Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman Page B

whiskey.”
    “And that, I’ve guessed, is why you don’t drink wine,” she said.
    Leaphorn sipped his tea. “Then, a day later and a long ways off at the Tano Pueblo, we have another homicide.”
    “I read about that one,” she said. “The koshare killed at his kiva right in the middle of a kachina ceremonial. Created quite a sensation. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”
    “That one’s not our case and I don’t know everything about it. But from what I do know, they don’t have a suspect, or a motive, or anything much to go on. Just somebody showed up at the little building off the plaza where the koshares dress and rest and so forth. He hit this guy on the head and nobody saw a thing.” Leaphorn paused again, watching her.
    She sipped her tea, looked at him over the rim, put down the cup. “Go on,” she said. “If the story stopped there you wouldn’t be telling me.”
    “It just happened that Jim Chee was there when the homicide took place,” he said. He told her about the effort to find the Kanitewa boy to keep his Navajo grandmother happy, and what had happened, and about Chee going back with Sergeant Blizzard, the cop from the BIA. Finally, he told her the connection Chee had made about the boy’s behavior after he’d heard the broadcast report of Dorsey’s murder.
    Bourebonette picked up her cup again and sipped.
    “What do you think?” Leaphorn asked.
    “Don’t rush me,” she said. “You’ve had all day to think about it.”
    “Take your time.”
    “Right off the bat, I’d say you picked a smart assistant. Pretty smart, Chee. Good thinking. Making the connection with the radio broadcast.” She paused, thinking. “Or was it hearing the broadcast that caused the boy—what was his name—caused him to run back to see his uncle again?”
    “Kanitewa,” Leaphorn said. “Tomorrow, when I get back on the job, we’ll see if we can find out.”
    “He’ll tell you?”
    “Why not? If we can find him. And unless it has something to do with his religion.”
    “I was thinking that. He’s a teenager. Old enough to be initiated, I’d think. I don’t know much about Tano specifically. But I’d think they’d be like the other Pueblos.”
    “So would I,” Leaphorn said. “But how do you think the two things connect? Kanitewa was going to school at Crownpoint. That’s maybe twenty-five miles from Thoreau.”
    “What do you think could have been in that package? The one Chee mentioned, wrapped in the newspaper?”
    “We’ll try to find out tomorrow,” Leaphorn said. “Probably will.”
    “If it’s not something religious.”
    “Yeah,” Leaphorn said. He felt an intense urge to yawn, stretch. Instead, he settled deeper into the chair. “The trouble is, we don’t have enough details to speculate.”
    “We can speculate anyway,” Professor Bourebonette said. “Maybe the boy had some way of knowing what’s-his-name. The teacher who got killed. Maybe there was some connection between Kanitewa’s uncle and the teacher. What’s your theory?”
    Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn didn’t answer, having gone soundly to sleep in the recliner.

JIM CHEE noticed a neat stack of papers in his in-basket when he walked into his office. He ignored them for a moment to stand staring out his window. The window was why he’d picked the office over a slightly larger one when he was transferred from Shiprock to Window Rock. From it he could look eastward at the ragtag southern end of the Chuska Range, the long wall of sandstone along which Window Rock had been built and which, because of the great hole eroded through it, gave the capital of the Navajo Nation its name.
    He looked out today into a windless autumn afternoon. No traffic was moving on Navajo Route 3 and a single pickup truck was ambling northward up Route 12 past the Navajo Veterans Cemetery. The trees at Tse Bonito Park were yellow, the roadsides were streaked with the purple of the last surviving October asters, and overhead