The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Page 17

  The question seemed directed at me, so I said, “Sooner is good.”

  “It is. And I can’t begin to describe how happy we are with the pot. It gives our entire collection a sense of completeness.”

  What pot? I wondered. “I’d like to see how it fits in,” I ventured.

  She clasped her hands together. “We would love that, wouldn’t we, Donald?”

  He nodded.

  “Could you come for a cocktail at five?” he said. “We can show you everything then.”

  “I’m already feeling thirsty. How about we make it at four?”

  I was anxious to find out what pot they were referring to and why they thought it was connected with me. But not so anxious that I wanted to cancel margaritas with Susannah.

  45

  I never use the F word. And I don’t like popular jargon and the abbreviations texting has introduced into the language.

  But I admit my first response on seeing the pot at Dotty and Donald’s sprawling home in Rio Rancho was WTF?!

  I didn’t say the words, just the letters. And I didn’t say them out loud. But I would have forgiven myself had I done so, because the pot they had nattered on about in my shop that afternoon turned out to be my fake Tompiro, which had somehow migrated from the Faye Po residence in Albuquerque to the Edwards residence in Rio Rancho.

  I spilled most of my Pimm’s cup. I seemed to have developed a tendency in that direction. As Dotty was wiping the Saltillo tile floor with a kitchen towel and telling me not to worry about the spill, thoughts were swirling through my mind like tumbleweeds in a tornado.

  Had Faye Po—with her ability to see through me—decided that dropping my teacup and beating a hasty retreat after she asked me to examine the pot were sure signs that the pot was a fake? Had she deacquisitioned it, as the museum crowd calls it? Sold it to the Edwardses?

  But the Edwardses thought I had something to do with their getting it. Maybe Ms. Po mentioned me and they mistakenly thought I had urged her to sell it to them.

  I declined a refill, concocted some lame story about an appointment I just remembered and headed to the Bronco. They followed me outside, thanking me profusely and asking me to return when I had time enough to see the entire collection.

  When I arrived at Dos Hermanas, Susannah said, “You’re right on time. I thought cocktails with the Edwardses might make you late.”

  “I didn’t stay long.” I took a deep breath. “The Edwardses have my fake Tompiro in their collection.”

  “I knew it,” said Susannah. “Ms. Po’s pot is the one you sold her. You just didn’t see it clearly. I told you that.”

  “No. The pot at Ms. Po’s house was the fake. I’m sure of that.”

  “Hmm. Okay, this must be what happened. She wanted you to tell her what it’s worth because she was thinking of selling it. Since you didn’t give her an evaluation, she just went ahead and sold it to the Edwardses.”

  “Then why did the Edwardses thank me as if I had arranged to have them get it?”

  “Maybe she mentioned that she bought one from you, and they figured you had convinced her to sell it to them.”

  I couldn’t argue with that because I’d had the same idea.

  Angie arrived unbidden with our drinks, chips and salsa. I took a salty sip. Susannah just sat there thinking.

  Glad showed up and said, “I closed up a bit late because another of those bargain hunters came in just before five. He didn’t buy, but I think he might.”

  “I’ve got it,” Susannah announced. “It’s like Rudyard Whelkin, who had multiple copies of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow and was trying to sell each one of them as a one-of-a-kind.”

  Glad asked if she meant Rudyard Kipling.

  “No. Rudyard Whelkin. He told Bernie he was named after Lake Rudyard.”

  “Bernie?”

  “Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar.”

  “He’s fictional,” I added.

  “I seem to have come in at the middle of this conversation.”

  “If you’d stayed in the shop just a bit longer, you’d have been spared all of it.”

  The pink gin Angie brought for Glad reminded me of my drink at the Edwardses. “Have you ever heard of a Pimm’s cup?”

  “Of course. It’s a tradition at Wimbledon. Over forty thousand are sold during the annual championship matches. They’re usually served with cucumber slices.”

  “What is it with British drinks and cucumbers?” asked Susannah.

  “Lends a healthy touch,” Glad replied, “though I don’t much care for them in any form.”

  46

  I’ll drive,” said Thelma.

  She was outside my door again, unbidden and again denied entrance because of the lit cigarette. She wanted to take me to meet Regina.

  “I don’t want you going back there alone after the three of us talk,” she said, “so you’ll need to be blindfolded.”

  “No way. I did that once and it turned out to be a disaster.”

  “Yeah. When you did that appraisal for Segundo Cantú.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Sure. Carl was the one set it up for you. He told me all about it.”

  “Did he also tell you I was charged with two murders as a result? And that I could have cleared the whole thing up except I didn’t know where I had been or who I’d talked to?”

  “I don’t think he mentioned that.”

  “Probably not. So I’ll drive and you give me directions. Otherwise, forget it.”

  Not only did I not want to be blindfolded again, I didn’t want to be in a car that smelled like an ashtray.

  She squinted at me through the smoke. “You promise you won’t go back and try to make a deal with her to cut me out?”

  “I promise.”

  “I guess I’ll just have to trust you.”

