The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Page 11

  “You’re lying, but I don’t blame you. I didn’t expect you to just hand it over. So I’m prepared to make you an offer. If you want to be technical about it, only half that money is mine. So you give me fifteen and you can keep the other fifteen.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilkes. I don’t know what Carl may have told you, but he didn’t give me any money.”

  “Yeah, and the collector told me she didn’t give Carl fifty thousand, and I know she was lying too, because I saw a Tompiro pot there when I went to see her. I couldn’t ask her to give me the money, because she’d already given it to Carl, but I was hoping she might know what Carl did with it. I’m his executor. It isn’t in his bank account.”

  She hung her head and shook it slowly. Then she looked back up. “You wouldn’t happen to know where it is, would you? If you could lead me to the fifty thousand the collector gave him, I might let you keep even more of the money Carl gave you.”

  I sighed. “Listen to me. I never got the pot. Carl never gave me the money. If the collector has a Tompiro pot, it’s likely one she already had. She was probably telling you the truth that she didn’t pay Carl fifty thousand—just like I’m telling you the truth that Carl didn’t pay me thirty thousand.”

  She lit another cigarette. “Carl wasn’t much of a husband. Gone most of the time even before we separated. Had lot of secrets. But he tried to be a good provider. He said once he sold the Tompiro, he’d pay off my medical bills. I’ve got emphysema. I can’t work. I need that money, Mr. Schuze.”

  “I liked Carl, Mrs. Wilkes—”

  “Call me Thelma.” She smiled and her lips cracked. She extracted some lip balm from her purse.

  “Call me Hubie. I didn’t get anything from him, Thelma. But even so, I’d be willing to help you out because he was my partner in a way. But I’m broke myself. I was counting on that money to pay my own medical bills and my mortgage and lots of other things. I wish I could help you, but right now I can’t even help myself.”

  She rubbed a second coat of balm on her lips and moved them around like she was silently practicing diction.

  “I’m still not sure I believe you, but you seem like a nice person. Carl always spoke highly of you.”

  I didn’t comment.

  “Maybe you could talk to the collector,” she suggested. “She didn’t want to admit to me that Carl sold her that pot, but she might admit it to you.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “You’re a dealer. She might want to be on your good side in case there are other pots she wants.”

  I shook my head. “First of all, the collector didn’t get the pot from Carl. Carl didn’t have a Tompiro. That’s why he asked me to find one. There’s no way Carl just stumbled across one in the past few days. They’re very rare. I’ve had only one in my twenty years in the business.”

  And sold it just last year, I thought to myself. To an elegant lady of a certain age named Faye Po. Then I thought about how different that sale was from most of my transactions.

  Layton Kent, prominent citizen and—despite that—my attorney, had arranged the sale. The two of us had gone to Ms. Po’s home, he carrying a sales contract, me carrying the pot in a shiny red gift box purchased by Mrs. Kent for the occasion.

  We had tea and strange cakes. We exchanged pleasantries. We signed the papers using a Visconti pen with an eighteen-karat-gold nib and a double reservoir filling system. I thought ink reservoirs had disappeared because of all the shirts they ruined. But I suppose the reservoir in a pen that costs more than the average American makes in a year does not leak.

  Now I was standing on the sidewalk haggling over pots and money with a woman I’d never before met, not even sure if she was who she claimed to be.

  “The collector’s name wouldn’t happen to be Faye Po, would it?”

  “No.”

  Of course not. Those two worlds never meet.

  “And don’t ask me what her name is,” Thelma added, “because I won’t tell you.”

  I asked instead about services for Carl.

  “He didn’t want any service. He told me that when he thought the cancer was going to kill him. ‘How about just a simple memorial?’ I asked him. He said not even that, and he made me promise.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “I ought to give up these cigarettes. They gave me emphysema and the damn smoke gets in my eyes.” She rubbed another tear away. “He was a tough old bird. Only thing he really liked was work.”

  “And pots.”

  “He hated pots.”

  “He did?”

  “Yep. Said they’d ruined his work. Like I said, he loved work. Loved gettin’ it done. He was happiest when he was part of a big job, a long canal or a big dam. The bigger the project, the more he liked it. Gave him a sense of accomplishment, I guess. When we were courting, he’d drive me to see some big concrete culvert he made. Not very romantic, but I liked that he wanted to share that stuff with me.”

  “How did pots ruin his work?”

  “It wasn’t the pots—it was ARPA. I guess you know all about that.”

  Too well, I thought.

  “After ARPA became law, they had to hold up every project while a bunch of archaeologists turned over every rock to make sure there wasn’t an artifact or bone that might be disturbed.”

  I told her I remembered Carl telling me when he was talking about dragline and bucket operations that “every third scoop had an artifact in it.”

  “Yeah. So after ARPA he decided to start selling the stuff. It was partly the money and partly just because he didn’t like the guys he described as namby-pambies who worked with brushes instead of backhoes. He could be ornery.”

  “Probably why he beat melanoma.”

