Kids in an arts and crafts shop trying to make stuff they could sell. The koshare’s an interesting figure. Easy to paint. And so forth.”

“Pretty weak link,” Chee agreed. “I can’t see it.”

Leaphorn rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. He looked glum. “I can’t either, but I always look. It’s an old habit. Wastes time, usually. All we have here is two men hit on the head. Same method. The kid runs away the same day as the Thoreau killing. If he had been a student of Dorsey’s we would be very, very interested. But he went to school over at Crownpoint. About twenty-five miles away. Nothing there.”

“Nothing,” Chee said. But you are thinking that if I hadn’t let the kid get away maybe he could explain all this.

“I don’t like coincidences,” Leaphorn said. “Even if this isn’t much of one. I guess I’ll find out which student was making the koshare.”

“I have a thought about the Sayesva thing,” Chee said. “I hear he was a certified public accountant. I heard he worked for that savings and loan outfit in Phoenix that went belly up. I heard that maybe a grand jury down there was interested in something-or-other. Maybe Sayesva knew something damaging.”

For the first time, Leaphorn’s expression shifted into something close to a smile.

“You get a ‘he was’ and a ‘he did’ and an ‘I hear that too’ and a ‘maybe so’ on all that,” Leaphorn said. “But the trouble is, Sayesva is none of our business. That case is way out of our jurisdiction. It’s strictly Bureau of Indian Affairs and FBI work. The late Eric Dorsey is our business because he was killed on the reservation.”

Leaphorn swiveled in his chair, stared at his map. It was freckled with clusters of pins in a variety of colors. Someday, Chee thought, he’d learn what they signified. If he stuck around long enough. Now he was only conscious that Leaphorn hadn’t been interested enough in his Sayesva theory to pursue it. He wasn’t going to enjoy this job.

“Like what?” Leaphorn said. “What do you think he might have known? About what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing specific. It’s just that an accountant, you know, would know things. Like maybe somebody’s stealing. Or cheating on taxes. Things like that. So you’d want to know who he was working for. The people he was auditing.”

Leaphorn was studying Chee.

“We wouldn’t want to know that,” Leaphorn said. “The FBI might. Or the sheriff’s office. But you and I wouldn’t have any interest in that at all.”

“Not unless it tied in with something that was our business,” Chee said.

Leaphorn scratched his ear. “If, for example, he’d been auditing the Thoreau school, for example,” he said finally. “If that was true we’ll find out because the feds will tell us. Meanwhile, I want you to find the Kanitewa boy.”

The tone of that said this conversation was ended, but Chee stopped at the door.

“Lieutenant. You know that business with Continental Collectors wanting to establish the waste dump out in the Checkerboard? I’ve been hearing some things about that.”

Leaphorn was shuffling through his file cabinet. He didn’t look up. “You mentioned that before,” he said. “And I told you our business in this office is crime, not politics.”

“Sometimes they mix.”

Leaphorn still didn’t look up. “What have you been hearing? It better be more than some old gossip about somebody from Continental bribing tribal councilmen. There’s always gossip about somebody bribing somebody.”

“I guess that’s all I know.”

“Do you know which councilmen? Or where you can get a witness? Or any kind of evidence at all?”

“No sir.”

“Then we’ve got plenty of other stuff to work on,” Leaphorn said. “Find the kid. That’s the thing that’s pressing on us right now.” He got up and stood looking out the window, hands clasped behind him.

“When we get that out of the way,” he said, talking to the glass, “I’d like to see what you can do with a vehicular homicide case. I’ll give you the file on it and you’re going to see it looks pretty hopeless.”

“Which one?” Tribal law prohibited sale or possession of alcohol on the reservation, but bars flourished in the border towns and deaths caused by drunk drivers were common fare for the Navajo Tribal Police.

“The victim was an old man named Victor Todachene. Lived near Crystal. Details are in the file,” Leaphorn said.

“Okay,” Chee said.

“What isn’t in the file is the chief’s interested in this one.” Leaphorn still seemed to be looking at something through the glass. “He was out at the Shiprock office when it got reported and he went out with the investigating officer. It was an unusually bad case.”

“How?” In his relatively short tenure as a Navajo Tribal Policeman Chee had seen an infinite variety of vehicular homicide. All ugly. All bad. Badness was measured by the number of bodies.

“Well,” Leaphorn said, “bad in a sense. The victim was a pedestrian. The vehicle sort of sideswiped him and then backed up – apparently to see what had happened – and then drove away and Mr. Todachene spent about two hours bleeding to death before the next driver came along.”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“I don’t think the chief has done a lot of work out on the road. I think it sort of shocked him.”

It shocked Chee, too. Driving away turned an accident into murder. The worst sort of murder. Murder with no motive except keeping oneself out of trouble.

“The Shiprock office has done all the regular stuff,” Leaphorn said. “Checking car repair places, sale of car paint, that sort of thing. It dead-ended. But the chief thinks we ought to solve it.”

“So do I,” Chee said. “But we probably can’t.”

“I guess you know that I think this job you got deserves the rank of sergeant,” Leaphorn said. “I haven’t been able to sell that yet. But the way the chief feels, if you solve this hit-and-run problem, making sergeant is a dead cinch.”

Chee had no comment to that. He had been a sergeant once. Acting sergeant. But he hadn’t liked it much and it hadn’t lasted. He and the captain at Crownpoint hadn’t agreed on how an investigation should be handled.

“Yes sir,” Chee said.

“But first find the Kanitewa boy.”

“Yes sir.”

“Remember, the Sayesva homicide is absolutely none of our business.”

Chee nodded and headed for the door, which, in Lieutenant Leaphorn’s office, was always open.

“One more thing,” the lieutenant said. “Stay off of roofs.”