“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.
Leaphorn picked up the telephone Eric Dorsey would never need, called Virginia, and got the number of Councilwoman Roanhorse. She was at home.
“No,” Leaphorn told her. “I’m not going to ask you where your grandson is. I’m asking you if you have a copy of today’s Navajo Times.”
She did.
“Now,” Leaphorn said. “All I want you to do is ask the boy to take a look at that photograph of Roger Applebee on the front page. Ask him if he saw that man going into the woodworking shop at Saint Bonaventure when he was at the mission. I’ll give you my telephone number here and I just ask you to call me back and let me know. That’s all I’m asking.”
Leaphorn listened.
“If Delmar recognizes Applebee, then we arrest Applebee. Delmar identifies him formally on the record before Applebee can get released on bond. And then you don’t have to worry about Delmar’s safety anymore.”
Leaphorn listened.
“He’ll be safe because we’d already have the formal identification from him. There’d be no reason to do away with Delmar then. Nothing to be gained, a lot to lose.”
Leaphorn listened.
“If he doesn’t recognize Applebee, then you just keep on hiding the boy if you want to.”
Councilwoman Roanhorse said, “Just a minute.”
“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll hold on.”
Leaphorn held on. He glanced at his watch. A minute passed. Two more. The next voice he heard was a boy’s.
“That’s the man,” Delmar Kanitewa said. “That’s him. I was coming out. He was going in. I held the door open for him and he said thanks.”
“You had the cane? Did he see it?”
“It was wrapped up in newspapers.”
“Why did the teacher give it to you?”
“Well, I went in to get a bracelet this friend of mine – Felix Bluehorse – had made for his girl, and I saw the Lincoln Cane. The teacher was wrapping it up but he left it on the bench there when he went to get the bracelet and I looked at it, and I saw it was our cane. Or maybe a copy of it. And so when he came back with the bracelet, I asked him about it, and he said he was making it for a guy, and I asked what the guy was going to do with it, and he said he didn’t know, and then when I explained to him what it was, he got mad.”
“Mad?”
“He got furious. Hit his fist on the bench. Said ‘dirty lying son-of-a-bitch.’ Things like that. It was scary. Then he finished wrapping the cane and handed it to me and told me to take it and give it to the people at my pueblo. So I took it to Tano and gave it to Uncle Francis.”
“I’m going to send a patrol car out to your grandmother’s house to give you a ride,” Leaphorn said. “We want you to identify this guy for us.”
“Sure,” Delmar said. “Like in a police lineup?”
“Exactly,” Leaphorn said.
He called Dilly then. While he hadn’t really expected Dilly to be overjoyed with a speculative theory about Lincoln Canes, he did expect Dilly to be happy with a witness who could put a suspect at the scene of the crime, up close and personal. He was right.
“I’ll call Albuquerque,” Dilly said. “They’ll get the warrant and pick up Applebee. And we’ll take the kid off your hands, too.”
“Applebee might still be in Window Rock,” Leaphorn said.
“If he is, I’ll go get him myself,” Dilly said. “If he’s gone back to Santa Fe, they’ll handle it there.”
“You might tell ’em to hurry. Applebee might be feeling the walls closing in on him. He might run.”
“Run where?” Dilly said. “You been watching too many TV movies.”
True, Leaphorn thought. Bona fide criminals, the professionals, can run and get away. For a lawyer with all sorts of connections, and possessions, running successfully would take weeks of planning.
“If I were you I’d give Eugene Ahkeah a look at Applebee, too,” Leaphorn added. “I guess Ahkeah was drunk, but Applebee must have seen him since he picked him for the frame. And so Ahkeah-”
“Must have been around there, too,” Dilly said. “And before you suggest it, yes we will indeed dig out the various fingerprints we collected from the shop, and from the stuff under Ahkeah’s place, and check them against Applebee’s, and so forth.”
“And don’t forget to read him his rights.”
“What would we do without you,” Dilly said. “You ought to get into police work.”
“Now it’s your turn to do some detecting. You tell me who killed the koshare.”
“Applebee,” Streib said. “What do you mean? Doesn’t the cane tie ’em right together?”
“Applebee has a perfect alibi for the Sayesva homicide,” Leaphorn said. “He was in plain view out in the ceremonial crowd when it happened.”
“Oh,” Dilly said. A long pause. “Who do you think did it, then?”
“I think I’m glad that one happened outside my jurisdiction,” Leaphorn said. “You and I can let your Albuquerque office and the BIA cops worry about that one.”
Why waste time saying more than that? He had no evidence and no way he could think of to get any. Maybe it would surface, maybe it wouldn’t. But Leaphorn wanted to understand it. So he sat in Dorsey’s chair, surrounded by Dorsey’s silence, and Dorsey’s loneliness, and worked out how it had probably happened.
Asher Davis, the trader with the gilt-edged reputation, needed money. Or received an offer. Or saw an opportunity to make some really big money. Davis knew Dorsey. Cowboy Dashee had told Chee that Davis had gotten better prices for artifacts Dorsey wanted to sell for his old people. Davis would have won Dorsey’s approval. Now, would Dorsey make Davis an ebony cane with a cast-iron tip and a silver head with “A. Lincoln,” the date, and “Pojoaque Pueblo” inscribed upon it?
A sudden thought struck Leaphorn. The date that first cane was ordered would have been just a few days after Tano’s Governor Penitewa announced he favored the deal for the Continental Collectors dump site. Applebee again. Applebee seeing a need to destroy Penitewa when the governor’s election time neared. Applebee suggesting to his old friend, Davis, his cat’s-paw since boyhood, the idea of having a Lincoln Cane made. Let’s see if the shop teacher can actually make a credible Lincoln Cane. We’ll get him to make us a Pojoaque cane. If it looks right, you sell it. We split. And thus, when the time was ripe to have a Tano cane made, the groundwork would be laid.