  “Didn’t help him much in the end.”

  Another few tears wetted her parched cheeks.

  “Why do you not want to tell me the collector’s name?”

  “I don’t want you and her to work something out behind my back.”

  “What could we work out behind your back?”

  “Maybe she and you together would figure out where Carl hid the fifty thousand and split it fifty-fifty. She gets half her money back, you get most of what Carl would’ve paid you, and I get left out in the cold. That’s why I want to be there when you talk to her.”

  Using my most charming tone and my most winning smile, I said, “First you say I seem like a nice person, and now you say I’d leave you out in the cold.”

  She smiled again. Her lips seemed a bit more supple. I guess the balm was working. “It would have been her idea, not yours. But I’d still be out in the cold.”

  “You’re not a very trusting person, are you, Thelma?”

  “You’re married to someone like Carl who never shares information, you get a little suspicious, I guess.”

  She was weathered. Wore a simple cotton dress and running shoes. No jewelry or makeup. A no-nonsense look.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  She ground out a cigarette on the sidewalk. “I need that money,” she said. “I’ll come back if I think of something else.”

  I watched her walk away, her wide shoulders slumping.

  I turned to the door and tried the knob. I had locked myself out. I took that as an omen and headed over to Dos Hermanas.

  28

  You should have agreed to talk to the collector, Hubie.”

  “She wouldn’t tell me who it is, so the only way I can do that is go with her.”

  “So? Why not go with her and at least find out who it is? Now that Carl isn’t in the deal as middleman, you can get the whole fifty thousand if you sell the pot to the collector.”

  “I don’t have the pot, remember? And the collector already has one. Maybe Thelma’s right and Carl somehow found another Tompiro and sold it to the collector.”r />
  “Let’s give him a name.”

  “Give who a name?”

  “The collector. Aren’t you tired of calling him that? Let’s call him Reginald.”

  “Why Reginald?”

  “Because rich people don’t have names like Hank or Pete. They have names like Thurston or Reginald.”

  “Okay, but it can’t be Reginald. The collector is a woman.”

  “So we’ll make it Regina.”

  She pronounced it reh-GEE-nah, which is how we normally hear it in the United States. But Sharice would pronounce it reh-JI-nah because that’s how they pronounce the name of the capital city of Saskatchewan.

  I saw no reason to argue the point. “Okay. But until I have the pot in hand, there’s no reason to talk to her.”

  “You’ll have the pot day after tomorrow.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that. You’re going to cho bun us.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s a phrase I learned from Faye Po, the lady who bought the last Tompiro from me. It’s when you start making plans for something good that you think is going to happen, but it doesn’t happen because you took it for granted and started planning as if it were a done deal.”

  “Well, everyone knows about that special sort of jinx, Hubie. You don’t need a Chinese word for it.”

  “Sure you do. There’s no English word for it.”

  I signaled Angie while Susannah thought about it.

  After Angie brought more salsa, Susannah asked if I’d finished my copy of the Tompiro pot.

  I nodded and sat there staring into my margarita and thinking. “Thelma said Faye Po is not the collector, but I wonder if there’s any connection between her and Regina.”

  “Wow. I hadn’t even thought about that. In the Bernie Rhodenbarr murder with Rudyard Kipling, he steals a book from a collector, and the person who asks him to steal it is the person who sold it to the collector in the first place.”

  When Susannah gets excited about what might be a real-life murder mystery, she often tries to pack too many thoughts into one sentence.

  “Rudyard Kipling steals a book?”

  “No, of course not. Bernie steals the book. He’s a burglar, remember?”

  “Is the collector he stole it from named Regina?” I was trying to find the connection.

  “No, he was named Jesse Arkwright. He bought the only copy of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow by Rudyard Kipling.”

  “The other copies were by someone else?”

  “How did you know there were other copies?”

  “A lucky guess?”

  “It seemed there was only one copy to begin with and a man named J. Rudyard Whelkin had it.”

  “There were two Rudyards?”

  “Three if you count the lake.”

  I felt like I was losing the thread. “The lake?”

  “Yeah, there’s a Rudyard Lake in England. Whelkin,” she continued, “sold the book to Arkwright, who paid a lot for it because he thought it was the only copy.”

  “Or at least the only copy by Kipling,” I added.

  She frowned. “Who else would write a copy of the same book?”

  “Who else, indeed,” I said, trying be amicable in the midst of my confusion.

  “So Whelkin hires Bernie to steal the book back. And you already know why because you guessed there were other copies.”

  I did?

  “Right,” I said, “but remind me why there being multiple copies made Whelkin want to get the book back.”

  “Because he had another buyer who was willing to pay even more than Jesse Arkwright, but only because the new buyer also thought it was the only copy in existence. Whelkin discovered that Arkwright was going to advertise his copy for sale. If the new buyer saw that ad, he would realize the book he was about to buy was not unique and there might be any number of them floating around.”

  “Okay, but what does this have to do with the Tompiro?”

