Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman Page A

“I guess—” she began, then shook her head. “Think how badly I’ll feel if you go to sleep on the interstate and run into somebody and kill yourself.”
    “I could get a motel room,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”
    “Thirty-five bucks. Or probably forty-five these days. Just think how much that money would buy out there in Mongolia.”
    And so Joe Leaphorn’s GMC Jimmy followed Professor Louisa Bourebonette’s little Honda Civic to her house.
    It stood on a narrow street only four blocks from the campus of Northern Arizona University, a brick bungalow, aged and small. The guest room was also small—very small, and crowded with a small couch, a work table, chair, computer, printer, supplies, books, odds and ends. Everything, it seemed to Leaphorn, except a bed.
    “The couch folds out. Just grab those tabs at the bottom and pull. I think it’s already made up,” she said, disappearing back into the hall. “But I’ll have to get you a pillow.”
    Leaphorn pulled. The couch converted itself into a thin, narrow bed. It looked lumpy and uncomfortable under a fresh white sheet.
    Professor Bourebonette’s voice came through the doorway. “How about a glass of wine first? Make you sleep.” There was the sound of things being moved. “Sorry. I forgot. How about a cup of tea then? I have a box here of something called ‘Sleepytime.’”
    “Fine,” Leaphorn said. “Although I don’t think I’ll need it.”
    He sat in a well-worn recliner in the living room and looked at a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape on the wall across from him—a landscape of red and black erosion. Probably near Abiquiu, he thought, but it could have been done a thousand places on the Big Rez. He shifted in the recliner, relaxing, comfortable, glad he hadn’t gone to a motel. What would be would be. In the kitchen, a teakettle began to whistle. Cups clattered. Leaphorn found his mind settling into an old, old groove. This was when he did his best thinking—just before sleep. He would review whatever puzzle was bothering him, turn the facts over and over, look at all sides of them, knock them together, and then explain it all to Emma—as much to organize it in his own mind as to ask her opinion. But her opinion was often wise.
    Louisa Bourebonette appeared carrying a tray. Two saucered cups, a steaming teapot, a little pitcher of cream. She put the tray on the table beside Leaphorn’s recliner, handed him his cup, dropped a tea bag into it, poured in hot water.
    “I would have offered you coffee, but I’m out of decaf. And you shouldn’t be drinking the high-octane stuff this late.”
    “This is fine,” Leaphorn said. “Better for me.”
    “It really is,” she said, perching on the sofa across from him with her own cup. “Especially this herbal stuff.”
    “How are you with puzzles?” Leaphorn said, and found himself surprised as he said it.
    “Puzzles?”
    “I’m working with an officer named Jim Chee,” Leaphorn said. “You met him last summer.”
    “I remember Jim,” she said.
    “He’s my assistant now. Brand new. Just started. We’re working on an odd case together.”
    He paused, watching her expression. “It’s a homicide. Somebody killed a teacher out at a mission school on the Checkerboard Reservation.” He paused again.
    “Go on,” she said. “I’m waiting for the puzzle.”
    “It may not really be a puzzle,” he said. “Just a little oddity, probably. But, being a Navajo—” He grinned at her. “I have to start at the beginning.”
    “The perfect place,” she said.
    “Two cases,” he said. “Two incidents. Unconnected. But are they?”
    He told her first of the death of Eric Dorsey, the telephone tip, the circumstances that had led to the arrest of Eugene Ahkeah, and his denial of the crime.
    “Sounds like no mystery there,” she said.
    “Exactly,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds typical of the homicides we work on on the reservation. Too much