The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Read online

  EARLY BIRD BOOKS

  FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

  BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

  NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

  The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O’Keeffe

  A Pot Thief Mystery

  J. Michael Orenduff

  This book is dedicated to

  Linda Easterling Aycock

  (1947–2014)

  The wife of my best friend. She loved her family, God, teaching,

  the University of Texas Longhorns, the Republican Party, and Tab.

  Linda was a gifted editor. And an even better friend.

  Prologue

  I thought black helicopters were an urban myth. Like alligators in the New York City sewers or a tooth dissolving overnight in a glass of Coke.

  But the swooshing behind me was not a thrashing gator or a foaming glass of cola. It came from the rotors of a machine with opaque windows and no markings.

  It was slowing to land but still gaining on me, in part because I didn’t have the good sense not to look back. It’s hard to run with your neck swiveled past your shoulder.

  I reached the slot between the boulders just as sand from the copter’s landing obscured the landscape. That was good. They couldn’t see which way I turned after clearing the gap.

  The cliff dwelling was to the right. I clambered up to it, hid behind the blue grama grass and stared at the gap between the boulders. Maybe the only guy in there is the pilot. He’s not going to leave the machine and start out on foot, I said to myself.

  Fat chance, my self answered back.

  Two guys in desert camouflage came through the slot carrying automatic weapons. The first word that sprung to mind was Guantánamo.

  The next one was waterboarding.

  I don’t pay much attention to current events, so I’m not exactly sure what waterboarding is. But I’m pretty certain it’s not a beach sport.

  I’m not a terrorist, just a harmless pot thief.

  No, not that kind of pot. The clay kind. Specifically, pots made by New Mexico’s ancient pueblo dwellers. Neither the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency nor the Defense Intelligence Agency is charged with stopping pot thieves. That duty falls to the Bureau of Land Management, and I didn’t think the BLM would send me to Guantánamo.

  But would the guys in the black helicopter buy my story that I was just digging up artifacts? Or would they assume that since I had breached one of the securest sites in the country, the digging was just a cover for espionage? After all, it was the third time I’d gained unauthorized entry.

  The camo guys split up after they cleared the passage between the boulders. I relaxed a bit when the one who came my way sprinted past my perch.

  But he stopped after fifty yards. He had seen me run, so he probably figured if he couldn’t catch up with me after fifty yards, I had sought cover, a commodity of which there is precious little in the desert.

  He scanned the terrain with binoculars. When he didn’t spot anything at ground level, he aimed the glasses at the mountainside. Sunlight glinted off the lenses. I held my breath and put my faith in the Tompiro people who built the cliff dwelling and the grama grass that shielded its entrance.

  1

  The first thing I noticed about Carl Wilkes when he walked into Spirits in Clay was his beard had grown back after the chemo. It was neatly trimmed as it had been before the melanoma, but it was now mostly gray.

  “You look a lot better than you did the last time I saw you.”

  “People who’ve been dead for a year look better than I did then.”

  “The important thing is you beat it.”

  “Yeah, Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali, but did you see Leon’s face after the fight? You still make bad coffee?”

  I gave him a cup. He looked around as he sipped. “I don’t see that Tompiro pot. You sell it?”

  “Last year.”

  “Get the thirty thousand you had it priced at?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t seem very happy about it.”

  “I had it almost twenty years. Now it’s gone.”

  He was silent for a moment. “It was ugly.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, it was. That’s the way they made them. I’ll bet the potter thought it was beautiful. And I think it had a kind of inner beauty, imparted from its maker. I miss it.”

  “If you liked it so much, why did you sell it?”

  “I had a buyer. I miss every pot I’ve ever sold. But I’m a dealer, not a collector. If I’m not willing to sell the pots, I should close the shop.”

  I poured myself some coffee. It wasn’t all that bad.

  He looked at me with those deep-set eyes. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “This place is just a way station for pots. I rescue them from the earth, pass them on to collectors who appreciate them.”

  “What if you didn’t see it that way? What if, instead of pots, you were digging up gold nuggets, something natural that you couldn’t connect to any human hand?”

  Carl’s cynical streak is tempered by his humor.

  “I have no interest in gold. I don’t dig up pots for the money. Like the mountain climber, I dig them up because they’re there. Because people who walked this land centuries before I was born made them. It seems sacrilegious to just leave them there, never to be seen again.”

  “You may dig them up because you don’t like the idea of them spending eternity in the dirt, but you make big bucks in the process.”

  “The money is a nice bonus. But the money from the Tompiro is already gone. The pleasure of unearthing it never will be.”

  “You need to experience that pleasure again. I have a buyer.”

  “You had a buyer for that Mogollon pot I stole from the museum, but his money disappeared when I finally got the pot.”

  “This buyer is legit. Prominent citizen. Tons of money.”

  “Even so, Tompiro pots are hard to come by.”