  “It’s obvious, Hubie. Regina has what she thought was the only Tompiro pot in existence. Then Carl offers to get her a second one. So Regina realizes her pot isn’t as valuable as she thinks it is. She agrees to buy the pot from Carl. Except when Carl shows up, she kills him and destroys the other pot to make sure she still has a one of a kind.”

  “You’re forgetting one small detail—Carl didn’t have a Tompiro.”

  “He could have found another one. Maybe it was cheaper than the thirty thou you wanted for yours, so he bought that one instead.”

  “There is no way he found another Tompiro.”

  “You found one at White Sands on your first try.”

  “Only because I was able to search in a site no one has searched because it’s inside the missile range. I scoured outside of the range on the east side of the Manzano Mountains for years and only found one intact pot.”

  “And it was on my family’s land. You should pay me something for it.”

  “You were about eight years old when I found it. I’ll give you a kid’s portion.”

  “I’m just kidding. But Carl could have found another one.”

  “It’s possible. There are a few in museums. There are more with cracks, chips and holes. And there may be some other intact ones to be dug up. But the odds that Carl found one are very long.”

  “So if Regina didn’t kill Carl, who did?”

  “Thelma,” I said, because it’s easier to indulge Susannah’s murder mystery interest than to talk sense to her when she slips into her Nancy Drew persona.

  “Why would Thelma kill him? She told you he was a good provider even after they separated. She doesn’t work, so why cut off her money supply?”

  “Maybe she wanted the whole fifty thousand.”

  “But she asked you to help her find it.”

  “Just a clever play to throw suspicion away from herself.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re just humoring me, aren’t you?”

  “Busted. I have no idea who killed Carl. Whit is investigating it. He doesn’t need my help.”

  “You don’t know if he needs your help or not. You may have a clue he doesn’t know about.”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “You said it. He was your partner, Hubert, and you aren’t lifting a finger to bring his killer to justice.”

  “I told Whit everything I know. What else can I do?”

  “Cozy up to Thelma. She might divulge something in an intimate moment.”

  “There is no way … you’re kidding, right?”

  “Two can play at that game.”

  We laughed and signaled for Angie. The timing was perfect because Sharice showed up just then to put in her order—a glass of Gruet.

  I introduced Sharice and Susannah and each woman told the other the wonderful things I had said about her. When the drinks arrived, Susannah offered a toast to Sharice and me.

  It was followed by an awkward silence.

  29

  I can’t believe you invited her to join us without telling me.”

  “You don’t complain when Martin or Tristan drop in on our cocktail hour unannounced.”

  I had just picked Susannah up for our trip to the Inchaustigui Ranch. It’s closer to the missile range. The next day promised to be long and tiring. Starting from the ranch would make it a bit easier.

  “I already know them, Hubert. It’s different when it’s somebody new. You should have told me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could prepare.”

  “Oh, come on. Sharice is not the Queen of England. You don’t need to practice up on your curtsy before meeting her.”

  “You are so clueless. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘You only get one chance to make a first impression’?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve always wondered why
people say it as if it’s some nugget of wisdom. It’s nothing but a tautology. You only get to do the first anything once—that’s what first means.”

  “It is a nugget of wisdom. You just don’t see that because as usual you’re intellectualizing it. Labeling it as a tautology, whatever the hell that is. If you tried to understand the feeling part, you wouldn’t sound so cold and clueless.”

  “Sorry,” I said in my little-boy voice.

  After a few seconds she exhaled audibly and said, “No, I’m the one who should apologize. I felt uncomfortable when she showed up. She’s so elegant and so thin. I felt clunky.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t say anything. I’m happy for you, Hubie. She’s not only strikingly beautiful, she’s intelligent and articulate. And it’s obvious from the way she looks at you that she’s madly in love with you. You deserve that. Your love life hasn’t been as rocky as mine, but no one would call it normal.” She paused for a deep breath. “I didn’t snap at you because I was unhappy with you as much as because I’m unhappy with myself. I don’t know how she makes herself up and still looks so natural. I don’t know how she walks without rocking like she’s on a horse. I envy how she’s thin without being skinny, how her long legs seem to go all the way up to her armpits. And most of all—God, this really hurts—I know I’ll never be able to wear the fabulous clothes she wears because I’m too damned fat.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake. You are not fat. You’re—”

  “Watch it, Hubert. Dragging out the wrong euphemism could be dangerous.”

  I raced through the options, rejecting full-figured, buxom, statuesque and voluptuous. “Shapely,” I said.

  “At least you didn’t say full-figured. I hate that.”

  Whew.

  “Put little fairy wings on her,” she said, relaxing a bit, “and she could be the black Tinker Bell. Designers would love her.”

  I decided not to comment.

  We were on I-40 driving east through Tijeras Canyon, an apt name for the scissorlike pass between Albuquerque and the plains of eastern New Mexico.

  I dislike freeways. I was looking forward to State Highway 14, where we could turn south onto a road with a view I could enjoy because the sun wouldn’t be in my eyes and the semis wouldn’t be on my tail.