Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 11 - Sacred Clowns

by Sacred Clowns(lit)

  The story beneath it said that employees at Navajo Tractor Sales had tentatively identified Roger Applebee, Santa Fe attorney and lobbyist for the environmental group, as the man who had walked in and broadcast the troublesome telephone call. It quoted Captain Dodge as saying that the investigation was continuing. Dodge said that a photograph of the lobbyist had been shown to employees at Navajo Tractor Sales, where the broadcast had originated. He said that the man who broadcast the tape "generally resembled the photograph of Applebee" except for the hair.

  "The suspect might have been wearing a wig," Captain Dodge said. Applebee, of course, "could not be reached for comment."

  Leaphorn examined the Applebee photograph that accompanied the story. He had caused Leaphorn a hell of a lot of trouble, but he was a decent-looking fellow. The only thing certain was that Dodge was doing his job, which was to get Councilman Chester cooled down and defused. Leaphorn was very much in favor of that. He also approved Dodge's silence on the matter of the tape left in his tape player, on Leaphorn's brief suspension, and on Jim Chee's boneheadedness. Let the department lick its wounds away from the public gaze.

  With even the want ads read, he'd unlocked Dorsey's office and spent thirty minutes planning the methodical search he and Chee would make of everything Dorsey owned. But where was Chee?

  Here was Chee now, driving onto the gravel of the visitors' parking area, looking sheepish.

  "I guess you stopped off for breakfast," Leaphorn said. "Or had car trouble."

  "No sir," Chee said.

  Leaphorn looked at his watch.

  "I had to detour over to Window Rock," Chee said.

  "Why?"

  Chee hesitated. "I had to drop somebody off."

  "You pick up hitchhikers?"

  "This was a lawyer," Chee said. "Had some business at the courthouse in Aztec."

  "Which-" Leaphorn began, and then decided he didn't need to ask which lawyer. He kept his expression absolutely neutral. "Let's get to work," he said, and ushered Chee into Dorsey's cramped quarters.

  "Dorsey's trailer was originally searched by Dilly Streib and Lieutenant Toddy. They were looking for nothing in particular, just anything that would shed a little light. Then Toddy and I took a second look at it. We were specifically looking for anything that would explain why Dorsey made that Lincoln Cane. Here's what we found."

  He handed Chee the sketch of the cane. "This was on top of Dorsey's 'unfinished business' basket."

  Chee examined it, glanced up at Leaphorn. "Interesting," he said.

  Leaphorn nodded. "I've had time to do some checking. The genuine Pojoaque Pueblo cane seems to have disappeared back in the nineteenth century. So I'm told it could be sold to a collector if you found one whose conscience wasn't too well developed."

  "That sounds reasonable," Chee said. "Is that why you were thinking of Asher Davis?"

  "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 running, yelling, laughing. Another bell. Silence descended. Chee had finished with the desk top, with Dorsey's briefcase, with a careful shakedown of Dorsey's meager wardrobe of shirts, jeans, underwear, and sweaters. Leaphorn was sitting beside the file cabinet, the middle drawer open.

  "Nothing so far," Chee said. "How about you?"

  "Did you find that hit-and-runner?" Leaphorn asked.

  "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 funny bumper sticker you told me about ought to make it easy."

  "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 dinner last night. Dinner with Janet. Dinner with-

  "You look happy," Leaphorn said.

  "Urn," 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 t
hese 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, grinning broadly. "No," he said, the grin developing into a chuckle. "I can just imagine Eric's reaction to something like that. After he got over thinking it was just silly, he'd begin worrying about who would feed the miners' kids if the boycott worked and they shut down the mines."

  "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 Cheyenne Autumn was causing among the assembled Navajos. Of Janet puzzled by a culture that was hers by blood but not by memory. He went back to the roof in Tano, Janet's jeans-clad thigh pressed against his, Janet asking "What's going on?" when the clown's wagon brought silence to the crowd, and his own sense of shared puzzlement.

  Leaphorn was saying something about linkages.

  "Hey," Chee said, loudly. He got down from the tailgate and stood facing Leaphorn. "I think I know why Applebee would have wanted that Lincoln Cane made." Leaphorn looked at him, waiting. "Just a second," Chee said, thinking it through. "I'm beginning to see why you want all those details in your reports."

  "I'm glad to hear that," Leaphorn said. "And why you use those pins on your map, linking things together. If you can find the link everything makes sense."

  "All right," Leaphorn said. "Let's hear it."

  "Why did Applebee get the cane made?" Chee said. "For the same reason he got Chester's telephone tapped."

  I Leaphorn considered. "Maybe. Chester was up for reelection. So was the governor. I see where you're going but you have some problems with it."