  He nodded. “That’s why I came to you.”

  Wilkes launched me into a life of crime five years ago with an offer of $25,000 to steal a pot from a museum. Even though he enticed me, I can’t blame the museum caper on Carl. But I also don’t think it was entirely my fault. I admit my moral fiber unraveled enough to allow me to consider it. A reconnoiter of the museum brought me to my senses, and I decided not to do it.

  But the moment I got home, a federal agent accused me of the very crime I had just resisted. I thought maybe that was a sign I ought to do it. If you’re going to be punished anyway, why not commit the crime?

  The pot in question—a spectacular Mogollon water jug—ended up in my possession but was eventually returned to the museum. I will not add the words where it belonged. That pot is all that remains of the life of the woman who made it. She put part of her soul in that clay. It deserves to be held and cherished by someone who cares. It does not belong on a plinth behind velvet ropes in a room no one ever visits.

  Carl’s second foray into my otherwise placid life did not involve any illegalities, just a blindfolded ride to an unknown location to do a simple appraisal of a collection of ancient pots. Which led to two murders, both of which I was charged with.

  You may be wondering why, given my experiences with Carl, I fell for his latest get-rich-quick opportunity.

  It’s simple—I needed the money.

  Of course, I didn’t know I would end up in that cliff dwelling.

  2

  I opened my Benchmark New M
exico Road & Recreation Atlas to page seven and plopped it down in front of Susannah. Her margarita had no salt on its rim and was half empty.

  “You’re late,” she said, and looked down at the atlas. Then she smiled and said, “You got lost and had to resort to a map?”

  It was a joke, not a question. I could walk the three blocks from my shop to Dos Hermanas Tortillaria while unconscious. Come to think of it, I’ve made the return trip in that condition a time or two.

  We meet there most days at five for chips, salsa and conversation, all of which mix well with tequila, lime juice and triple sec. Not to mention the spectacular New Mexico sunsets above the west mesa and the smell of piñon smoke hanging sweetly in the crisp desert air.

  “Sorry. I was studying the atlas and lost track of time. Look at the outline of the state and tell me what shape it has.”

  She’s accustomed to my quirks, so she played along. “It’s basically a rectangle.”

  “You know what I see when I look at it? A doughnut.”

  “New Mexico has a hole in the middle?”

  I nodded.

  She asked where the hole was, and her eyes followed my finger as I placed it just south of the middle of the state.

  She squinted at the small type. “Trinity Site? The atom bomb blew a hole in the state?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Not a good comparison. The hole in a doughnut goes all the way through. I suppose the bomb made a crater, but you can’t look through it and see the sky over China.”

  She was right, of course. The detonation of the first atom bomb on July 16, 1945, vaporized the tower it was attached to and blasted out a big depression. But not as big as the depression I feel when I think about how many nuclear weapons have been built since then.

  “The hole I’m talking about wasn’t caused by the explosion. It was caused by the bomb.”

  “Huh? How can it be caused by the bomb but not the explosion?”

  “Because if you’re going to explode an atomic bomb, you need lots of space. So the government confiscated over three thousand square miles of land just to blow up one bomb.”

  “Well they couldn’t very well blow it up with people around. And it isn’t like the land was scenic oceanfront.”

  “Some of us think desert landscapes are more scenic than oceanfront. And it was over three thousand square miles. That’s larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.”

  She pointed down at the map. “See these words right next to Trinity Site? Jornada de Muerto. If you have to blow up a big bomb, what better placed than one called Journey of Death? Where else could they have done it?”

  “I don’t know—Detroit?”

  She chuckled. “So the hole is just a metaphor?”

  “Right. Even if the bomb had been a dud, the hole would still be there. It’s called the White Sands Missile Range. It’s over a hundred and fifty miles north to south and fifty miles east to west. You can’t walk on it. You can’t drive through it. You can’t even fly over it. It’s in the middle of my state like a big doughnut hole and I can’t get in.”

  She stared at me for a few seconds. “Ooooh, I get it. There’s a place inside the missile range where you want to steal some pots.”

  My name is Hubert Schuze, and I’ve already admitted to you that I’m a pot thief. At least according to the Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA). It’s an unjust law, and I’ve been successfully ignoring it for over twenty years. I’ve never been caught. I’ve never even been charged. Although I have to admit that my illegal digging has occasionally plunged me into other sorts of agua caliente, but that’s just a matter of bad luck.

  “It isn’t stealing,” I said. “I was making a living digging up and selling ancient pots before ARPA was passed. I should have been grandfathered. Making my livelihood illegal after I already started practicing it is unconstitutional.”

  “Yeah, I remember that from when I was in pre-law. I can’t remember what it’s called, some phrase like post office.”

  “I think it’s ex post facto.”

  She smiled. “Or maybe it’s E pluribus unum.”