  “Learning to trust is important. This will be good for you.”

  “Hmff.”

  “One more thing. You can’t smoke in my vehicle.”

  “I got a better idea. Let’s walk. That way I can smoke. It’s not very far.”

  “Then why did you want to drive?”

  “I planned to go around in a few circles so you wouldn’t know where we were.”

  “Oh, good grief. Lead the way.”

  We cut over to Rio Grande and walked south across Central. When we turned onto Chacoma and walked along the edge of the country club, a thought popped into my head. We were in the vicinity of the residences of both Faye Po and the Kents—Layton and Mariella.

  Faye Po is a collector. Mariella Kent is a collector.

  Was one of them Regina?

  Thelma said she saw a Tompiro at the collector’s house. I’m Mariella Kent’s pot dealer. Uh, make that pottery dealer. I know her collection as well as she does. She doesn’t have a Tompiro. So Mariella was not Regina.

  And Thelma had said the collector was not named Faye Po.

  Thelma must have lied. How many female collectors of ancient Native American pottery can live in one neighborhood? It had to be one of those two.

  And it was. But not the one I’d reasoned it out to be.

  We approached a sprawling home originally designed by El Paso architect Henry Trost, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright who did major works in New Mexico, including the Sunshine Theater, Albuquerque’s first film house.

  “Mariella Kent?” I said.

  “You dog. I’m about to be kicked to the curb. You got to her and cut a deal.”

  “Remember what I told you about trust? I’ve known Mariella Kent for twenty years. Most of the pots in her collection came from me. But I didn’t know she was the collector you mentioned until we rounded that corner. And she doesn’t have a Tompiro, so you couldn’t have seen one here.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said
as she hit the buzzer.

  As I listened to footsteps approaching the door, another possibility came to mind. Mariella has an old pot from Acoma with black hatching on a white background. Maybe Thelma mistook it for a Tompiro.

  Mariella de Baca Enríquez Kent is said to be descended from Don Francisco Fernández de la Cueva Enríquez, Duque de Alburquerque. My hometown is 91.66 percent named after him. We didn’t get the first r.

  In fact, El Duque never set foot outside of Spain. Perhaps one of his descendants did so and Mariella is a tenth-generation granddaughter.

  Even if she is not descended from Spanish royalty, she has a regal bearing and more class than the average European royal. Of course, in light of the events of recent years, that is faint praise.

  Mariella led us into the room where she displays her pottery. The old Acoma pot was where it’s always been. The Tompiro was about eight feet to the left and on a higher shelf. So Thelma did know a Tompiro when she saw one. Well, I thought, she was married for some years to a pot hunter.

  “I told you she had Carl’s Tompiro,” Thelma said, rather loudly. She was certain Mariella and I were in cahoots.

  Mariella said, “Let me again express my condolences for your loss. As I mentioned the first time you came here, I did not enlist your husband to procure a Tompiro pot for me. I did meet him the one time I mentioned to you. He came to ask if I would sell him my Tompiro. I told him it was not for sale.”

  “If you didn’t get it from Carl, where did you get it?”

  Mariella looked at me. “I know this must be a bit of a shock for you, Hubie.”

  “Yes. I told Thelma you didn’t have a Tompiro, but now you do. And of course I recognize it. I dug that pot up twenty years ago not far from Willard. It sat in my shop until last year when I finally sold it. How did it end up here?”

  “The person you sold it to sold it to me.”

  “That’s a drummed-up story if I ever heard one. Carl didn’t come here to buy a pot, he came here to sell one.”

  “Why would we drum up a story?” I asked. “If Mariella bought it from Carl, she has nothing to gain by denying it.”

  “Sure she does. You two figured out where the fifty thousand went … wait, now I get it.” She stared at Mariella. “You never paid him. That’s why I can’t find any trace of the money. He delivered the pot and you told him you’d pay him later. Then when you found out he was dead, you figured you just saved yourself fifty thousand dollars. So you two cooked up a cover story about Hubie digging up the pot and selling it to someone who sold it to you.”

  “I have a copy of the sales contract in my shop,” I said.

  “Which you probably drew up after I came to see you.”

  “Get a grip, Thelma. Remember that trust thing? The contract was signed and dated by both me and the buyer, and it was drawn up by my lawyer.”

  “Sure it was. Does this lawyer have a name?”

  He did, of course. The same one as Mariella. Rather than make the situation worse by telling Thelma the lawyer was married to the woman she had just accused of swindling her, I said nothing.

  My silence just increased her distrust and frustration.

  “There’s another possibility.” She looked at Mariella again. “Maybe you killed Carl to get out of paying him.”

  47

  When Sharice told me she was preparing moules à l’Indienne, I flashed back to the gastric episode I’d experienced at Chuy’s Mexican Mariscos.

  I learned the few French words I know from working in a restaurant and reading cookbooks, so “moules” struck fear in my innards.

  The scent of fresh-baked bread filled the condo. I watched Sharice line up ten small ceramic bowls containing mussels, minced shallots, crushed garlic, sliced ginger, chopped cilantro, salt, pepper, ground coriander, champagne and something that looked like the runt of a carrot crop. The table held the crusty bread and the bottle of Gruet from which the champagne in the bowl had come.

