Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman Page A

wasn’t Blizzard’s case. Now it was Chee’s case.
    “You know what,” Chee said. “I think you have some very important information. Can we come in and sit down and talk about it?”
    In the crowded Bluehorse living room it developed that Felix Bluehorse did have quite a bit of information, if one could only calculate what it meant.
    Chee was thinking of that now, going over it in his mind, reading through the report he’d typed for Lieutenant Leaphorn, wondering if he’d left anything out. If he had, it was too late to do anything about it. There was a tap on the door, it opened, and the lieutenant looked in at him. The lieutenant looked old and tired.
    “Virginia said you were looking for me.”
    “Yes sir,” Chee said. He stood, handed Leaphorn the file folder.
    “You find him?”
    “No sir,” Chee said. “Well, not exactly. Blizzard found him . . .”
    Leaphorn’s expression stopped Chee. It was a broad, happy grin.
    Chee hurried on. “. . .  at Grants, and he picked him up and took him to Crownpoint.” Chee swallowed. “But he got away again.”
    Leaphorn’s grin disappeared. He tapped the folder. “It all in here?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “I’ll read it,” Leaphorn said. His tone suggested to Chee that reading it would not have high priority.
    “It connects the Kanitewa boy to the homicide at Thoreau,” Chee said.
    Leaphorn took his hand off the doorknob, flipped the report open, scanned it, looked up at Chee. “Let’s talk in my office,” he said.
    But before they talked, Leaphorn eased himself into the chair behind his desk, put on his glasses, slowly reread Chee’s report, placed it on the desk top, restored his glasses to their case, put the case in his shirt pocket, and looked at Chee for a long moment.
    “What’d you think of the Bluehorse boy?”
    “He seemed like a nice kid,” Chee said. “He wanted to cooperate. Enjoying the excitement, somebody paying attention to him. Liking being important.”
    “He said he had no idea where Kanitewa was hiding out. You think that’s true?”
    “Maybe,” Chee said. “I doubt it. I’d bet he could give us two or three guesses if he wanted to.”
    Leaphorn nodded. “He told you that Kanitewa thought the man who killed Dorsey would be after him?”
    “Right,” Chee said.
    “And the man was a Navajo?”
    “Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed. “I think he actually said Kanitewa told him it was a man he’d seen at Saint Bonaventure Mission. You know, you’re dealing with a hearsay, secondhand description. He said Kanitewa said this man was medium-sized and kind of old. I think we just took for granted we were talking about a Navajo because he didn’t say ‘white,’ or ‘Chinese,’ or ‘Hispanic.’”
    Leaphorn produced an affirmative grunt. He extracted his glasses, reread part of the report.
    “You say here Bluehorse said he didn’t know whether Kanitewa had actually witnessed the crime.”
    “We pressed him on that. He said he wasn’t sure. Maybe Kanitewa had actually seen it. But he didn’t tell him he had. I’d say if Delmar had seen it, he’d have said so. And he would have yelled. Reported it.”
    “Yeah,” Leaphorn said.
    “I’d guess that when he heard the radio broadcast about Dorsey being killed, he remembered seeing this guy going into the shop and put two and two together.”
    Leaphorn nodded.
    “Could it be Eugene Ahkeah?” Chee asked.
    Leaphorn said, “Big. Kind of old. That could be just about anybody. Could be Ahkeah. He’s not much older than you. But for a teenager, ‘kind of old’ is anybody over twenty.”
    “And Ahkeah was there that day,” Chee said. “Other people saw him?”
    “Yep,” Leaphorn said. He sighed, got up, walked to the window, and stood, hands in his pockets, looking out. “We’ve got our man in jail,” he said, finally. “We’ve got him at the scene. There’s no question he had the opportunity. We’ve got a good motive—theft plus drunkenness. And we have