  “Whatever it’s called, it isn’t fair. How would you feel if you were a lowly peddler selling brooms door-to-door, and Congress passed a law requiring everyone to buy a vacuum cleaner? You’d be out of business.”

  “That’s a ridiculous example, Hubie. Congress can’t make people buy vacuum cleaners.”

  “They can make you buy health insurance. The Supreme Court said so.”

  “Health insurance is a far cry from vacuum cleaners.”

  “Right. Vacuum cleaners are cheap and you use them every day. Health insurance is expensive and you hope you never use it.”

  Her teasing me about being a thief is a staple of our cocktail-hour banter.

  “I know your standard line by heart,” she said. “The people who created those pots would prefer to have them admired rather than hidden away in the ground, and they belong to anyone who has the skill to find them.”

  “And I have that skill. But what good does it do me? I can’t get in.”

  She twirled her glass and smiled at me. “Actually, you can.”

  I perked up. Susannah has shown considerable pluck as an accomplice in my illegal capers, from kicking in doors to shooting the gun out of a bad guy’s hand à la Annie Oakley. Maybe she had a clever plan.

  “How can I get in?”

  “This is the month they open the Trinity Site to visitors.”

  I perked back down.

  “I already thought of that. It won’t work. The gate is open only from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. So I’d have to drive along in broad daylight and just hope none of the MPs or the two thousand tourists notice me steer off the road and head out across open desert toward the Oscura Mountains and a site I think might contain some Tompiro pots.”

  “Maybe you could find a turnoff when no cars are close and drive your four-wheel Bronco along a deep arroyo.”

  “Seems like a long shot.”

  “You won’t know if you don’t try. And if it turns out to be impossible to leave the road without being spotted, you could just visit the Trinity Site like the other tourists.”

  “I don’t want to visit the Trinity Site. I want to visit a ruin on the western slope of the Oscura Mountains.” I shrugged. “It’s irritating that I can’t go there. I need the money, but it isn’t worth the risk. Although I sometimes think of myself as a short Indiana Jones, the truth is we don’t have much in common.”

  “Yeah. Starting with the fact that you’re real and he’s a fictional character.”

  “But he’s a real fictional character.”

  “As opposed to what? A fictional fictional character?”

  “No. I mean he’s real in the sense that they created his character with the movies. We all know him. He’s tall and daring and frequently swashes his buckle.”

  “Or buckles his swash. You can also be pretty daring when you have to be.”

  “But I don’t want to have to be. I hate taking risks.”

  “So if it looks too risky, just keep driving until you reach the Trinity Site. It might be interesting.”

  “It is not interesting. The only facilities are the Porta-Potties next to the parking lot, and the only thing to see besides the big crater are the trinitites.”

  “That’s what they call people who live there?”

  “No one lives there, Suze. Trinitites are pieces of the stuff created by the explosion. It was hotter than the surface of the sun and fused the desert sand into glasslike chunks.”

  “You could bring back a piece as a souvenir.”

  “Not if I ever want to have children.”

  “They’re radioactive?”

  “Yeah, and you’re not allowed to touch them. Some of the isotopes in those
green chunks have a half-life of twenty-five thousand years.”

  “Why not just say they have a full life of fifty thousand years?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. There is no prospect of me having children.”

  “You’re not too old to be a father.”

  “I wasn’t referring to my age.” I’m between forty and fifty. Okay, closer to fifty.

  “Oh. So you and Sharice still haven’t—”

  “No.”

  “So what’s the holdup?”

  Susannah is refreshingly blunt. She’s short of thirty the same number of years I am from fifty. She’s tall and outdoorsy with thick brown hair and big brown eyes that betray her every mood. She’s attractive but not like the contestants in a traditional beauty contest. Which is a good thing, because I can’t imagine her consenting to parade around in a bikini. But despite a dazzling smile that matches her personality, she hasn’t yet attracted the right guy. Maybe men can’t deal with her lack of guile. She’s not the person to ask how you look if you happen to be ugly.

  I pointed down at the cast on my ankle. “This thing makes it sort of awkward.”

  A mischievous smile formed on her lips. “Awkward could be fun.”

  “Not going to happen. She said maybe after the cast is off.”

  “You had the cast off, and it didn’t happen.”

  “I had it off for one day. Then I had to have a new one on.”

  “I still can’t believe you re-sprained your ankle jumping off the curb.”

  “It’s a higher-than-normal curb.”

  “Right. Ten inches.”

  I ignored the sarcasm. “I get this one off tomorrow, but sex with Sharice is still a maybe.”

  “You’ve been dating for months. How long does it take the girl to decide she likes a guy enough to—”

  “I don’t think that’s the issue. The maybe is not about whether she likes me. It’s about something she has to tell me before we have sex.”

  Now it was her turn to perk up. “You have any idea what this something is?”

  “Not a clue.”