  “I like the way you have all the ingredients ready to go.”

  “Mise-en-place,” she said.

  I also knew what that meant from my restaurant days, but did I want my French limited to culinary terms?

  “Should I learn French?”

  She took her hands off the counter and clasped them behind my head. She brought her lips close to mine. “You planning on continuing to have your wicked way with me?”

  I nodded.

  “Then learning a bit of French would be good.” She pulled me to her and kissed me.

  “C’est bon,” I said when she finally let me come up for air.

  I suggested delaying dinner and putting Benz on the balcony, but she didn’t want to leave the mussels out too long. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Why did you throw that one out? It looked fine.”

  “It was open.”

  I told my stomach to relax. The cook had everything under control.

  She sautéed the shallots and ginger in a deep pan. Then she grated the carrot runt into the pan and added the garlic. Just as the garlic began to scent the room, she poured in the champagne and turned the heat to high. She added the coriander, salt and pepper. When the steam began to rise, she tossed in the mussels.

  I was a bit alarmed by how soon she took them out, but they looked and smelled great. She ladled them into bowls and sprinkled them with cilantro.

  We ate them with the crusty bread. Except for when I get a breakfast sandwich at the Grove, tortillas are my bread. Of course, I never eat mussels, and I didn’t know there was a fish called arctic char. My food horizon was expanding.

  “What was that orange thing you grated into the pan?”

  “Turmeric.”

  “Isn’t that a poem by Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “No, that’s ‘Tamerlane.’ He wrote it when he was a teenager.”

  “That probably explains why the meter was so bad. I remember reading it. So where have I heard the word turmeric?”

  “At an Indian restaurant?”

  “There are no Indian restaurants. There’s a place called Pueblo Harvest Café inside the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center on Twelfth, but it isn’t really Native American food. It’s what they call Native-fusion. It’s good, though.”

  “I meant Indian as in India. They use a lot of turmeric.”

  After dinner we did what I had wanted to do before dinner. All thoughts of pots vanished.

  Then we played Scrabble while nibbling on Cocopotamus New Mexican Green Chile Caramel Truffles and drinking Gruet, both made right here in Albuquerque. Take that, France and India.

  Benz was distracted by the empty mussel shells he was batting around. Although Sharice had cleaned them, I suspect the scent was still enticing.

  She racked up eighteen points with klaxon.

  I put ind to the right of her k and scored nine.

  “A four-letter word? That’s the best you can do?”

  “Nine points isn’t bad for only four letters.”

  “Five of those were from my k.”

  “I could have done a longer word, but this one reminded me of you.”

  She giggled. “You hoping for a second romp?”

  “Of course. But you are a kind person. And courageous as well.”

  She cocked her head to the right and asked me why I said that.

  “It took a lot of courage to show me your scar and to tell me about your past.”

  “Or lack thereof,” she said, and we laughed.

  “And you’re kind because you did both of those things for the same reason—you wanted to spare me the shock of discovering them while we were in flagrante delicto.”

  “You’re sexy when you speak Latin.”

  “You wouldn’t think so if you heard Father Groas and me talking in it.”

  “Anyway, you’re right. I didn’t want you t
o have a heart attack the first time we had sex.”

  “I was willing to risk it.”

  “So why are you saying all these nice things to me? Are you going to propose to me again?”

  “So you did notice?”

  “It’s not something a girl would miss.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “The first time didn’t count. You were much too excited to be rational.”

  “You’re the one who met me at the door naked and dragged me into the bedroom.”

  “And the second time, you couched it as a joke—offering to make me a citizen.”

  “You didn’t answer either time.”

  “This is my first ever courtship, Hubie. I’d like to prolong it.”

  48

  She left early the next morning for work. I slid over to her side of the bed and drifted back to sleep in the cocoon of her warmth and fragrance.

  When I awoke an hour later, I went to her kitchen. A brief study of the coffee roaster, grinder and brewer confirmed it was beyond my skill level.

  I bought a coffee at the Flying Star on Silver and drank it while I walked home.

  Diego showed up around eleven carrying a box, which he placed on my counter. “This is a present for you from Ms. Po. She would like to speak with you.”

  “I’ll get a coat and tie.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Schuze. She awaits you in the car.”

  I followed Diego into the street. He held the rear door of the car open for me. When I was seated, he closed the door and walked over to the gazebo.

  The “car” turned out to be a Lincoln MKZ, trimmed with polished wood and smelling of leather. Its backseat was higher than a normal car’s, making it comfortable for Ms. Po, who sat across from me on the spacious rear bench. She looked very much as she does in that throne of a chair in her house.

  There was a box on her lap.

  “My father had a Lincoln when I was a small girl. It was the only car in our village. It was called a Zephyr.”

  I made a mental note in case I ever got those letters in Scrabble. Twenty-three points would impress Sharice.

  “I have not heard the word zephyr for many years. It is a wind, is it not?” she asked.