  "I do," Chee said. "But now I understand why the crowd got so silent when the cane went by in the clown's wagon. Those Tano people weren't seeing an artifact for sale. They were seeing the cane as a symbol of the governor's authority. They saw the koshare accusing the governor of corruption, of selling them out on the toxic dump issue, I'll bet."

  Leaphorn was smiling slightly now. "Of course," he said. "That makes sense. But we still have problems."

  "I know it," Chee said. "Like who killed the koshare. We know it wasn't Applebee. I guess Janet and I are both his alibi. I know we both saw him out there in the crowd on the plaza about when Sayesva was being killed. She pointed him out to me. Going to introduce us, because I'd just written that letter to the Navajo Times about the waste dump plan. I didn't put anything about Applebee in my report."

  "Well, there was no reason to do that," Leaphorn said. "You can't provide an inventory of the crowd. Now we can see it matters. Can you think of anything else that might matter, knowing what we know now?"

  "Nothing," Chee said.

  "Applebee and Davis were both at the Tano ceremonial," Leaphorn said. "Along with a few thousand other people. But did you see anything that might connect them?"

  "Wait," Chee said. "Sure. Davis told us they were old friends." He stopped, remembering. And Leaphorn stood, willing to wait. Patient again.

  And Chee extracted, from a memory trained by a culture which had kept its past alive without a written language, an almost exact account of what Asher Davis had told them of the Applebee-Davis friendship.

  Leaphorn considered, shook his head. "Another link," he said. "Can you see how it helps?"

  "No," Chee said. "Not yet."

  "I guess we're finished here, anyway," Leaphorn said. "I'll take care of reporting this to Dilly Streib. He might have some ideas. You can get back on that hit-and-runner and the other stuff on your list."

  Chee was backing out of the parking area when he stopped. "One thing I might add to that report from Tano," he said. "We can't provide an alibi for Asher Davis there. He was off buying stuff. But as far as I know he could have gone back down that alley and done the job."

  "We have all the wrong alibis for the wrong people in the wrong places," Leaphorn said.

  "And one more thing," Chee added. "I remember when I met Applebee in the coffee shop, he mentioned he sometimes collects old Navajo stuff."

  "But no mention of collecting Lincoln Canes, I guess," Leaphorn said.

  And Jim Chee drove away, smiling and happy. But that, Leaphorn understood, had nothing at all to do with canes or inconvenient alibis.

  28

  BACK IN DORSEY'S cramped quarters Leaphorn called Dilly Streib. He explained he was once again officially in the law enforcement business, officially unsuspended. He told Streib of the poster and what they had learned in Dorsey's quarters.

  "Uh-huh," Dilly said. "I don't see making much out of that. It could have come from anywhere. It doesn't look to me like it's going to be much help."

  "Maybe not," Leaphorn said. But it was all the help they had. And when Dilly was off the line, he called the Santa Fe office of Nature First. A woman answered, sounding young and Eastern. Yes, that was an attractive poster, and yes, Nature First had produced and distributed it. That boycott was one of their more successful ventures. Stonewashed jeans had declined in popularity and the market for Jemez Mountains perlite had significantly diminished.

  So there was the possible connection, nebulous and insignificant as it was, between two Lincoln Canes and two murders and Roger Applebee.

  But Applebee couldn't be the killer. Chee was watching him in the Tano Plaza at the moment Sayesva was being killed.

  Davis could have killed the koshare. But he was away on the Hopi Reservation with Cowboy Dashee when Eric Dorsey died.

  Think. Applebee and Davis were lifelong friends, if you could call such a relationship friendship. How about some sort of a conspiracy?

 
Joe Leaphorn sat in the chair Eric Dorsey no longer needed and considered. A bell rang somewhere. A door opened and was slammed. The air smelled of dust and of the long, dark days of winter. Leaphorn methodically worked his way through a variety of possibilities and hit a variety of dead ends. He got up, stretched, glanced at his watch. About quitting time. He'd missed lunch but he wasn't hungry. He pulled back the curtain on Dorsey's tiny window to inspect the weather. Clouds building up. Tonight it might snow. Just about now, Louisa would be in Honolulu. He let the curtain fall and sat down again. Concentrate. Work out the possibilities one at a time. And start with Dorsey, where his own jurisdiction was involved. Forget the koshare for a moment. Without that, the solution to the Dorsey homicide seemed clear enough. But even as he was thinking that, Leaphorn's lifelong Navajo conditioning to look for harmony in all things bore its fruit. Abruptly, he saw the connections, how it had happened, and why it had happened. The irony of it produced a brief, bleak smile.